What shall posterity say?

It is for you to choose…

Friends, we’re in Low Power Mode, which is what I call it when I take vacations or otherwise have to take a couple of days off from writing. During Low Power Mode, we skip the “7 other things” and revisit some “greatest hits” from the last 5 years of the newsletter.

(Wait, 5 years? Five years of writing a daily newsletter? No wonder I need some time off.)

Fortunately, today happens to be the 142nd anniversary of one of my favorite stories that I’ve learned as a result of this newsletter. It’s what I call Julia Sand Day.

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“Who was Chester Arthur?”

On July 2, 1881, President James Garfield was shot by an assassin. He held on for two months before he died, and the entire nation spent the summer of 1881 on a deathwatch.

All eyes were on Vice President Chester Arthur, and the national mood was basically: Really? This guy is about to become president of the United States?

Arthur had been a blatant, political machine compromise candidate the year before; his highest previous office was Collector of the Port of New York (a 100% pure patronage job). In his entire career, the only election Arthur ever entered or won was his 1880 presidential/vice-presidential election.

As Garfield hung on and the nation waited, a young woman named Julia Sand wrote a letter to Arthur. While she and Arthur were both from New York City, they didn’t know each other; she was just a citizen. She wrote:

The hours of Garfield's life are numbered – before this meets your eye, you may be President. The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.

…

Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest of aims.

A hundred years hence, school boys will recite your name in the list of presidents & tell of your administration.

And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose…

Garfield died, Arthur was sworn in, and Julia wrote dozens more letters.

She pushed him on all kinds of political positions, and some historians think she might have influenced him on civil service reform, which was a big issue of the day.

Other things we know:

• President Arthur was lonely. He was a 51-year-old widower whose wife, Ellen, had died shortly after the election of 1880. He carried a lot of guilt.

• Julia was also lonely. She was 31, unmarried, cooped up in her family’s Upper East Side home all day. (Think HBO’s The Gilded Age, by the way — exact same time and place.) She wrote that she’d had no personal visitors in five years.

Wouldn’t it be funny if the president of the United States broke that string? she suggested. Ha ha ha flirt flirt flirt ha ha ha maybe?

Arthur was apparently the type to play with fire, because he took her up on it: On August 20, 1882, the sitting president of the United States showed up completely unannounced at the Sand family house, 46 East 74th Street in New York.

The visit is the main reason we know about any of this, but it was a total disaster.

Sand totally freaked out. Among other things, she’d suggested in her letters that if her fantasy played out Arthur should come in the morning when nobody else would be there.

Instead, he came by in the evening, just after the entire Sand family had finished dinner.

Julia’s brother and sisters dominated the conversation. At one point, Julie hid behind a curtain. I wound up feeling bad for both of them at this point, reading the saved letters in the National Archives.

It was like a date that seemed so promising but fell flat all around. Julia wrote to the president the next day, obviously embarrassed:

My brother said I was like the man in ‘Arabian Nights,’ who got the Big Genie out of the vase, and then was so frightened he wanted to put it back again.

She asked to meet again—but, they never did.

In fact, we might well wonder if Julia meant anything to Arthur at all except for one fact: He ordered all his papers burned after his death, but he saved Julia’s letters.

Arthur, heartsick and unwell, barely bothered to campaign in 1884 and died two years later.

Sand was committed to a mental institution in 1886, and died there 47 years later, unnoticed, in 1933. (I’m not sure she was confined the whole 47 years; she may have been in and out.)

The whole thing is so sad, except for one point:

Looking through Sand’s letters and Arthur’s otherwise unexplained positions, some historians think she made a difference.

She was reform-minded and good government-heavy. Arthur, by nature, was not. These historians say her chatty letters pushed him to act differently than he might have otherwise.

“We’ll never know for sure,” Scott S. Greenberger, author of The Unexpected President: The Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur, told the New York Times in 2018, “but there’s good reason to believe that this anonymous young woman helped to change the course of the presidency.”