A patronage machine insider, Chester Arthur surprised everyone by signing civil service reform
Chester A. Arthur rose as a loyal cog in Roscoe Conkling's New York political machine and was fired from a plum patronage job. After James Garfield's assassination made him president in 1881, he signed the Pendleton Act, which began dismantling the spoils system that had made his own career.
Born in Fairfield, Vermont, in 1829, Arthur was the fifth of nine children of an Irish-born Baptist preacher and outspoken abolitionist whose convictions kept the family moving between towns. Those moves later fed rumours, spread by an opponent in 1880, that Arthur had been born in Ireland or Canada and was ineligible for office; neither claim gained traction. He studied at Union College, taught school, and qualified as a lawyer in New York City in 1854.
His early legal career had a civil rights edge. His firm took part in Lemmon v. New York, arguing that enslaved people brought into the state became free, a position upheld on appeal in 1860, though Arthur's role was minor. In 1854 he was lead counsel for Elizabeth Jennings Graham, a Black woman thrown off a streetcar, and his victory led to desegregation of the city's streetcar lines. During the Civil War he handled supplies for the state's militia as its quartermaster general.
Politics then pulled him into Conkling's orbit. Ulysses S. Grant made him Collector of the Port of New York in 1871, a post overflowing with jobs to hand out, until President Rutherford B. Hayes removed him in 1878 as part of a patronage clean-up. At the 1880 convention he was added to Garfield's ticket to balance it and soothe Stalwarts upset by Grant's defeat. Four months into the term Garfield was shot and died 11 weeks later.
As president, Arthur rebuilt the navy and backed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 to reformers' astonishment. His record on immigration was harsher: he vetoed a twenty-year ban on Chinese immigrants as a breach of the Burlingame Treaty, then signed a ten-year version. He also appointed two Supreme Court justices. In poor health, he made only a half-hearted bid for renomination in 1884 and died in November 1886, remembered by contemporaries for a solid, if quiet, presidency.
Source: Chester A. Arthur
