It was May 7, 1873, and President Ulysses S. Grant had a big job opening that he needed to fill and soon. Salmon P. Chase, the great antislavery lawyer who had been appointed chief justice of the United States by President Abraham Lincoln, had just died at his home in Washington, D.C., after suffering what was probably a stroke. That left a vacancy atop the highest court in the land. Who would Grant pick to fill it?
Roscoe Conkling was a U.S. senator from New York and the undisputed boss of the Empire State's notorious Republican political operation. To say that Conkling knew a thing or two about dispensing political favors via patronage and graft would be a staggering understatement. "We are told the Republican party is a machine," Conkling declared. "Yes. A government is a machine…a political party is a machine." According to the journalist George Smalley of the New-York Tribune, Conkling once "talked long on, or rather against, civil service reform and in favor of the practice summed up in the maxim that to the victors belong the spoils."
