Although Garfield understood clearly, and at times painfully, that he was poor, he had inherited from his mother an innate dignity that never failed to inspire respect. His mother was fiercely proud that she and her children had “received no aid, worked and won their living and could look any man in the face.” Even as a child, Garfield walked with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back. “If I ever get through a course of study I don’t expect any one will ask me what kind of a coat I wore when studying,” he wrote to his mother while attending a nearby school, “and if they do I shall not be ashamed to tell them it was a ragged one.”
Eliza Garfield’s greatest ambition for her second son was a good education. She came from a long line of New England intellectuals, including a president of Tufts College and the founder and editor of a Boston newspaper. She donated some of her land for a small schoolhouse so that her children, as well as her neighbors’ children, could have a place to learn. Even when James turned eleven years old, the age at which his brother had begun helping the family by working on neighboring farms, she insisted that he stay home and concentrate on his education—and Thomas wholeheartedly agreed. “Whatever else happens,” they said, “James must go to school.”
James, unfortunately, had different dreams. Although he could not swim, and admitted that he “knew almost nothing about the water except what I had read,” he longed for a life at sea. As he was hundreds of miles from any ocean, the best he could do was the Erie and Ohio Canal, the canal his father had helped to build. At sixteen years of age, he left home to become a canal man, breaking his mother’s heart and, she feared, putting an end to her hopes for him.
Garfield’s first job on the canal was as a driver, the lowliest position among a group of rough, and occasionally violent, men. As the months passed, he became increasingly comfortable with the life he had fashioned for himself. He knew that the work he was doing, and the men he met along the way, likely made him “ripe for ruin,” but he was willing to take that chance.
Before he could “drink in every species of vice,” however, the course of his young life took a sudden turn. As he stood alone at the bow one night, struggling with a coiled rope, he lost his balance and, before he could right himself, fell into the canal. He had fallen in before, more than a dozen times, but each time it had been daylight, and there had been men on the deck to pull him out.
Now it was midnight, and Garfield was certain that he would drown. He cried out for help although he knew it was useless. Everyone on the boat was fast asleep. As he searched frantically and blindly for something to save his life, his hands suddenly struck the rope that had been the cause of his fall. Gripping it tightly, he found that, with a “great struggle,” he could use it to slowly pull himself up until, finally, he fell heavily onto the boat.
As he sat, dripping and scared, on the deck of the canal boat, Garfield wondered why he was still alive. The rope was not secured to anything on the boat. When he had pulled on it, it should have fallen off the deck, slipping to the bottom of the canal and leaving him to drown. “Carefully examining it, I found that just where it came over the edge of the boat it had been drawn into a crack and there knotted itself,” he would later write. “I sat down in the cold of the night and in my wet clothes and contemplated the matter.… I did not believe that God had paid any attention to me on my own account but I thought He had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canaling.”
Although his life would change dramatically in the years to come, Garfield would never be able to tell the story of that night without wonder. Looking back on it, moreover, he would have a much clearer and broader understanding of its importance than he could have hoped to have at sixteen. “Providence only could have saved my life,” he wrote years later, struggling to understand all that had happened to him in the intervening years. “Providence, therefore, thinks it worth saving.”
Garfield returned home soon after his near drowning a changed man, but also a very sick one. He had contracted malaria on the canal, and by the time he reached his family’s log cabin, he could barely walk. “As I approached the door at about nine o’clock in the evening,” he later recalled, “I heard my mother engaged in prayer. During the prayer she referred to me, her son away, God only knew where, and asked that he might be preserved in health to return to her.” When Eliza ended her prayer, her son quietly stepped into the cabin.
James had returned, but so ill was he that his family now feared they would lose him for good. Although his fever broke after ten days, three weeks later it was back, stronger than before. For two months, no one knew if he would survive. When he finally began to recover, his mother dared to hope that his canal days were behind him. After asking him to consider returning to his studies rather than to the canal, she told him that she had more than advice to offer. Since he had been gone, she and Thomas had managed to save seventeen dollars, and they hoped that he would use it to go back to school. “I took the money,” Garfield wrote, “as well as the advice.”
By the fall of 1851, Garfield had transformed from a rough canal man into a passionate and determined student. After studying at local schools, he was accepted to a small preparatory school in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. The school’s entire campus consisted of a wide cornfield and, on the crest of a hill, a modest three-story redbrick building with a white bell tower. “It was without a dollar of endowment, without a powerful friend anywhere,” Garfield would later write, but to him, it was a chance to become an educated man.
Unable to afford tuition, he convinced the school to allow him to work as a janitor in exchange for his education. He swept floors, hauled wood, and made fires, and he never tried to hide his poverty from his fellow students. As he walked to the tower every morning, having left the first lecture of the day early so he could ring the school’s enormous bell, his “tread was firm and free,” a friend would recall years later. “The same unconscious dignity followed him then that attended him when he ascended the eastern portico of the Capitol to deliver his Inaugural address.”
Garfield quickly realized that he was an extraordinarily talented student, and the more he learned, the more ambitious he became. “The ice is broken,” he wrote as he began his academic life. “I am resolved to make a mark in the world.… There is some of the slumbering thunder in my soul and it shall come out.” His day began at 5:00 a.m., as he immersed himself in Virgil before breakfast, and it continued, unabated, with studying, classes, work, and more studying until just before midnight. No one worked harder, and if they came close, Garfield took it as a personal challenge. “If at any time I began to flag in my effort to master a subject,” he wrote, “I was stimulated to further effort by the thought, ‘Some other fellow in the class will probably master it.’ ” As determined as Garfield was to outpace his fellow students, his fiercest competition was with himself. “He had a great desire and settled purpose to conquer,” a classmate and student of his wrote. “To master all lessons, to prove superior to every difficulty, to excel all competitors, to conquer and surpass himself.”
So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more—one on penmanship and the other on Virgil.
In 1854, Garfield was accepted to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the competition was greater than he had ever experienced, stirring in him an even fiercer ambition. “There is a high standard of scholarship here and very many excellent scholars, those that have had far better advantages and more thorough training than I have,” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving in Williamstown. “I have been endeavoring to calculate their dimensions and power and, between you and me, I have determined th
at out of the forty-two members of my class thirty-seven shall stand behind me within two months.”
After graduating with honors from Williams two years later, Garfield returned to the Eclectic Institute to teach. By the time he was twenty-six, he was the school’s president.
Two things ended Garfield’s academic career: politics and war. When an Ohio state senator died unexpectedly in the summer of 1859, Garfield was asked to take his place in an upcoming election. He accepted the nomination, but not without concern. “I am aware that I launch out upon a fickle current and am about a work as precarious as men follow,” he wrote in his diary the night of the nomination. Two months later he won the election by a wide margin, quietly beginning a career that, in the end, would lead him to the White House.
Little more than a year after Garfield entered politics, the country was plunged into civil war. Garfield, anxious to leave the legislature for the battlefield, wrote to a friend that he had “no heart to think of anything but the country.” Four months after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, he was made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. Soon after, at thirty years of age, he was promoted to colonel and enthusiastically began recruiting men from Ohio to join the ranks of his regiment—the 42nd.
As he looked into the eager faces of his recruits, many of them students of the Eclectic Institute, Garfield shared their excitement, too young himself to understand that, before the war had ended, he would be filled with “pride and grief commingled.” The 42nd’s first commission was to fight back the growing rebel incursion into Kentucky. Every soldier, Union or Confederate, understood the critical role Kentucky would play in the outcome of the Civil War. As a border state, and Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, it was the constant target of military and ideological attacks from the North and the South. “I hope to have God on my side,” Lincoln reportedly said, “but I must have Kentucky.”
Garfield’s regiment did not have a hope of succeeding. The Confederate force it faced was two thousand men strong, fortified with a battery of four cannons and several wagonloads of ammunition, and led by Humphrey Marshall, a well-known, well-seasoned brigadier general who had graduated from West Point the year after Garfield was born. In sharp contrast, the 42nd had five hundred fewer soldiers and no artillery. Worse, its commander was a young academic who had spent the past decade thinking about Latin and higher math and had absolutely no military experience, in war or peace.
Although he was hopelessly inexperienced, outmanned, and outgunned, Garfield accepted the assignment. After he received his orders, he worked through the night, hunched over a map of eastern Kentucky. By the light of a lantern, he traced the ragged mountains and deep valleys that marked the six thousand square miles of territory he and his men had been asked to defend. By morning, he was ready to set out.
In the end, the struggle for Kentucky’s allegiance came down to a single, seminal battle—the Battle of Middle Creek—and a military strategy that some would call brilliant, others audacious. In January of 1862, after weeks of marching through fog and mud, shivering under thin blankets in snow and sleet, and surviving largely on whatever could be found in the countryside, the 42nd finally reached Marshall’s men. Despite the Confederate force’s size and artillery, Garfield refused to wait for additional troops. Instead, he divided his already small regiment into three even smaller groups. The plan was to attack the rebels from three different sides, thus giving the impression, Garfield hoped, of a regiment that was much larger and better equipped than his.
Incredibly, Marshall believed everything Garfield wanted him to, and more. When Garfield’s first detachment attacked, the Confederates, as expected, confidently rushed to meet them. Then a second force fell upon the rebels from a different direction, throwing them into disarray and confusion. Just as they were beginning to figure out how to fight on two fronts, Garfield attacked on a third. “The [Confederate] regiment and battery were hurried frantically from one road to another,” recalled a young private, “as the point of attack seemed to be changed.” Finally, convinced that a “mighty army”—a force of four thousand men with “five full regiments of infantry, 200 cavalry, and two batteries of artillery”—had surrounded him, Marshall ordered his men to retreat, leaving Kentucky solidly in Union hands.
Although the Battle of Middle Creek made Garfield famous, and resulted in his swift promotion to brigadier general, he would always remember the battle less for its triumph than for its tremendous loss. When the fighting had ended, when his gamble had paid off and the 42nd stood victorious, Garfield learned the truth about war. Stepping into a clearing, he saw what at first he took to be soldiers sleeping, “resting there after the fatigue of a long day’s march.” He would never forget how they looked, scattered over the “dewy meadow in different shapes of sleep.” However, just as quickly as the impression of peace and tranquillity had formed in his mind, it was replaced by the sickening realization that the young men before him were not resting but dead. His own clever plan, moreover, was responsible for this carnage. It was in that moment, Garfield would later tell a friend, that “something went out of him … that never came back; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”
As painful as it was for Garfield to witness the death of his young soldiers, he remained firmly committed to the war, determined that it would end in Confederate defeat. “By thundering volley, must this rebellion be met,” he wrote, “and by such means alone.” For Garfield, however, the Civil War was about more than putting down a rebellion or even preventing the country from being torn in two. It was about emancipation.
Throughout his life, Garfield had been an ardent abolitionist. As a young man, he had written feverishly in his diary that he felt “like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant evil.” In an attempt to help a runaway slave, he had given him what little money he could spare and urged him to “trust to God and his muscle.” In the darkest days of the Civil War, he had wondered if the war itself was God’s punishment for the horrors of slavery. “For what else are we so fearfully scourged and defeated?” he had asked.
Although Garfield had chosen a life of calm, rational thought, when it came to abolition he freely admitted that he had “never been anything else than radical.” He found it difficult to condemn even the most violent abolitionists, men like John Brown whose hatred of slavery allowed for any means of destroying it. In 1856, Brown had planned and participated in the brutal slaying of five proslavery activists near the Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. Three years later, he raided the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in a desperate attempt to form an “army of emancipation.”
Garfield had felt a profound sense of loss when, in 1859, he learned that Brown was to be hanged. “A dark day for our country,” he wrote in his diary. “John Brown is to be hung at Charleston, Va.… I do not justify his acts. By no means. But I do accord to him, and I think every man must, honesty of purpose and sincerity of heart.” On the day of the execution, Garfield wrote in his pocket diary, “Servitium esto damnatum.” Slavery be damned.
Despite the fact that, since winning his state senate seat two years earlier, Garfield had spent far more time on the battlefield or in a military encampment than in his office, his political career continued to take on a life of its own. In the fall of 1862, just ten months after the Battle of Middle Creek, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, receiving nearly twice as many votes as his opponent, although he had done nothing to promote his candidacy. Before the results were even announced, he had set out for Washington—not to prepare himself for Congress, but to seek his next military appointment.
Garfield would not take his congressional seat until more than a year later, when Abraham Lincoln asked him to. “I have resigned my place in the army and have taken my seat in Congress,” Garfield wrote home, clearly conscious of his unique role. “I did this with regret, for I had hoped not to leave the field till every insurgent state had returned to its allegiance. Bu
t the President told me he dared not risk a single vote in the House and he needed men in Congress who were practically acquainted with the wants of the army. I did not feel it right to consult my own preference in such a case.”
Although he worried that it would seem as if he were abandoning the war, and his men, Garfield soon learned that he could fight more effectively, and win more often, on the floor of Congress. He introduced a resolution that would allow blacks to walk freely through the streets of Washington, D.C., without carrying a pass. Appealing to reason and the most basic sense of fairness, he asked, “What legislation is necessary to secure equal justice to all loyal persons, without regard to color, at the national capitol?” After the war ended, he gave a passionate speech in support of black suffrage. By denying freedmen the right to vote, he argued, the United States was allowing southerners extraordinary and unconscionable power over the lives of their former slaves. They were placing every black man at the mercy of the same people “who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat.”
Having known intimately the cruelties and injustices of poverty, Garfield found ways to help not just the despairing, but even the despised. As head of the Appropriations Committee, he directed funds toward exploration and westward expansion, the only hope for thousands of men much like his father. It was to Garfield that the geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell turned when he needed support for a surveying expedition. Powell, who navigated rapids and climbed cliffs with one arm, having lost the other to a lead bullet in the Civil War, published a full report of his historic exploration of the Colorado River, and the first non-native passage through the Grand Canyon, only after Garfield insisted that he do so.
Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President Page 3