The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States: Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor as a Soldier; His Career as a Statesm…

x, 11-672 pp. Leather spine and corners, pebbled cloth boards, gilt titles and decorations, marbled edges and endpapers, engraved illustrations throughout, including an image of the Capitol building. James Garfield, twentieth president of the United States, was born in Orange township (now Moreland Hills) in the Western Reserve region of northern Ohio, the son of Abram Garfield and Eliza Ballou, farmers. After his father's death in 1833, he was brought up amid rural poverty by his strong-willed mother. The hardships of those early years would later provide grist for campaign biographers, including Horatio Alger, who transformed Garfield's log-cabin birth and his brief stint as a canal boy into political legend. Conversion, at age eighteen, to the Disciples of Christ gave young Garfield a sense of self-worth; education, especially in classical languages, gave him his first vocation. In 1851 he entered the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), and three years later he enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts, receiving his A.B. in 1856. After graduation, Garfield returned to Hiram as professor of ancient languages, and in 1857 he was named president of the tiny school. In 1858 he married Lucretia Rudolph (Lucretia Rudolph Garfield). They had seven children, five of whom survived infancy. He was ordained a minister in the Disciples church and studied law but found himself strongly drawn to politics, even though his church frowned on such "carnal" activity. Elected as a Republican to the Ohio legislature in 1859, he expressed antislavery views in the heated debates during the secession crisis. When that crisis exploded into the Civil War, he helped recruit the Forty-second Ohio Volunteer Infantry and was commissioned colonel of the regiment. His first assignment was in eastern Kentucky to counter a small Confederate force led by Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall. Marshall's invasion was already floundering, and after an inconclusive skirmish at Middle Creek on 10 January 1862, the Confederates withdrew, leaving Garfield in control of eastern Kentucky. It was a modest triumph, but at this stage of the Civil War even small victories were welcome. Garfield was rewarded with considerable acclaim as well as a promotion to brigadier general. In April 1862 he was given command of a brigade, just in time to participate in the last stage of the battle of Shiloh. These military laurels helped boost Garfield's political stock. Although he had a lifelong aversion to "place-seeking" and consistently refused to promote his own advancement, his friends had no such scruples. In September 1862 they engineered his nomination for Congress from Ohio's Nineteenth District. In such a solidly Republican district, nomination was tantamount to election, and Garfield won a lopsided triumph, the first of nine consecutive victories. While waiting for the Thirty-eighth Congress to assemble, Garfield served in the Army of the Cumberland as chief of staff to Major General William S. Rosecrans. In that capacity he planned the skillfully designed Tullahoma campaign of June 1863, which led to the capture of the vital railroad center of Chattanooga, Tennessee. His role in the subsequent Union defeat at Chickamauga on 19 - 20 September 1863 was ambiguous, but Garfield salvaged his military reputation by leaving the retreating Rosecrans to join General George H. Thomas in his memorable stand at Chickamauga, an act that gave him the aura of a hero and helped earn him a major general's stars. In December 1863 Garfield resigned his commission to take his seat in Congress. He initially joined the ranks of Republicans who were impatient with President Abraham Lincoln's seemingly cautious moves toward full emancipation, but after the war Garfield's radicalism moderated. Although in 1868 he supported the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson, he felt increasingly uncomfortable in the role of firebrand. His interests shifted to matters of financial policy. He advocated lower tariffs (except for items produced in his district) and was an avid crusader for hard money. He worked tenaciously for these policies on the House Ways and Means Committee and as chairman of the Appropriations Committee during the Forty-second and Forty-third Congresses. In that chairmanship, his capacity for sustained intellectual effort and his ability to form generalized principles from a mass of detail enabled him to exert some congressional control over the previously unchecked spending process and brought him into the inner circle of congressional leadership. He was assisted in this rise to prominence by a number of personal assets. One was his eloquence, honed by years in the classroom and on the pulpit, which he developed into a crisp, modern style of oratory. Another was his unique blend of amiability and intellectuality. Over six feet tall, fun-loving, and warm-hearted, Garfield was, he ruefully admitted, "a poor hater," unlike his friend James G. Blaine and his rival Roscoe Conkling. At the same time, Garfield retained the scholarly habits he had cultivated as a college professor. Even in the midst of political battles he could find time to study ancient history or translate Goethe and Horace. His judicious temperament, which enabled him to see all sides of a question, was sometimes mistaken for indecisiveness. Ulysses S. Grant scoffed that Garfield lacked "the backbone of an angleworm." In 1873 Garfield's political career was threatened by a series of scandals. The most damaging was the accusation that he had once accepted stock in the notorious Credit Mobilier corporation. Although he received only $329 from the transaction and no corrupt intention was firmly established, his reputation was marred by the charge. It was further darkened by his vote in favor of the unpopular retroactive increase of congressional pay (dubbed the "Salary Grab") and by a rumored linkage with the DeGolyer paving contract scandal. After a hard-fought reelection battle in 1874, Garfield was returned to his congressional seat. Many other Republicans were not so fortunate. For the first time since the Civil War, the Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives. Garfield spent the rest of the decade in the legislative minority while becoming a leading spokesman for his party. In that capacity he was one of the "visiting statesmen" who investigated the disputed Louisiana returns in the election of 1876, and he then sat on the electoral commission that awarded that presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes. During the Hayes administration, Garfield helped preserve harmony among the fractious congressional Republicans and kept the majority Democrats off balance by skillfully waving the "bloody shirt" of Civil War memories. It was a virtuoso performance but not one congenial to a man who preferred dealing with ideas and issues rather than with personalities. In January 1880 the Ohio legislature elected Garfield to the U.S. Senate. To smooth his path to the Senate, Garfield had to agree to support Treasury Secretary John Sherman's presidential bid and put aside, for the time being, his own presidential ambitions. At the 1880 Republican National Convention Garfield served as floor manager for Sherman's campaign and even placed his name in nomination. The convention was sharply divided, reflecting the divisions within the party itself. The "Stalwart" element, led by Roscoe Conkling of New York, looked back with nostalgia to the days of Grant. Appropriately enough, their candidate was Grant himself, now back from his world travels and ready for an unprecedented third term. He was opposed by an assortment of rivals, most notably Sherman and Blaine, who feared that another round of Grant would sink the Republican party. The clear leader on the first ballot, Grant would very likely have been nominated if Garfield had not blocked a Stalwart attempt to impose the unit rule. For thirty-three ballots the convention remained deadlocked, with Grant unable to secure a majority and his rivals equally unable to unite on an acceptable alternative. On the next ballot, however, the Wisconsin delegation unexpectedly cast sixteen votes for Garfield, who had not even been nominated. Despite Garfield's attempt to withdraw his name, the convention impulsively elected him on the thirty-sixth ballot in an emotional frenzy seldom matched in U.S. politics. Three hundred and six Stalwarts stubbornly stood by Grant to the end and were only partially placated by the selection of one of their number, Chester Alan Arthur of New York, as Garfield's running mate. Garfield began the presidential campaign as an underdog. Not only was his party deeply divided, but the Democratic candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero of Gettysburg, was likely to neutralize the reliable Republican issue of the "bloody shirt." Republican party unity was established by making further concessions to Conkling and by sidestepping the explosive issue of civil service reform. Hancock was attacked at his most vulnerable point: his lack of civilian experience. An unfortunate interview in which Hancock dismissed the tariff as "purely a local question" gave Republicans an opening to exploit their own support for tariff protection. In so doing, they helped reorient Republicans from the party of the Union to the party of prosperity. Nineteenth-century presidential candidates were not expected to campaign on their own behalf, a convention Garfield evaded by delivering little talks to visiting delegations on the front porch of his Mentor, Ohio, home, "Lawnfield." The candidate's conciliatory personality helped bring Republican factions together, and his inspirational life story provided a text for Republican orators and pamphleteers. Garfield was "the ideal candidate," said outgoing president Hayes, "because he is the ideal self-made man." By October the tide had turned in Garfield's favor and not even the forged Morey letter, which alleged that Garfield supported importation of Chinese laborers, could prevent his victory in November. Garfield's popular majority over Hancock was less than 0.1 percent of the total votes cast, but he secured 214 electoral votes to Hancock's 155. Except for New Jersey, Nevada, and California, Democratic strength was confined to the former slave-holding states. Between his election and his inauguration on 4 March 1881, Garfield was occupied with constructing a cabinet that would balance all Republican factions. Blaine was rewarded with the State Department. William Windom of Minnesota was named secretary of the Treasury. The Navy Department was headed by William H. Hunt of Louisiana; the War Department by Robert Todd Lincoln, the martyred president's son; and the Interior Department by Iowa's Samuel J. Kirkwood. Wayne MacVeagh of Pennsylvania was asked to be attorney general, and New York was represented by Postmaster General Thomas James. This last appointment infuriated Conkling, who demanded nothing less for his faction and his state than the Treasury Department. He was so insulted that he, in effect, declared war on the administration. This unedifying squabble would consume the energies of the brief Garfield presidency. It overshadowed promising activities such as Blaine's efforts to build closer ties with Latin America, Postmaster General James's investigation of the "star route" postal frauds, and Windom's successful refinancing of the federal debt. The feud with Conkling reached a climax when the president, at Blaine's instigation, nominated Conkling's enemy, Judge William H. Robertson, to be collector of the port of New York. Conkling raised the time-honored principle of senatorial courtesy in attempting to defeat the nomination but to no avail. Finally he and his junior colleague, Thomas Platt, resigned their Senate seats to seek vindication, but they found only further humiliation. Garfield's victory was complete. He had routed his foes, weakened the principle of senatorial courtesy, and revitalized the presidential office. He had little time to savor his triumph. On 2 July 1881, as Garfield was waiting at the Baltimore and Potomac station for a train to carry him to his summer vacation, a shabby, unhinged religious fanatic named Charles J. Guiteau pumped two .44-caliber bullets into his back. Mortally wounded, the president was carried back to the White House where he slowly wasted away, as an anxious nation hung on the daily medical bulletins from his sick room. In September he was transferred to Elberon, New Jersey, to escape the Washington heat, and there he died. After a massive funeral in Cleveland, Ohio, Garfield was buried in Lake View Cemetery. Over his tomb a 165-foot-high monument was constructed at a cost of $225,000. This might seem an excessive memorial for a president who served only six months, two of which were spent as a helpless invalid. But in mourning Garfield, Americans were not only honoring a president; they were paying tribute to a man whose life story embodied their own most cherished aspirations. - Dictionary of National Biography