Rev. Samuel D. Burchard’s alliterative description of Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion” stands as one of the earliest — and perhaps most significant — example of the “October surprise.”
Time Magazine’s “Made By History” platform published my piece on the October surprise that helped derail James G. Blaine’s campaign for the presidency in 1884: https://time.com/7095847/october-surprise-history/
One of James G. Blaine’s most influential biographers was a member of his extended family and a leading Gilded Age journalist.
Family, friends, and colleagues knew her as Mary Abigail Dodge, or more simply, Abby. The public knew her as Gail Hamilton.1
In an era when women were discouraged from pursuing careers outside the home, and in a profession dominated by cigar-chomping, hard-drinking men, Dodge — who adopted “Gail Hamilton” as her pen name — carved out a unique role as a Washington correspondent whose columns filled the pages of the New York Tribune and other publications.
Born in Hamilton Mass., in 1833, Dodge was a prolific author and editor who began her career in the 1850s writing for the abolitionist National Era in Washington D.C. One of her friends and colleagues was Sara Jane Lippincott, who wrote under the pen name Grace Greenwood for the New York Times. Dodge also happened to be part of the extended family of James G. Blaine. It was through this connection that she produced what is arguably the most revealing — and also the most frustrating — biography of the distinguished Republican elder statesman.2
A former House Speaker, senator, and two-time secretary of state (for James A. Garfield and Benjamin Harrison), Blaine was one of the most popular — and widely disliked — politicians of his generation. Blaine “was born to be loved or hated,” Massachusetts Republican George Frisbie Hoar wrote. “Nobody occupied a middle ground as to him.”3
After Blaine’s death in 1893, authors rushed out biographies of the man known to his devotees as the “Plumed Knight” and to his foes as the “tattooed man” — a reference to a Puck cartoon of Blaine covered in tattoos listing the various scandals with which he was associated. The bibliography accompanying Blaine’s entry in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress lists no fewer than seven biographies published between Blaine’s death in 1893 and 1934, when David Muzzey published his authoritative James G. Blaine: A Political Idol of Other Days.4 In 2007, Neil Rolde added to the Blaine canon with Continental Liar from the State of Maine.
Some of the biographies attempt to come to grips with Blaine’s controversial career. Charles Edward Russell, a turn of the century muckraker, concedes Blaine’s brilliance as a politician while going into great detail about his ethical shortcomings. Muzzey takes a more balanced approach but also grapples with Blaine’s failings.
There is very little objectivity — and certainly none of the scathing commentary of Russell — in Dodge’s James G. Blaine, published in 1895 under the Gail Hamilton pen name. Dodge, who died in 1896, was an unabashed admirer, and her tome is a worshipful account of Blaine’s life and political career.
“Gail Hamilton was the person of all persons to write the life story of Blaine,” according to a review in the Omaha World-Herald. “She had the literary ability, political knowledge, and the necessary personal acquaintance with the great political leader to make the biography intensely interesting. She also had that unbounded admiration and enthusiasm for Blaine which places her in the closest sympathy, not only with him and his career, but with the American public, with whom Blaine holds a place of tender regard rarely equalled.”5
Parsed carefully, this assessment reveals the value and weaknesses of Dodge’s book. The “necessary personal acquaintance” included spending winters with the Blaines in Washington D.C., allowing her glimpses of personalities and events.6 She knew her subject well and, perhaps more than any other biographer, could provide insights into his character and motivations. She also had access to the prolific correspondence of Blaine and, just as importantly, his wife, Harriet Stanwood Blaine, like her husband an acute observer of events and people.
On the other hand, her “unbounded admiration” makes her a less than reliable evaluator of Blaine’s career. Her target readers were those who regarded Blaine with the same admiration as the World-Herald. Less a biographer than a hagiographer, Dodge was uncritically supportive of Blaine’s decisions and motivations. That makes for a tedious read.
Nevertheless, some passages are revelatory. As a student of the Credit Mobilier affair, I was particularly intrigued by her description of Blaine’s behind-the-scenes role as a counselor and adviser to some of the Republicans implicated in the scandal.
“Mr. Blaine was indefatigable in defending and advising those who were the objects of attack,” Dodge wrote. Befuddled lawmakers, “gentle and scholarly men, in the natural timidity of their unwontedness, suffered many a pang, and the door-bell sometimes rang Mr. Blaine from his bed at midnight to counsel and console.”7
Oakes Ames, the Union Pacific railroad financier and Massachusetts Republican congressman at the center of the scandal, presented a particularly pitiful sight. One evening, Ames sat before the fireplace in Blaine’s library, “stunned into immobility,” according to Dodge, “with his head bowed on his breast,” while Blaine “applied himself indefatigably in and out of the house, arranging for [Ames’s] defense and for that of the other men who were implicated with him and were equally guiltless of bribery.”8
Dodge was not a neutral observer. Few thought then (or believe today) that the lawmakers implicated in the scandal were entirely “guiltless.” But her observations about Blaine’s behind-the-scenes efforts on their behalf and Ames’s dejected demeanor offer a revealing glimpse into what was going beyond the confines of the Capitol hearing room where the affair was being investigated.
Dodge’s biography is full of similar nuggets. Plowing through it can be tedious, but for students of the Plumed Knight, it is worth it.
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My book on Blaine’s two-decade long battle with Roscoe Conkling — The Partisans: James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and the Politics of Rivalry and Revenge in the Gilded Age is coming soon from Edinborough Press.
John Wilkes Booth, Charles Guiteau, and the madness of assassination.
At first glance, the killers of Abraham Lincoln and James A. Garfield would seem to have little in common.
In the early 1860s, John Wilkes Booth appeared to be the latest in his family’s line of talented actors. His father was an accomplished performer, and his older brother, Edwin, was described at his death as “America’s great tragedian.” In 1862, the Chicago Tribune praised the Booth family’s contributions to American theater and foresaw great things for Edwin’s brother. John Wilkes “steps forward to claim the attention of the American public” with talent “equaling both father and brother in the delineation of Shakespearean characters,” the Tribune predicted.1
Charles Guiteau, on the other hand, was a failed attorney who wrote and sold religious tracts and insurance. The Illinois native joined a New York commune that practiced free love but departed when he was restricted to menial kitchen duty. He beat his wife during their five years of marriage — only one example of his vicious temper. In New York City, he stalked a young woman he believed wrongly to be an heiress until the police told him to stop.2
Booth basked in national acclaim. Guiteau labored in well-deserved obscurity. Both believed they would change history. They did – but not in the ways they intended.
On April 14, 1865, less than a week after Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Booth fatally shot President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater. Jumping onto the stage from the presidential box, he shouted “sic semper tyrannis” — the Latin motto of Virginia meaning “thus only to tyrants.” Elsewhere in the capital, an assassin working with Booth gained entrance at the home of Secretary of State William Seward — bedridden as he recovered from a recent carriage accident — and attempted to kill him. Seward and his son suffered serious stab wounds in the attack but survived.
A diehard supporter of the Confederacy, Booth had plotted to kidnap Lincoln in March 1865, apparently in the belief that such an act could turn the tide of the war in favor of the South. That plot fell through, as James L. Swanson recounts in Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, but soon gave way to something more despicable. Instead of kidnapping Lincoln, Booth would assassinate him.3
Booth hated the idea that once-enslaved Black men and women would enjoy civil and political rights in post-war America. He hoped that killing the president would somehow revive the rebellion, restore enslavement, and consign Lincoln to the dustbin of history. None of those events occurred, Swanson notes. In fact, the shooting transformed Lincoln into a national hero on a par with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other honored figures from our past.4
Above all else, Booth wanted to be a hero. But as the New York Herald reported days after the assassination, he failed in all respects.
The assassination of Lincoln and the attempt to kill Seward “continue to inform the engrossing and melancholy subject of thought, feeling, conversation and action throughout the North,” the Herald reported on April 18. “The murder of a Chief Magistrate being an unprecedented event in our history, of course the demonstration of feeling is such as never been before manifested by the people, whose affection for their martyred president, estimation of their great loss, and terrible indignation over the foul act by which his death was produced are unmistakably shown in a nation spontaneously draping itself in the solemn weeds of mourning.”5
While the murder of Lincoln originated in the fevered brain of a diehard Confederate sympathizer, Garfield’s assassination grew out of the delusions of a disappointed office-seeker as a struggle over patronage and power roiled the Republican Party.
Guiteau numbered among the thousands seeking appointment to a job in the Garfield administration. He considered himself worthy of a prestigious diplomatic appointment and pressed his claim at the White House and State Department. At at one point actually gained admission to see Garfield, handing him a copy of a speech he wrote with the words “Paris consulate” scrawled across the top.
Far more significant than Guiteau’s troubles getting a job was the battle for patronage and influence in the new administration being fought by James G. Blaine of Maine and Senator Roscoe Conkling, the imperious boss of the New York Republican Party and Blaine’s enemy. Conkling was the titular head of a party faction known as the Stalwarts that included Garfield’s vice president, Chester A. Arthur.
After weeks of trying to propitiate the rival Republicans, Garfield nominated a Conkling foe to run the Port of New York, the patronage bastion that formed the basis of Conkling’s power in the Empire State. Blaine won the power struggle with his archrival.
In protest, Conkling shocked the nation on May 16 when he and his fellow New York Republican Thomas C. Platt resigned from the Senate. His friends in the press hailed the resignations as a triumph of principle over politics. “There are two men in the country, at least, to whom self-respect is more important than office,” the Chicago Inter-Ocean thundered. “Senator Conkling and his colleague have exercised an undoubted privilege and taken a manly course, and have done that which few public men would dare to do in the face of an angry and powerful executive.”6
Many others were critical. “The news produced a profound sensation throughout the country,” the New York Tribune reported. The anti-Conkling Tribune noted that the “conduct of the ex-senators was sharply condemned in Washington and elsewhere.”7
Meanwhile, Guiteau was getting nowhere. He continued his pursuit of a diplomatic position but was eventually barred from the White House. An exasperated Blaine told Guiteau to stop pestering him.8
Following the battle between Blaine, Conkling and Garfield in the newspapers, Guiteau decided God wanted him to kill Garfield to save the Republican Party.
After spending weeks planning the assassination and stalking the president, he fired three bullets into Garfield at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881. Afterward, he tried to cast his murderous attack as an act of altruism. “I did it, and will go to jail for it. Arthur is president, and I am a Stalwart,” Guiteau declared as he was led away by police.9
But Guiteau’s declaration proved premature and wildly off the mark. Garfield clung to life until September 19, when he died in Elberon, N.J. By that time, the political repercussions of Guiteau’s act of madness had claimed Conkling — the leader of the Republican faction on whose behalf Guiteau claimed to be acting — as an unintended victim of the shooting. Conkling failed to win re-election to the Senate, a defeat that ended his career in politics.
Shortly after Garfield was shot, the influential Springfield Republican weighed in from western Massachusetts with a verdict that Conkling and his allies proved unable to overcome. The newspaper described Guiteau as “a miserable ne’er-do-well” who is “in sympathy with Arthur and Conkling in the struggle over the New York custom house.”10
Far from aiding Stalwarts, Guiteau saddled them with the stigma of Garfield’s assassination and accelerated their demise as a dominant force in Republican politics.
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The assassination of Garfield figures prominently in my upcoming book, The Partisans: James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and the Politics of Rivalry and Revenge in the Gilded Age. Coming soon from Edinborough Press.
