Background
Roscoe was born on October 30, 1829 in Albany, New York, United States. The son of Alfred and Eliza (Cockburn) Conkling.
Roscoe was born on October 30, 1829 in Albany, New York, United States. The son of Alfred and Eliza (Cockburn) Conkling.
After attending Mount Washington Collegiate Institute in New York City and Auburn Academy, Roscoe Conkling studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1850.
Conkling served in both the U. S. House (1859–63 and 1865–67) and the U. S. Senate (1867–81). Conkling twice turned down nominations to the U. S. Supreme Court, including a confirmed nomination in 1882.
In 1858, he was elected both mayor of Utica and representative to the U. S. Congress.
He became a Free-Soil Republican, strongly opposing the introduction of slavery into the territories and new states of the U. S. West.
Blaine became Speaker of the House from 1869 to 1875.
Conkling never forgave him, and when Blaine ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1876 and 1880, Conkling helped frustrate his candidacies.
In 1866, Conkling was elected to the U. S. Senate from New York, winning a seat he would hold through two reelections, until his resignation in 1881.
These were the years of Conkling's greatest political ascendancy, when he became the most powerful politician in New York.
He also became a strong opponent of Hayes, who sought to end patronage by separating civil service officials from party control.
In 1879, Hayes ousted many of Conkling's friends in the New York patronage system.
At the Republican National Convention in the summer of 1880, Conkling made a desperate bid for the nomination of Grant as the presidential candidate.
Conkling opposed the Garfield administration after it assumed office, again over the issue of the right to control jobs in the New York Custom House.
When he failed to prevent the confirmation of Garfield's appointees, Conkling resigned his Senate seat in disgust, on May 16, 1881, and persuaded Platt to join him.
His clients included the financier Jay Gould and other notorious figures of the Gilded Age.
Conkling turned the nomination down, even after it had been confirmed by the Senate.
Conkling was later upset that Arthur whom Conkling sneeringly called His Accidency had not decided to run a Stalwart-dominated administration.
Conkling, of course, had been involved in framing the Fourteenth Amendment, and now he argued that the clause was originally intended to protect corporations as well as persons.
The Court did not make a decision regarding Conkling's claims, declaring the case moot after the railroad honored some of its tax requirements to the county. In the 1886 the Court agreed with Conkling's claims that the term person as used in the equal protection clause applies to corporations as well as natural persons.
On April 18, 1888, Conkling died at age fifty-nine, in New York City, of complications surrounding a brain abscess.
He remains most well-known for his tremendous New York political machine and for his spirited political maneuvers that helped define the political atmosphere during the post Civil War era in the United States.
Despite his political stature, Conkling had sponsored relatively little significant legislation during his career.
Though he did help create the Fourteenth Amendment, he played a fairly peripheral role in Reconstruction legislation.
During his years in Congress, he became an influential Republican leader.
In subsequent years, and while still in his twenties, Conkling made a reputation for himself as an orator and aspiring politician at the Whig party's county and state conventions.
Conkling refused the offer, believing his talents to be suited more to the role of politician than to that of judge. In 1877 Conkling made important contributions to the electoral commission bill that resolved the contested election between presidential candidates samuel j. tilden, a Democrat, and Hayes, a Republican.
Indeed, in 1883, Arthur signed into law the Pendleton Act, also called the Civil Service Act (5 U. S. C. A. § 1101 et seq. ), which was the first comprehensive act of Congress toward civil service reform, further dismantling the system whereby Conkling and others had amassed tremendous political power.
Roscoe Conkling was married to Julia Seymour.