The Last Lincoln Republican - a Review

Benjamin A. Arrington The Last Lincoln Republican: The Presidential Election of 1880 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020).

Years ago - I wrote a satirical post for this website asking whether or not one could pick Rutherford B. Hayes out in a line-up. I was questioning Americans’ historical consciousness at the time (and I still do…) after a number of references suggesting the intersection of popular culture and history populated my (since deleted) Twitter timeline. But whatever the context or frame of reference, I could ask this same question - and the answer for the average person would most certainly be: “probably not.”

Have we forgotten the Gilded Age presidents? Maybe at best we remember them as the presidents in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century either with the beards or without the beards, but not much else. Teachers tend to overlook them in history classrooms - focusing less on presidential politics during this era than any other.

Garfield using patronage to tie political enemies Conkling and Blaine together

If anything, Arrington makes a compelling argument for rethinking this approach…an argument that I have embraced with great enthusiasm. One leaves this book with a keen understanding of intra-party political sparring - especially among Republicans leading up to the 1880 nominating convention. There’s Stalwarts v. Half Breeds, divisions over whether Ulysses S. Grant would or would not run for an unprecedented third term, questions over civil service reform, rivalries between such fascinating politics actors as Roscoe Conkling, James Blain, and John Sherman.

And all of this swirling around the surprising nomination and subsequent election of dark-horse candidate James Garfield - Union veteran, astute politician, and champion of equality before the law for all Americans. If you love nineteenth-century politics…well then, I think you will find this book as exhilarating as I did. Arrington offers more than the political machinations of a contentious election year, he reveals a vision of what might have been. Now, as I have noted with great frequency, I am not one for counterfactuals, but I would agree that we can look at Garfield’s short tenure as president - at the very least - as a lost moment.

Not to spoil the story, but Garfield only served a fraction of his term. On July 2, 1881 a deranged office seeker, Charles Guiteau, shot Garfield as he boarded a train in Washington City. The president lingered for months under abysmal medical care, and then succumbed to his wounds.

Had he lived…well who knows. But I think it is safe to say - as Arrington does - that Garfield would have held true to his Republican Party principles, particularly that of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights for formerly enslaved black Americans. Check this - once nominated, he addressed a crowd of New Yorkers at the Republic Party headquarters:

We have seen white men betray the flag and fight to kill the Union; but in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in black skin. Our comrades escaping from the starvation of prison, fleeing to our lines by the light of the North Star, never feared to enter the black man’s cabin and ask for bread. In all that period of suffering and danger, no Union soldier was ever betrayed by a black man or woman. And now that we have made them free, so long as we live we will stand by these black allies. We will stand by them until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of our Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, black or white, throughout the Union.

Garfield was not one to abandon the possibilities implied by freedom and citizenship. Alas, this last of the “Lincoln Republicans” died along with the promises offered by the Reconstruction amendments. Garfield strikes me as a far more intriguing historical actor than most give him credit. As such, his career deserves more attention. And hopefully, this book will inspire others, as it has inspired me, to treat this era of politics as more than a surface transition from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the Progressives of the early twentieth century.

With compliments,

Keith