“James A. Garfield soon disappeared from the public’s memory, and he remains one of America’s least remembered chief executives. ‘For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life?’ asked the novelist Thomas Wolfe. ‘Who could believe that his footballs ever sounded on a lonely pavement?’ But Garfield did exist—he was a son, a husband, and a father. He lived and breathed and laughed and cried and played a major role in American politics. He was the last of the nation’s ‘born in a log cabin’ presidents, a general during the Civil War, and the quintessential rags-to-riches, self-made American man” (Rutkow, p. 3).
I simply couldn’t remember this guy’s name! Recently, my Mom had casually asked me how many presidents had been killed by assassination and somewhere in my head I knew that the number was 4 (don’t ask me how). But when I went to name them off to her, I could count only three: Lincoln, McKinley, and Kennedy. But I swore there were four of them! Frowning I racked my brain to disgorge the final name but after a few seconds of really heavy mental lifting, I had nothing. Knowing that someday, someday, I would discover that name did not really ease the frustration but that is the best part about reading a bio for every single president—I’m going to get the information eventually.
And here it is, folks! The mystery is solved--#4 is James A Garfield. Aha! Of course I had to call my Mom immediately but it turned out to be one of those situations when you wake up in the middle of the night with the answer on your lips and nobody understands you at all. What I mean to say is my Mom had no clue what I was talking about, I guess, assuming that we had dropped this topic weeks ago. Of course, I was so excited, I didn’t help matters.
“Mom? It’s Garfield! No, I’m Vanya, but Garfield is the answer! Remember when we were talking about assassinations? (annoyance) Come on—you asked me how many presidents were assassinated. I don’t remember when—a couple weeks ago maybe? Don’t you remember? I was having trouble remembering the fourth president to be assassinated and it was driving me crazy. (resignation) Oh nevermind! It doesn’t matter. If it ever comes up in trivia, remember Garfield. No, I have enough money to buy groceries. Gotta go.”
Now that I’m rereading this, I’m a little embarrassed at how excited I was in the first place. It’s not like I’m a kick-ass historical detective or something here but I do like finding out answers to the little questions. It’s too bad that after my euphoria over discovering Garfield’s claim to fame, I then had to read on—and really, it’s too horrible. I’ve been sad over presidents before but my emotions reached a new low with Garfield and his end. Sigh. I guess you should just read on to see what I mean. (I read James A Garfield: American Presidents Series by Ira Rutkow, New York: Times Books, 2006.)
As stated above, James Abram Garfield really was born in a log cabin in Orange, Ohio on November 19, 1831. Only two years later, his father and three siblings would die of pneumonia, leaving Eliza to manage the farm and raise the rest of the children alone. James was clumsy and awkward growing up but he was also ambitious, disciplined and intelligent. He had minimal formal schooling but he was a voracious reader and learned a lot that way.
In October of 1848 aged 16, Garfield left home to become a “sailor” for pontoon boats in the Great Lakes. Unfortunately, Garfield did not know how to swim and nearly drowned several times. Eventually he enrolled himself in the Geauga Academy and then switched to the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in 1851. Finally, a year later, he went up to Williams College in Massachusetts to receive his degree. While there, he became involved in Republican politics and embraced abolitionism. He graduated in 1856 as the salutatorian.
Having really no money or prospects, Garfield went right into teaching and then became president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. In November 1858, he married Lucretia Randolph, a sweetheart from school days at Geauga and Western Reserve and they moved to a little cottage near the college.
Being very ambitious, Garfield knew he could not stay where he was as a president of a college. In 1859, then, he was elected to the Ohio Senate. “Three qualities immediately set Garfield apart from other senators: a prodigious capacity to grasp the minutiae of legislation, extraordinary speechmaking abilities, and a genuineness in forming friendships” (p. 11). He was also admitted to the bar, by simply reading a few legal books and taking an oral examination. He would never practice as a lawyer—it was simply a fall-back plan in case politics did not work out.
War interrupted and in 1861, Garfield became the lieutenant colonel of 42nd Ohio regiment. From there, they were sent down to Kentucky to take part in the Battle of Middle Creek. They won and Garfield was promoted to brigadier general. He had been wounded and found himself recovering in Washington DC where he made good use of his time networking. He was even elected to the US House of Representatives but since he was still in the military, he had to return to the front. In 1863, he was sent to the Army of the Cumberland in TN and became chief of staff under General Rosecrans. Garfield was severely disillusioned after the loss at the Battle of Chickamauga and left the army to take up his post in congress.
Back in Washington, he joined the group of radical republicans and was immediately placed on the Committee on Military Affairs. He was increasingly involved with the financial aspect of Congress, becoming involved in the Committee of Ways and Means, the Committee of Appropriations, and the Committee of Banking and Currency. “He promoted what might later be called the trickle-down theory of economic growth, whereby the government facilitates the expansion of business productivity on the assumption that all of society will eventually benefit” (p. 31).
In 1880, he was elected to the US Senate, but he was only able to serve a couple months before he was nominated as the Republican National presidential candidate. His nomination came as a complete surprise. The Republican Party had split with the Half-Breeds supporting James G Blaine for president and the Stalwarts backing Ulysses S Grant for a third term. No single candidate was able to receive a majority of votes until Garfield’s name was thrown into the mix. He won the nomination and then, running against the Democratic candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock, won the presidency despite a truly dirty campaign. “Most observers agree that, in view of the nastiness of the campaign, Garfield’s victory could be regarded as a personal triumph. He had captured the presidency by keeping the party’s faithful focused and united while presenting a positive and modest image to American voters” (p. 62).
Patronage was immediately a problem for Garfield. “In 1881, government jobs seekers enjoyed open access to the executive mansion, and it was not uncommon that they attempted to speak one-on-one with the president to plead their case” (p. 71). Many office seekers were sent away unhappy and unappreciated. But there were other problems on the horizon for Garfield. The first was his hatred of Chester A Arthur, his vice president. Garfield very clearly leaned toward the Half-Breed side of the Republican Party and when he was nominated for the presidency, everyone decided it would be a good idea to pair him with a Stalwart supporter, in this case, Chester Arthur. After the election, Garfield and Arthur could not have been farther apart, politically, and by the summer of 1881, they were not speaking at all. The second problem was the advent of a mother of a scandal which would implicate numerous Washington bigwigs and tons of government postal employees. Called the Star Route Scandal, some government officials decided to charge the government extra to deliver the mail in out-of-the-way places. Garfield cracked down hard on this type of thing.
One of the really great things that Garfield accomplished in office was his reselling of some government bonds that helped pay off some of the debt from the war. It was in a rather good mood that on the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield and Blaine, the Secretary of State, headed to the train station. Garfield and some of the other cabinet members were going to take a tour of New England. Unfortunately, at the train station, Garfield walked right into an insane, frustrated office seeker,
Charles Guiteau, who shot Garfield in the back. Guiteau was a “mentally unstable, penny-ante scalawag, who stole from everyone he knew. He was the child of a deceased schizophrenic mother and a religion-obsessed, know-it-all father” (p. 71-2). Garfield lay bleeding onto the floor of the train station while people ran around in panic. “Turning Garfield on his side to examine the bullet hole, Townshend [a health officer for the District of Columbia] became the first of what would be numerous individuals to place their unwashed fingers and unclean instruments directly into the president’s wound” (p. 85). Soon several other medical men had joined Townsend, including Doctor Bliss, Garfield’s future physician, and each of them stuck their fingers into the wound to try and ascertain the path of the bullet. Bliss, a Civil War surgeon, soon took over and decided that the bullet had hit the president’s liver and he would not live long.
They finally were able to move the president back to the White House where Bliss maintained a strict regimen of dosing his patient with large quantities of quinine and morphine. Garfield routinely vomited after meals and his temperature began to spike each night above 100 degrees but Bliss and the other doctors believed it to be for the best. “For Bliss and his minions, ancient remedies, old-world philosophies, and a stubborn resistance to scientific progress characterized their every deed and word” (p. 92).
Over the next 80 days, Garfield was kept in near isolation under the orders of Dr. Bliss. He continued to lose weight because of the vomiting and he contracted blood poisoning, abscesses and pneumonia. When he finally died on September 19, 1881, he was more than a hundred pounds thinner, he had tons of abscesses filled with pus all over his body and, after a hasty autopsy, it was discovered that the bullet wound was non-lethal. “Lamb performed the dissection, which revealed that the ball had entered Garfield’s body three and a half inches to the right of the spine, fractured the eleventh and twelfth ribs, passed through thoracic and lumbar vertebrae—without injuring the spinal cord—and lodged deep in the tissues of the president’s left back, apparently a nonlethal injury” (p. 128). Chester A Arthur was sworn in as the next President of the United States.
