Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,37
asking him to withdraw his nomination.
Two days later, on the morning of his inauguration, Garfield lost yet another cabinet member to Conkling. At 8:30 a.m., he learned that Senator William Allison, who, just the day before, had agreed to be his secretary of the treasury, had also changed his mind. “Allison broke down on my hands and absolutely declined the Treasury,” Garfield wrote in his diary. Like Morton, Allison was clearly unwilling “to face the opposition of certain forces.”
Almost as maddening as Conkling’s sabotage of his administration was the fact that Garfield’s efforts to reunify the party and, he hoped, to reassemble his cabinet were thwarted at every turn by the men who were supposed to be on his side. The Capitol building, where Garfield had spent seventeen years of his life, suddenly seemed a snake pit, a place where vicious, small-minded men lay in wait, ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. “The Senate,” Henry Adams would write a few years later in his memoir, The Education of Henry Adams, “took the place of Shakespeare, and offered real Brutuses and Bolingbrokes, Jack Cades, Falstaffs and Malvolios,—endless varieties of human nature nowhere else to be studied, and none the less amusing because they killed.”
Although John Sherman had tried to forgive Garfield for winning the nomination, he remained deeply bitter over the loss of his best chance at the White House, and he wanted revenge. “The nomination of Garfield is entirely satisfactory to me,” he had written after the convention. “As it has come to him without his self-seeking, it is honorable and right and I have no cause of complaint.” Sherman did, however, complain loudly and often about the Stalwarts, doing what he could to punish those who had voted for Grant, and deepening the divide between them and Garfield. So transparent were Sherman’s motives that the New York Times openly accused him of “using his influence and power to gratify personal revenge upon men who fought him at Chicago.”
The only person who had wanted the presidential nomination more than Sherman, and whose hatred of the Stalwarts—and in particular of Roscoe Conkling—ran even deeper, was James G. Blaine. Although fifteen years had passed since their famous fight on the floor of Congress, Conkling and Blaine had never forgiven each other, nor did they intend to. Blaine was well aware that Conkling had stopped at nothing to deny him the power of the presidency, and now that his man, not Conkling’s, was in the White House, Blaine looked forward to repaying the favor.
Blaine and Garfield had begun a lasting, if at times strained, friendship nearly two decades before, when they had entered Congress at the same time. Although Garfield liked and admired Blaine, he had learned over the years that his friend could be “a little reckless of his promises, and a little selfish withal.” As Blaine had risen to power, becoming speaker of the house in 1868, he had made and broken commitments to Garfield with a nonchalance that Garfield found astonishing. Nevertheless, Blaine was a highly skilled tactician and had a political acumen that Garfield knew he lacked. “As a shrewd observer of events, he has few equals in the country,” he had written of Blaine. “As a judge of men, he is equally sagacious.”
As aware of Blaine’s faults as he was his attributes, Garfield decided to offer his friend the most coveted position in his cabinet: secretary of state. The offer, however, came with an absolute and, for Blaine, painful condition: he could never again run for president. “I ask this,” Garfield told him, “because I do not propose to allow myself nor anyone else to use the next four years as the camping ground for fighting the next Presidential battle.” Blaine accepted the condition, knowing that, at this point in his life, he had very little chance of being nominated anyway. More important, as secretary of state he would be in a powerful position not only to influence the president, but to shut Conkling out.
Knowing that Garfield wanted to have men from both factions of the party in his cabinet, Blaine tried everything in his power to convince him that this was not just a bad idea but a dangerous one. When Garfield asked Blaine what he thought about offering the position of secretary of state to Conkling instead, with the idea of keeping his friends close and his enemies closer, Blaine had been horrified. “His appointment would act like strychnine upon your Administration,” he