Roscoe Conkling

CONKLING, ROSCOE

Roscoe Conkling was for many years in the late nineteenth century the most powerful politician in the most powerful state in the Union, New York. Conkling served in both the U.S. House
(1859–63 and 1865–67) and the U.S. Senate (1867–81). During his years in Congress, he became an influential Republican leader. Conkling was a close friend of President ULYSSES S. GRANT and an avowed enemy of other prominent Republicans of the day, namely, James G. Blaine, RUTHERFORD B. HAYES, and JAMES GARFIELD. Conkling twice turned down nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, including a confirmed nomination in 1882. In the Senate, he fought ferociously for the continuation of political patronage—the system whereby elected officials appoint individuals to positions in the civil service and other areas of governments—and against the civil service reform efforts that would have ended it. His political machine in New York State was, according to his principal biographer, “one of the wonders of the age.”Conkling himself, it might be said, was one of the wonders of the age—the Gilded Age, that is, the late-nineteenth-century era following the Civil War when business and moneymaking were the foremost concerns in the United States.

Conkling was born October 30, 1829, in
Albany, New York. After attending Mount
Washington Collegiate Institute, in New York
City, he moved to Utica, New York, where he
studied law with a local firm. He was admitted
to the bar in 1850 and was immediately
appointed district attorney of Albany. In subse-
quent years, and while still in his twenties, Con-
kling made a reputation for himself as an orator
and aspiring politician at the Whig party’s
county and state conventions. In 1855, he mar-
ried Julia Seymour—sister of Horatio Seymour,
who was elected governor of New York in 1853
and 1863.

In 1858, Conkling was elected both mayor of
Utica and representative to the U.S. Congress.
He won the latter office as a Republican and
served three terms. He became a Free-Soil
Republican, strongly opposing the introduction
of SLAVERY into the territories and new states of
the U.S. West. After the Civil War was over in
1865, Conkling served on the Committee of
Reconstruction, and on the Committee of Fifteen,
where he helped draft the FOURTEENTH
AMENDMENT.
At about the same time, one of the principal
rivalries of Conkling’s political career began to
heat up. In 1866, while skirmishing over issues
of Reconstruction in the House, fellow Republican
Blaine, of Maine, in a famous speech before
Congress, criticized Conkling’s “haughty disdain,
his grandiloquent swell, his majestic,
supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler
strut”—words that became associated with
Conkling for the rest of his career. Blaine
became Speaker of the House from 1869 to
1875. Conkling never forgave him, and when
Blaine ran for the Republican presidential nomination
in 1876 and 1880, Conkling helped frustrate
his candidacies. The rivalry between these
two politicians was a defining feature of Republican
politics in the 1870s and 1880s.

In 1866, Conkling was elected to the U.S.
Senate from New York, winning a seat he would
hold through two reelections, until his resignation
in 1881. These were the years of Conkling’s
greatest political ascendancy, when he became
the most powerful politician in New York. Most
notoriously, Conkling gained control over
appointments to the New York Custom House,
the large administrative body that oversaw business
at the nation’s most important commercial
hub. The Custom House’s payroll was the
plum of the patronage system, and Conkling
appointed dozens of people to it. These people,
in turn, became political allies, able to use their
time and energy to aid the politician who gave
them their jobs.

Conkling’s power was solidified when Grant
entered the office of president in 1869, a post he
held to 1877. Conkling and Grant became
strong political allies, and in 1873, Grant offered
Conkling the position of chief justice of the
Supreme Court, after Salmon P. Chase’s death.
Conkling refused the offer, believing his talents
to be suited more to the role of politician than to
that of judge.

In 1877 Conkling made important contributions
to the electoral commission bill that
resolved the contested election between presidential
candidates SAMUEL J. TILDEN, a Democrat,
and Hayes, a Republican. He also became a
strong opponent of Hayes, who sought to end
patronage by separating civil service officials
from party control. Conkling asserted that a
senator had the right to control the federal
administration in his own state, and he opposed
the idea that the president should make such
appointments. In 1879, Hayes ousted many of
Conkling’s friends in the New York patronage
system. However, in 1880, Conkling won reelection
to the Senate, and his friend Thomas C.
Platt was elected as a fellow U.S. senator from
New York.

In the events surrounding the presidential
election of 1880, Conkling became the leader of
a group of Republicans known as the Stalwarts,
who were fervent supporters of Grant. Opposed
to the Stalwarts was the Half-Breed faction of
the REPUBLICAN PARTY, which favored Blaine.
At the Republican National Convention in the
summer of 1880, Conkling made a desperate bid
for the nomination of Grant as the presidential
candidate. He failed, and his political machine
quickly crumbled, though he did succeed in
blocking the nomination of Blaine. Garfield and
CHESTER A. ARTHUR, an ally of Conkling’s,
became the Republican nominees, and Conkling
reluctantly supported them during the election.
Conkling provided crucial campaign support to
Garfield and believed that he would be rewarded
for his help, but those hopes were dashed when
Garfield nominated Conkling’s enemy Blaine as
SECRETARY OF STATE. Conkling opposed the
Garfield administration after it assumed office,
again over the issue of the right to control jobs
in the New York Custom House.When he failed
to prevent the confirmation of Garfield’s
appointees, Conkling resigned his Senate seat in
disgust, on May 16, 1881, and persuaded Platt to
join him. Conkling’s defeat was an important
gain for the presidency at a time when congressional
powers were stronger than ever before or
since.

Strangely enough, when the psychotic
Charles Julius Guiteau assassinated President
Garfield on July 2, 1881, he claimed to be a Stalwart
who sought to remove Garfield and make
way for Vice President Arthur.Much of the public
outrage over Garfield’s assassination was
vented on Conkling, and, though Guiteau was
only remotely associated with Conkling, many
considered the assassin to be one of Conkling’s
followers.

After failing in an attempt to induce the New
York Legislature to reelect him as senator after
his resignation, Conkling retired from politics and began a successful and lucrative corporate
law practice in New York City. He proved to be a
highly effective trial lawyer. His clients included
the financier Jay Gould and other notorious figures
of the Gilded Age. On February 24, 1882,
President Arthur, who had become Garfield’s
vice president through Conkling’s help,
attempted to repay his political debt when he
nominated Conkling to take the seat of U.S.
Supreme Court justice WARD HUNT, who was
retiring. Conkling turned the nomination down,
even after it had been confirmed by the Senate.
Conkling was later upset that Arthur—whom
Conkling sneeringly called His Accidency—had
not decided to run a Stalwart-dominated
administration. Indeed, in 1883, Arthur signed
into law the Pendleton Act, also called the Civil
Service Act (5 U.S.C.A. § 1101 et seq.), which
was the first comprehensive act of Congress
toward civil service reform, further dismantling
the system whereby Conkling and others had
amassed tremendous political power.
On December 19, 1882, Conkling appeared
before the Court as a lawyer in San Mateo
County v. Southern Pacific R.R., 116 U.S. 138, 6 S.
Ct. 317, 29 L. Ed. 589 (1885). Arguing on behalf
of the railroad, Conkling sought to persuade the
Court that a county tax violated the DUE
PROCESS CLAUSE of the Fourteenth Amendment,
which reads, “ . . . nor shall any State
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law.” Previously, in the
SLAUGHTER-HOUSE CASES, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36,
21 L. Ed. 394 (1873), the Court had restricted
application of the Due Process Clause to freed
African Americans. Conkling, of course, had
been involved in framing the Fourteenth
Amendment, and now he argued that the clause
was originally intended to protect corporations
as well as persons. The Court did not make a
decision regarding Conkling’s claims, declaring
the case moot after the railroad honored some
of its tax requirements to the county.
In the 1886 case SANTA CLARA COUNTY V.
SOUTHERN PACIFIC R.R., 118 U.S. 394, 6 S. Ct.
1132, 30 L. Ed. 118, the Court agreed with Conkling’s
claims that the term person as used in
the EQUAL PROTECTION CLAUSE applies to corporations
as well as natural persons. Conkling’s
arguments therefore influenced the later development
of the doctrine of SUBSTANTIVE DUE
PROCESS, which the Court used repeatedly to
strike down state and federal regulation of business
from the 1890s to the 1930s.
On April 18, 1888, Conkling died at age fiftynine,
in New York City, of complications surrounding
a brain abscess. Despite his political
stature, Conkling had sponsored relatively little
significant legislation during his career. Though he did help create the Fourteenth Amendment, he played a fairly peripheral role in Reconstruction legislation. He was a politician motivated principally by personal rivalries rather than by ideas. He remains most well-known for his tremendous New York political machine and for his spirited political maneuvers that helped define the political atmosphere during the post–Civil War era in the United States.

FURTHER READINGS
Jordan, David M. 1971. Roscoe Conkling of New York: Voice in the Senate. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press.