Chester A. Arthur
Chester Alan Arthur enters the American imagination as a contradiction that slowly resolves into character: a genial machine man who becomes a gentleman reformer, a collector of customs turned collector of virtues, a vice president chosen to keep spoils flowing who ends up closing the tap, a politician famous for waistcoats and dinners who quietly builds a modern state out of statutes and steel. He does not begin with the aura of destiny. He is the son of a strict Baptist minister who moved parishes the way other men changed coats, born in a northern Vermont farmhouse, raised across the New York frontier where sermons braided with snow, where books and thrift, not lineage, were the natural furniture of a life. He studies, argues, teaches school, reads law, and absorbs the moral grammar of the Whig world: order over frenzy, improvement over improvisation, self-command as the precondition of public command. In his twenties he takes a case that becomes a parable. A Black woman named Elizabeth Jennings has been forced from a segregated New York City streetcar; Arthur helps argue the suit that wins damages and pries open the cars to equal passage. The episode will be remembered later as a foreshadowing, the neat note a biographer circles in the margin: remember this when the country forgets who he was supposed to be.
Selenius Media
