James A. Garfield, statue on campus
James A. Garfield (left), his wife Lucretia Rudolph Garfield (right) and other faculty, 1858.
James A. Garfield, statue on campus
James A. Garfield (left), his wife Lucretia Rudolph Garfield (right) and other faculty, 1858.
Garfield at age 16
Garfield Monument, by the Capitol, where he served almost twenty years
Inauguration of James A. Garfield
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James A. Garfield was born on November 19, 1831, near Cleveland, Ohio, United States. Although his family dated back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his immediate ancestors had not prospered, and Garfield's upbringing was plagued by dire poverty. His father died when James was 2 years old, and he was early put out to labor to help keep the family intact.
James loved reading from a young age and excelled in academics, particularly Latin and Greek. He attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later renamed Hiram College) from 1851 to 1854. Then he went to Williams College from where he graduated in 1856.
James taught school briefly and returned to Hiram as a professor and head of the college, but he did not enjoy the life. "You and I know," he wrote a friend, "that teaching is not the work in which a man can live and grow." Still, Garfield remained bookish throughout his life, and while by no means brilliant or original, he emerges as truly distinctive in his occasional writings, letters, and diary. These reveal a perspicacious mind, shrewd insight into his contemporaries' personalities, and a rare comprehension among politicos of the day of the vast changes through which the United States was going.
In 1859 Garfield was elected to the Ohio Senate and became a leading Union supporter in the Civil War. He accepted a commission as colonel and, typically, set about studying military strategy and organization. His readings must have been well selected because his rise in rank was rapid even for the Civil War era. An active role in the Battle of Middle Creek on Jan. 10, 1862, made him a brigadier general, and, in April, he fought during the bloody second day at Shiloh. After that he left the lines to become chief of staff through the Chickamauga campaign, organizing a division of military information and being promoted to major general.
Garfield's military career reflected the dexterity with which he would later escape political crises unscathed, for although he was closely associated with several disasters that ruined associates, he himself escaped blame. Indeed, in December 1863 Garfield was elected to the House of Representatives in recognition of his military service and, until his death, was never again out of Federal office. His Ohio district was safe for Republicans, so Garfield could concentrate on the affairs of office, and he was the leader of his party in the House during the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes.
Scandal nearly wrecked Garfield's career when he was accused of accepting money in return for supporting a congressional subsidy of the transcontinental railroad's construction company. But he managed to sidestep and survive the accusation, and he also weathered the revelation that he had accepted a legal fee from a company involved in government-contracted improvement of Washington streets. These lapses in ethics were more the result of carelessness than personal corruption, and Garfield in his last years was extremely careful to avoid any possible conflicts of interest. On the whole, he had a good record in the graft-sullied political world of the day, and reformers who could not support James G. Blaine were willing to accept Garfield.
In 1880 Garfield was elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio, but before he took his seat, he agreed to manage John Sherman's campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination. The chief Republican candidates that year were former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant and Senator James G. Blaine. Sherman's hopes were based on an anticipated deadlock between the two front-runners, which would force the convention to turn to him as a compromise candidate. The convention did, indeed, deadlock and settle on a third person, but that person was Garfield rather than Sherman. Toward the end of his life Sherman became convinced that his manager had actively betrayed him, but close examination of the records by several historians indicates that this was not so. Garfield knew before the convention that certain parties were working for him as a compromise candidate, but he neither encouraged nor effectively discouraged the talk. He certainly had presidential ambitions, but like a good party regular, he recognized Sherman's seniority among Ohio politicians and was willing to wait his turn. When the opportunity beckoned in 1880, he was more than ready.
The immediate problem was the party's "stalwarts." Garfield had selected one of their number, Chester A. Arthur, as his vice-presidential candidate, but the leader of the "stalwarts," New York politician Roscoe Conkling, refused to work to get the important New York vote without specific promises from Garfield on patronage. Conkling believed that he received such promises and did help elect Garfield, but soon after the election, the two fell out. Garfield named Conkling's archenemy, James G. Blaine, to be his secretary of state and increasingly relied on Blaine's counsel. In a battle over the appointment of the collector of customs for the Port of New York (one of the richest plums in the Federal patronage), Conkling resigned his Senate seat and asked the New York Legislature, in effect, to rebuke the President by reelecting him. What might have happened under normal circumstances is impossible to tell, for on July 2, 1881, Garfield was shot in the back in a Washington railroad station by a deranged man named Charles Guiteau, who claimed he had killed the President in order to put Chester A. Arthur into office.
Garfield did not die immediately. But doctors could not locate one of the bullets, and infection eventually sapped his strength. Conkling was not reelected in the shocked aftermath of the shooting, and a civil service reform bill aimed at Conkling-style politics eventually passed Congress. But Garfield never left his bed; he died at Alberon, New Jersey, on September 19, 1881.
Garfield was a significant figure in the development of congressional power during the 1860s and 1870s. His premature death precludes knowledge of how his perceptions of the changes America was undergoing might have impacted the successfulness of his presidency.
The James A. Garfield Monument was dedicated to him in Washington in 1887.
In his early adulthood, Garfield sometimes preached and held revival meetings.
Garfield was capable of neatly straddling a volatile issue. He was never so strong on the high-tariff issue as were most of his Republican colleagues and, as late as his presidential campaign of 1880, he remained publicly equivocal on the issue of Federal patronage. The Federal jobs at the disposal of the party in power were the life-blood of politics during the "gilded age." One wing of the Republican party—the "stalwarts"—called for no dalliance on the question, claiming the jobs as the just due of those who worked to put the party in power. Another wing of reformers, the "doctrinaires," felt that the quality of government would be improved if Federal jobs were assigned on the basis of merit. Garfield attempted to placate both sides.
On the money question Garfield was firm, standing unalterably for "hard" currency when many of his former constituents called for inflation. But he was less steadfast on the Southern question, alternating between "waving the bloody shirt"—exploiting Northern bitterness toward the South over the war—and supporting a more compromising attitude.
Entering the presidency, Garfield had little foreign policy experience, so he leaned heavily on Blaine. Blaine, a former protectionist, now agreed with Garfield on the need to promote freer trade, especially within the Western Hemisphere. Their reasons were twofold: firstly, Garfield and Blaine believed that increasing trade with Latin America would be the best way to keep Great Britain from dominating the region. Secondly, by encouraging exports, they believed they could increase American prosperity. Garfield authorized Blaine to call for a Pan-American conference in 1882 to mediate disputes among the Latin American nations and to serve as a forum for talks on increasing trade. At the same time, they hoped to negotiate a peace in the War of the Pacific then being fought by Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. Blaine favored a resolution that would not result in Peru yielding any territory, but Chile, which by 1881 had occupied the Peruvian capital, Lima, rejected any settlement that restored the previous status quo. Garfield sought to expand American influence in other areas, calling for renegotiation of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty to allow the United States to construct a canal through Panama without British involvement, as well as attempting to reduce British influence in the strategically located Kingdom of Hawaii. Garfield's and Blaine's plans for the United States' involvement in the world stretched even beyond the Western Hemisphere, as he sought commercial treaties with Korea and Madagascar. Garfield also considered enhancing the United States' military strength abroad, asking Navy Secretary Hunt to investigate the condition of the navy with an eye toward expansion and modernization. In the end, these ambitious plans came to nothing after Garfield was assassinated. Nine countries had accepted invitations to the Pan-American conference, but the invitations were withdrawn in April 1882 after Blaine resigned from the cabinet and Arthur, Garfield's successor, cancelled the conference. Naval reform continued under Arthur, if on a more modest scale than Garfield and Hunt had envisioned, ultimately ending in the construction of the Squadron of Evolution.
Garfield believed that the key to improving the state of African American civil rights would be found in education aided by the federal government. During Reconstruction, freedmen had gained citizenship and suffrage that enabled them to participate in government, but Garfield believed their rights were being eroded by Southern white resistance and illiteracy, and was concerned that blacks would become America's permanent "peasantry."
Quotations:
"A brave man is a man who dares to look the Devil in the face and tell him he is a Devil."
"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."
"Nobody but radicals have ever accomplished anything in a great crisis."
"A law is not a law without coercion behind it."
"Right reason is stronger than force."
He was a Freemason.
Although a pugnacious youth, Garfield matured into a good-natured, amiable, and gregarious fellow. Extremely tactile, he liked to hug and stroke friends and characteristically slung an arm around the shoulders of whomever he was talking to. He was a gifted orator, among the most popular and persuasive of his day. He was most ambitious but did little to promote his own fortunes. “I so much despise a man who blows his own horn,” he commented, “that I go to the extreme of not demanding what is justly my due.” To refrain from self-aggrandizement became the guiding principle of his life. “He was convinced that he was destiny’s child,” biographer Allan Peskin has written, “marked out for some special purpose. Secure in his faith, he place his career in the hands of his destiny, preferring to drift with the tide of fortune rather than take the initiative and oppose it.” As a young adult he experienced a prolonged period of mental depression, a period he later referred to as his “years of darkness.” Similarly after his election as president but before the inauguration, he was overcome with a sense of foreboding. He complained of severe headaches. He began having nightmares of being naked and lost. Throughout his life, his self-confidence was fragile.
Physical Characteristics: A muscular, robust, handsome figure, Garfield stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 185 pounds. He had a disproportionately large head, a prominent forehead, light brown hair, blue eyes, and an aquiline nose. He wore a beard from young adulthood. He was left-handed. His health generally was sound, except during periods of overwork, when he complained of body aches and indigestion.
Quotes from others about the person
"Here he was leader and master, not by combination of scheming, not by chicanery or caucus, but by the force of his cultivated mind, his keen and farseeing judgment, his unanswerable logic, his strength and power of speech, his thorough comprehension of the subjects of legislation. Always strong, he was strongest on his feet addressing the House or from the rostrum the assembled people. Who of us having heard him here or elsewhere speaking upon a question of great national concern can forget the might and majesty, the force and directness, the grace and beauty of his utterances? He was always just to his adversary, an open and manly opponent, and free from invective. He convinced the judgment with his searching logic, while he swayed his listeners with brilliant periods and glowing eloquence. He was always an educator of people. His thoughts were fresh, vigorous, and instructive."
William McKinley, in a eulogy during an unveiling of a statue of Garfield (19 January 1886), as quoted in One of the People : Life and Speeches of William McKinley (1896) by F. T. Neely also quoted in The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield: 1831-1877 Vol. 2 (1925) by Theodore Clarke Smith
"Garfield appointed four black men, among them Frederick Douglass, to posts in his administration. We are left to wonder today what a president of conviction and conscience such as Garfield might have done to rouse the country and lead it against the vicious new institutions of repression and virtual re-enslavement that were taking hold in the American South, with the silent acquiescence of the north. We will never know, of course, what the limits of his leadership might have been, but it would seem, from the grief at his passing and the memorials that remain, that he was a president who left more of a mark on the people’s consciousness in a few months than some others have in four years and more."
The New York Times, "For the briefest time, President Garfield was an inspiration" (17 February 2013), The Post's View, New York
James Garfield married Lucretia Rudolph, a former classmate, in November 1858. They had four sons and a daughter who lived to maturity. Garfield had an extramarital affair with Lucia Calhoun in 1860s though he later admitted this to his wife and sought her forgiveness.
1799–1833
1801–1888
1832–1918
1860–1863
1863–1942
1865–1950
1867–1947
1870–1951
1872–1958
1874–1876
