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DEAD
VICE PRESIDENTS |
Civil War to World War
I
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Hannibal
Hamlin |
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William
A. Wheeler |
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Andrew Johnson
Republican Served:
March 4, 1801 to March 4, 1805
Johnson was a U.S. Senator from Tennessee, at the time of the secession of the Southern states. He was the only southern Senator not to quit his post upon secession and later was appointed military governor of Tennessee. Johnson became the Vice President in 1864 on the ticket with Lincoln. Johnson became president upon Lincoln's assassination on April 15, 1865. As president, he fought with the Radical Republicans in Congress and became the first U.S. President to be impeached. Johnson, who was of Scots-Irish and English decent, was born in 1808, in Raleigh, North Carolina, to Jacob Johnson and Mary McDonough. Andrew Johnson's father died when Andrew was three years old, leaving his family in poverty. Johnson's mother then worked to support her family and later remarried. She bound Andrew as an apprentice tailor when he was 14 but at age 16-17 he and his brother ran away to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he found work as a tailor. Johnson married Eliza McCardle Johnson at the age of 19. He never attended any type of school and taught himself how to read and spell; his wife taught him arithmetic, and how to read and write more fluently. Johnson, who loved to talk politics, used his tailor shop in Greeneville to start his political career. Johnson served as an alderman in Greeneville from 1829 to 1833 and was elected mayor of Greeneville in 1833. In 1835 he was elected to the Tennessee House of Representatives, where after serving a single term he was defeated for re-election. In 1839 he was elected to the Tennessee Senate, where he served two two-year terms. In 1843 he became the first Democrat to win election as the U.S. Representative from Tennessee's 1st congressional district; he held the office for five terms. Below is a photo President Andrew Johnson house. Johnson owned this home for 24 years, both before and after his presidency. He lived here until his death in 1875, however, he did not die here. During the Civil War the home was used by both Union and Confederate troops as headquarters. A section of the left on the walls by soldiers during that time has been left exposed for visitors to see. Some of the graffiti written by Confederate soldiers is not very complimentary of Johnson "the traitor". Johnson was elected governor of Tennessee, serving from 1853 to 1857, and was elected as a Democrat to the United States Senate and served from October 8, 1857, to March 4, 1862. Before Tennessee voted on secession, Johnson, who lived in Unionist east Tennessee, toured the state speaking in opposition to the act, which he said was unconstitutional. Johnson was an aggressive stump speaker and often responded to hecklers, even if those hecklers were in the senate. At the time of secession of the Confederacy , Johnson was the only Senator from the seceded states to continue participation in Congress. In March 1862, shortly after the fall of Forts Henry and Donelson and the capture of Nashville, Lincoln appointed Johnson military governor of Tennessee. During his three years in this office he "moved resolutely to eradicate all pro-Confederate influences in the state." This "unwavering commitment to the Union" was a significant factor in his choice as vice-president by Lincoln. According to tradition and local lore, on Aug. 8, 1863, Johnson freed his personal slaves. He vigorously suppressed the Confederates and later spoke out for black suffrage. As a leading War Democrat and pro-Union southerner, Johnson was an ideal candidate for the Republicans in 1864 as they enlarged their base to include War Democrats and changed the party name to the National Union Party. He was elected Vice President of the United States. At the inauguration ceremony, Johnson, who had been drinking (he explained later) to offset the pain of typhoid fever, gave a rambling speech and appeared intoxicated to many. In early 1865, Johnson talked harshly of hanging traitors like Jefferson Davis, which endeared him to the Radicals. On April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth while attending a play at Ford's Theater. Booth's plan included the assassination of Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward that same night. Seward narrowly survived his wounds, while Johnson escaped attack, when his would-be assassin, George Atzerodt, failed to go through with the plan. Upon the death of Lincoln the following morning, April 15, 1865, Johnson was sworn in as President of the United States by Lincoln's newly appointed Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase. He was the first Vice President to succeed to the U.S. Presidency upon the assassination of a President and the sixth vice president to become a president. Photo is of President Johnson's desk in his home in Greenesville, Tennessee. The office is to the right of the front door seen in the above photo. As president, Johnson forced the French out of Mexico by sending a combat army to the border and issuing an ultimatum. The French withdrew in 1867, and their puppet government quickly collapsed. Secretary of State Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russia Empire on April 9, 1867, for $7.2 million. Critics sneered at "Seward's Folly" and "Seward's Icebox" and "Icebergia." However, it was Post-Civil War Reconstruction that shaped Johnson's legacy. At first Johnson talked harshly, "Treason must be made odious... traitors must be punished and impoverished ... their social power must be destroyed." But then he struck another note: "I say, as to the leaders, punishment. I also say leniency, reconciliation and amnesty to the thousands whom they have misled and deceived." His class-based resentment of the rich appeared in a May 1865 statement to W. H. Holden, the man he appointed governor of North Carolina, "I intend to confiscate the lands of these rich men whom I have excluded from pardon by my proclamation, and divide the proceeds thereof among the families of the wool hat boys, the Confederate soldiers, whom these men forced into battle to protect their property in slaves. "Johnson in practice was not at all harsh toward the Confederate leaders. He allowed the Southern states to hold elections in 1865 in which prominent ex-Confederates were elected to the U.S. Congress; however, Congress did not seat them. Congress and Johnson argued in an increasingly public way about Reconstruction and the manner in which the Southern secessionist states would be readmitted to the Union. Johnson favored a very quick restoration, similar to the plan of leniency that Lincoln advocated before his death. Johnson appointed governments all passed Black Codes that gave the Freedmen second class status. In response to the Black Codes and worrisome signs of Southern recalcitrance, the Radical Republicans blocked the re-admission of the ex-rebellious states to the Congress in fall 1865. Congress also renewed the Freedman's Bureau, but Johnson vetoed it. Although strongly urged by moderates in Congress to sign the Civil Rights bill, Johnson broke decisively with them by vetoing it on March 27. His veto message objected to the measure because it conferred citizenship on the Freedmen at a time when eleven out of 36 States were unrepresented and attempted to fix by Federal law "a perfect equality of the white and black races in every State of the Union." Johnson said it was an invasion by Federal authority of the rights of the States; it had no warrant in the Constitution and was contrary to all precedents. The Democratic Party, proclaiming itself the party of white men, north and South, aligned with Johnson. However the Republicans in Congress overrode his veto and the Civil Rights bill became law. The last moderate proposal was the Fourteenth Amendment, designed to put the key provisions of the Civil Rights Act into the Constitution, but it went much further. It extended citizenship to everyone born in the United States (except Indians on reservations). Johnson used his influence to block the amendment in the states, as three-fourths of the states were required for ratification. (The Amendment was later ratified.) The moderate effort to compromise with Johnson had failed and an all-out political war broke out between the Republicans (both Radical and moderate) on one side, and on the other Johnson and his allies in the Democratic party in the North, and the conservative groupings in the South. The decisive battle was the election of 1866. Johnson campaigned vigorously but was widely ridiculed. The Republicans won by a landslide (the Southern states were not allowed to vote), and took full control of Reconstruction. Johnson was almost powerless. Photo is of the Johnson family plot containing President Johnson and his wife Eliza atop Signal Hill in 1875. Known today as Monument Hill. Also here are his two unmarried sons Charles and Robert. The Republicans were determined to rid themselves of Johnson. There were two attempts to remove President Andrew Johnson from office. The first occurred in the fall of 1867, after a furious debate, a formal vote was held in the House of Representatives which failed 108-57. Later, Johnson notified Congress that he had removed Edwin Stanton as Secretary of War (Johnson had wanted to replace Stanton with former General Ulysses S. Grant who refused to accept the position). This violated the Tenure of Office Act, a law enacted by Congress in March 1867 over Johnson's veto, specifically designed to protect Stanton. Johnson had vetoed the act, claiming it was unconstitutional (years later in the case Myers v. United States in 1926, the Supreme Court ruled that such laws were indeed unconstitutional). The House impeached Johnson for intentionally violating the Tenure of Office Act. On March 5, 1868, a court of impeachment was constituted in the Senate to hear charges against the President. William M. Evarts served as his counsel. Eleven articles were set out in the resolution, and the trial before the Senate lasted almost three months. Johnson's defense was based on a clause in the Tenure of Office Act stating that the then-current secretaries would hold their posts throughout the term of the President who appointed them. Since Lincoln had appointed Stanton, it was claimed, the applicability of the act had already run its course. In May, 35 Senators voted "guilty" and 19 "not guilty." As the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority for conviction in impeachment trials, Johnson was acquitted. A single changed vote would have sufficed to return a "Guilty" verdict. Seven Republican senators were disturbed by how the proceedings had been manipulated in order to give a one-sided presentation of the evidence. Senators William Pitt Fessenden (Maine), Joseph S. Fowler (Tennessee), James W. Grimes (Iowa), John B. Henderson (Missouri), Lyman Trumbull (Illinois), Peter G. Van Winkle (West Virginia) and Edmund G. Ross (Kansas), who provided the decisive vote, defied their party and public opinion and voted against conviction. Had Johnson been successfully removed from office, he would have been replaced with Radical Republican Benjamin Wade, making the presidency and Congress somewhat uniform in ideology, although in many ways Wade was more "radical" than the Republicans in Congress. This would have established a precedent that a President could be removed not for "high crimes and misdemeanors," but for purely political differences. Here is a photo of me in front of Johnson's grave that my wife Debbie took. Family tradition holds that Johnson chose this spot as his final resting place, and it has a commanding view of the distant mountains. The words inscribed there are a testament to Johnson's political legacy - "His Faith in the People Never Wavered." One of Johnson's last significant acts was granting unconditional amnesty to all Confederates on Christmas Day, December 25, 1868. This was after the election of U.S. Grant to succeed him, but before Grant took office in March 1869. Johnson was an unsuccessful candidate for election to the United States Senate from Tennessee in 1868 and to the House of Representatives in 1872. However, in 1874 the Tennessee legislature did elect him to the U.S. Senate. Johnson served from March 4, 1875 until his death. He is the only former President to serve in the Senate. In his first speech since returning to the Senate, which was also his last, Johnson denounced the corruptions of the Grant Administration. His passion aroused a standing ovation from many of his fellow senators who had once voted to remove him from the presidency. On July 28, 1875, Johnson and his wife were visiting their daughter at her home near Elizabethton, Tennessee when he suffered a stroke. He recovered somewhat but suffered a second stroke the next day. He passed away two days later. He was returned to Greeneville where his body lay in state at the Greeneville County Courthouse (only a couple of blocks from his home). Because of the hot weather, his body started to decompose so the casket remained closed. On August 3, his body was escorted by honor guard to his gravesite where a simple Masonic funeral service was held. He was buried covered in the American flag and with his head resting on a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The gravesite was on land he owned and had personally chosen for his burial. His wife Eliza died six months later and was buried along side him. The family erected the tall obelisk over Andrew and Eliza Johnson’s grave in 1878. There was a dedication ceremony, and afterwards, this became known as “Monument Hill.” The photo here is of the eagle atop Johnson grave. Johnson's personal life was sad. His wife Eliza became an invalid. She supported her husband in his political career, but had tried to avoid public appearances. Though she lived in the White House, she was not able to serve as First Lady due to her poor health. He had three sons, Charles, Robert and Andrew Jr. (nicknamed Frank) and two daughters, Martha and Mary. Charles, a surgeon during the Civil War, fell from a horse and died in 1863 at the age of 33. Robert, who became a colonel and the commander of the 1st Tennessee Cavalry (a pro-Union Tennessee regiment) during the war, never got over the death of his brother and resigned his commission shortly afterwards. He committed suicide at the age of 36 in the Johnson home shortly after the family’s return from Washington in 1869. Both brothers Charles and Robert, who had severe alcoholic problems, are buried side by side near their parents. Andrew Johnson Jr. was the youngest of the Johnson children by 18 years and the only son to marry. He never had children and died four years after his parents. Martha, who was the oldest of the children and her father's favorite, served as White House hostess for her invalid mother. Martha’s husband, David Trotter Patterson, had been one of Tennessee’s Senator at the time of Johnson’s impeachment. Patterson cast one of the Democratic “not guilty” votes during the trial. Martha lost both David and their daughter Belle within months of each other in 1891. Martha, however, lived longer than any of the other Johnson children. She witnessed the turn of a century, and died in 1901. Mary and her first husband, Daniel Stover, had three children, Sarah, Lillie and Andrew. Daniel died during the Civil War and the widowed Mary moved to the White House with her parents. She preceded the family's return to Greeneville to renovate and restore the family home to accommodate her and her children. However, a short time after finishing she married William Brown and moved away (they divorced after the deaths of her parents). The cemetery was owned by the family until 1906. From 1906 until 1942, the cemetery was under the jurisdiction of the War Department. The first veteran burial took place in 1908, one hundred years after the birth of Andrew Johnson. By 1939, there were 100 graves. When the National Parks Service took over in 1942, their original policy was to allow no more burials. The DAR and American Legion, however, began lobbying for the reactivation of the Cemetery, and in 1946 they found success. The cemetery is still active today. This is one of the few cemeteries administered by the National Park Service to have soldiers other than those who fought in the Civil War. Here you will find veterans from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Gulf Wars. National Park Service: Andrew
Johnson National Historic Site |
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Schuyler Colfax Republican
Schuyler Colfax's father died of tuberculosis before he was born. At the age
of ten, Schuyler went to work clerking in a store to help support his mother
who was only 27. The following year, his mother remarried in 1834 and two
years later they moved to New Carlisle, Indiana. After working in minor
political jobs, Colfax founded the St. Joseph Valley Register in South Bend
in 1845 and served as the editor of the influential Whig newspaper for
eighteen years. Two years later, he would meet Abraham Lincoln. Colfax was
one of the founders of the Free Soil Party in 1848 and was a delegate
to Whig Conventions that year and again in 1852. In 1950, Colfax ran
unsuccessfully as a Whig candidate for U.S. House of Representatives from
Indiana. Later in 1852, he declined the Whig nomination for Congress. |
Schuyler Colfax was the first dead vice president, and the 17th overall, that
my wife Debbie and I visited on "The Five DPOTUS Tour '05".
Along with the dead presidents, we picked up dead vice presidents, dead
supreme court chief justices and losing presidential candidates. We started
out from Bayonne early in the morning on Saturday, August 27. We drove across
I-80 through Pennsylvania (what a drive that was) and into Ohio. We went past
Cleveland and west along the Ohio Turnpike to Fremont (Rutherford B. Hayes)
and finally to Sandusky to spend the night. The next day, we continued our
trip west toward Chicago. One of the stops on the way was South Bend,
Indiana. We found City Cemetery fairly easy and Colfax even easier. He is
just inside the main gate. After snapping our photo we left to visit the
University of Notre Dame. We walked around the campus seeing the chapel, the
grotto, the stadium and of course, 'Touchdown' Jesus. Both Debbie and I were
very much impressed with Notre Dame.|
Henry Wilson Republican
Wilson was born Jeremiah Jones Colbath in Farmington, New Hampshire. Coming
from a poor family, his father sent him as an indentured servant to a nearby
farmer named Wilson until he was 21. He had little formal education, but read
everything he could on his own. Long estranged from his family, in 1833 he
had his name legally changed to Henry Wilson after the man who took care of
him. Wilson literally walked from Farmington, New Hampshire to Natick,
Massachusetts that year and was taught to be a shoemaker. He attended several
local academies, and also taught school in Natick, where he later engaged in
the manufacture of shoes. Wilson became successful as a shoe manufacturer and
as a Whig politician. In 1936, he visited Washington D.C. and was so
horrified at the sight of a slave auction, he left Washington determined
"to give all that I had . . . to the cause of emancipation in America,"
he said. At that point, Wilson committed himself to the antislavery movement. |
At the end of July, 2006, my wife and I drove to Massachusetts for three
days. We stayed in the town of Natick, just outside of Boston. We went to a
Red Sox game in Fenway Park and got to see David Ortiz hit a walk-off three
run homer against the Cleveland Indians. The next morning, we set out to find
Henry Wilson. The cemetery was about a mile from the hotel. There are two
Dell Park cemeteries next to each other, with identical signs, and neither
one saying "Old." The first one looked a lot more modern then the
second one. I have a feeling that the name is not the Old Dell Park Cemetery,
but it's rather the "old" Dell Park Cemetery. We did find the right
one and found Wilson fairly easy. The marker is a lot smaller then I thought
it would be.
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Chester Arthur
Republican Served:
March 4, 1881 to September 19, 1881
As soon as you enter the cemetery (they do have maps in a
box at the main building), there are signs that lead you directly to Chet.
It's a very large, hilly place. There are some other famous people resting at
Albany Rural like Revolutionary War hero Philip Schuyler, Stephen Van
Rensselaer and New Jersey's 2nd Governor William Paterson.
The grave is very interesting. The bronze angel resting
her hand on Chet's coffin is very interesting. The flowers were from
President Clinton (Debbie checked the card on the wreath.) We arrived only a couple of weeks after Chester Arthur's
birthday (his 179th). These flowers were sent by the White House. It must be
a tradition to send flowers on the birthdays of ex-presidents I returned to see Chet with my nephew Justin during a hockey tournament in Albany. We were in the neighborhood so I thought I would drop by. It was his First DPOTUS. After leaving the cemetery, we drove over the Berkshires into Western Massachusetts. We spent the night in the Charlemont Inn on Route 2 in Charlemont, Massachusetts. The next morning we are heading north into Vermont to find Calvin "Silent Cal" Coolidge. Arthur was born in Northern Vermont – one of two presidents born in the Green Mountain State – the other being Coolidge.
White House Biography of Chester A.
Arthur |
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Thomas Hendricks Democrat
Hendricks, who was born on a farm in Ohio and moved to Indiana the following year with his parents, John and Jane Thomson. Hendricks was from a prominent political family; his father, an uncle and three cousins were all members of the Indiana state legislature while another uncle was the third governor of Indiana and a U.S. senator. After his graduation from Hanover College in 1841 (another famous alumni of Hanover College is actor Woody Harrelson from TV's Cheers), he began studying law. Becoming a lawyer two years later, he practiced law in Shelbyville, Indiana and later married Eliza Morgan. A Jacksonian Democrat, he became involved in politics shortly after. He spoke out against the "Know-Nothing" Party and their anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant views. In 1848, Hendricks, who was very politically ambitious, was elected to the Indiana state legislature where he became a member of the State constitutional convention where he led the move to enact "Black Laws" that promoted segregation and restricted the migration of free blacks into the state. Two years later, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives and won. He won re-election two years later in 1852. A popular member of the House, he became a follower of Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas and supported Douglas' controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act permitted residents of the territories to determine whether or not to permit slavery, a concept known as "popular sovereignty." This issue was very controversial and resulted in the emergence of the new Republican party. His support of the Kansas-Nebraska Act brought about his defeat for re-election to a third term in 1854. After his defeat, Hendricks accepted an appointment from President Franklin Pierce to become commissioner of the General Land Office in the Interior Department, a post he held through 1859. Next, Hendricks ran for Governor of Indiana in 1860, but lost to Republican Henry S. Lane. After his defeat, he moved to Indianapolis and practiced law. After the firing on Fort Sumter in April of 1861, Civil War broke out in the United States. Indiana was split between those who advocated peace by letting the South secede from the Union and those who wanted to fight to maintain the Union. Hendricks became one of his state’s leading "War Democrats." Later in the year, when it was discovered that Jesse D. Bright, the president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate and Indiana's leading Democrat, was supporting the Confederacy, was expelled from the Senate. The following year, the Indiana state legislature choose Hendricks to take his seat in the United States Senate [popular voting of senators wouldn't come about until 1913]. He was one of only ten Democrats in the now reduced Congress [The eleven southern Confederate states were gone]. Unlike many Democratic "Copperheads", Hendricks was loyal to President Lincoln and the Union but opposed many aspects of the Republican-dominated military effort in the American Civil War and the Reconstruction program for the South after the war. He favored Lincoln's plan of leniency toward the former Confederate states and opposed the Radical Republicans plans. Unfortunately, his racist belief that Blacks were not equal to Whites led him to oppose all legislation aimed at assisting freed Blacks, either politically or economically. He went so far as to openly oppose the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution that gave freedom for slaves as well as voting rights and U.S. citizenship.
In 1868, during the Democratic National Convention held at
Tammany Hall in New York City, Hendrick's name was put forward for
president, but he lost to New York Governor Horatio Seymour. From that year
until his death, he was put forward for nomination for the Presidency at
every national Democratic Convention except 1872. After his one term as
senator was up, he returned to Indiana. In 1872, Hendrick's
During the presidential election of 1872, Democratic candidate Horace Greeley died days after the popular vote in the presidential election. In the Electoral College, Governor Hendricks received 42 electoral votes that were previously pledged to Greeley. In the 1876 Democratic National Convention held at Merchants Exchange Building in St. Louis, Hendricks was the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. The Democratic Party, but after the Panic of 1873, Hendricks became associated with the "greenbacks." This made New York financiers very nervous and the nomination went to New York governor Samuel Tilden instead. To balance out the ticket, and get "greenback" votes, Hendricks was nominated to be Tilden's running mate. The Election of 1876 was the most controversial in the history of the United States (even more then 2000). Because of all of the scandals surrounding the prior Grant administration, both parties looked to get candidates who could win the public trust. When the votes were counted up, Tilden looked like the easy winner. He had 4,288,546 votes to Hayes' 4,034,311 giving Tilden 51% of the popular vote. However, Tilden was one electoral vote short of the majority needed to win. Hayes had even less electoral votes. The problem was that three southern, and former Confederate states, had sent in two sets of voting results. South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida where Reconstruction Republican governments were still in control submitted two sets of electoral ballots, one favoring Tilden, the other Hayes. Congress opted to appoint an Electoral Commission to find a solution. The commission consisted of five members of the House, five from the Senate and five justices from the Supreme Court with a party affiliation of seven Republicans, seven Democrats and one Independent. The Independent, Supreme Court Justice David Davis of Illinois (whose grave I also photographed on this trip), dropped out when the Illinois state legislature suddenly appointed Davis to fill an empty seat in the U.S. Senate. Justice Joseph P. Bradley, a Republican, was selected as his replacement. Though a fan of Tilden, he joined the other Republicans and the vote was 8 to 7 along party lines. Hayes was president. However, Southern Democrats planned to block the Commission's report with a filibuster. A secret compromise was worked out to get the Democrats to go along with it, including removal of Federal troops from the former Confederate states and ending Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. In the Democratic Convention of 1880 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Hendricks was not nominated, that honor going instead to William H. English of Indiana, who with presidential candidate Winfield Scott Hancock, lost to Republican James Garfield. Later that year, he suffered a stroke while on vacation in Arkansas.
Four years later in the 1884 Democratic
National Convention
held at the Exposition Building in Chicago, Hendricks was a delegate.
The field for candidates was wide open and the Democrats were looking to go
with a 'new' face and nominated the reform governor of New York, Grover
Cleveland. However, opponents to Cleveland decided to throw Hendricks, who
represented the "old ticket" of 1876 that had been robbed of
victory, into the mix and get him nominated instead. Cleveland did prevail
and received the nomination when it was realized he stood the best chance of
winning the general election. They did nominate Hendricks as his running mate
despite the fact that Cleveland did not want him on the ticket (delegates
gave him the vice president spot claiming he deserved it and again with the
hope of gaining "greenback" votes). This was the second time that
Hendricks ran as the running mate of a New York governor. This time they won,
however by a slim margin of 30,000 votes, in what has often been described as
one of the "dirtiest" campaign in American political history. |
Thomas Andrews Hendricks was the sixth dead vice president, and the 22nd
overall, that my wife Debbie and I visited on "The Five DPOTUS Tour
'05". Along with the dead presidents, we picked up dead vice
presidents, dead supreme court chief justices and losing presidential candidates.
We started out from Bayonne early in the morning on Saturday, August 27. We
drove for two days, with numerous stops, on our way to Chicago. After
spending the week in Chicago, we headed on to Iowa and then back to
Springfield, Illinois. The next night we left Springfield and headed to
Indianapolis, Indiana. In Indianapolis, we drove to Crown Hill Cemetery. This
is one of the most famous cemeteries in the country due to the fact it has
one dead president, Benjamin Harrison, three dead vice-presidents; Charles
Fairbanks, Thomas Marshall and Hendricks along with famous gangster John
Dillinger. Crown Hill is extremely large and though Harrison's grave is easy
to finds (since there are signs to it) the three vice-presidents were not. I
knew the areas they were in, but they were not easily marked in the cemetery.
Hendricks was the last to be located and by far the most difficult.
defeated
Civil War general Thomas M. Browne to become Indiana's 16th governor, the
first Democratic governor elected in a northern state after the war,
replacing Republican Conrad Baker. |
Levi P. Morton Republican Born: May 16, 1824 in Shoreham, Vermont
Morton was born in Shoreham, Addison County, Vermont to a Congregationalist minister. His older brother, David Oliver Morton would become the Mayor of Toledo. Morton, an Episcopalian, was a clerk in a general store in Enfield, Massachusetts, taught school in Boscawen, New Hampshire, engaged in mercantile pursuits in Hanover, New Hampshire, moved to Boston, entered the dry-goods business in New York City and engaged in banking there. On October 15, 1856, he married his first wife, Lucy Young Kimball in Flatlands, New York. They had one child together. His wife died on July 11, 1871 and he remarried to Anna Livingston Reade Street. They had five daughters. Morton, an Episcopalian, was an unsuccessful candidate for election in 1876 to the 45th Congress. He was appointed by President Rutherford B. Hayes as honorary commissioner to the Paris Exhibition of 1878 (where the completed head of the Statue of Liberty was showcased). Morton was elected as a Republican to the 46th and 47th Congresses, serving from March 4, 1879 until his resignation on March 21, 1881. Presidential candidate James Garfield asked him to be his vice presidential candidate in 1880, but Morton rejected the offer. He asked to be Minister to Great Britain or France instead. Ironically, if Morton had accepted. He, instead of Chester Arthur, would have become the 25th president after the assassination of Garfield in 1881. Garfield named him to be Minister to France (ambassador) and he served from 1881 to 1885 (Incidentally, it was this appointment that led indirectly to Garfield's assassination — his murderer, Charles Guiteau, decided to assassinate the president when he was passed over as minister to France).
Despite losing the popular vote by 90,000 to Cleveland, Harrison won the Electoral College 233 to 168. The pivotal swing state was New York (as well as having the most electoral votes - 36). This was Cleveland's state as well as Morton's. The Republican's were determined to carry the state. Money was collected to buy votes and a British ambassador was tricked into revealing his support for Cleveland which alienated Irish voters. This helped give the Republicans a 1% edge in the vote which carried New York. Morton was now Vice President of the United States. During his term, Harrison tried to pass an election law enforcing the voting rights of blacks in the South, but Morton did little to support the bill against a Democratic filibuster in the Senate. Harrison blamed Morton for the bill's eventual failure, and, at the Republican convention in 1892, Morton was replaced by Whitelaw Reid as the vice-presidential candidate (they would ultimately lose to Cleveland). After leaving as vice president, Morton was elected as the 31st Governor of New York and served one two-year term from 1895 to 1896. During the 1896 Republican Convention in St. Louis, Morton received the fourth highest votes (58 votes) during the first ballot for president, but William McKinley (who would ultimately win the general election), who had received an overwhelming 661½ votes and won the nomination for president. Following his public career, he became a real estate investor. He died in Rhinebeck on his 96th birthday (the only U.S. President or Vice President to have died on his birthday). Among vice presidents, Morton lived to be the second oldest (the oldest was John Nance Garner who lived to the age of 98). Morton even survived five of his successors in the vice presidency; Adlai E. Stevenson, Garret Hobart, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles W. Fairbanks and James S. Sherman. The Village of Morton Grove, in Cook County, Illinois is named after Morton. |
One pleasant Sunday afternoon in May of 2006, my wife and I took a drive
north along the Hudson River towards Rhinebeck, New York. Rhinebeck is
a picturesque town among the hills of upstate New York. It's a short distance
north of Hyde Park and Franklin D. Roosevelt's home and museum. While in
Rhinebeck, which has some nice antique shops, we visited Rhinebeck Cemetery
and got a photo of Levi Morton's grave. Morton becomes the 23rd dead vice
president on my list.
Morton was very popular in France, helping
commercial relations run smoothly between the two countries during his term,
and he hammered the first nail in the construction of the Statue of Liberty
(It was driven into the big toe of Lady Liberty’s left foot.). Also, while
minister, he moved the U.S. Embassy to a new location in Paris. The plaza in
front of the embassy was renamed Place des États-Unis (United States Place).
Today there is a statue to Washington and Lafayette in the center of the
square.
In 1888, Morton was chosen the vice
presidential candidate on the Republican ticket headed by Benjamin Harrison
of Ohio in their convention in Chicago. In the election, they were opposed by
President Grover Cleveland. The Republicans campaigned heavily on the issue
of protective tariffs, turning out protectionist voters in the important
industrial states of the North.|
Adlai Stevenson Democratic
Adlai Ewing Stevenson, son of John Turner Stevenson and Eliza Ewing Stevenson (descended from Northern Irish Presbyterians), was born on the family tobacco farm in Christian County, Kentucky. At the time, Kentucky was a slave state and the Stevenson family owned a few slaves. When their tobacco crop was ruined in 1852, the family set their slaves free and moved to Bloomington, Illinois, where they operated a sawmill. Stevenson attended Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. He studied law and became a lawyer. He wanted to marry Letitia Green, the daughter of the college president and Presbyterian minister, but their family considered Stevenson socially inferior. After nine years, and the death of the minister, they were married. They had three daughters and a son Lewis (father of future presidential hopeful Adlai Stevenson II). Stevenson became involved in politics after attending the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858. Stevenson became a supporter of the Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas and helped campaign for him against Lincoln. He spoke out against the "Know-Nothing" Party and their anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant views which made him popular among immigrants. In 1860, at age 23, he received a small political office which he held throughout the Civil War. In 1864, he was elected District Attorney and later started a law firm with his cousin James S. Ewing creating a very prominent law firm, Stevenson & Ewing. In 1874, Stevenson ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives and won. This is a major accomplishment considering that the Republicans dominated post-Civil War politics. However, the economic panic of 1873 caused voters to sweep him into office in the first Democratic congressional majority since the Civil War. He was defeated for re-election in 1876. In 1878, he returned to Congress for another term, but was again defeated when he ran for re-election. Stevenson served as a delegate to the Democratic convention of 1884 held at Exposition Building in Chicago that nominated Grover Cleveland for president. Cleveland also abhorred the patronage system and refused to hand out jobs as political rewards. He eventually gave in to those who insisted on rewarding the party faithful and made Stevenson Postmaster General, who promptly set about replacing postmasters around the country with loyal Democrats. Postmasters, there were about 55,000 of them, were important political jobs since they had the ability to know everyone in small communities and were able to help distribute partisan mail. One Republican newspaper called Stevenson, ""an official axman who beheaded Republican officeholders with the precision and dispatch of the French guillotine in the days of the Revolution." In all, Stevenson replaced 40,000 postmasters with loyal Democrats. When Cleveland was defeated for re-election by Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, the new Postmaster General reversed over 30,000 of Stevenson appointments.
The currency controversy would dominate the term. Just before Cleveland was inaugurated, a financial panic on Wall Street, caused by a major railroad company going bankrupt, plunged the country into a depression. Cleveland was opposed to any government interference while Stevenson, called "Uncle Adlai," advocated currency reform. In 1893, in an effort to protect the U.S. gold reserve, Cleveland wanted to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act [this act allowed citizens to exchange their silver for gold]. This split the Democratic Party. Those like Cleveland, called "Goldbugs," believed the currency should only be based on gold. Those like Stevenson, called "Silverites" believed in minting unlimited amounts of silver coins and paper currency. The silverite Democrats in the senate used every means possible to stop the repeal including a filibuster. Stevenson, as president of the senate, did nothing to stop them. They eventually compromised on a three-year gradual repeal. The silverites called it the "Crime of 1893" and it hurt the economy anyway causing many to lose upcoming elections in 1894. This issue was so sensitive, that when Cleveland faced a life threatening cancer operation and with a silverite vice president, he had it done in secret so as not to cause another financial panic. Cleveland and Stevenson remained cordial but Cleveland never consulted Stevenson on any issue. Cleveland thought that Stevenson was too deep among the free-silver men, referring to them as "Stevenson's Cabinet." At the 1896 Democratic National Convention held again at the Chicago Coliseum, Stevenson hoped to get the nomination for president. Though there was some support, it soon faded away amid the enthusiastic support for newcomer William Jennings Bryan. Bryan supported free silver with his "Cross of Gold" speech. Cleveland was totally left out when the Democrats embraced the free silver platform and nominated Bryan. Most pro-Cleveland Democrats deserted Bryan but Stevenson supported him. Bryan eventually lost to Republican William McKinley. McKinley tried to appease the silverites by creating a bipartisan commission led by Stevenson, but this amounted to little. Four years later at the 1900 at the Democratic National Convention held at Convention Hall in Kansas City, Bryan was re-nominated. Many Democrats felt that he was doomed to defeat and showed little interest in being the losing running mate. The Democrats turned to 65 year old Stevenson to be vice president, but as was predicted, they went down to defeat against the William McKinley/Teddy Roosevelt Republican ticket. Stevenson returned to his law practice in Bloomington. At age 73, he ran unsuccessfully for governor of Illinois. He retired from politics and died of a heart attack in Chicago at the age of 78. One grandson, Adlai Ewing Stevenson II, would go on to run twice unsuccessfully for president of the United States and later become U.N. Ambassador who played a pivotal role during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His son, Stevenson's great-grandson, Adlai Ewing Stevenson III, was a U.S. senator from Illinois from 1970 to 1981. His son, Stevenson's great-great-grandson, Adlai Stevenson IV, was a Chicago television reporter back in the 1980's. There is now an Adlai Stevenson V born in 1994. McLean Stevenson, an actor who among his many roles played Col. Blake on the television series "M*A*S*H", was the grandson of Adlai Stevenson's brother. |
Adlai Stevenson was the third dead vice president, and the 19th overall, that
my wife Debbie and I visited on "The Five DPOTUS Tour '05".
Along with the dead presidents, we picked up dead vice presidents, dead
supreme court chief justices and losing presidential candidates. We started
out from Bayonne early in the morning on Saturday, August 27. We drove for
two days, with numerous stops, on our way to Chicago. After spending the week
in Chicago, we headed on to Iowa to visit Herbert Hoover's grave and then
back to Springfield, Illinois. On the way to Springfield, we stopped in
Bloomington, Illinois to visit the Stevensons. They were both easy to find. I
had e-mailed the cemetery before going and they gave me good directions to
the gravesites. 
At the 1992 Democratic National
Convention held at the Chicago Coliseum, Cleveland was nominated to try and
regain the White House and as his running mate, the Democrats nominated the
"headsman of the post office," Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson, like
many others in the party wanted to use greenbacks and free silver to inflate
the currency and help the farmers which would balance out Cleveland, who was
a hard-money, gold-standard supporter laissez-faire president. This was the same
strategy that worked in 1884 with Cleveland and Hendricks and it worked again
as both Cleveland and Stevenson won the election by almost 400,000 votes.|
Garret A. Hobart Republican
Garret Augustus Hobart, or "Gus" as he was known to his friends, was born in Long Branch, New Jersey and graduated from Rutgers College (now a university) in New Brunswick. In 1866, he became a lawyer in Paterson, New Jersey. In 1869, he married Jennie Tuttle, the daughter of a prominent Paterson attorney, Socrates Tuttle, who he worked for. Hobart's rise in his profession and in the business world was rapid: he became the director of several banks and at one time was connected with sixty corporations. A Republican, he became involved in local politics and in 1872, he was elected to the state assembly. In 1876, he was elected to the state senate and became president of the senate in 1881. He left the senate in 1882 and became a member of the Republican National Committee. Hobart was never elected to any national office when the Republican Party tapped him to be McKinley's running mate in 1896. Many attribute this selection to Mark Hanna, McKinley's key political aide. Hobart was a strong supporter of the Gold Standard and the Republicans needed an easterner to help get the big business vote. This he did as McKinley and Hobart won by a landslide over William Jennings Bryan.
Hobart helped McKinley with Congress, particularly in getting Congress
to approve the Spanish-American war. His one important act as vice president
was to cast the tie-breaking vote in 1899 against an amendment to the treaty
with Spain that would have promised future independence for the Philippine
Islands. In 1899, it was expected that the two would run together for
re-election.
I returned to Cedar Lawn in June of 2012 to meet fellow cemetery historian Tim Bash and his family (picture above left).
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Theodore Roosevelt
Republican Served:
March 4, 1901 to September 14, 1901
After the war, he married Theodosia Bartow Prevost, the widow of a British officer and moved to New York City. They had a daughter Theodosia. Burr's wife died in 1794. He practiced law and entered politics, becoming Attorney General for New York in 1789. Burr was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1791, unseating Senator Philip Schuyler and making a lifelong enemy of Schuyler's son-in-law, Alexander Hamilton. As senator, he spoke out against many Federalist policies in Washington's and Adams' administration. In the Election of 1800, Burr was the vice president on the Democratic-Republican's ticket, headed by Thomas Jefferson. Their opponent was incumbent president John Adams. The election was especially ugly as both sides looked to discredit the other. However, it was after the election that the real fun began.
Elections were different in 1800 than they are Today. The
Electors would cast two ballots, the man with the most votes would be
president and the second with be vice president. Before voting, one Elector
was to cast his ballot for someone beside the chosen vice president so he
would come in second. Somehow, the Democratic-Republicans did not select
anyone to cast this vote. Consequently, Jefferson and Burr tied for the most
electoral votes with 73 each. Since Burr was his party’s selection for vice
president, he should have stepped aside. According to the Constitution, if
the election is tied, it goes to the House of Representatives with each state
getting one vote. The representatives from each state would poll their Not surprisingly, Burr was not re-nominated by his party in the Election of 1804. So he decided to run for New York Governor. He lost badly. He blamed Hamilton, who referred to Burr as, "a dangerous man, and who ought not to be trusted." Burr, who was still vice president, challenged Hamilton to a duel. On July 11, 1804 on a cliff in Weehawken, New Jersey, Burr mortally wounded Hamilton. Even though it was illegal, dueling was socially accepted. However, Burr was heavily criticized for it. He was indicted for murder in New York and New Jersey but never stood trial for it. Burr returned to Washington D.C. to continue to preside of the Senate. He left the vice presidency in 1805, heavily in debt. Burr entered in a strange plot with Louisiana Governor James Wilkinson. Burr was going to lead an attack against Mexico hoping to get many Western States to leave the Union and make a southeastern confederacy under his leadership. Before it began, Wilkinson betrayed Burr, who was arrested on the charge of treason. He was tried for treason in Richmond, Virginia in 1807. Chief Justice John Marshall presided over the trial and was responsible for Burr's acquittal. After the trial, Burr left for Europe. Burr returned to New York five years later. In 1813, his daughter, Theodosia, was lost at sea. Burr never overcame the loss of his beloved daughter. He remarried in 1833 to a wealthy widow, but she soon found out he was squandering her money and sued for divorce. Burr was incapacitated by a series of strokes, eventually dying on Staten Island. Burr was buried with full military honors. Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace
National Historic Site (NPS) |
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Charles Fairbanks Republican Born: May 11, 1852 in Muskingum County, Ohio
Charles Fairbanks was born in a modest log house in Ohio. His father, Loriston Fairbanks, was a farmer and wagon maker who had moved from New York to go into business for himself and his mother, Mary Adelaide Smith, was a local temperance advocate. Charles graduated from Ohio Wesleyan and later from Cleveland Law College, taking only six months to complete his courses and pass the bar. On October 6, 1874, Charles married Cornelia Cole and moved with her to Indianapolis, Indiana, where, with the help of an uncle, Charles took a position as attorney with the Chesapeake and Ohio railroad system. Over the next decade, young Fairbanks built a sterling reputation, as well as a personal fortune, as a lawyer for numerous railroad interests in the Midwest. In 1884, Indiana's Republicans split in their support of presidential candidates, some favoring Walter Q. Gresham and others preferring Benjamin Harrison. The election of Harrison in 1888 seemingly jeopardized Fairbanks' prospects, since he had been active on behalf of the Gresham faction. Harrison's lackluster performance in the White House and impressive Democratic victories in 1892, gave Fairbanks the opportunity to return to prominence. The campaign of 1892 also brought him into contact with the governor of Ohio, William McKinley. The two men formed a friendship that lasted until McKinley's untimely death in 1901 and proved extremely beneficial to the careers of both men.
Even though he held no office, Fairbanks managed to gain control of the
Indiana Republican party, primarily because of his wealth. Perhaps most
importantly, he secretly owned a majority interest in the state's largest
newspaper, The Indianapolis News. By 1901, he had also purchased the
major opposition daily, The Indianapolis Journal. Fairbanks' control
of the press significantly promoted the Republican cause in Indiana. As
leader of his state's Republican party, Fairbanks stood in an excellent
position to command the attention of the national party. With the parties
almost evenly balanced in the late nineteenth century, a small shift in the
voting patterns of one of the more densely populated industrial states could
win or lose a presidential election. Indiana was one of these vital states.
In the thirteen presidential elections from 1868 to 1916, eleven of the
national tickets boasted a Hoosier candidate, usually running for vice
president. Charles Fairbanks thus became an important man in Republican
electoral considerations. When William McKinley ran for president in 1896, he made his friend Fairbanks a key player in his campaign strategy. Fairbanks ran McKinley's campaign in Indiana and delivered a united Hoosier delegation for McKinley at the Republican National Convention in St. Louis. McKinley won the Republican nomination handily, and then defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the general election. With the Republicans in control of the Indiana legislature, they choose, with a little help from President McKinley, Fairbanks as senator [up until 1913, state legislatures choose U.S. Senators not popular vote]. Fairbanks' Senate career proved competent if unspectacular. He was neither a great orator nor a brilliant political thinker. He succeeded by mastering the intricacies of the Senate and by avoiding controversy. He stuck to the party line and was well respected among his colleagues. He favored restricting immigration and requiring a literacy test before entry into the United States, both popular positions. Although he had originally opposed the pressure for war with Spain in 1898, he faithfully followed President McKinley's lead when war came. He was involved in the Canadian-Alaska border dispute. The people of Alaska showed their appreciation by naming the city of Fairbanks in his honor. Perhaps Fairbanks' only controversial stand in the Senate was for black soldiers fighting in Cuba be commanded by black officers. Thanks to the senator's intervention, Indiana became the first state to accept this position as general policy for its militia units. Fairbanks' calm demeanor and "safe" Republican views made him very popular in the Senate. As a senator from a pivotal state and a consistent defender of the McKinley administration, Fairbanks emerged as a natural successor to McKinley. He certainly looked presidential at six feet, four inches and very dignified. In 1900 some conservatives, most notably Ohio Senator Mark Hanna, tried to maneuver Fairbanks into a vice-presidential nomination. However, Fairbanks had higher ambitions and turned him down. President McKinley assassination on September 6, 1901, lost Fairbanks a friend, political patron and a close connection to the White House. Now with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House, the nation's political environment was changing in ways that would leave Fairbanks in the shadows. President Roosevelt brought a new glamour to the presidency. He dominated the news and shifted the national debate to new issues. None of these changes proved helpful to Fairbanks' presidential ambitions. Even in Indiana, Fairbanks was being pushed aside by younger politicians. Fairbanks saw his presidential hopes gradually slipping away. President Roosevelt effectively maneuvered to gain control of the Republican party and ensure his re-nomination in 1904. Fairbanks became more closely identified as the heir to McKinley, but Roosevelt's dominating presence, rather than McKinley's spirit, had come to control the party. If the goal of constructing a national presidential ticket is to achieve a complementary balance between its two members, the Republican ticket of 1904 came close to being ideal. Roosevelt and Fairbanks differed from one another in nearly every way. The ticket offered balance both geographically, between New York and Indiana, and ideologically, from progressive to conservative. Perhaps the greatest contrast was one of personality. The vigorous and ebullient Roosevelt differed markedly from the calm and cool Fairbanks. One wag called the 1904 ticket "The Hot Tamale and the Indiana Icicle." Fairbanks's cool demeanor often led cartoonists to portray him as a block of ice. Although friends claimed he was a very genial fellow in private and only appeared austere, the icy image remained the popular one, providing an interesting contrast to the "strenuous life" of President Roosevelt. The Republicans' landslide victory over Democrats Judge Alton B. Parker and Henry G. Davis was unquestionably the result of Roosevelt's popularity over the rather lifeless Parker. Fairbanks was now vice president and aspiring to get to the White House himself soon.
Roosevelt, while New York City police commissioner, had argued that the vice
president should participate actively in a presidential administration,
including attendance at cabinet meetings and consultation on all major
decisions. Now that he was president, however, Roosevelt displayed no
intention of following his own advice. He did not invite Fairbanks to
participate in the cabinet and consulted the vice president about nothing of
substance. The new vice president spent much of his time presiding over the
Senate. He undoubtedly felt comfortable dealing with his old friends on
Capitol Hill, and President Roosevelt gave him nothing else to do. As Senate
president, Fairbanks had little direct power to affect the course of
legislation, but working in tandem with the Republican leadership he was able
to play a role in passing the president's ambitious legislative program that
included the Pure Food and Drug Act. Fairbanks didn't have much power, but
used what he had effectively. Roosevelt spent most of 1907 and 1908 fighting with Congress over expanding the powers of the executive branch. Roosevelt believed that executive agencies as opposed to Congress were more capable of maintaining a careful watch over the nation's business community. Opposition from his own party in the Senate constantly frustrated Roosevelt, who attempted to rouse public opinion in support of greater executive power. The Senate resented Roosevelt's constant public criticism. Vice president Fairbanks' sympathies plainly lay with the Senate, and when his term ended in 1909, he used his farewell address to launch a vigorous defense of his Senate colleagues. During his vice-presidency, Fairbanks also spent considerable time trying to secure the Republican presidential nomination in 1908. In this endeavor, he faced serious obstacles like his perceived lackluster image by the public. Fairbanks' popularity increased somewhat after a supposed attempt on his life. While the vice president was in Flint, Michigan, police arrested a man in the crowd carrying a .32-caliber revolver and pockets full of "socialistic literature." This incident surely evoked memories of the assassination of President McKinley. Fairbanks also tried to use favorable publicity to bolster his image by having himself photographed chopping down a tree on his farm, perhaps trying to emulate Roosevelt's much-admired vigor. Still, no one outside the inner circle of the Republican party seemed to pay much attention. An even more serious problem for Fairbanks loomed in the form of opposition from Theodore Roosevelt. The president had already announced he would not run in 1908, but he intended to choose his own successor. His list clearly did not include Fairbanks. Roosevelt choose his secretary of war and close friend, William Howard Taft, using the power of his office to secure convention delegations loyal to Taft. By the time the Republican National Convention, held in Denver's Auditorium, began, Taft's selection was nearly determined. Against the power of a popular incumbent president, Fairbanks never had a chance. Roosevelt could hardly conceal his scorn for Fairbanks. The president liked to tell amusing stories about his uninspiring vice president and would often discuss his preferred successors in Fairbanks' presence without mentioning the gentleman from Indiana. After gaining the nomination, Taft went on to win an easy victory over William Jennings Bryan in November by over a million votes. Fairbanks returned to Indiana to live the life of a country gentleman. He remained marginally active in Indiana politics but tried to maintain a low profile during the disastrous party split in 1912. In 1914, the former vice president returned to prominence once more as the advocate of party unity. The Indiana delegation to the 1916 Republican National Convention held at Chicago Coliseum supported him as a "favorite son" candidate for president, in hopes of a deadlocked convention. When Charles Evans Hughes obtained the nomination, there was talk of proposing Fairbanks for vice president. The prospect of reacquiring his old position did not appeal to Fairbanks. He wired his friends in the Indiana delegation, "My name must not be considered for Vice President and if it is presented, I wish it withdrawn. Please withdraw it." When, despite Fairbanks' wishes, he was nominated on the first ballot, his loyalty to the party induced him to accept the nomination and fulfill his duty as a candidate. He toured the country calling for a return to the high tariff policies that Democratic President Woodrow Wilson had abandoned. Hughes and Fairbanks suffered a narrow defeat in 1916 (by 23 electoral votes), but Fairbanks could take comfort that Indiana swung once more into the Republican column. After the election, Charles Fairbanks again retired to private life. He never did achieve his goal of the White House. By understanding party politics, Fairbanks advanced as far as the vice-presidency. Yet, in an era dominated by the likes of Roosevelt, Wilson and Bryan, Fairbanks' political skills were not sufficient to allow him to escape the shadows of those men. During the World War I, he visited several army camps to encourage the troops and spoke for the Liberty Loan campaigns. Fairbanks died on June 4, 1918, at the age of 66. In a note on popular culture, Fairbanks was portrayed by American character actor Thomas A. Carlin in the 1981 film Ragtime. In the film, he is incorrectly referred to as the vice president while running with Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. They, of course, won the election and Fairbanks then became vice president. |
Charles Fairbanks was the fifth dead vice president, and the 21st overall,
that my wife Debbie and I visited on "The Five DPOTUS Tour '05".
Along with the dead presidents, we picked up dead vice presidents, dead
supreme court chief justices and losing presidential candidates. We started
out from Bayonne early in the morning on Saturday, August 27. We drove for
two days, with numerous stops, on our way to Chicago. After spending the week
in Chicago, we headed on to Iowa and then back to Springfield, Illinois. The
next night we left Springfield and headed to Indianapolis, Indiana. In
Indianapolis, we drove to Crown Hill Cemetery. This is one of the most famous
cemeteries in the country due to the fact it has one dead president, Benjamin
Harrison, three dead vice-presidents; Fairbanks, Thomas Marshall and Thomas
Hendricks along with famous gangster John Dillinger. Crown Hill is extremely
large and though Harrison's grave is easy to finds (since there are signs to
it) the three vice-presidents were not. I knew the areas they were in, but
they were not easily marked in the cemetery. Fairbanks was the second to be
located.
Still, the Old Guard could not simply be dismissed. If one of their own could
not be the presidential nominee, they would choose the vice-presidential
candidate. Fairbanks was the obvious choice. Roosevelt was far from pleased
with the idea of Fairbanks for vice president. He would have preferred Robert
R. Hitt of Illinois, but he did not consider the vice-presidential nomination
worth a fight and Fairbanks was easily placed on the 1904 Republican ticket
in order to appease the Old Guard.|
James S. Sherman Republican
James Schoolcraft Sherman, also known by his nickname, "Sunny Jim," was the son of New York state assemblyman, Richard U. Sherman. He was born in Utica where his grandfather, Willett Sherman, ran a profitable glass factory and owned an impressive farm. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1878, he became a lawyer in 1880. In 1881, he married Carrie Babcock of East Orange, New Jersey; they would have three sons. A Republican, he was elected Mayor of Utica four years later. Two years later, in 1886, his district elected him to the U.S. House of Representatives. Except for the two years following his defeat for reelection in 1890, he remained in national public office for the rest of his life. He was re-elected two years later. Sherman was defeated for re-election in 1890, but won again in 1892, narrowly defeating Democrat Henry Bentley, who had beaten him in 1890. As a Republican committed to a high protective tariff, Sherman blamed his single defeat on an angry voter reaction to the McKinley Tariff of 1890, which had swept many members of his party out of Congress (including William McKinley). He won the next seven elections to the House serving a total of 10 terms (20 years). There Sherman reestablished himself as the leader of a "jolly coterie" of New York Republicans. Speaker Thomas B. Reed, who enjoyed the company of these younger men, promoted Sherman in the House hierarchy. Democratic Leader Champ Clark identified him as among the "Big Five" in the House Republican leadership, but Sherman never held a party leadership post or chaired a major committee (later becoming chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs). While in the House, Sherman was a leader in the fight to preserve the gold standard against Populist proposals for "free silver"—by which farmers hoped to reduce their debts by fueling inflation through an expansion of the amount of money in circulation. Sherman also fought Democratic President Grover Cleveland's efforts to lower the tariff. McKinley's assassination in 1901 transferred the presidency to the dynamic Theodore Roosevelt, whose strong personality stimulated a national reform movement that had grown out of a series of local responses to the human abuses of industrialism. Progressives demanded change, which conservative leaders in Congress resisted. Sherman stood with the Old Guard. In 1908, Sherman's supporters then launched a vice-presidential bid for him. President Theodore Roosevelt had announced that he would not stand for a third term, and had anointed Secretary of War William Howard Taft as his successor. At the 1908 Republican National Convention held at Chicago Coliseum, Taft won the nomination and would have preferred a progressive running mate, but House members, led by Speaker Cannon, pressed for the nomination of James Sherman and through some clever behind the scenes maneuvering, got it..
His tenure as vice-president was very un-eventful. At first, Taft thought he had a perfect role for Sherman. The president-elect said that he had no intention of having anything to do with the reactionary House Speaker Cannon. He wanted Sherman to deal with Cannon. Sherman refused saying, "you will have to act on your own account. I am to be Vice President and acting as a messenger boy is not part of the duties as Vice President." A month later, Taft invited Cannon to visit him, and thereafter Taft and Cannon met regularly at the White House. It was the beginning of a drift to the right that would eventually alienate Taft from Republican progressives and cause Roosevelt to run against him in 1912.
The more
conservative the president became, the closer he grew to his vice president.
Taft found that he liked Sherman, a man who "hated shams, believed in
regular party organization, and was more anxious to hold the good things
established by the past than to surrender them in search for less certain
benefits to be derived from radical changes in the future." Like Taft,
Sherman possessed a jovial spirit, and the president credited the vice
president with accomplishing much on Capitol Hill by his "charm of
speech and manner, and his spirit of conciliation and compromise."
Sherman succeeded through a "sunny disposition and natural good will to
all." Yet he also manifested what Taft called "a stubborn adherence"
to his principles. "In other words," said Taft, "it would be
unjust to Mr. Sherman to suggest that his sunny disposition and his anxiety
to make everybody within the reach of his influence happy, was any indication
of a lack of strength of character, of firmness of purpose, and of clearness
of decision as to what he thought was right in politics." Sherman was the president of the U.S. Senate when Arizona and New Mexico were admitted as states. Politically, Taft and Sherman drifted apart to the point where Taft found no reason to involve Sherman in day-to-day affairs of the presidency. Despite this, The Republicans nominated Sherman for reelection with Taft in the 1912 Republican national Convention. He became the first sitting vice president to be renominated since John C. Calhoun, eighty years earlier and the first Republican outright. Roosevelt tried to win the nomination for president, but lost to Taft. Denied the nomination, the former president walked out of the Republican convention to form the Progressive ("Bull Moose") party. Democrats meanwhile had nominated the progressive governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, who became the frontrunner by virtue of the Republican split. Sherman, who was suffering from Bright's disease, a serious kidney ailment, since 1904 and was unable to campaign. During the long session of the Senate in 1912, Sherman's discomfort had been increased by the Senate's inability to elect a Republican president pro tempore who might spell him as presiding officer. He returned to Utica, where his family doctor diagnosed his condition as dangerous and prescribed rest and relaxation. His doctor urged him not even to deliver his speech accepting the nomination, at ceremonies planned for late August. "You may know all about medicine," Sherman responded, "but you don't know about politics." Sherman went through with the ceremonies and spoke for half an hour. Two days later, his health collapsed, leaving him bedridden. By mid-September, Sherman felt well enough to travel to Connecticut, where he checked into an oceanside hotel to recuperate. When reporters caught up with him and asked why he had avoided campaigning, Sherman replied, "Don't you think I look like a sick man?" Just days before the election, "Sunny Jim" Sherman died at his home in Utica.
President Taft was at
a dinner at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, after launching the battleship New York,
when word came that Vice President Sherman had died. Publicly, Taft spoke of
personal loss, but privately he was concerned that this might cost him the
election. Mrs. Taft considered Sherman's death "very It was too late
to replace him on the ballot, so Sherman becomes
the only deceased man to receive votes for vice-president, more than 3
million people voted for Taft and Sherman. Sherman's eight electoral votes
were given to Columbia University President Nicholas Murray Butler (who
filled in for Sherman). It all became academic, since the Democratic candidate,
Woodrow Wilson, won the presidency with 435 electoral votes; the Progressive
candidate, Theodore Roosevelt, took second place with 88 electoral votes; and
Taft came in a dismal third, with only the 8 electoral votes of Vermont and
Utah. Taft's reelection campaign remains one of the worst defeats ever
suffered by a Republican presidential candidate (in 1936, Alf Landon tied
Taft by winning only 8 electoral votes). |
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Thomas R. Marshall Democratic
Born in Indiana on March 14, 1854, he was the only child of a country doctor. Marshall attended Wabash College and went on to become a lawyer. At an early age, he had a terrible drinking problem. He was also a bachelor who lived at home with his mother until her death. Shortly thereafter, however, at the age 41, he married Lois Kimsey. After several difficult years, his wife persuaded him to stop drinking, and after 1898 he never touched another drop Marshall came from a traditionally Democratic family who traced their political roots back to the age of Andrew Jackson. In 1876, he became involved in politics and became secretary of the Democratic County Convention. In 1880, he unsuccessfully ran for prosecuting attorney and for years did not run for another political office. In 1908, Marshall tried again, this time instead of prosecuting attorney who wanted to be governor of Indiana. In the election, he defeated Republican James "Sunny Jim" Watson (future Senate majority leader) and became governor.
The "boss"
of the Indiana Democratic party at that time was the Irish-born Thomas
Taggart, owner of a nationally famous hotel, health resort and gambling
casino at French Lick, Indiana. In the 1912 Democratic National Convention
held at the 5th Maryland Regiment Armory in Baltimore, Taggart wanted to get Marshall on the ticket as vice
president. A conventional, middle-of-the-road politician, Marshall as
governor had been neither in Taggart's pocket nor much identified with his
party's more progressive wing. But Indiana was a pivotal state, carried by
every winning presidential candidate since 1880. Moreover, having Marshall on
the national ticket would help state Democrats elect the machine's new
candidate for governor. Taggart disliked New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, whom progressive Democrats were supporting. Instead Taggart hoped for the nomination of House Speaker Champ Clark. But the party boss was shrewd enough to keep Indiana's 29 votes united for Marshall as their "favorite son," until he could determine how to use them to the best advantage. Clark started out well, but started losing ground to Wilson. Taggart, on the 28th ballot, gave all of Marshall's delegates to Wilson, who went on to win the nomination on the 46th ballot. Wilson wanted Alabama Congressman Oscar W. Underwood on his ticket, but when Underwood declined, Taggart clinched the nomination for Governor Marshall. As for Marshall, he had hoped that the front running Wilson and Clark would eliminate each other, giving him the presidential nomination as the dark horse candidate. When this didn't happen and he was awarded the vice-presidential nomination instead. Marshall almost turned it down, but took it to please his wife. Wilson and Marshall went on to defeat Theodore Roosevelt's "Bull Moose" ticket and Republican William H. Taft. Marshall went to Washington and quickly became aware that his job to preside over the Senate was almost purely ceremonial. The Senate did what they wanted to do and did not need the services of the Senate president. He also found out that his salary was considerably less than the president or members of the senate. Marshall came to agree with Vice President John Adams who thought he should be addressed as "His Superfluous Excellency."
A slight, bespectacled man, with his hat pushed back on
his head, a pipe or cigar always ready in his hand, Marshall knew that he
"was too small to look dignified in a Prince Albert coat," and so
he continued his ordinary manner of dress. "He is calm and serene and
small; mild, quiet, simple and old-fashioned," as one Indiana writer
described him. "His hair is gray and so is his mustache. His clothes are
gray and so is his tie. He has a cigar tucked beneath the mustache and his
gray fedora hat shades his gray eyes." From these descriptions, it is
not surprising that Vice President Marshall gained a reputation as a rustic
provincial. He also won notice for his folksy stories and down-home wit. In
those days the Capitol guides escorted visitors through the corridor behind
the Senate chamber. Whenever the vice president left the door to his office
open, he could hear the guides pointing him out as if he were a curiosity.
One day he went to the door and said, "If you look on me as a wild
animal, be kind enough to throw peanuts at me." Seeking more space and
more privacy, Marshall requested and received an office in the recently opened
Senate Office Building, where he could "put his feet on the desk and
smoke." Serving under a vigorous and innovative president, Marshall had difficulty determining his own role. Woodrow Wilson had no particular use for his vice president. Marshall quickly ascertained that he was "of no importance to the administration beyond the duty of being loyal to it and ready, at any time, to act as a sort of pinch hitter; that is, when everybody else on the team had failed, I was to be given a chance." Marshall was probably also aware of Wilson contempt for the office itself. Although both men had served as Democratic governors and both were Calvinist Presbyterians, Wilson and Marshall in fact had little in common. Marshall had considered himself a progressive governor of his state, but the president and his closest advisers looked upon him as a conservative. The White House rarely consulted him, and many months often elapsed between meetings of the president and vice president. Marshall loyally supported Wilson's program but found it hard to embrace wholeheartedly Wilson's idealism. For instance, the vice president never reconciled himself to child labor laws or woman suffrage. Certainly Marshall lacked Wilson's imagination and determination, two qualities that the vice president admired greatly in his chief executive. "Whether you may like Woodrow Wilson, or not, is beside the point," Marshall wrote, "this one thing you will be compelled to accord him: he had ideas and he had the courage to express them. He desired things done, and he had the nerve to insist on their being done." Ironically, Vice President Marshall did not deserve authorship of his most famous quip about "a good five-cent cigar." Although there are many versions of this story, the most often repeated alleges that Kansas Senator Joseph Bristow had been made a long-winded speech with the repeated refrain "What this country needs—" causing the vice president to lean over and whisper to one of the Senate clerks: "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar." Historian John E. Brown has traced the quotation back to an Indiana newspaper cartoonist. Marshall simply picked up the phrase, repeated it, and became its surrogate father. Marshall's second term proved difficult and stressful. In April 1917, the United States entered the World War I against Germany. Marshall spent much of the war speaking at rallies to sell Liberty bonds. Victory thrust the United States into the negotiations to end the war and determine the future of Europe and the world. On December 4, 1918, President Wilson sailed for France to negotiate the peace treaty. Except for the few days, Wilson remained out of the country until July, after the Treaty of Versailles had been signed. During Wilson's unprecedented long absences from the United States, he designated Vice President Marshall to preside over cabinet meetings in his place. On December 10, 1918, he presided over the cabinet for the first time, and Navy Secretary Josephus Daniels recorded in his diary that Marshall "was bright & full of jest." However, a photograph taken of him presiding showed a man trying to look resolute but appearing decidedly uncomfortable. Marshall presided only briefly over the cabinet, withdrawing after a few sessions on the grounds that the vice president could not maintain a confidential relationship with both the executive and legislative branches. Still, he had established the precedent of presiding over the cabinet during the president's absence, making it particularly difficult to understand why he failed to carry out that same duty in 1919, after Wilson suffered a paralytic stroke. Initially, Wilson's wife Edith, his personal physician Admiral Cary Grayson and his secretary Joe Tumulty, kept the vice president, the cabinet and the nation in the dark over the severity of Wilson's illness. Noting with understatement that the eighteen months of Wilson's illness were "not pleasant" for him, Marshall recalled that the standing joke of the country was that "the only business of the vice-president is to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of health of the president." In fact, Marshall was admittedly afraid to ask about Wilson's health, for fear that people would accuse him of "longing for his place." Tumulty eventually sent word to Marshall that the president's condition was so grave that he might die at any time. A stunned Marshall sat absolutely speechless. "It was the first great shock of my life," he said. Still, he could not bring himself to act, or to do anything that might seem ambitious or disloyal to his president. It was Secretary of State Robert Lansing rather than Vice President Marshall who determined to call cabinet meetings in the president's absence. Without the participation of either the president or vice president, the cabinet met regularly between October 1919 and February 1920. When Wilson recovered sufficiently, he fired Lansing for attempting to "oust" him from office by calling these meetings. Wilson, who was never himself after his stroke, argued that these meetings held no purpose since no cabinet decisions could be made without the president. Yet Wilson himself had sanctioned the cabinet meetings over which Marshall had presided a year earlier. If nothing else, for the cabinet to hold regular meetings at least assured the American public that their government continued to function. The Constitution declares that the vice president could assume the duties of president in case of the president's "Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office," but until the Twenty-fifth Amendment was adopted in 1967, the Constitution said absolutely nothing about how he should do it. Marshall was clearly in a difficult situation. As editor Henry L. Stoddard observed, "Wilson's resentment of Lansing's activities is proof that Vice President Marshall would have had to lay siege to the White House, had he assumed the Presidency." Historian Thomas A. Bailey noted that President Wilson "clung to his office, without the power to lead actively and sure-footedly, but with unimpaired power to obstruct." In looking at Wilson's failed attempt to get the Congress to approve the U.S. entry into the League of Nations, Bailey speculated that if Wilson had died from his stroke, the results would have been far more positive, and that Wilson's historical reputation would have eclipsed even Abraham Lincoln as a martyr. Had Wilson died, the Senate might well have been shamed into action on the League of Nations. "Much of the partisanship would have faded, because Wilson as a third-term threat would be gone, and Vice President Marshall, was not to be feared," wrote Bailey: Marshall of course would have been President for seventeen months. Having presided over the Senate for more than six years, and knowing the temper of that body, he probably would have recognized the need for compromise, and probably would have worked for some reconciliation of the Democratic and Republicans points of view. In these circumstances it seems altogether reasonable to suppose that the Senate would have approved the treaty with a few relatively minor reservations. Indeed, Marshall presided over the Senate during the "long and weary months" of debate on the Treaty of Versailles. Although he stood loyally with the president, he believed that some compromise would be necessary and tried unsuccessfully to make the White House understand. "I have sometimes thought that great men are the bane of civilization," Marshall later wrote in his memoirs, in a passage about the clash between Woodrow Wilson and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: "They are the real cause of all the bitterness and contention which amounts to anything in the world. Pride of opinion and authorship, and jealousy of the opinion and authorship of others wreck many a fair hope." Although Thomas Marshall publicly hinted that he would accept the Democratic nomination for president at the 1920 Democratic National Convention held in the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, few delegates outside of Indiana cast any votes for him. Instead, Democrats nominated James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who lost overwhelmingly to the Republican ticket of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Marshall left office as vice president in March 1921 and returned to Indiana. He died while visiting Washington on June 1, 1925, at age 71. In 1922, President Harding had appointed him to serve on the Federal Coal Commission to settle labor troubles in the coal mines, but otherwise Marshall insisted he had retired. "I don't want to work," he said. "[But] I wouldn't mind being Vice President again." |
Thomas R. Marshall was the fourth dead vice president, and the 20th overall,
that my wife Debbie and I visited on "The Five DPOTUS Tour '05".
Along with the dead presidents, we picked up dead vice presidents, dead
supreme court chief justices and losing presidential candidates. We started
out from Bayonne early in the morning on Saturday, August 27. We drove for
two days, with numerous stops, on our way to Chicago. After spending the week
in Chicago, we headed on to Iowa and then back to Springfield, Illinois. The
next night we left Springfield and headed to Indianapolis, Indiana. In
Indianapolis, we drove to Crown Hill Cemetery. This is one of the most famous
cemeteries in the country due to the fact it has one dead president, Benjamin
Harrison, three dead vice-presidents; Charles Fairbanks, Thomas Marshall and
Thomas Hendricks along with famous gangster John Dillinger. Crown Hill is
extremely large and though Harrison's grave is easy to finds (since there are
signs to it) the three vice-presidents were not. I knew the areas they were
in, but they were not easily marked in the cemetery. Marshall was the first
to be located.
In 1916 the
Democratic National Convention held at Convention Hall in St. Louis, the
Democrats renominated Wilson and Marshall. Wilson gave little indication
whether he wanted to retain or replace Marshall saying, "I have a very
high regard for Vice-President Marshall and I wish you would tell him
so." With a difficult reelection campaign ahead, the Democrats hesitated
to drop the well-liked vice president from the ticket. In November, Wilson
and Marshall won a narrow victory over the Republican ticket of Charles Evans
Hughes and Charles Fairbanks (also from Indiana - which went Republican in
the election). Marshall became the first vice president since John C.
Calhoun, almost a century earlier, to be reelected to a second term.
E-mail me with any comments or questions you
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