Anti-slavery politicians formed the Republican Party in the 1850s. In 1856, the party ran its first candidate for president, John C. Fremont, who lived for much of his adult life in New York City. (During his candidacy he lived at 56 E. 9th Street.) I find it amazing that this year’s convention is the Republicans’ first in New York. Mind you, New York’s not been a great city for political conventions. The Democrats have been here only five times. By contrast, Chicago has hosted 25 conventions (14 Republican, 11 Democratic).

It’s a good time, then, to consider the importance New York has had for the Republican Party, which has drawn many of its leading lights from the city. To get the measure of Republican New York, I suggest a walk from Madison Square to Union Square. Along the way, you can ponder the lives and deeds of New York Republicans.

Begin at Lexington Avenue and 28th Street. At 123 Lexington, near the northeast corner, stands a handsome 19th-century townhouse, now occupied by Kalustyan’s, a renowned Indian grocery. Here, on September 20, 1881, Chester Arthur took the oath of office as our 21st president.

It’s a great trivia question: Who were the two presidents to be administered the oath in New York City? Answer: George Washington (we were the capital at the time) and Arthur. Why Arthur? In July of 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield, who died on September 19.At 2 a.m. of the 20th, Arthur, the vice president took the oath at his New York home. Arthur still resided at this address when, having chosen not to seek a second term, he died on November 18, 1886. (From 1900 to 1907, presidential wannabe William Randolph Hearst lived in the same townhouse.)

Born in Vermont in 1829, Arthur was well-educated, tall, handsome, and charming. He came to New York in 1853 and practiced law in the city. Drawn to the anti-slavery cause, he gravitated to the new Republican Party. At first a protege of New York’s Republican Governor Edwin Morgan, Arthur later enjoyed the patronage of the powerful Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling.

A brief stroll to Madison and 26th takes us to Madison Square, where near the park’s northeast corner stands a statue of Arthur. The excellent portraitist George Edwin Bissell created the statue, dedicated in 1899. At the park’s southern end, along 23rd Street, stands an even better statue, John Quincy Adams Ward’s 1893 portrait of Conkling. He was a power in the Grant wing of the Republican Party, a leader of the “Stalwarts,” who wished to exact harsh reparations from the South after the war. This faction had a mastery of the “spoils system” of 19th-century politics, which to our eyes looks like corruption on a large scale. Through Conkling, Arthur got the plum job – better than president, some said – of Collector of the Port of New York. The port provided the bulk of the federal government’s revenues and the chances for graft were monumental.

Arthur served from 1861 to 1878, until his ouster by President Rutherford Hayes – a member of a rival Republican faction. The Grant faction had been discredited, but Conkling sought to regain power. He himself came close to the presidential nomination in 1876, falling short in part because of (well-founded) allegations that he had engaged in an extramarital affair with Kate Chase Sprague, Salmon Chase’s daughter.

In 1880, the non-Stalwart Garfield won the nomination. To placate Conkling, who controlled a substantial part of the Republican base, Garfield offered the vice-presidential slot to Arthur, a Conkling man. No one dreamed that the next year Arthur would be president. In office, he assumed a new gravitas and pushed for an end to the spoils system from which he had so benefited. Conkling never got over his disappointment, even turning down a seat on the Supreme Court.

We honor a Conkling nemesis in Madison Square’s southwest corner, where the great bronze seated figure depicts William Seward.

He served as governor of New York and senator. Pundits and the public widely presumed he would win the 1860 presidential nomination. Instead, Lincoln prevailed. The two shared many values. Seward was arguably the nation’s leading anti-slavery politician.

Some historians say he lost the nomination because he alienated the “Know-Nothing” part of the Republican base by being too pro-immigrant.

Lincoln asked Seward to be his secretary of state, and the New Yorker became a close confidant. On April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth (brother of New York’s most beloved actor) shot and killed President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. Many forget that on the same evening, Booth’s coconspirator, Lewis Powell, attempted to kill Seward, who survived a knife attack. The plan had been to dispatch both great Republicans who had irrevocably, and vastly for the better, altered the nation.

An urban legend attaches to the Seward statue, dedicated in 1876. An anonymous “artist,” apparently no fan of the statue’s well-known sculptor, Randolph Rogers, wrote to the New York Times claiming proof that Rogers had modeled a head of Seward but stuck it on a casting of the body from a Lincoln statue Rogers had done for Philadelphia. Others, noting that the body in the Seward statue seemed rather longer and leaner than Seward’s, credited the letter-writer’s contention. However, even a cursory comparison of the two statues shows that the story is utterly fallacious.

Walk down Broadway to 20th Street, and take a left. On the south side of the street, between Broadway and Park Avenue South, stands the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace National Historic Site. The full name is important. For this, in fact, is a reconstruction of TR’s birthplace. The future president was born in 1858 in a house on this site. That house came down in 1916. Immediately, the Women’s Roosevelt Memorial Association, as though thinking that if they acted quickly enough no one would notice, bought the property and rebuilt the house, which opened as a museum in 1923. (When else has a historical reconstruction followed so close upon the demolition of the original?) The house was reconstructed to the way it appeared in 1865, when TR was 7. He lived in the house until 1872.

Roosevelt is the only native resident of New York City to become president. Like Arthur, he was vice president when the president, in this case McKinley, died from an assassin’s bullet. The year was 1901. Unlike Arthur, Roosevelt ran again, and won – though he failed to win his native city!

There’s another connection between Arthur and Roosevelt. The fashionable Arthur (known as the “dude president”) hired Louis Tiffany to redecorate the White House. The Tiffany decorations remained until Roosevelt had them removed. Tiffany lived near Roosevelt in Oyster Bay. Roosevelt, observing the goings-on at Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall, determined that the artist was a man of loose morals, whose works were thus unsuited to adorn the executive mansion.

Continue across 20th Street to Gramercy Park . John Bigelow lived at 21 Gramercy Park South from 1881 to his death in 1911. The editor and reformer was an early power in the Republican Party, was a friend of Fremont and Seward, and served as Lincoln’s minister to France. Later, the independent-minded Bigelow disappointed his fellow Republicans when he worked for the election of the reforming Democrat Samuel Tilden.

Tilden also lived on Gramercy Park, in what’s now the National Arts Club. He knocked two standard brownstones together and hired Vaux and Radford to do the picturesque remodeling we admire today. The bachelor Tilden helped expose corruption in the Democratic Party, won the governorship, and ran against the Republican Hayes in 1876. Tilden won the popular vote (by a much greater margin than did Al Gore) but lost the Electoral College, under suspicious cir cumstances. Tilden, like Richard Nixon in 1960, refused to challenge.

Walk south on Irving Place to 17th Street, take a right, and continue to the north end of Union Square . Here stands Henry Kirke Brown’s statue of Abraham Lincoln, dedicated in 1870. Prior to September 11, the most plaintive day in New York City history had been April 25, 1865. On that day, President Lincoln’s funeral cortege made its way up Broadway from City Hall. The city was draped in mourning. The cortege paused at Union Square, where Archbishop McCloskey and Rabbi Isaacs (of Shaaray Tefila) said prayers. The procession continued, via Fifth Avenue, to 34th Street and the Hudson River, where the president’s coffin was placed on a train to Albany.

New York had been the crucible of Civil War discontents; on that April day, we showed, in mourning, the “better angels of our nature.” May the visiting Republicans see how New Yorkers show those better angels in a million and one small ways, every day.