The Duck Hunts of President Grover Cleveland

When Chester Arthur yielded the White House in 1881 to former New York Governor Grover Cleveland, it marked the end of 16 years of post-Civil War Republican dominance – and the beginning of 12 years, between Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, of Oval Office duck hunters. Their time afield was during, as many call it, the Golden Age of Waterfowling. The most frequented presidential ducking grounds south of the White House were along the Potomac River, Virginia’s Back Bay, and North Carolina’s Albemarle and Currituck Sounds. Also popular with presidents during the Golden Age of Waterfowling were the Upper Chesapeake Bay’s Gunpowder and Bush Rivers, and the Susquehanna Flats.

Cleveland’s First Term

Grover Cleveland came into office as an accomplished outdoorsman, but he didn’t hunt waterfowl often during his first term. The press covered one excursion in April 1886 at Maryland’s San Domingo Farm Club near Maxwell’s Point, on the Gunpowder and Bush Rivers. Leased by sportsmen from Cleveland’s home state, their finely appointed three-story clubhouse was tended by a house staff and guides. The president impressed his host, former Civil War General John G. Farnsworth, by downing seven redheads with a single discharge from his double-barreled shotgun. Some sources credit Cleveland with making other first-term trips to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, but they weren’t reported in the popular press.

During his 1888 presidential reelection bid, Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a wide margin to Republican Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison. Civilian Cleveland returned to New York City to practice law, with more time to hunt and fish.

Citizen Cleveland

Former President Cleveland made up for lost sporting time while he was out of office. In the winter of 1892, he lodged at actor Joe Jefferson’s mansion tucked in the live oaks of Jefferson Island, Louisiana, a place still so remote that the only language he heard was “bastard French.” Guided by two local “boatmen” in pirogues, he told a newspaperman that “I have never seen such clouds of ducks in my life.” The outing also appeared in Forest and Stream in a feature by a Canadian sportsman impressed by the number of ducks, snipes, and woodcocks that fell to Cleveland’s Scott 12-gauge and 10-gauge Purdey double guns.

During March, citizen Cleveland was a guest of New York political supporters at the Spesutia Island Rod and Gun Club on Maryland’s Susquehanna Flats, one of America’s renowned canvasback gunning destinations. Overlooking the Chesapeake Bay on Sandy Point, its membership built a well-appointed lodge surrounded by outbuildings and a boathouse stacked with wooden duck, swan, and goose decoys, with a scattering of wooden skiffs and sinkboxes. Each morning, guides spread 20 bushels of corn by each “shooting box,” and a tender, or small sailing skiff, tacked downwind to collect the kill. Shooting his Greener 10-bore, hammerless double gun, citizen Cleveland and his party killed 120 birds in two mornings.

In late spring, Cleveland returned to the Upper Chesapeake Bay as a guest of the Bowley’s Quarters Ducking Club, located on a narrow neck between the Middle River and Seneca Creek. 1892 was an election year, and it was in front of the club fireplace that he penned his platform for the summer Democratic National Convention. Facing incumbent Benjamin Harrison in the November election, he won a second term.

President-Elect Cleveland

The first thing Grover Cleveland did after his 1892 victory was accept an invitation from newspaper editor L. Clark Davis and Philadelphia sportsmen for a two-week hunt at the Broadwater Island Club on Hog Island, located on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Cleveland’s post-campaign trip was celebrated in syndicated newspapers and periodicals throughout the United States. Never had the press covered a presidential ducking excursion in such detail.

The president-elect journeyed by rail down peninsular Virginia to the depot at Exmore, boarding the steam yacht Sunshinefor Hog Island at Willis Wharf. Cleveland likely appreciated the irony of the ship’s name, Sunshine, as he made a “tempestuous” bay crossing in driving rain and gale-force winds. Between the rain and spray, the president took notice of the large numbers of black ducks, redheads, and brant that rose in front of the boat. After a short carriage ride, he reached the Broadwater Island Clubhouse in a stand of pine and cedar trees behind the sand dunes.

Separated from Cobb Island to the south by the Great Machipongo Inlet, Hog Island’s community of watermen lived mostly in the village of Broadwater. Essayist Alexander Hunter, in his 1908 “Huntsman in the South,” was less than enthralled by the locals, writing: “There are some bright examples, but the majority are slothful, and their dispositions mean and malicious. There are no criminals among them, [because] they have not the energy or spirit to commit a crime, except in the breaking of the game laws. They fish and hunt, and labor for a few weeks gathering oysters, and this gives them enough money to live in ease and comfort. Most of these islanders hibernate like an animal; they eat heavily and then doze for hours.”

The islanders who catered to the president-elect were not like those in Hunter’s colorful portrayal. Each day, small crowds made their way to the Broadwater kitchen bearing gifts of clams, oysters, mackerel, rockfish, terrapin, canvasbacks, and figs, and one townsman secured milk and cream on the mainland and delivered them daily by sail. Cleveland said he was glad to receive callers from the island and even Virginia politicians, but “no office-seekers, reporters, or non-residents of the state.” Journalists were required to stay on the mainland in Exmore.

Cleveland hunted ducks, brant, and shorebirds. We’ll never know for certain the identity of the birds he killed on the beach one afternoon because a reporter called them snipes. They were probably curlews, yellowlegs, and plovers, but whatever they were, he killed 126 of them. The writer covering the outing lost all credibility when he alleged that wingshooter Cleveland killed 53 with a single shot.

With clear blue skies and no wind near the end of the trip, huge flocks of birds congregated in the deepwater of Machipongo Inlet. For the chase, club guides converted an old square-ended and demasted oyster scow into a floating duck blind and towed it into the channel. They took great care in providing for its occupants, fitting the barge with a coal oil stove and a “revolving chair, so that the president-elect can shoot in every direction without rising from his seat.”

On December 4, the presidential party departed on the Sunshine for the Exmore train. Cleveland’s private car was the same one that conveyed the flag-draped casket of assassinated President Lincoln from Washington to Springfield in 1865.

Cleveland Redux

Cleveland returned to the White House to begin his second term in March 1893. America’s 24thpresident spent part of the 1893 Christmas holiday on a Potomac River duck hunt on the coal-fired Navy lighthouse tender Violet with Lighthouse Board Secretary Robley D. Evans. Weeks later, he set off on another Potomac River junket with Evans, Treasury Secretary John G. Carlisle, and Secretary of State Walter Q. Gresham.

In late March 1894, Cleveland, Evans, and Gresham gunned on Back Bay at Knott’s Island and Swan Island as guests of the Ragged Island Gunning Club. Founded by Norfolk sportsmen in 1890, they awarded Cleveland an honorary club membership. The party steamed south for hunts on North Carolina’s Outer Banks at Bodie’s Island, where on one shoot, they killed 285 ducks and geese. On an afternoon outing, Cleveland shot 160 “bay birds” – a local term for shorebirds and snipes – and four curlews. Returning to the Capitol and the 7th Street pier, the deck of the Violet was said to be loaded with “a large collection of wild swan, geese, and ducks,” and an accidental albatross.

In December 1894, Cleveland took his first trip to coastal South Carolina near Georgetown, the epicenter of Lowcountry waterfowl hunting. Northern sportsmen had only recently discovered places like North Island, located at the mouth of Winyah Bay, and the Cat and South Islands between Winyah and the North Santee River, and Murphy’s Island below the South Santee. From a bird’s eye view, its habitat was unlike any other Atlantic Seaboard. Cutting across arcuate ridges and swales, the Waccamaw, North Santee, and South Santee Rivers formed low-energy delta lobes dissected by a maze of tidal waterways. Man’s hand was evident mostly in a checkerboard of rice levees and freshwater canals scratched from its boggy soils during its plantation past.

The sporting logistics of Cleveland’s December excursion were arranged by former Confederate general and railroad executive Edward Porter Alexander, who owned land on North, South, and Cat Islands, and was a member of the Annandale Club on South Island. The gunning party included Capt. Evans, Charles Jefferson, the son of his host at Jefferson Island during 1892, and his personal physician, US Army Surgeon Robert O’Reilly. Traveling by train to Georgetown, they were escorted to the government lighthouse tender Wistaria at anchor in Muddy Bay, an arm of Winyah Bay adjacent to the Annandale Hunting Club grounds.

On their first hunt, the group killed 49 ducks, mostly mallards, and “a large raccoon.” One tale from the trip has it that, on another shoot, the portly president became mired in Lowcountry mud, his sticking creating a challenging rescue for guide Sawney Caines. Despite the mud, cold, and indignity, the president killed 30 mallards that morning. In total, the party returned to the Capitol with a total of 300 birds, with the president’s tally at 158.

After Congress adjourned in February 1895, Lighthouse Board District Inspector Benjamin Lamberton accompanied Cleveland and physician O’Reilly on the tender Violet during their inspection tour of Outer Banks lighthouses. Invited again as a guest at the Ragged Island Gunning Club, the president traveled south to Pamlico Sound and the back barrier wetlands of Hatteras Island. Although the numbers seem hard to believe, the Norfolk Virginian wrote that Cleveland tied a club record with his harvest of 143 ducks, 51 geese, 17 brant, and 20 swans.

The president returned to the North Carolina Outer Banks the following December, sailing to Cape Channel, near Cape Hatteras with Secretary of War Daniel Lamont, Navy Commander George Wilde, and surgeon Joseph Bryant. Perhaps to dodge the press, it was reported that Cleveland would travel aboard the Myrtle, but he instead left the Washington docks on the Violet before transferring in Norfolk to the Maple. Even his stay on the way south at the Ragged Island Club was denied as a rumor.

This was Cleveland’s seventh gunning trip in just two years, and the press’s goodwill towards his Oval Office absences had largely worn off. America was in the throes of a four-year depression, and although it began during the Harrison administration before him, it came to a head as the Panic of 1893 during Cleveland’s second term. The US Treasury was bleeding gold, and silver prices were in free fall. Stocks crashed. Railroads and banks failed. Commodity prices fell, and unemployment rose. America was in an ugly mood. Cleveland, who was charged with “sneaking off” on duck hunts while the country’s finances were in turmoil, became fodder for newspapermen.

“The president [has] gone duck hunting again!” crowed a Minneapolis editorial. “One day, a message that expresses alarm for the country’s finances and exposes a state of panic in the White House, and the next, a duck hunt. One day distress and the next a frolic.” It continued: “This thing of the president running away for a duck hunt every two or three weeks ought to be avoided. It is such an inconvenience for him to go down the Potomac” each time there is a political crisis. The writer provided a solution, suggesting that “Congress fix up a duck pond on the White House lot so as not to interfere with his other duties.” Another journalist wrote: “If the president makes up his mind to go out on a two-week duck hunt, he’ll go even if the whole country is on fire.” Cleveland’s absences from office were compared to Nero’s fiddling as Rome burned.

Cleveland also received unfavorable press from an unexpected source – sportsmen – at about the same time. In the December 1895 Forest & Stream, a reader complained about his posing the spoils of his North Carolina kill on the White House lawn for “public admiration.” The display of “52 ducks, five geese, four brant, and 32 quail” stacked neatly in rows, in his opinion, was from the hand of a butcher, not a sportsman. Other Forest & Stream letters attacked presidential hunts during the spring. Conservation of America’s wildlife resources was a relatively new topic, and some worried that killing birds during their breeding grounds migration might one day have an impact on bird populations.

On the evening of his January 1896 shooting trip on the Potomac River, the president changed from formal dinner attire into “a ducking costume,” leaving the White House portico at midnight for the carriage ride down 7th Street to the city wharf. Accompanied by physician O’Reilly and New York banker and trusted associate Elias C. Benedict, the party secreted away in the darkness on the government steamer Maple. Despite every effort to prevent the two-day trip from leaking to the press, headlines announced that “The President is on Another Duck Hunt.”

This was Cleveland’s first visit to the private Arkendale estate of Withers Waller, on Virginia’s Widewater Peninsula between Aquia Creek and the Potomac River. It was only a 38-mile run from the White House, a two-hour journey on the Maple. The president killed 13 ducks and geese, and the next day, 50 ducks. He returned in March to Widewater, gunning for a single day at the Arkendale estate on Aquia Creek. Although it came to naught, he was in negotiations to purchase Arkendale. Making the trip aboard the Maple again, Cleveland shot 13 ducks with Lamberton and Dr. O’Reilly before returning to the Capitol.

The cannonades of the 1896 spring shooting season would give way to press static of the coming July 1896 election. Would Cleveland run for a third term? He didn’t. After the election, citizen Cleveland retired from politics, leaving Washington for Princeton, New Jersey. He would go duck hunting again. 

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