No doubt you all remember the 1880 election. It came four years after the closest election in presidential history when Rutherford Hayes was elected president after he was awarded the disputed electoral votes of three states just days before he was inaugurated. Many believe that a deal was made in which Hayes was declared president in return for a ( Read more... )

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite obscure Presidents, Chester Alan Arthur. He was born on October 5th, probably 1829. (Arthur's tombstone says that he was born in 1830, but his leading biographer Thomas C. Reeves makes a much stronger case for Arthur being born in 1829, which would mean that he was born 195 years ago today).

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On September 19, 1881 (142 years ago today) James Abram Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, died as the result of gunshot wounds he sustained earlier that year, when he was shot by assassin Charles Guiteau at a Washington DC train station. Garfield was 49 years old when he died.


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When James Garfield died three months after being shot by crazed office seeker Charles Guiteau, many cringed at the thought that Chester Alan Arthur would now become President. A former bagman, who used his lucrative position as Collector of the Port of New York to fill Republican Party coffers, Arthur had never held elected office before being ( Read more... )

Before Ulysses Grant became President, some made comparisons to George Washington, and how one great general became a great president, though this wasn't always the case. The esteem that many held Grant in lessened when it became known that many of Grant's friends, who had been appointed to positions of responsibility in his administration, were ( Read more... )

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the Constitution requires that, in order to be eligible to hold the office, a president must "be a natural-born citizen of the United States". Long before President Barack Obama was accused by a group of conspiracy theorists, dubbed as "birthers" by the media, of not being born in the United States, a similar ( Read more... )

Harry Truman is another person (like John Tyler or Chester Alan Arthur for example) who never expected to be President and who no one else ever expected to be President. He had poor eyesight, didn't come from a rich family, was a failure as a small business owner and even his wife's mother said that he would never amount to anything. But he ( Read more... )

Chester Alan Arthur has such an interesting story. Dismissed as a political hack and a backroom crony of New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (leader of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party), Arthur had never run for office until he was put on a ticket as James Garfield's running mate in the 1880 Presidential election. That was done to appease ( Read more... )

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of you who have some Irish ancestry. Apparently there were 23 Presidents who had some Irish ancestry, some of whom will surprise you. For three of these (Taft, Harding and Truman), I have been unable to locate which ancestor of theirs lived in Ireland. Here is the list:


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The potus_geeks library (my personal collection of books about the Presidents) has grown to over a thousand volumes, though I would be less than truthful if I said that read every word in every volume. They are organized on shelves in a small room that's supposed to be a small bedroom, starting with generic volumes about all of the presidents, and then going ( Read more... )