Garfield even defended enemies of the Union. In his only case as a lawyer, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1866, just a year after the Civil War had ended, he represented five Indiana men who had been sentenced to death for stealing weapons and freeing rebel prisoners. The men, who were fiercely hated throughout the North, claimed not that they were innocent but that, as civilians, their court-martial had been unconstitutional. To the horror and outrage of his Republican friends and colleagues, Garfield agreed, accepted their case, and won.
Inexplicably, it seemed that the only cause for which Garfield would not fight was his own political future. In an early-adopted eccentricity that would become for him a central “law of life,” he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. “I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements,” he admitted. “I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.” From his first political campaign, he had sternly instructed his backers that “first, I should make no pledge to any man or any measures; second, I should not work for my own nomination.” The closest he had come to even admitting that he was interested in a political office was to tell his friends, when a seat in the U.S. Senate became available in 1879, that “if the Senatorship is thus to be thrown open for honorable competition, I should be sorry to be wholly omitted from consideration in that direction.” After a landslide victory, his campaign’s expenses amounted to less than $150.
When it came to the presidency, Garfield simply looked the other way. He spent seventeen years in Congress, and every day he saw men whose desperate desire for the White House ruined their careers, their character, and their lives. “I have so long and so often seen the evil effects of the presidential fever upon my associates and friends that I am determined it shall not seize me,” he wrote in his journal in February 1879. “In almost ever[y] case it impairs if it does not destroy the usefulness of its victim.” Aware that there was talk of making him a candidate in the presidential election of 1880, Garfield hoped to avoid the grasp of other men’s ambitions, and to be given a chance to “wait for the future.” However, he had already lived a long life for a young man, and he knew that change came without invitation, too often bringing loss and sorrow in its wake. “This world,” he had learned long before, “does not seem to be the place to carry out one’s wishes.”
• CHAPTER 3 •
“A BEAM IN DARKNESS”
Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
When Garfield made his way through the crowded streets of Chicago to the Republican National Convention on the evening of June 6, 1880, he felt not excitement, but a heavy sense of dread. The convention was about to begin the second session of its fourth day, and he had no illusions about what it would hold. Each day had been more bruising than the last, as the crowd had grown louder, the tensions higher, and the delegates angrier. The viciousness of the convention dismayed Garfield, but it did not surprise him. His first night in Chicago, he had written home asking for help in the days ahead. “Don’t fail to write me every day,” he wrote to his wife. “Each word from you will be a light in this wilderness.”
In 1880, the Republican Party was sharply divided into two warring factions. At the convention, delegates had little choice but to choose a side—either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation with the South; or the men whose values Garfield shared, a determined group of reformers who would become known as the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts had nothing but contempt for their rivals within the party, particularly Rutherford B. Hayes, who was about to complete his first term in the White House. President Hayes’s attempts to replace government patronage with a merit system had been met with such fury from the Stalwarts, and had led to such bitter contention and open rebellion, that he had made it clear to anyone who would listen that he did not want to be nominated for a second term. “The first half of my term was so full of trouble and embarrassments as to be a continual struggle,” Hayes wrote, “and I do not propose to invite a new season of embarrassment.”
Hayes’s abdication and the escalating battle for control of the party had aroused such intense interest in the nomination that, for the first time in Republican history, every state had sent a representative to the convention. The Half-Breeds had two top candidates: John Sherman, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s younger brother and secretary of the treasury under Hayes, and James G. Blaine, who had been speaker of the house and was now a senator of such charm and influence that he was known as the Magnetic Man from Maine. The Stalwarts, on the other hand, had only one serious candidate—Ulysses S. Grant.
If anyone was considered a safe bet in this turbulent convention, it was Grant. The idea of a third term, for anyone, was controversial, and the two terms Grant had already served as president had been notoriously rife with corruption. He was, however, still a national hero. Not only had he commanded the Union Army in the Civil War, but he had personally accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In 1868, and again in 1872, he had been given the Republican nomination for president on the first ballot. No one believed he would win the nomination as easily this time, but few believed he would lose.
Although the Republican Party had controlled the White House for more than ten years, and their leading candidates in 1880 were all widely known and well worn, they had wisely chosen as the setting of their convention a city that, more than any other city in the nation, then symbolized rebirth and renewal. Less than ten years earlier, Chicago had been devastated by the worst natural disaster in the country’s 104-year history—the Great Chicago Fire. Since then, the city had not only recovered, but had literally risen from the ashes to become one of America’s most modern metropolises.
As Garfield made his way toward the convention hall, he saw all around him evidence of the path the fire had taken. The street he was walking on, Michigan Avenue, had been leveled for ten blocks, from Congress Avenue north to the Chicago River. Every building, every lamppost, even the sidewalks themselves had been destroyed.
At the time of the fire, in the fall of 1871, Chicago had been a tinderbox. A hundred days had passed with little more than an inch of rain. The buildings were made of wood, wooden planks covered the streets and sidewalks, and, in anticipation of the coming winter, cords of wood, gallons of kerosene, and mounds of hay had been stockpiled throughout the city. The fire, which had started in a cow barn on the city’s west side, raged for almost two days, destroying thousands of buildings and more than seventy miles of street, killing at least three hundred people, and leaving a hundred thousand homeless.
As wide-ranging and devastating as the damage had been, Chicago had sprung back to life with astonishing speed. Rebuilding efforts started so quickly that the ground was still warm when the first construction began. Within a year of the fire, nearly $50 million worth of buildings had been erected, and by 1879 the city had issued some ten thousand construction permits. By the time Garfield saw Chicago, its skyline was dotted with beautiful modern buildings, and it was just five years away from being home to the world’s first skyscraper.
While Chicago brought a sense of progress and innovation to the Republican convention, the convention in turn brought money, excitement, and worldwide attention to the city. Delegates, reporters, and curious citizens streamed in by the thousands. There were no vacant rooms at the hotels, no free tables in the restaurants. The streets were clogged with people, horses, and carriages. “Fresh crowds arriving by every train,” Garfield marveled, “and the interest increasing every hour.”
When Garfield finally reached the convention hall, he stood before one of Chicago’s most extravagant buildings. The Interst
ate Industrial Exposition Building, the city’s first convention center, had been built in 1872, on the heels of the great fire. Instead of wood, it was made of gleaming, fire-resistant glass and metal. It was a thousand feet long and seventy-five feet high, with elaborate ornamental domes inspired by the grand exposition halls of London and New York.
Leaving the warmth of a mild summer evening, Garfield stepped into the hall’s vast, richly decorated interior. Hundreds of red-white-and-blue flags papered the walls and swung from the arched, raftered ceiling. From huge, open windows, “the cool air of the lake poured in,” one reporter wrote. It “shook the banners, bathed the heated galleries, and then fought for mastery with the sewer-gas, which, in some mysterious way, seemed ‘entitled to the floor.’ ” In the center of the hall was a long, narrow stage bordered on one side by rectangular tables covered in heavy white cloths. On the other side of the tables, facing the stage, were tight rows of chairs arranged in alphabetical order for the more than 750 delegates. Above the delegates’ heads swayed enormous portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and along the hall’s curved back wall stretched a wide banner bearing the final words from the Gettysburg Address: “And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Although the hall could accommodate thousands of people, it was full to overflowing. Every seat was taken—both on the floor and in the balcony, which rose to the ceiling in steep, vertiginous layers—and every inch of standing room had been claimed. Mortal enemies sat shoulder to shoulder. Reporters hunched over six long tables, elbowing for room. Men even sat on the edge of the stage, their black, highly polished shoes dangling over the side, threatening to tear the bunting with every swing.
As crowded as the hall was, it sounded as if it held twice as many people as it actually did. Beyond the typical raucous, partisan singing and chanting that took place at every convention, a deafening vitriolic battle was being waged between the party’s opposing factions. The day before, a woman from Brooklyn, who, despite her great girth, had somehow managed to hoist herself onto the stage, had to be forcibly removed from the hall as she shrieked, over and over again, “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!” Whenever a Stalwart spoke, whether to argue a position or simply to note a minor point of order, he was met by angry hisses from the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts, in turn, greeted declarations from Half-Breeds with a chorus of boos so loud they drowned out every other sound in the hall, from the thunderous scuffing of wooden chairs on the wooden floor to the jarring screeches of trains along a track just a few blocks away.
As Garfield quietly found his seat on the convention floor, he took in the spectacle around him with weary eyes. Not only had he already spent four days in the crowded, roaring hall, but his hotel room offered no refuge at night. So crowded was the city that many people who wanted to attend the convention, and even some who were obliged to attend, found themselves with no place to sleep. At one in the morning following the convention’s opening day, just as he was finally about to collapse into bed, Garfield had heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find a friend with a favor to ask. He “asked me to allow his brother (a stranger) [to] sleep with me,” Garfield sighed in a letter home the following day. He could not bring himself to say no, but he wished he had. “My bed is only three quarter size and with a stranger stretched along the wall,” he wrote. “I could not [get]… a minute of rest or sleep.”
Perhaps even more to blame for keeping Garfield up at night was the nominating speech he knew he had to give for John Sherman. Before becoming secretary of the treasury, Sherman had been a powerful senator from Ohio, and he was keenly aware that there was more enthusiasm within his state for Garfield’s nomination than his own. Nicknamed the “Ohio Icicle,” Sherman had been determinedly working behind the scenes for years, waiting for an opportunity to win the White House. He was confident that, this time, it was his turn. “It is evident,” said William Henry Smith, a former Ohio state secretary, that Sherman “thinks Heaven is smiling upon him.” First, however, Sherman had to dampen interest in Garfield, and the best way to do that, he reasoned, was to have Garfield nominate him at the convention.
Nor, certainly, had it escaped Sherman’s notice that Garfield was one of the best speakers in the Republican Party. From a very young age, Garfield had realized that he had one skill above all others—the ability to capture a crowd. When he was just twenty-one, he had humiliated a well-known traveling philosopher named Treat who made his living by going from town to town attacking Christianity and those who would defend it. After Treat had addressed one of the professors at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, with taunting disrespect, Garfield had stood up and, to the surprise of no one but Treat, quietly and calmly eviscerated him. “It is impossible,” a man who attended the debate would later recall, “for me to give any idea of his speech or of its effect upon his audience.… The applause was constant and deafening. He spoke with readiness and power and eloquence which were perfectly overwhelming. I do not think that Mr. Treat ever attempted another speech at Hiram.”
By the time Garfield entered Congress, he was a highly skilled rhetorician. The only problem was that, as good as he was at speaking, he enjoyed it even more, perhaps too much. It was not unheard of for him to speak on the floor of Congress more than forty times in a single day, and when he gave a speech, it was rarely a short one. Over the years, he had tested his colleagues’ patience on more than one occasion, prompting some of them to complain that he was “too fond of talking.” Even Garfield himself admitted that, when it came to words, he had a “fatal facility.”
However, when the fate of a bill lay in the balance or there was a moment of grave national importance, Garfield’s colleagues often turned to him to speak for the Party. On the first anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, he had been asked to give an impromptu eulogy, even though he was then one of the most junior members of Congress. Garfield had resisted, arguing that someone with substantially more seniority should give the address, but his colleagues would not relent. With only a few minutes to prepare, he delivered a speech that would be remembered not only for its eloquence but also for the powerful emotion it conveyed. At one point, he recited from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which he had not read in many years. “We have but faith: we cannot know; / For knowledge is of things we see / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.”
Yet despite his ability, Garfield dreaded the speech he was about to give. He was obliged to support Sherman, a fellow Ohioan, but he did not believe Sherman was the best candidate for the nomination. So reluctant was Garfield to deliver the speech that he had hardly given any thought to what he would say. “I have arisen at 7 this morning to tell you the peril I am in,” he had written home in desperation just a few days earlier. “I have not made the first step in preparation for my speech nominating Sherman and I see no chance to get to prepare. It was a frightful mistake that I did not write [it] before I came. It now seems inevitable that I shall fall far below what I ought to do.”
Garfield’s agonizing situation was made far worse by the fact that he would be competing for the attention and sympathies of the rabidly partisan crowd with Roscoe Conkling, a senior senator from New York and the undisputed leader of the Stalwarts. Conkling was not only a famously charismatic speaker, but arguably the most powerful person in the country. Ten years earlier, then President Grant had given Conkling, his most fiercely loyal supporter, control of the New York Customs House, which was the largest federal office in the United States and collected 70 percent of the country’s customs revenue. Since then, Conkling had personally made each appointment to the customs house. Any man fortunate enough to receive one of the high-paying jobs had been expected to make generous contributions to the Republican Party of New York, and to show unwavering loyalty to Conkling. So powerful had Conkling become that he had cavalierly turned down Grant’s offer to nominate him to the
U.S. Supreme Court six years earlier.
Like Garfield, Conkling had been an outspoken abolitionist and was a powerful defender of rights for freed slaves. He had helped to draft the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans citizenship and equal rights under the Constitution, and he argued vehemently for taking a hard line toward the defeated South. To no cause, however, had Conkling committed himself more passionately than the spoils system, the source of his personal power. When Rutherford B. Hayes, as part of his sweeping efforts at reform, had removed Conkling’s man, Chester Arthur, from his position as the collector of the New York Customs House, Conkling had attacked Hayes with a vengeance, ensuring that he was thwarted at every turn for the rest of his presidency. Finally, defeated and exhausted, Hayes had bitterly complained that Conkling was a “thoroughly rotten man.”
Hayes was not alone in his assessment of Conkling’s character. As is true of most men who wield their power like a weapon, Conkling was widely feared, slavishly obeyed, and secretly despised. He offended fellow senators with impunity, ignoring their red-faced splutters even when they threatened to challenge him to a duel.
Conkling was also exceedingly vain. He had broad shoulders and a waspishly thin waist, a physique that he kept in trim by pummeling a punching bag hanging from the ceiling of his office. He wore canary-yellow waistcoats, twisted his thick, wavy blond hair into a spit curl in the center of his high forehead, used lavender ink, and recoiled at the slightest touch. When he had worked as a litigator, he had often worried that he would lose a case after flying into a rage when “some ill-bred neighbor” put a foot on his chair.
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