Tom Smith

Tom Smith was born in England around 1840. At the age of four, he moved with his family to the United States. As a young man, he worked with his uncle at a livery stable near Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. During the Civil War, Smith was a coachman for Spanish diplomat Commander Portestar. He also reportedly drove Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to the Soldiers’ Home after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. It is not clear how Smith began working at the White House. In a 1926 newspaper interview, he said he served as President Chester A. Arthur’s coachman.¹ Smith described his duties as driving the president to dinners and social events and taking care of the horses and carriage. 

After leaving the White House, Smith worked as a coachman for several prominent Washington residents, including Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, whom he served for twenty-one years. Little else is known about his life, including when or where he died. Most of what is known about Smith’s White House service comes from a single newspaper interview published in 1926, more than forty years after Arthur’s presidency. Although the White House is an important part of American history, memories recorded decades later can be difficult to verify without contemporary documentation. Records from Arthur’s presidency identify Albert Hawkins as the White House coachman, suggesting that if Smith did serve at the Executive Mansion, he may have been employed as a temporary or additional coachman under Hawkins’s supervision. To date, no primary sources have been identified that corroborate Smith’s account of his White House service.