The Partisans: James G. Blaine, Roscoe Conkling, and the Politics of Rivalry and Revenge in the Gilded Age
Coming this fall: Roscoe Conkling demanded attention. Tall, blond, and athletic, the handsome representative from Utica in Upstate New York comported himself in ways that simply could not be ignored. If Conkling’s vanity was obvious, so was his skill as an orator. “He is not satisfied with killing an antagonist’s argument,” according to Sara Jane Lippincott, writing under the pen name Grace Greenwood in the New York Times. “If, after mashing the head of a fallacy, he passes triumphantly on, he is apt to go back, and pound at the innocuous reptile while there is a wriggle of life left in the tail.” When he stalked his foes, he used words as weapons. And on April 24, 1866, the 36-year-old Conkling was on the prowl. His targets: the corruption-ridden Army bureau that oversaw the draft and the officer who led it.
In March 1863, with the Union Army facing the prospect of dangerously depleted troop levels due to a decline in volunteers, Congress created a Provost Marshals Bureau to manage a draft. Corruption and mismanagement plagued the program throughout the country. Bounty brokers made their money by finding volunteers, forging enlistment papers, kidnapping unwitting young men, and encouraging enlistees to desert and re-enlist. Conkling understood the abuses plaguing the bureau better than most of his colleagues. In 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton appointed him to prosecute Major John Haddock, who faced court martial for colluding with bounty brokers in western New York. The court found Haddock guilty and fined him $10,000, but Conkling believed the corruption he uncovered extended to the officer in charge of the bureau, General James B. Fry.
As he addressed the House, Conkling called for the elimination of the bureau. It constituted “an unnecessary office for an underserving public servant,” he began, referring to Fry. Conkling’s broadsides roused a member of the Military Affairs Committee to respond. James Gillespie Blaine of Maine had taken a deep interest in the mechanics of conscription, and during his first term in Congress proposed changes in the way local jurisdictions could meet their draft quotas. Blaine was outraged that Conkling linked Fry – “a high-toned gentleman, whose character is without spot or blemish” – to the conscription scandals in Upstate New York.
Blaine threw down the gauntlet. Conkling picked it up.
“[I]f General Fry is reduced to depending for vindication upon the gentleman from Maine he is to be commiserated certainly,” Conkling responded. Referring to Blaine, he added: “If I have fallen to the necessity to [sic] taking lessons from that gentleman in the rules of propriety, or of right or wrong, God help me.”
Six days after their initial confrontation, Conkling and Blaine resumed hostilities on the House floor. Blaine defended Fry and assailed the honesty of Conkling with documents read to the chamber by the House clerk. In one, Fry alleged that Conkling discouraged the investigation of corruption in Utica by the bureau while pursuing it elsewhere in New York. If Conkling had evidence that Fry was corrupt, the general asserted, then failure to present that information to the secretary of war represented a breach of duty.
Conkling asked for – and got – the matter referred to a committee to investigate the allegations. But he could not conclude without taking another shot at his adversary. “[I]f the member from Maine had the least idea how profoundly indifferent I am to his opinion on the subject which he has been discussing, or upon any other subject personal to me, I think he would hardly take the trouble to rise here and express his opinion,” Conkling said.
Blaine fired back with a burst of sarcasm that echoed for decades.
“The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting; his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, super-eminent, overpowering turkey-gobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all members of this House that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity to venture upon a controversy with him,” Blaine said.
“That attack was made without any provocation by me as against Mr. Blaine, and when I was suffering more from other causes than I ever suffered at any other time, and I shall never overlook it,” Conkling later said. He spent the better part of the next 20 years making good on his vow.