James A. Garfield

• 1. Introduction

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  James A. Garfield arrived at the presidency having never once sought the job. At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, delegates spent 35 ballots locked in a stalemate between Ulysses S. Grant and James G. Blaine. On the 36th ballot, they broke the deadlock by turning to the man who had come to nominate someone else. Garfield protested to the Ohio delegation that he had not sought the nomination and would not betray his candidate, John Sherman. They overruled him. He won the presidency by fewer than 2,000 popular votes out of more than 9.2 million cast. Then, on the 2nd of July 1881, a disappointed office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau fired two shots at him in a Washington train station. Garfield lingered for months and died on the 19th of September, having served less than a year. That brief presidency conceals a life of remarkable range: a log-cabin childhood, a battlefield command, nine terms in Congress, a published proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and a record of civil rights advocacy that outpaced the politics of his era. The question is not simply what ended Garfield's presidency. It is what, exactly, the country lost when it ended.

• 2. From the Canal to Williams

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  On the 19th of November 1831, Garfield was born the youngest of five children in a log cabin in Orange Township, Ohio. His father Abraham died in 1833, leaving the family in poverty under the care of Garfield's mother Eliza, who became the dominant influence on his life. Poor and fatherless, Garfield was mocked by his peers and found escape in books. At age 16 in 1847 he left home, walked to Cleveland, and was turned away from the only ship in port. He found work instead on a canal boat, managing the mules that pulled it. Illness cut that career short after six weeks, and during his recovery his mother and a local school official extracted a promise from him to spend a year in school instead. He enrolled at Geauga Seminary in Chester Township in 1848, where he excelled at languages and elocution, and where he first encountered Lucretia Rudolph, the woman he would marry. He was baptized by immersion in the icy Chagrin River on the 4th of March 1850, marking a religious awakening that would last the rest of his life. From 1851 to 1854 he attended the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, where he secured a position as janitor on entry and rose to teaching Greek while still a student. Garfield enrolled at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, as a third-year student, earning credit for two years of prior study after a cursory examination. The college president, Mark Hopkins, made a deep impression. Garfield later said, "The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student on the other." He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and as salutatorian in August 1856. His biographer Ira Rutkow noted that Williams gave Garfield his first sustained exposure to people outside the Western Reserve of Ohio, and that socially conscious New Englanders liked and respected the unsophisticated Westerner from the start.

• 3. Soldier and Commander

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  When Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter in April 1861, Garfield had no military training but regarded the coming war as a holy crusade against the Slave Power. In August 1861, he received a commission as a colonel in the 42nd Ohio Infantry, a regiment that existed only on paper. He recruited quickly, filling the ranks with neighbors and former students and marching them to Camp Chase outside Columbus for training. His first independent campaign sent him into eastern Kentucky with the 18th Brigade to drive Confederate forces from the region. Garfield positioned his troops to deceive Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall into believing the rebels were outnumbered, forcing Marshall to withdraw. On the 9th of January 1862, Garfield's men attacked at the Battle of Middle Creek, and when the fighting ended the Confederates withdrew from the field. The victory earned him promotion to brigadier general. He followed that campaign with service at Shiloh, joining the second day of what was then the bloodiest battle of the war, and later served as chief of staff to Major General William S. Rosecrans. That role proved to be his most consequential military position. Rosecrans had a voracious appetite for late-night conversation, and in Garfield he found, in the source's words, "the first well read person in the Army"; they became close despite a twelve-year age difference. At the Battle of Chickamauga on the 19th and the 20th of September 1863, confusion among wing commanders created a gap in the Union lines and the right flank collapsed. Rosecrans concluded the battle was lost, but Garfield thought part of the army had held. With Rosecrans's approval, he rode across Missionary Ridge to survey the scene, and his hunch proved correct. He then sent a telegram to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton alerting Washington to the need for reinforcements. Lincoln and Halleck responded by sending 20,000 troops by rail within nine days. Garfield returned to Washington and was promoted to major general.

• 4. Congress and Controversy

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  Garfield took his seat in the House in December 1863 after President Lincoln personally advised him that the country needed congressmen with military knowledge more than it needed additional generals. He proved a skilled legislator and a compelling orator, but his eighteen years in Congress were never free of controversy. The Crédit Mobilier scandal broke publicly in July 1872 and named Garfield among the congressmen who had been offered stock in the corrupt company at favorable prices. Testimony was contradictory: Oakes Ames said Garfield had agreed to take ten shares on credit and that dividends had paid for them; Garfield said the $300 in question was a loan he had repaid. His biographers have declined to fully exonerate him. Allan Peskin wrote that Garfield neither lied exactly nor told the truth completely, and that his enemies never claimed his involvement actually changed his behavior in Congress. The so-called Salary Grab of 1873, which raised congressional pay by 50% retroactive to 1871, created a separate problem. As chairman of the Appropriations Committee, Garfield had shepherded the underlying bill; he personally refused to accept the increase, but the public blamed him anyway. In a bad year for Republicans, he won reelection with only 57% of the vote, his closest congressional race. His financial views were unambiguous throughout: he was a firm defender of the gold standard and gave a two-hour speech on currency in 1868 that was widely praised. He also made his mark in the courts, successfully arguing the landmark case Ex parte Milligan before the Supreme Court, establishing that civilians could not be tried in military tribunals while civil courts remained open. He had been given the case one week before arguments, and though his clients refused to pay him, the case established him as a preeminent attorney.

• 5. The Pythagorean Congressman

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  Garfield's aptitude for mathematics surfaced in an unexpected place. In 1876, he developed a trapezoid proof of the Pythagorean theorem. It was published in the New England Journal of Education, and according to the Journal itself, Garfield arrived at the proof during "mathematical amusements and discussions with other members of congress." Mathematics historian William Dunham later described it as "really a very clever proof." Garfield's intellectual range extended into policy as well. He believed statistics could and should drive government decisions, and as early as February 1866 he co-drafted a bill with Ohio School Commissioner Emerson Edward White to create a National Department of Education, arguing that statistical evidence would compel Congress to establish a federal school reform agency. His advocacy for civil rights was grounded in the same empirical thinking. He warned that without federal support for education, African Americans risked becoming America's permanent "peasantry" and proposed a universal education system funded by the federal government. He also had a gift for oratory that his classmates at Geauga noticed early; he wrote at the time that the speaker's platform "creates some excitement. I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error." That phrase captures something essential about Garfield: a man who found genuine pleasure in the rigor of argument, whether the subject was monetary policy, constitutional law, or the geometry of a trapezoid.

• 6. A Presidency Cut Short

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  Garfield took office on the 4th of March 1881, and almost immediately confronted the machinery of political patronage. His most consequential move was nominating William H. Robertson, an enemy of the powerful Senator Roscoe Conkling, to the lucrative post of Collector of the Port of New York. Conkling invoked senatorial courtesy and demanded the nomination be withdrawn. Garfield refused, saying the fight would settle the question of "whether the president is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States." Conkling and his New York colleague Thomas C. Platt resigned their Senate seats to seek vindication, but the New York legislature elected other men in their places. Robertson was confirmed. On the fiscal side, Garfield ordered Treasury Secretary William Windom to refinance the national debt by calling in outstanding bonds paying 6% interest; holders could accept cash or new bonds at 3%, and the move saved taxpayers an estimated $10 million. He worked to root out corruption in the Post Office, directing that the star-route profiteering ring be pursued "to the bone" regardless of where it led, even when his own campaign manager Stephen W. Dorsey was implicated. In foreign policy, he authorized Secretary of State Blaine to call a Pan-American conference for 1882 and pursued commercial treaties with Korea and Madagascar. Nine countries had accepted conference invitations before Garfield was shot. Charles Guiteau had determined that Garfield's death would restore peace between the Republican factions, believing Arthur's succession would benefit fellow Stalwarts. On the 2nd of July 1881, knowing Garfield planned to leave Washington for a cooler climate that day, Guiteau shot him at a Washington train station. Garfield survived the shooting but died on the 19th of September from infections related to the wounds. Chester A. Arthur, the Stalwart vice president, became the 21st president. The civil service reforms Garfield had championed passed Congress in 1883 as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act and were signed into law by Arthur.

• 7. Legacy and Civil Rights

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  Garfield appointed Frederick Douglass as recorder of deeds in Washington, Robert Elliot as special agent to the Treasury, John M. Langston as Haitian minister, and Blanche K. Bruce as register to the Treasury. These appointments reflected a civil rights commitment that dated to the 1860s. After the 13th Amendment was ratified he asked of its meaning, "What is freedom? Is it the bare privilege of not being chained?...If this is all, then freedom is a bitter mockery, a cruel delusion." He had voted in support of all eleven articles of impeachment against Andrew Johnson in 1868, hailed the 15th Amendment in 1870, and as president sought to break Democratic control of the Solid South by working with Virginia's biracial Readjuster Party under Senator William Mahone. His inaugural address, though criticized as flat, contained this line on civil rights: "Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen." Historians tend to rank Garfield as a below-average president or omit him from rankings entirely, citing his brief tenure and the lack of major legislative changes during his months in office. Some view his potential favorably, pointing to anti-corruption actions and civil rights stances. The Pendleton Act he championed, signed into law after his death, restructured how the federal government hired its employees. His trapezoid proof of the Pythagorean theorem, published in 1876, remains the only mathematical proof known to have been published by a sitting or future president of the United States.