The Scandalous Governor Who Never Was
A political fixer with a reputation for bribery and forgery was appointed Governor of Washington Territory, triggering a national outcry that exposed the deep corruption of the era's patronage system.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The appointment of James F. Legate as Governor of Washington Territory is a forcible illustration of the wide difference which exists between the theory and practice of the Administration and its friends under the new system of Civil Service Reform. Mr. Legate, at the time of his appointment, was well known to be under a cloud in Kansas, where he has figured for some years as an active and not particularly scrupulous local politician, on account of charges pending against him—and now being investigated—of having bribed certain members of the Legislature of that State to vote for Senator Caldwell. It would have been only decent if the Kansas Senators who obtained for him his Governorship had waited until he had cleared himself from these charges before hurrying him off to the Pacific Coast with a Presidential appointment in his pocket. But this recent affair in Kansas is not all there is against him. It was proven by his own confession, and by abundant testimony taken by a committee of the House in the XLIst Congress, that, while holding an appointment as a special mail agent, he was in Washington during the Impeachment trial, endeavoring to corrupt Senators by bribes to vote against the conviction of Johnson. Senator Pomeroy swore before the committee that the letter Legate presented was a forgery, and his clerk, a Mr. Luce, swore that Legate had offered him $1,000 to forge such a letter, he being able to imitate the Senator's handwriting so perfectly that no person could recognize any difference. The worst part of this thoroughly bad business is that the President was fully informed as to Legate’s character by the Hon. Selucius Garfielde, Delegate from Washington Territory, and entreated not to outrage the people of that Territory by sending such a man to be their Governor.
“The appointment of James F. Legate as Governor of Washington Territory is a forcible illustration of the wide difference which exists between the theory and practice of the Administration.”
Long before Washington was a state, the 'territorial' model meant political patronage appointments from D.C., which often resulted in local residents being governed by figures with no ties to the region. This 1872 battle mirrors the modern tension between local self-determination and the influence of distant, politically motivated power structures in regional appointments.
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