James A. Garfield
James Abram Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, serving from March 1881 until his death in September that year after being shot in July. A preacher, lawyer, and Civil War general, Garfield served nine terms in the United States House of Representatives and is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president. Before he ran for president, the Ohio General Assembly had elected him to the U.S. Senate, a position he declined upon becoming president-elect.
Garfield was born into poverty in a log cabin and grew up in northeast Ohio. After graduating from Williams College in 1856, he studied law and became an attorney. Garfield was a preacher in the Restoration Movement and president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, affiliated with the Disciples. He was elected as a Republican member of the Ohio State Senate in 1859, serving until 1861. Garfield opposed Confederate secession, was a major general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, and fought in the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. He was elected to Congress in 1862 to represent Ohio's 19th district. Throughout his congressional service, Garfield firmly supported the gold standard and gained a reputation as a skilled orator. He initially agreed with Radical Republican views on Reconstruction but later favored a Moderate Republican–aligned approach to civil rights enforcement for freedmen. Garfield's aptitude for mathematics extended to his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem, published in 1876, and his advocacy of using statistics to inform government policy.
At the 1880 Republican National Convention, delegates chose Garfield, who had not sought the White House, as a compromise presidential nominee on the 36th ballot. In the 1880 presidential election, he conducted a low-key front porch campaign and narrowly defeated the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield's accomplishments as president included his assertion of presidential authority against senatorial courtesy in executive appointments, a purge of corruption in the Post Office, and his appointment of a Supreme Court justice. He advocated for agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights for African Americans. He also proposed substantial civil service reforms, which were passed by Congress in 1883 as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act and signed into law by his successor, Chester A. Arthur. Garfield was a member of the intraparty "Half-Breed" faction that used the powers of the presidency to defy the powerful "Stalwart" Senator Roscoe Conkling from New York. He did this by appointing Blaine faction leader William H. Robertson to the lucrative post of Collector of the Port of New York. The ensuing political battle resulted in Robertson's confirmation and the resignations of Conkling and Thomas C. Platt from the Senate.
On July 2, 1881, Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau, a deluded office seeker. He died on September 19 from infections related to the wounds and was succeeded by Vice President Chester A. Arthur. Due to Garfield's brief term in office and lack of major changes during his tenure, historians tend to rank him as a below-average president or omit his name entirely from rankings, though some view Garfield's potential favorably, praising him for anti-corruption and pro-civil rights stances.
Childhood and early life
James Abram Garfield was born the youngest of five children on November 19, 1831, in a log cabin in Orange Township, which later became Moreland Hills, Ohio. Garfield's ancestor Edward Garfield migrated from Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, to Massachusetts around 1630. James's father Abraham was born in Worcester, New York, and came to Ohio to woo his childhood sweetheart, Mehitabel Ballou, only to find her married. He instead wed her sister Eliza, who was born in New Hampshire. James was named after an earlier son of Eliza and Abram who had died in infancy.In early 1833, Abram and Eliza Garfield joined a Stone-Campbell church, a decision that influenced their youngest son's life. Abram died later that year, and James was raised in poverty in a household led by his strong-willed mother. He was her favorite child and the two remained close for the rest of his life. Eliza remarried in 1842, but soon left her second husband, Warren Belden, and a divorce was awarded in 1850. James took his mother's side in the matter and noted Belden's 1880 death with satisfaction in his diary. Garfield also enjoyed his mother's stories about his ancestry, especially those about his Welsh great-great-grandfathers and an ancestor who served as a knight of Caerphilly Castle.
Poor and fatherless, Garfield was mocked by his peers and became sensitive to slights throughout his life; he sought escape through voracious reading. He left home at age 16 in 1847 and was rejected for work on the only ship in port in Cleveland. Garfield instead found work on a canal boat, managing the mules that pulled it. Horatio Alger later used this labor to good effect when he wrote Garfield's campaign biography in 1880.
After six weeks, illness forced Garfield to return home, and during his recuperation, his mother and a local school official secured his promise to forgo canal work for a year of school. In 1848, he began at Geauga Seminary, in nearby Chester Township, Geauga County, Ohio. Garfield later said of his childhood, "I lament that I was born to poverty, and in this chaos of childhood, seventeen years passed before I caught any inspiration... a precious 17 years when a boy with a father and some wealth might have become fixed in manly ways."
Education, marriage and early career
Garfield attended Geauga Seminary from 1848 to 1850 and learned academic subjects for which he had not previously had time. He excelled as a student and was especially interested in languages and elocution. He began to appreciate the power a speaker had over an audience, writing that the speaker's platform "creates some excitement. I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error." Geauga was coeducational, and Garfield was attracted to one of his classmates, Lucretia Rudolph, whom he later married. To support himself at Geauga, he worked as a carpenter's assistant and teacher. The need to go from town to town to find work as a teacher aggravated Garfield, and he developed a dislike of what he called "place-seeking", which became, he said, "the law of my life." In later years, he astounded his friends by disregarding positions that could have been his with little politicking. Garfield had attended church more to please his mother than to worship God, but in his late teens he underwent a religious awakening. He attended many camp meetings, which led to his being born again on March 4, 1850, when he was baptized by being submerged in the icy waters of the Chagrin River.After he left Geauga, Garfield worked for a year at various jobs, including teaching jobs. Finding that some New Englanders worked their way through college, Garfield determined to do the same and sought a school that could prepare him for the entrance examinations. From 1851 to 1854, he attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, a school founded by and still affiliated with the Christian Church. While there, he was most interested in the study of Greek and Latin but was inclined to learn about and discuss any new thing he encountered. Securing a position on entry as janitor, he obtained a teaching position while he was still a student there. Lucretia Rudolph also enrolled at the Institute and Garfield wooed her while teaching her Greek. He developed a regular preaching circuit at neighboring churches and, in some cases, earned one gold dollar per service. By 1854, Garfield had learned all the Institute could teach him and was a full-time teacher. Garfield then enrolled at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a third-year student; he received credit for two years' study at the Institute after passing a cursory examination. Garfield was also impressed with the college president, Mark Hopkins, who had responded warmly to Garfield's letter inquiring about admission. He said of Hopkins, "The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student on the other." Hopkins later said of Garfield in his student days, "There was a large general capacity applicable to any subject. There was no pretense of genius, or alternation of spasmodic effort, but a satisfactory accomplishment in all directions." After his first term, Garfield was hired to teach penmanship to the students of nearby Pownal, Vermont, a post Chester A. Arthur previously held.
Garfield graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Williams in August 1856, was named salutatorian, and spoke at the commencement. His biographer Ira Rutkow writes that Garfield's years at Williams gave him the opportunity to know and respect those of different social backgrounds, and that, despite his origin as an unsophisticated Westerner, socially conscious New Englanders liked and respected him. "In short," Rutkow writes, "Garfield had an extensive and positive first experience with the world outside the Western Reserve of Ohio."
Upon his return to Ohio, the degree from a prestigious Eastern college made Garfield a man of distinction. He returned to Hiram to teach at the Institute and in 1857 was made its principal, though he did not see education as a field that would realize his full potential. The abolitionist atmosphere at Williams had enlightened him politically, after which he began to consider politics as a career. He campaigned for Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont in 1856. In 1858, he married Lucretia, and they had seven children, five of whom survived infancy. Soon after the wedding, he registered to read law at the office of attorney Albert Gallatin Riddle in Cleveland, though he did his studying in Hiram. He was admitted to the bar in 1861.
Local Republican leaders invited Garfield to enter politics upon the death of Cyrus Prentiss, the presumptive nominee for the local state senate seat. He was nominated at the party convention on the sixth ballot and was elected, serving from 1860 to 1861. Garfield's major effort in the state senate was an unsuccessful bill providing for Ohio's first geological survey to measure its mineral resources.