James A.

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James A. Garfield.
I

INTRODUCTION

James A. Garfield (1831-1881), 20th president of the United States (1881). He held the office of president only four months before he was fatally shot by an assassin.
He had served in the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States for 17 years and had established a distinguished record there. He was only lightly
touched by the corruption in government that marked the period after the Civil War ended in 1865. Garfield's assassination by a disappointed office seeker gave new
impetus to demands for reform of the federal employment system, called the civil service.

II

EARLY LIFE

James Abram Garfield was born on November 19, 1831. He was the son of Abram Garfield and Eliza Ballou Garfield, New Englanders who had settled in the Western
Reserve region of northern Ohio. Abram Garfield, a farmer and canal construction worker, died when James was two years old, leaving his widow and four children to
face the rigors of frontier life. James's childhood was one of hardship and work. The last president to be born in a log cabin, Garfield had little leisure time in his youth.
He did farm work until he was 16 years old, then found employment on a canal boat.

III

EDUCATION

In 1849 Garfield's mother persuaded him to enter Geauga Academy in Chester, Ohio. "No greener boy ever started out to school," he recorded. Also about this time he
was baptized into the Disciples of Christ, the church of his parents. Garfield's early journals are filled with allusions to his religious faith.
In 1851 he entered Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College), a Disciples of Christ school at Hiram, Ohio. There he began teaching and lay preaching. He
was a persuasive speaker and debater but had no patience with politics. "I am exceedingly disgusted with the wire-pulling of politicians and the total disregard of truth
in all their operations," Garfield wrote.
By 1854, through the strictest economy, Garfield had saved enough money to enroll at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. After two years at Williams, he
graduated with honors and returned to teach ancient languages and literature at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. However, his religious beliefs had changed. In
September 1856 he wrote a friend, "My stay here will certainly be very short. ... Had I known all I know now I would not have come here at all." Nevertheless, Garfield
became the principal of the institute and continued to preach in the Disciples of Christ Church.

IV

MARRIAGE

On November 11, 1858, Garfield married Lucretia Rudolph, a childhood friend and fellow student at Geauga Academy. The couple had five sons and two daughters. One
of the sons, James Rudolph Garfield, later served as secretary of the interior under President Theodore Roosevelt. Another son, Harry Augustus Garfield, became
president of Williams College.

V

EARLY POLITICAL CAREER

Garfield slowly abandoned his disdain for politicians. In 1856 he got involved in politics on behalf of Senator John C. Frémont of California, the presidential candidate of
the Republican Party. In 1859 Garfield ran as a Republican for the Ohio state senate. His oratory, developed through lay preaching, and his skill as a debater aided him
in the campaign. He defeated his Democratic opponent by a substantial margin. While in the senate, he cultivated the friendship of prominent party leaders. In his
spare time he studied law in the Cleveland office of Albert G. Riddle. In 1861 Garfield was admitted to the practice of law in Ohio.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Garfield used his oratorical powers to raise troops for the Union Army. He helped assemble the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, and
he was appointed lieutenant colonel and later commanding colonel of this regiment. Garfield saw active service against forces of the Confederate States of America in
Kentucky and was promoted to the rank of brigadier general of volunteers. He participated in the second day's fighting at Shiloh and fought in the Battle of
Chickamauga under General William S. Rosecrans. In 1863 he was promoted to major general of volunteers.

VI

UNITED STATES CONGRESSMAN

Garfield's military service ended with his election to the House of Representatives. In December 1863 he started his first term as representative for his home district.
Garfield was reelected for eight successive terms to the same office.
Garfield was a loyal Republican. He favored a policy of "hard money," the principle that all paper money issued by the government should be secured by gold or silver.
He took no strong stand on the issue of whether tariffs (taxes on imports) should be set high to protect American industry from foreign competition. After the Civil War
he sided with the Radical Republican faction that opposed the moderate policy toward the defeated South advocated by President Andrew Johnson. Garfield supported
the Radicals' proposed punitive measures, including seizure of the property of those who had served the Confederacy. He joined in the Radical demand for voting rights
for blacks.
Serving on the influential Ways and Means Committee and Appropriations Committee in the House, Garfield soon became a power in his party. In 1876, when
Representative James G. Blaine of Maine resigned his seat to serve in the Senate, Garfield assumed Republican leadership in the House.
During his rise to political power, two incidents were made public that tarnished Garfield's record. He was named among the House members who were allegedly bribed
to delay a congressional investigation of the Crédit Mobilier company, which had made illegal profits from government contracts. Garfield denied the charges, but they
provided a political weapon for his foes. He was also accused of accepting fees from a company trying to obtain a paving contract from the city government of
Washington, D.C. Both scandals were known to Garfield's Ohio constituents in 1874, but he was elected for a seventh term.
Garfield supported Rutherford B. Hayes in the bitterly fought presidential campaign of 1876, which, because of disputed elections in several Southern states, resulted in
a deadlock. Garfield served on the electoral commission appointed to decide the election. Like the other members of the commission, he decided in favor of his party's
candidate.

VII

ELECTION OF 1880

In January 1880 the legislature of Ohio elected Garfield to the U.S. Senate for the following year. Before his term began, however, Garfield became involved in the
presidential campaign of 1880. Garfield apparently regarded himself as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination. However, he supported Secretary of the

Treasury John Sherman, another Ohioan. He went to the Republican national convention as head of his state's delegation and manager of the Sherman campaign.
The Republican Party at that time was split into two factions, the Stalwarts, led by Roscoe Conkling, senator from New York, and the Half-Breeds, led by Blaine. The two
groups had few political differences, but disagreed over the division of appointments to federal positions, known as patronage. The Stalwarts wanted control of all
federal appointments to offices in New York; the Half-Breeds wanted these decisions to be made in Washington. In 1880 Conkling's Stalwarts supported former
President Ulysses S. Grant to run for president again. The Half-Breeds supported Blaine. Sherman's candidacy found little national support at the convention, but it
helped block the nomination of either Grant or Blaine.
Garfield worked hard to win convention delegates for Sherman. As chairman of the convention's rules committee, he persuaded the convention to permit delegates to
vote individually rather than in state blocs. This system of voting freed more than 60 New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois delegates from party-dictated support of
Grant. Garfield also addressed the convention on behalf of Sherman, but he probably won more cheers for himself than for his candidate. He spoke for 15 minutes
before he mentioned Sherman's name, and many began to suspect that Garfield was adroitly placing himself in nomination. But there is no evidence to suggest that
Garfield was disloyal to Sherman.
On the first ballot, Sherman polled 93 votes to Grant's 304 and Blaine's 284. Ballot after ballot brought little change. No candidate was able to muster a majority.
Finally, the Blaine and Sherman followers combined to break the deadlock. Garfield was presented as a compromise candidate because he was Blaine's friend and
Sherman's manager. On the 36th ballot and on the convention's sixth day, Garfield was nominated for president. He polled 399 votes. One of Conkling's men, Chester
A. Arthur, the former customs collector of the port of New York, was nominated for vice president.
In the election, Blaine's and Sherman's followers worked for Garfield. The Grant-Conkling faction gave him reluctant support. There were few issues between Garfield
and his Democratic opponent, Major General Winfield S. Hancock of Pennsylvania. The major difference was that the Republicans favored a protective tariff, and the
Democrats did not. Garfield, who did not feel strongly about the tariff, went along with his party. In November, Garfield won the presidency. He received 214 electoral
votes to Hancock's 155. However, he did not have a majority of the popular vote. Discontented farmers and working people cast 308,578 votes for the GreenbackLabor Party candidate, General James B. Weaver of Iowa. Neal Dow of the Prohibition Party received 10,305 votes. Garfield had 4,454,416 votes to Hancock's
4,444,952. His electoral margin came mainly from Northern states.
Shortly after the election, Garfield resigned from the House and surrendered the Senate seat to which he had been elected earlier in the year. He was inaugurated as
president on March 4, 1881.

VIII

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Garfield's brief administration was marked by intraparty disputes over Cabinet appointments and the disposition of federal patronage. Garfield passed over the Stalwart
faction in filling important government posts. His appointment of Blaine, leader of the Half-Breeds, as secretary of state was especially offensive to Conkling and the
Stalwarts. Conkling countered by trying to block Garfield's appointments to the New York Custom House and resigning his Senate seat in protest. The protest was futile,
however, and Garfield's choices were approved by Congress.
In the spring of 1881, Garfield began the prosecution of the star route frauds, an attempt by post office employees, in collusion with private mail carriers, to defraud
the government. Before the case was brought to trial, however, Garfield's career came to an abrupt end.

IX

ASSASSINATION

On the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield was preparing for a trip to New England. While waiting for his train in Washington's Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station, the
president was felled and gravely wounded by the shots of an assassin. Garfield was carried to the presidential mansion, the White House. For weeks he was nursed
there. Later he was moved to Elberon, New Jersey, to be with his family. Garfield never left his sickbed, and on September 19, 11 weeks after the shooting, he died.
Garfield's assassin was Charles J. Guiteau, a religious fanatic and a Stalwart, who was apparently angered because he had been refused a government job. He stated
that he shot Garfield in order "to unite the Republican Party and save the Republic." Guiteau readily gave himself up after the shooting, certain that the people would
understand the high-mindedness of his purpose. He was found guilty of murder, however, and was executed in 1882.
Vice President Chester A. Arthur succeeded Garfield as president. A member of the Stalwart faction, he had sided with Conkling in the dispute over Garfield's
appointments. He gradually replaced all of Garfield's Cabinet with Stalwarts, but picked them for ability rather than loyalty to Conkling. The shocking nature of Garfield's
death fueled a movement in Congress for civil service reform, which had been started but stalled under the Hayes administration. As a result Congress passed the
Pendleton Act, which President Arthur signed into law in 1883. It established the Civil Service Commission to ensure that federal jobs would be awarded according to
qualifications rather than connections (see Personnel Management, Office of).

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