promised, “first bringing contortions, and then be followed by death.” While Blaine was determined to keep Stalwarts out of Garfield’s administration, he knew that he had to resist the temptation to rush in as Sherman had. Conkling and his men were formidable adversaries. To succeed, an attack would have to be both clever and quiet. “They must not be knocked down with bludgeons,” Blaine brooded. “They must have their throats cut with a feather.”
Although he had dangerous enemies and problematic friends, Garfield’s biggest problem was his own vice president—Chester Arthur. Not only had the Republican nomination been thrust upon Garfield without his consent, but so had his running mate. Flush with victory, Garfield’s supporters had begun to plan the campaign while still at the convention hall, and without consulting their candidate. Knowing that without New York it would be difficult to win the presidency, and that without Conkling it would be almost impossible to win New York, they had decided to offer the vice presidential nomination to one of Conkling’s men. No one in the Republican Party was more Conkling’s man than Chester Arthur.
Politically, Arthur was wholly Conkling’s creation. The only public position Arthur had held before becoming vice president of the United States was as collector of the New York Customs House, a job that Conkling had secured for him and which paid more than $50,000 a year—as much as the president’s salary, and five times as much as the vice president’s. Even then, he had been forced out of office amid widespread allegations of corruption. “The nomination of Arthur is a ridiculous burlesque,” John Sherman had spat after the convention. “He never held an office except the one he was removed from.”
Conkling had at first been as furious as Sherman about Arthur’s nomination. After he was approached by Garfield’s supporters, Arthur had searched the convention hall for Conkling, finally finding him in a back room, pacing the floors in an apoplectic rage in the wake of Grant’s defeat. “The Ohio men have offered me the Vice Presidency,” Arthur told him. Conkling, with barely suppressed fury, replied, “Well, sir, you should drop it as you would a red hot shoe from the forge.” For the first time in his life, however, Arthur defied his mentor. “The office of the Vice President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining,” he said. “I shall accept the nomination.”
Although Conkling had stormed out of the room that night, it had not taken him long to realize that having Arthur in the office of vice president was nearly as useful as having Grant in the White House. Perhaps even more so. While Grant was very much his own man, Conkling had complete control over Arthur. Arthur was one of the two men Conkling sent to drag Levi Morton out of bed and force him to resign from Garfield’s cabinet—just days before Arthur’s own inauguration. A bachelor since the death of his wife five months before the Republican convention, Arthur even lived in Conkling’s home at Fourteenth and F Streets in New York. By the time Conkling witnessed his protégé’s swearing in, in a private ceremony that took place inside the Capitol just before Garfield’s inauguration, he was thrilled at the prospect of advising Arthur in his new role in Washington.
As strong a grip as he had on the vice president, Conkling was confident he would have little difficulty controlling the president. Even Garfield’s friends worried that he was an easy mark. He was too interested in winning over his enemies to be able to protect his own interests. “For his enemies, or those who may have chosen thus to regard themselves,” a friend had said of him, “he had no enmity—naught but magnanimity.” When challenged in Congress by men for whom “no sarcasm was too cutting, no irony too cold,” Garfield never rose to the bait. He would reply with such earnestness that, in the words of an early biographer, “a stranger entering the House after Garfield had begun his speech in answer to some most galling attack would never suspect the speech was a reply to a hostile and malignant assault.”
Nor was Garfield capable of carrying a grudge, a character trait that neither Conkling nor Blaine could begin to understand. Years before, Garfield had resolved to stop speaking to a journalist who had tried to vilify him in the press. The next time he saw the man, however, he could not resist greeting him with a cheerful wave. “You old