James A. Garfield

James A. Garfield (born November 19, 1831, near Orange [in Cuyahoga county], Ohio, U.S.—died September 19, 1881, Elberon [now in Long Branch], New Jersey) was the 20th president of the United States (March 4–September 19, 1881). He had the second shortest tenure in U.S. presidential history. When he was shot and incapacitated, serious constitutional questions arose concerning who should properly perform the functions of the presidency.

Early life and political career

The last president born in a log cabin, Garfield was the son of Abram Garfield and Eliza Ballou, who continued to run the family’s impoverished Ohio farm after her husband’s death in 1833. Garfield dreamed of foreign ports of call as a sailor but instead worked for about six weeks guiding mules that pulled boats on the Ohio and Erie Canal, which ran from Lake Erie to the Ohio River. By his own estimate, Garfield, who did not know how to swim, fell into the canal some 16 times and contracted malaria in the process. Always studious, he attended Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College) at Hiram, Ohio, and graduated (1856) from Williams College. He returned to the Eclectic Institute as a professor of ancient languages and in 1857, at age 25, became the school’s president. A year later he married Lucretia Rudolph (Lucretia Garfield) and began a family that included seven children (two died in infancy). Garfield also studied law and was ordained as a minister in the Disciples of Christ church, but he soon turned to politics.

An advocate of free-soil principles (opposing the extension of slavery), he became a supporter of the newly organized Republican Party and in 1859 was elected to the Ohio legislature. During the Civil War he helped recruit the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry and became its colonel. After commanding a brigade at the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862), he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and, while waiting for Congress to begin its session, he served as chief of staff in the Army of the Cumberland, winning promotion to major general after distinguishing himself at the Battle of Chickamauga (September 1863). It was about that time that Garfield had an extramarital affair with a Lucia Calhoun in New York City. He later admitted the indiscretion and was forgiven by his wife. Historians believe that the many letters he had written to Calhoun, which are referred to in his diary, were retrieved by Garfield and destroyed.

For nine terms, until 1880, Garfield represented Ohio’s 19th congressional district. As chairman of the House Committee on Appropriations, he became an expert on fiscal matters and advocated a high protective tariff, and, as a Radical Republican, he sought a firm policy of Reconstruction for the South. In 1880 the Ohio legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate.

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Road to the presidency

At the Republican presidential convention the same year in Chicago, the delegates were divided into three principal camps: the “Stalwarts” (conservatives led by powerful New York Sen. Roscoe Conkling), who backed former president Ulysses S. Grant; the “Half-Breed” (moderate) supporters of Maine Sen. James G. Blaine; and those committed to Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman. Tall, bearded, affable, and eloquent, Garfield steered fellow Ohioan Sherman’s campaign and impressed so many with his largely extemporaneous nominating speech that he, not the candidate, became the focus of attention. As the chairman of the Ohio delegation, Garfield also led a coalition of anti-Grant delegates who succeeded in rescinding the unit rule, by which a majority of delegates from a state could cast the state’s entire vote. This victory added to Garfield’s prominence and doomed Grant’s candidacy. Grant led all other candidates for 35 ballots but failed to command a majority. On the 36th ballot the nomination went to a dark horse, Garfield, who was still trying to remove his name from nomination as the bandwagon gathered speed.

His Democratic opponent in the November 1880 general election was Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, like Garfield a Civil War veteran, so both could wrap themselves in the symbolic “bloody shirt” of the Union. But Garfield also capitalized on his rags-to-riches background, and, along with a campaign biography literally written by Horatio Alger, he reached back to his humble beginnings as a “canal boy” for the slogan “From the tow path to the White House.” (“No man ever started so low that accomplished so much, in all our history,” said former president Rutherford B. Hayes of Garfield. He was “the ideal self-made man.”) In an era when it was still considered unseemly for a candidate to court voters actively, Garfield, aided by Lucretia (who remained an important adviser), conducted the first “front porch” campaign, from his home in Mentor, Ohio, where reporters and voters came to hear him speak. Notwithstanding allegations of involvement in the Crédit Mobilier scandal, in which Garfield had received $329 from stock in the notorious company (a remuneration which Democrats characterized as a bribe and played up as a campaign issue by plastering walls, sidewalks, and placards with “329”), and a forged letter that supposedly revealed Garfield’s advocacy of unrestricted Chinese immigration, he defeated Hancock (as well as the third-party Greenback candidate), though he won the popular election by fewer than 10,000 votes. The vote in the electoral college was less close: 214 votes for Garfield, 155 for Hancock.