Our older grandson from the State of Washington was with us this week. Mother and I just put him on a train back to college in DC. Not a bad ride: no changes in either direction, the price is hard to beat, and he can read to his heart’s delight (which is his heart’s delight) all day long.

He’s interested in politics, which in Vermont is almost a family affair, so we made sure he got to the State House, where the Legislature is currently in full cry. First we had a fascinating guided tour with David Schütz, the State House Curator, who’s been instrumental in the building’s restoration during the past thirty years. The tour ended by design in the Cedar Creek Room, one wall of which is occupied by a huge period painting of the Vermont Brigade at the Battle of Cedar Creek in October, 1864. That battle closed off the Shenandoah Valley’s agricultural resources to the Confederacy, and effectively nailed shut the coffin of its hopes of victory. Vermonters, whose Eighth Regiment lost nearly two-thirds of its men in a stand against a vigorous surprise attack by Confederate General Jubal Early, are justifiably proud of both that history and the painting.

The Cedar Creek Room is often used for small ceremonies. The occasion that day was the unveiling of drawings on paper of prominent Vermonters whose portraits have not been done in oils. The piéce de resistance du jour was the unveiling of a drawing of Levi P. Morton, the only Vermonter to be Vice-President of the United States without becoming President. The Governor and several residents of Shoreham were present for the ceremony.

Lest you consider Levi Morton a hard-luck Henry, you should know that he was one of the United States’ wealthiest and most influential private citizens, who very late in life (he lived to 96) merged his eponymous bank with that of J.P. Morgan. A son of a Congregational minister, he was born in Shoreham, Vermont, in 1824. The family had little money, so Levi was unable to go to college, but an older brother apparently advised him that “a self-taught man is worth two of your college boys.” Starting out as a country store clerk, he worked his way up into accounting and was sent by an employer in Concord, New Hampshire, to Hanover to manage a branch store there.

In Hanover he became engaged to a Dartmouth professor’s daughter, but wanted to put off the wedding until he should make his fortune. He got his chance when the company he worked for went bankrupt and its chief creditor, impressed by the young man, hired him to work for him in New York City. Soon Levi opened his own business and married his beloved, only thirteen years after their betrothal. He thereafter switched from business to banking, another astute move.

Wealth and the Republican Party walked hand-in-hand in the years after the Civil War. When Morton was elected to Congress in 1879, it was often difficult to distinguish between his advocacy for the interests of his constituents and those of his bank. He established his family in posh quarters in Lafayette Square, and entertained members of both the political class and the haut monde. One friend was a young Ohio congressman, James Garfield.

Thereon hangs our tale. When the Republican presidential nominating convention of 1880 deadlocked between Ulysses Grant and James Blaine of Maine, the delegates picked a dark horse candidate, James Garfield. Garfield felt he needed a New Yorker to balance his ticket. He asked Morton, but Morton’s powerful political allies objected, and Morton deferred to them. Chester Arthur, another Vermonter, had fewer reservations about crossing the bosses, and accepted.

After numerous back-room maneuverings, Morton, who had worked tirelessly as the Garfield campaign’s finance committee chairman, was appointed United States Minister to France. Meanwhile, a half-mad debt-collections lawyer and religious zealot from the Midwest, Charles Guiteau, who fancied he’d helped Garfield get elected, had petitioned for the same position. Finally told by Secretary of State James Blaine to get lost and not come back, Guiteau smoldered, bought a large-caliber revolver, and on July 2, 1881, shot Garfield in the back at the B&O railroad station in Washington. Garfield died two weeks later of sepsis, and the Vermonter Arthur succeeded him.

Chester Arthur is a hero of our grandson’s for his rejection of the spoils system and his support of the Pendleton Act of 1883, which established the Civil Service System, based federal appointments on the results of examinations instead of political connections, and (for a time at least) put a damper on large contributions from wealthy donors expecting political favors.

Morton returned from France in 1885 and in 1889 was elected Vice-President under Benjamin Harrison. Presiding over the Senate, he refused to help break a filibuster on the so-called Force Bill, which would have required Southern states to permit black men to vote. During the next campaign, Harrison dumped him, and he retired to a a quiet life as Governor of New York and chairman of the Morton Trust Company, which in 1909 merged with J.P. Morgan.

A few years later another Vermonter, Calvin Coolidge, succeeded to the Presidency when Warren Harding died of a heart attack. But Morton remains obscure and little-known outside Vermont – even, I daresay, outside Shoreham. Except, perhaps, for that trailblazing climb he is said to have made inside the huge statue on Bedloe’s Island on July 4, 1884.