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Partly-printed DS as president, one page, 8 x 10, February 27, 1885. President Arthur authorizes and directs "the Secretary of State to cause the Seal of the United States to be affixed to a Proclamation convening the Senate in extra session at 12 o'clock March 4, 1885." Boldly signed at the conclusion in ink by President Chester A. Arthur. In fine condition.
Chester A. Arthur became a very popular president, having taken office in the aftermath of the tragic death of President James A. Garfield. As publisher Alexander McClure wrote: 'No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Arthur, and no one ever retired from the highest civil trust more generally respected.' Although he considered it for a time, Arthur did not make a bid for a full term in 1884 because of a decline in his health. He was suffering from Bright's disease, and feared he might not survive a second term: in this he was correct, as he died in November 1886, what would have been just a year and a half into his term.
Arthur's Republican Party nominated James G. Blaine for the presidency instead, while the Democrats nominated Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, a man with a reputation as a reformer and an opponent of corruption. In the presidential election, Cleveland won by the slimmest of margins: he received 4,879,507 votes (48.5 percent) to Blaine's 4,850,293 votes (48.2 percent). If Blaine had won a few more votes in New York—which he lost to Cleveland by only 1,200 votes out of the more than one million cast—he would have taken that state's huge electoral slate and won the presidency. As it was, Cleveland received 219 electoral votes to Blaine's 182.
As the March 4, 1885 inauguration of Grover Cleveland approached, President Arthur called the U.S. Senate into session for the event. At the East Portico of the United States Capitol, Chief Justice Morrison Waite administered the presidential oath of office to Cleveland, who swore upon a Bible that had been given to him by his mother in his youth. On his swearing-in, Cleveland became the first Democratic president since the Civil War.
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