Roscoe Conkling - Elected Office Holder

Elected Office Holder

Conkling was elected Mayor of Utica in 1858, and then elected as a Republican to the 36th and 37th United States Congresses, holding office from March 4, 1859, to March 4, 1863. He was Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on the District of Columbia (37th Congress). He refused to follow the financial policy of his party in 1862, and delivered a notable speech against the passage of the Legal Tender Act, which made a certain class of treasury notes receivable for all public and private debts. In this opposition he was joined by his brother, Frederick Augustus Conkling, at that time also a Republican member of Congress. That year he was defeated for re-election by Democrat Francis Kernan.

From 1863 to 1865, he acted as a judge advocate of the War Department, investigating alleged frauds in the recruiting service in western New York. In 1864, two years after his defeat by Kernan, Conkling defeated Kernan for re-election, and served in the 39th and 40th United States Congresses from March 4, 1865, to March 4, 1867. As a congressman, he served on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction which drafted the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Conkling had been re-elected to the 41st United States Congress in November 1866, but did not take his seat, instead entering the U.S. Senate.

Conkling was elected in January 1867 a U.S. Senator from New York, and re-elected in 1873 and 1879, served from March 4, 1867 to May 16, 1881. Through the eight years of President Grant's administration, he stood out as the spokesman of the President and one of the principal leaders of the Republican Party in the Senate. In 1873, Grant urged him to accept an appointment as chief justice of the Supreme Court, but Conkling declined. Conkling was active in framing and pushing through Congress the reconstruction legislation, and was instrumental in the passage of the second Civil Rights Act, in 1875, and of the act for the resumption of specie payments, in the same year. He was Chairman of the U.S. Senate Committee on Revision of the Laws of the United States (40th - 43rd Congresses), of the United States Senate Committee on Commerce (44th, 45th and 47th Congresses), of the U.S. Senate Committee on Engrossed Bills (46th and 47th Congresses).

Conkling was entirely out of sympathy with the reform element in the Republican Party. His first break with the Hayes administration occurred in April 1877 when the Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman appointed a commission to investigate the affairs of the New York Custom House. The investigation brought to light extensive irregularities in the service, showing in particular that the federal office holders in New York constituted a large army of political workers, and that their positions were secured by and dependent upon their faithful service in behalf of the men holding the principal government offices in the city.

President Hayes decided upon the removal of Chester A. Arthur, the Collector, General George H. Sharpe, the Surveyor, and A.B. Cornell, the Naval Officer of the Port, and in October 1877, sent nominations of their successors to the Senate. Senator Conkling defended the displaced officials, and, through his influence in the Senate, secured the rejection of the new nominations. He succeeded in blocking all the efforts of President Hayes and Secretary Sherman until January 1879, when, a new lot of nominations having been made, they were confirmed in spite of Conkling's continued opposition.

Early in 1880, Senator Conkling became the leader of the movement for the nomination of General Grant for a third term in the Presidency. He had a strong regard for Grant, and was hostile to the other two leading Republican candidates, Sherman, with whom he had come into conflict during Hayes' administration, and James G. Blaine, whose bitter political and personal enemy he had been for 24 years. The convention, by a combination of the Blaine and Sherman interests, nominated James A. Garfield. Conkling and the other faithful Grant Stalwarts were allowed to name the candidate for vice presidency, Chester A. Arthur.

Immediately after Garfield's inauguration, Conkling presented to the President a list of men whom he desired to have appointed to the federal offices in New York. Garfield's appointment of Blaine as Secretary of State, and of Windom as Secretary of the Treasury, instead of Levi P. Morton, whose appointment Conkling had urged, angered Conkling and made him unwilling to agree to any sort of compromise with Garfield on the New York appointments. Without consulting him, the President nominated for Collector of the Port of New York William H. Robertson, the leader of the opposing Half-Breed faction. Roberston's nomination was confirmed by the Senate, in spite of the opposition of Conkling, who claimed the right of Senators to control federal patronage in their home states.

In protest, Conkling resigned with his fellow Senator Thomas C. Platt, confident that he would be re-elected by the New York legislature (at the time, senators were chosen by their states' legislatures). However, he was defeated in the resulting special election after an almost two-month long struggle between the opposing factions of the Republican Party.

Afterwards he resumed the practice of law in New York City. He declined a nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1882. He died after falling ill from walking in a blizzard in New York City. He was buried at the Forest Hill Cemetery in Utica. A statue of him stands in Madison Square Park in New York City. Roscoe, New York, is named for him.