Chester Alan Arthur

Chester A. Arthur is not a name that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of great American presidents. He is, in many ways, the forgotten man of the White House, and most Americans would probably struggle to place him, let alone recall what he actually did. And yet his story is remarkable and, in many ways, surprising.

Arthur was one of those so-called accidental presidents who never sought the nation's highest office but stumbled into it only because an assassin's bullet cut down his predecessor, President James Garfield. Nobody expected much of him. He was a machine politician—a product of the corrupt New York patronage system and a man whose chief qualification for high office appeared to be his loyalty to the right people. What happened next surprised everyone, including, perhaps, Arthur himself.

Faced with the weight of an office he never asked for, and privately battling a terminal kidney disease that would kill him just a year after leaving the White House, Chester Arthur rose to the occasion in ways that nobody had thought possible. He took on the very system that had made him, signed landmark legislation that transformed the US government, and left office more respected than any man could reasonably have expected when he first took the oath. This is his life and his story in full.