Roscoe Conkling was a congressman (1859-1863; 1865-1867) and
senator (1867-1881) from New York. He served on the Joint
Congressional Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the
Fourteenth Amendment and the Military Reconstruction Acts. Conkling was born in Albany, New York, on October 30, 1829,
to Eliza Cockburn Conkling and Alfred Conkling, a congressman,
federal judge, and diplomat. Little is known about his
childhood, but in 1842 Conkling was sent to an academy in New
York City, where he lived with his elder brother, Frederick.
The next year, he returned to his family in Utica, and attended
a local academy. His father was a leader of New York’s Whig
Party, and hosted political notables, including former
presidents John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren, in the family
home. In 1846, young Conkling decided against college, to his
father’s dismay, and began studying law at a Utica firm. In
early 1850, he passed the bar, and that April, the 21 year old
was appointed district attorney for Oneida County by Governor
Hamilton Fish, a friend of his father.
In 1854, Conkling helped organize the Republican Party in New
York. In June of the next year, he married Julia Seymour, the
younger sister of the former (and future) governor of New York,
Horatio Seymour (who opposed the marriage). In March 1858,
Conkling won the Utica mayoral election as a Republican, but in
November 1858 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives,
where he served two consecutive terms (1859-1863). After losing
reelection in 1862, he was elected two years later to another
term (1865-1867). In Congress, he sided with the Radical
Republicans, strongly supporting their Reconstruction policies
during and after the Civil War, and with advocates of the gold
standard against inflationary paper currency (“greenbacks”). He
was not, however, a particularly effective legislator, and is
not identified with any specific law or cause.
In 1867, Conkling was elected by the New York legislature to
the U.S. Senate. In the 1870s, he became one of the most
visible supporters of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877).
The president gave him control of New York’s patronage, which
allowed the senator to build a personal political machine in the
state. Conkling declined the president’s offer of the chief
justiceship to run unsuccessfully as Grant’s surrogate for the
Republican presidential nomination in 1876. Adamantly opposed
to civil service reform, the surly, quarrelsome senator
delivered an intemperate, much-publicized speech in 1879 in
which he attacked the reformers’ masculinity by referring to
them as, among other things, “man-milliners” (i.e., men who make
and sell women’s clothing).
One of the many targets of Conkling’s wrath, James Garfield,
aptly summarized the New Yorker as being “a great fighter,
inspired more by his hates than his loves.” Over the years, the
senator alienated himself from other key Republicans, including
Senator James Blaine and President Rutherford B. Hayes. In his
private life, Conkling’s relationship with his wife became
distant and formal, and he refused to speak to his daughter (and
only child) after she wed a man of whom he disapproved. Further
undermining his already failing marriage was his affair in the
1870s with Kate Chase Sprague, the wife of Senator William
Sprague and the daughter of Chief Justice Salmon Chase, which
became fully public when Kate Sprague sued for divorce in 1881.
Conkling ended the affair rather than suffer further
embarrassment and political damage.
When Hayes defeated Conkling for the Republican nomination in
1876, the New York senator sulked while other former candidates,
such as Blaine, rallied to the party banner. During the
Electoral College controversy following the presidential
election, Conkling suggested publicly that the Democratic
nominee, Samuel Tilden, had won Louisiana and Florida. Once in
office, President Hayes named William Evarts, a Conkling rival
in New York, as secretary of state. The administration also
initiated an investigation of corruption in the New York
Customhouse, which was run by Conkling’s patronage appointees.
It was nothing less than an attack on the senator’s power base,
culminating in the removal of Conkling protégé Chester Arthur
from the position of collector of the port.
In 1880, Conkling orchestrated the third-term movement for
Grant, but the former president lost the nomination to
compromise candidate James Garfield. Although Chester Arthur
had not heeded Conkling’s advise to reject the vice-presidential
nomination, he did manage to convince his political mentor to
grudgingly campaign for the Republican ticket, but only after
Garfield made assurances of respecting the senator’s patronage
requests. As president, Garfield angered Conkling when he
appointed Blaine as secretary of state and denied a similar top
post to one of the New Yorker’s minions. The final straw came
when Garfield named a leading opponent of the senator, William
Robertson, as collector of the Port of New York. In a fit of
rage, Conkling and New York’s junior senator, Thomas Platt,
resigned from the Senate in May 1881, expecting that the New
York legislature, in a symbolic show of solidarity, would
reelect them. They did not.
An embittered Conkling retired from politics, even rejecting
an offer by President Arthur of a Supreme Court justiceship, and
resumed his law practice in New York City. On April 18, 1888,
Roscoe Conkling died from illnesses brought on by exposure
during a late-season
blizzard.
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