Chester A. Arthur: the Fairfield-born president nobody expected
Photo: Abraham Bogardus / Adam Cuerden, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Vermont has produced two presidents, and the one less often remembered was born in Fairfield, in Franklin County, in 1829. Chester Alan Arthur’s father, William Arthur, was an Irish-born Baptist preacher who moved the family through a series of towns in Vermont and New York.
Arthur graduated from Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., taught school in Vermont and New York, and became a lawyer in New York City. As a young lawyer, he worked on cases challenging racial segregation, including one that helped end segregation on New York streetcars.
Machine politics
After serving as quartermaster general of New York during the Civil War, Arthur became a lieutenant of Sen. Roscoe Conkling’s Republican machine. In 1871 he was appointed collector of the Port of New York, a position that controlled hundreds of patronage jobs. President Rutherford Hayes removed him in 1878 amid a push for reform.
In 1880, the Republicans put Arthur on the ticket as vice president with James Garfield to keep the Conkling wing happy.
The surprise
When Garfield was shot in July 1881 by a disappointed office seeker and died in September, many expected Arthur to run a spoils-system White House. He did not. He signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, which required that many federal jobs be filled on merit. He also modernized the Navy. Ill with kidney disease, he did not actively seek a second term and died in 1886.
The state operates the President Chester A. Arthur State Historic Site in Fairfield, with a reconstruction of the parsonage where his family lived and a granite marker. It is a quiet spot on a back road, open seasonally.
