(RETURN TO THE TRUMBULL & MAHONING COUNTIES INDEX)

A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD, TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTY, OHIO - 486 JAMES A. GARFIELD. HIS ANCESTORS AND BIRTHPLACE. On both his father's and his mother's side General Garfield comes of a long line of New England ancestry. The first of the American' Garfields was Edward, who came from Chester, England, to Massachusetts bay as early as 1630, settled at Watertown, and died June 14, 1672, aged ninety-seven. One of the family, Abraham Garfield, a great uncle of General Garfield, was in the fight at Concord Bridge, and was one of the signers of the affidavits sent to the Continental Congress ar Philadelphia to prove that the British were the aggressors in that affair, and fired twice before the patriots replied. After the Revolutionary war several members of the family left Massachusetts and settled in Central New York. General Garfield's father, Abram Garfield, was born there in 1799. He lived there till his eighteenth year, when he went to Newburg, Ohio, and soon after settled near Zanesville. He was a tall, robust young fellow, of very much the same type as his famous son, but a handsomer man, according to the verdict of his wife. He had a sunny, genial temper, like most men of great physical strength, was a great favorite with his associates, and was a natural leader and master of the rude characters with whom he was thrown in his forest-clearing work and his later labors in building the Ohio canal. His education was confined to a few tern-is in the Worcester district school, and the only two specimens of his writing extant show that it was not thorough enough to give him much knowledge of the science of orthography. He was fond of reading, but the hard life of a poor man in a new country gave him little time to read books, if he had had the money to buy them. The weekly newspapers and a few volumes borrowed from neighbors formed his intellectual diet. On the 3d of February, 1819, Abram Garfield and Eliza Ballou were married in the village of Zanesville by a justice of the peace named Richard H. Hogan. The bridegroom lacked nine months of being twenty-one years of age, and the bride was only eighteen. Eliza Ballou's father was a cousin of Hosea Ballou, the founder of Universalism in this country. Eliza was born in 1801. The Ballous are of Huguenot origin, and are directly descended from Maturin Ballou, who fled from France on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and with other French Protestants joined Roger Williams' colony in Rhode Island, the only American colony founded on the basis of full religious liberty. The gift of eloquence was undoubtedly derived by General Garfield from the Ballous, who were a race of preachers. The newly wedded pair went to Newburg, Cuyahoga county, Ohio—now a part of the city of Cleveland—and began life in a small log house on a new farm of eighty acres. In January, 1821, their first child, Mehitabel, was born. In October, 1822, Thomas was born, and Mary in October, 1824. In 1826 the family moved to New Philadelphia, Tuscarawas county, where the father had a contract to construct three miles of canal. In 1827 the fourth child, James B., was born. This was the only one of the children that the parents lost. He died in 1830, after the family returned to the lake country. In January, 1830, Abram went to Orange township, Cuyahoga county, where lived Amos Boynton, his half-brother—the son of his mother by her second husband—and bought eighty acres of land at $2 an acre. The country was nearly all wild, and the new farm had to be carved out of the forest. Boynton purchased at the same time a tract of the same size adjoining, and the two 486 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. families lived together for a few weeks in a log house built by the joint labors of the men. Soon a second cabin was reared across the road. The dwelling of the Garfields was built after the standard pattern of the houses of poor Ohio farmers in that day. Its walls were of logs, its roof was of shingles split with an axe, and its floor of rude thick planking split out of tree-trunks with a wedge and maul. It had only a single room, at one end of which was the big cavernous chimney, where the cooking was done, and at the other a bed. The younger children slept in a trundle-bed, which was pushed under the bedstead of their parents in the. daytime to get it out of the way, for there was no room to spare ; the older ones climbed a ladder to the loft under the steep roof. In this house James A. Garfield was born, November 19, 1831. The father worked hard early and late to clear his land and plant and gather his crops. No man in all the region around could wield an axe like him. Fenced fields soon took the place of the forest; an orchard was planted, a barn built, and the family was full of hope for the future when death removed his strong support. One day in May, 1833, a fire broke out in the woods, and Abram Garfield, after heating his blood and exerting his strength to keep the flames from his fences and fields, sat down to rest where a cold wind blew, and was seized with a violent sore throat. A country doctor put a blister on his neck, which seemed only to hasten his death. Just before he died, pointing to his children, he said to his wife: "Eliza, I have planted four saplings in these woods. I leave them to your care." He was buried in a corner of a wheat-field on his farm. James, the baby, was eighteen months old at the time. HIS BOYHOOD. The childhood of James A. Garfield was passed in almost complete isolation from social influences save those which proceeded from the home of his mother and that of his uncle Boynton. The farms of the Garfields and Boyntons were partially separated from the settled country around by a large tract of forest on one side and a deep rocky ravine on another. For many years after Abram Garfield and his half-brother Boynton built their log cabins, the nearest house was seven miles distant, and when the country became well settled the rugged character of the surface around their farms kept neighbors at a distance too great for the children of the two families to find associates among them, save at the district school. The district school-house stood upon a corner of the Garfield farm, and it was there, when nearly four years old, that James conned his Noah Webster's Spelling Book, and learned his "a-b ab's." James was put to farm work as soon as he was big enough to be of any use. The family was very poor, and the mother often worked in the fields with the boys. She spun the yarn and wove the cloth for the children's clothes and her own, sewed for the neighbors, knit stockings, cooked the simple meals for the household in the big fireplace, over which hung an iron crane for the pothooks, helped plant and hoe the corn and gather the hay crop, and even assisted the oldest boy to clear and fence land. In the midst of this toilsome life the brave little woman found time to instil into the- minds of her children the religious and moral maxims of her New England ancestry. Every day she read four chapters of the Bible—a practice she keeps up to this time, and has never interrupted for a single day save when lying upon a sick bed. The children lived in an atmosphere of religious thought and discussion. , Uncle Boynton, who was a second father to the Garfield family, flavored all his talk with Bible quotations. He carried a Testament in his pocket wherever he went, and would sit on his plough-beam at the end of a furrow to take it out and read a chapter. It was a time of religious ferment in Northern Ohio. New sects filled the air with their doctrinal cries. The Disciples, a sect founded by the preaching of Alexander Campbell, an eloquent and devout man of Scotch descent, who ranged over Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, from his home at Bethany in the "Pan Handle," had made great progress. They assailed all creeds as made by men, and declared the Bible to be the only rule of life. Attacking all the older denominations, they were vigorously attacked in turn. James' mind was filled at an early day with the controversies this new sect excited. The guests at his mother's house were mostly traveling preachers, and the talk of the neighborhood, when not about the crops and farm labors, was usually on religious topics. At the district school James was known as a TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 487 fighting boy. He found that the larger boys were disposed to insult and abuse a little fellow who had no father or big brother to protect him, and he resented such imposition with all the force of a sensitive nature backed by a hot temper, great physical courage, and a strength unusual for his age. His big brother, Thomas, had finished his schooling and was much away from home, working by the day or month to earn money for the support of the family. Many stories are told in Orange of the pluck shown by the future major-general in his encounters with the rough country lads in defense of his boyish rights and honor. They say he never began a fight and never cherished malice, but when enraged by taunts or insults would attack boys of twice his size with the fury and tenacity of a bulldog. A few years after the death of his father the house was enlarged in a curious fashion. The log school-house was abandoned for a new frame building, and the old structure was bought by Thomas Garfield for a trifle, and he and James, with the help of the Boynton boys, pulled it down and put it up again on a site a few steps in the rear of the Garfield dwelling. Thus the family had two rooms and were tolerably comfortable, as far as household accommodations were concerned. In these two log buildings they lived until James was fourteen, when the boys built a small frame house for their mother. It was painted red and had three rooms below and two under the roof. FARM BOY AND BOATMAN. James often got employment in the haying and harvesting season from the farmers of Orange. When he was sixteen he walked ten miles to Aurora, in company with a boy older than himself, looking for work. They offered their services to a farmer who had a good deal of hay to cut. "What wages do you expect?" asked the man. "Man's wages—a dollar a day," replied young Garfield. The farmer thought they were not old enough to earn full wages. "Then let us mow the field by the acre," said the young man. The farmer agreed; the customary price per acre was fifty cents. By 4 o'clock in the afternoon the hay was down and the boys earned a dollar apiece. Then the farmer engaged them for a fortnight. James' first wages were earned from a merchant who had an ashery where he bleached ashes and made black salts, which were shipped by the lake and canal to New York. He got $9 a month and his board, and stuck to the business for two months, at the end of which his hair below his cap was bleached and colored by the fumes until it assumed a lively red hue. Afterwards he went to Newburg, where an uncle lived who had a piece of oak-timbered land to clear on the edge of Independence township. James agreed to chop one hundred cords of wood at fifty cents a cord. He boarded with one of his sisters, who was married and lived near by. He was a good chopper and easily cut two cords a day. The view of Lake Erie and the passing sails stirred afresh in him the ambition to be a sailor, which almost every sturdy farmer's boy feels who reads tales of sea fights and adventures in the quiet monotony of his inland home. He resolved to 'ship on one of the lake craft, and with this purpose he walked to Cleveland and boarded a schooner lying at the wharf and told the captain he wanted to hire out as a sailor. The captain, a brutal, drunken fellow, was amazed at the impudence of the green country lad, and answered him with a torrent of profanity. Escaping as quickly as he could from the vessel, the lad walked up the river along the docks. Soon he heard himself called by name from the deck of a canalboat, and turning round, recognized a cousin, Amos Letcher, who told him he commanded the craft, and proposed to engage him to drive horses on the towpath. The would-be sailor thought that here was a chance to learn something of navigation in a humble way, preparatory to renewing his application for service on the lakes. He accepted the offer and the wages of “$10 a month and found," and next day the boat started for Pittsburg with a cargo of copper ore. It was called the Evening Star, was open amidships, and had a cabin at the bow for the horses and one at the stern for the men. On the return trip the Evening Star stopped at Brier Hill on the Mahoning river, and loaded with coal at the mines of David Tod, afterwards Governor of Ohio, and a warm friend of Garfield, the major-general and member of Congress. The boating episode in Garfield's life lasted through the season of 1848. After the first trip to Pittsburg the boat went back and forth between Cleveland and Brim Hill with cargoes of coal and iron. 488 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. Late in the fall the young driver, who had risen to the post of steersman, was seized with a violent attack of ague, which kept him at home all winter and in bed most of the time. All his summer's earnings went for doctor's bills and medicines. When he recovered, his mother, who had never approved of his canal adventure, dissuaded him from carrying out his project of shipping on the lakes. To master one passion she stimulated another—that of study.. She brought to her help the district school teacher, an excellent, thoughtful man named Samuel D. Bates, who fired the boy's mind with a desire for a good education, and doubtless changed the course of his life. He went to the Geauga academy, at Chester, a village a few miles distant, and began a new career. He repulsed all efforts to persuade him to join the church, and when pressed hard stayed away from meetings for several Sundays. Apparently, he wanted full freedom to reach conclusions about religion by his own mental processes. It was not until he was eighteen and had been two terms at the Chester school that he joined his uncle's congregation. He was baptised in March, 1850, in a little stream putting into the Chagrin river. His conversion was accomplished by a quiet, sweet-tempered man who held a series of meetings in the school-house near the Garfield homestead, and told in the plainest and most straightforward manner the story of the Gospel. A previous perusal of Pollock's Course of Time had made a deep impression upon him and turned his thoughts to religious subjects. FIGHT FOR AN EDUCATION. The country school-master who helped Mrs. Garfield dissuade her son from going as a sailor on the lakes in the spring of 1849 was a student at Geauga academy, a Free-will Baptist institution in the village of Chester, ten miles away from the home of the Garfields in Orange. The argument which finally turned the robust lad from his cherished plan of adventure was advanced by his mother, and was that, if he fitted himself for teaching by a few terms in school, he could teach winters and sail summers, and thus have employment the year round. In the month of March, with $17 in his pocket, got together by his mother and his brother Thomas; James went to Chester with his cousins, William and Henry Boynton. The boys took a stock of provisions along, and rented a room with two beds and a cook-stove in an old unpainted house where lived a poor widow woman, who undertook to prepare their meals and do their washing for an absurdly small sum. The academy was a two-story building, and the school, with about a hundred pupils of both sexes, drawn from the farming country around Chester, was in a flourishing condition. It had a library of perhaps one hundred and fifty volumes.—more books than young Garfield had ever seen before. A venerable gentleman named Daniel Branch was principal of the school, and his wife was his chief assistant. At the end of the term of twelve weeks he went home to Orange, helped his brother build a barn for their mother, and then worked for day wages at haying and harvesting. With the money he earned he paid off some arrears of doctors' bills left from his long illness. When he returned to Chester in the fall he had one silver sixpence in his pocket. Going to church next day he dropped the sixpence in the contribution box. He had made an arrangement with Heman Woodworth, a carpenter in the village, to live at his house and have lodging, board, washing, fuel, and light for $r.o6 a week, and this sum he expected to earn by helping the carpenter on Saturdays and at odd hourson school days. The carpenter was building a two-story house, and James' first work was to get out siding at two cents a board. The first Saturday he planed fifty-one boards, and so earned $1.02, the most money he had ever got for a day's work. That term he paid his way, bought a few books, and returned home with $3 in his pocket. He now thought himself competent to teach a country school, but in two days' tramping through Cuyahoga county failed to find employment. Some schools had already engaged teachers, and where there was still a vacancy the trustees thought him too young. He returned home completely discouraged and greatly humiliated by the rebuffs he had met with. He made a resolution that he would never again ask for a position of any sort, and the resolution was kept, for every public place he has since had came to him unsought. Next morning, while still in the depths of despondency, he heard a man call to his mother from the road, "Widow Gaffield," (a local corruption of the name Garfield), "where's your TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 489 boy Jim? I wonder if he wouldn't like to teach our school at the Ledge." James went out and found a neighbor from a district a mile away, where the school had been broken up for two winters by the rowdyism of the big boys. He said he would like to try the school, but before deciding must consult his uncle, Amos Boynton. That evening there was a family council. Uncle Amos pondered over the matter, and finally said, "You go and try it. You will go into that school as the boy, 'Jim Gaffield; see that you come out as Mr, Garfield, the school-master." The young man mastered the school, after a hard tussel in the school-room with the bully of the district, who resented a flogging and tried to brain the teacher with a billet of wood. His wages were $12 a month and board, and he "boarded around" in the families of the pupils. He had $48 in the spring—more money than had ever been in his possession before. Before returning to Chester he joined the Disciples' church, and his religious experience, together with his new interest in teaching, caused him to abandon his boyhood ambition of becoming a sailor. During his third term at the academy he and his cousin Henry boarded themselves. At the end of six weeks the boys found their expenses for food had been just thirty-one cents per week apiece. Henry thought they were living too poorly for good health, and they agreed to increase their outlay to fifty cents a week apiece. James had up to this time looked upon a college course as wholly beyond his reach, but he met a college graduate who told him he was mistaken in supposing that only the sons of rich parents were able to take such a course. A poor boy could get through, he said, but it would take a long time and very hard work. The usual time was four years in preparatory studies and four in the regular college course. James thought that by working part of the time to earn money he could get through in twelve years. He then resolved to bend all his energies to the one purpose of getting a college education. From this resolution he never swerved a hair's breadth. Until it was accomplished it was the one overmastering idea of his life. The tenacity and single-heartedness with which he clung to it and the sacrifices he made to realize it unquestionably exerted a powerful influence in molding and solidifying his character. He began to study Latin, philosophy, and botany. When the spring term ended he went home again and worked through the summer at haying and carpentering. Next fall he was back at Chester for a fourth term, and in the winter he got a village school to teach in Warrensville, at $16 a month and board. Returning to Orange in the summer, he decided to go on with his education at a new school just established by the Disciples at Hiram, Portage county, a petty cross-roads village, twelve miles from the town and a railroad. His religious feeling naturally called him to the young institution of his own denomination. In August, 1851, he arrived at Hiram, and found a plain brick building standing in the midst of a cornfield, with perhaps a dozen farm houses near enough for boarding places for the students. He lived in a room with four other pupils, studied harder than ever, having now his college project fully anchored in his mind, got through his six books of Caesar that term, and made good progress in Greek. In the winter he again taught school at Warrensville, and earned $18 a month. Next spring he was back at Hiram, and during the summer vacation he helped build a house in the village, planing all the siding and shingling the roof. At the beginning of his second year at Hiram, Garfield was made a tutor in place of one of the teachers who fell ill, and thenceforward he taught and studied at the same time, working tremendously to fit himself for college. His future wife, recited to him two years in Greek, and when he went to college she went to teach in the Cleveland schools, and to wait patiently the realization of their hopes. When he went to Hiram he had studied Latin only six weeks and had just begun Greek, and was therefore in a condition to fairly begin the four years' preparatory course ordinarily taken by students before entering college in the freshman class. Yet in three years' time he fitted himself to enter the junior class, two years further along, and at the same time earned his own living, thus crowding six years' study into three, and teaching for his support at the same time. To accomplish this he shut the world out from his mind save that little portion of it within the range of his studies, knowing nothing of politics or the news of the day, reading no light litera- 490 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. ture, and engaging in no social recreations that took his time from his books. In the spring of 1854 he wrote to the presidents of Yale, Brown, and Williams, telling what books he had studied, and asked what class he could enter if he passed a satisfactory examination in them. All three wrote that he could enter the junior year. President Hopkins, of Williams, added this sentence to the business part of his letter: " If you come here, we shall do what we can for you." This seemed like a kindly hand held out, and it decided him to go to Williams. He had been urged to go the Disciples' college, in Bethany, Virginia, founded by Alexander Campbell, but with a wisdom hardly to be expected in a country lad devotedly attached to the sect represented by the Bethany school, he sought the wider culture and broader opportunities of a New England college. LIFE AT COLLEGE. When Garfield reached Williams college, in June, 1854, he had about $300 which he had saved while teaching in the Hiram school. With this money he hoped to manage to get through a year. A few weeks remained of the closing school year, and he attended the recitations of the sophomore class in order to get familiar with the methods of the professors before testing his ability to pass the examinations for the junior year. The examination for entering the junior class was passed without trouble. Although self-taught, his knowledge of the books prescribed was thorough. A long summer vacation followed his examination, and this time he employed in the college library, the first large collection of books he had ever seen. His absorption in the double work of teaching and fitting himself for college had hitherto left him little time for general reading, and the library opened a new world of profit and delight. He had never read a line of Shakespeare, save a few extracts in the school reading-books. From the whole range of fiction he had voluntarily shut himself off at eighteen, when he joined the church, having serious views of the business of life, and imbibing the notion, then almost universal among religious people in the country districts of the West, that novel reading was a waste of time, and therefore a sinful, worldly sort of intellectual amusement. When turned loose in the college library, with weeks of leisure to range at will over the shelves, he began with Shakespeare, which he read through from cover to cover. Then he went to English history and poetry. Of the poets Tennyson pleased him best, which is not to be wondered at, for the influence of the laureate was then at its height. Garfield studied Latin and Greek, and took up German as an elective study. One year at college completed his classical studies, on which he was far advanced before he came to Williams. German he carried on successfully until he could read Goethe and Schiller readily, and acquired considerable fluency in the conversational use of the language. He entered with zeal into the literary work of the school, joined the Philologian society, was a vigorous debater, and in his last year was one of the editors of the Williams Quarterly, a college periodical of a high order of merit. At the end of the fall tern) of 1854 came a winter vacation of two months, which Garfield employed in teaching a writing-school at North Pownal, Vermont. He wrote a bold, handsome, legible hand, not at all like that in vogue nowadays in the systems taught in the commercial colleges, but a hand that was strongly individual, and was the envy of the boys and girls who tried to imitate it in his Vermont class. It is said that a year or two before Garfield taught his writing-class in the North Pownal school-house, Chester A. Arthur taught the district school in the same building. At the end of the college year, in June, Garfield went hack to Ohio and visited his mother, who was then living with a daughter in Solon. His money was exhausted, and he had to adopt one of two plans, either to borrow enough to take him through to graduation at the end of the next year, or to go to teaching in order to earn the money, and thus break the continuity of his college course. He then hit upon a plan of insuring his life, and assigning the policy as a security for a loan. His brother Thomas undertook to furnish the funds in instalments, but becoming embarrassed was not able to do so, and a neighbor, Dr. Robinson, assumed the obligation. Garfield gave his notes for the loan, and regarded the transaction as on a fair business basis, knowing that if he lived he would repay the money, and that if he died his creditor would be secure. TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 491 His second winter vacation Garfield spent in Poestenkill, New York, a country neighborhood about six miles from Troy, where a Disciple minister from Ohio, named Streeter, was preaching, and where he soon organized a writing- school to employ his time and bring him in a little money. Occasionally Garfield preached in his friend's church. During a visit to Troy he became acquainted with the teachers and directors of the public schools of that city, and was one day surprised by the offer of a position in them at a salary far beyond his expectation of what he could earn after his graduation and return to Ohio. It was a turning-point in his life. If he accepted, he could soon pay his debts, marry the girl to whom he was engaged, and live a life of comfort in an attractive eastern city; but he could not finish his college course, and he would have to sever the ties with his friends in Ohio and with the struggling school at Hiram, to which he was a deeply attached. Had he taken the position, his whole subsequent career would no doubt have been different. During his last term at Williams he made his first political speech, an address before a meeting gathered in one of the class-rooms to support the nomination of John C. Fremont. Although he had passed his majority nearly four years before, he had never voted. The old parties did not interest him; he believed them both corrupted with the sin of slavery; but when a new party arose to combat the designs of the slave power it enlisted his earnest sympathies. His mind was free from all his bias concerning the parties and statesmen of the past, and he could equally admire Clay or Jackson, Webster or Benton. He is the first man nominated for the Presidency whose political convictions and activities began with the birth of the Republican party. He was graduated August, 1856, with a class honor established by President Hopkins, and highly esteemed in the college—that of metaphysics—reading an essay on The Seen and the Unseen. TEACHER AND PREACHER. Before Garfield graduated at Williams college the trustees of the Hiram Eclectic 1nstitute elected him teacher of ancient languages, and the post was ready for him as soon as he got back to Ohio. It was not a professorship, because the institution was not a college, and did not became one until 1869, long after his connection with it ceased. A year later, when only twenty-six years old, he was placed at the head of the school with the title of chairman of the board of instruction, the board waiting another year before conferring upon him the full honors of the principalship. He continued to hold the position of principal until he went into the army in 1861. He was nominal principal two years longer, the board hoping he would return and manage the school after the war ended. -When he went to Congress he was made advising principal and lecturer, and his name was borne upon the catalogues in this capacity until 1864. Before he went to college Garfield had begun to preach a little in the country churches around Hiram, and when he returned he began to fill the pulpit in the Disciples' church in Hiram with considerable regularity. In his denomination no ordination is required to become a minister. Any brother having the ability to discourse on religious topics to a congregation is welcomed to the pulpit. His fame as a lay preacher extended throughout the counties of Portage, Summit, Trumbull, and Geauga, and he was often invited to preach in the towns of that region., One of his former pupils says of his peculiarities as a teacher: No matter how old the pupils were Garfield always called us by our first names, and kept himself on the most familiar terms with all. He played with us freely, scuffled with us sometimes, talked with us in walking to and fro, and we treated him out of the class-room just about as we did one another. Yet he was a most strict disciplinarian and enforced the rules like a martinet. He combined an affectionate and confiding manner with respect for order in a most successful manner. If he wanted to speak to a pupil, either for reproof or approbation, he would generally manage to get one arm around him and draw him close to him. He had a peculiar way of shaking hands, too, giving a twist to your arm and drawing you right up to him. This sympathetic manner had helped him to advancement. When I was janitor he used some tunes to stop me and ask my opinion about this and that, as if seriously advising with me I can see that my opinion could not have been of any value, and that he probably asked inn partly to increase my self-respect, and partly to show me that he felt an interest in me. I certainly was his friend all the firmer for it. ENTRANCE INTO POLITICS. He cast his first vote in 1856 for John C. Fremont, his own political career thus beginning with the first National campaign of the Republican party. Before leaving Williams college he made a speech to the students on the question of slavery in the Territories, and during the fall, after 492 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. he returned to Hiram, he spoke in the Disciples' church, in reply to Alphonso Hart, of Ravenna, who had delivered a Democratic address there a few nights before. Then a joint debate was arranged at Garrettsville, between Hart and Garfield, which attracted a good deal of local attention, and is well remembered to this day by the older farmers of Portage county. This debate launched Garfield as a political speaker. His reputation as a stump orator widened steadily from that debate until it embraced first the State of Ohio and then the Nation. A year after he took charge of the Hiram school Garfield married Lucretia Rudolph, his fellow-student and pupil in former years, to whom he had engaged himself before he went to Williams college. Their love had stood the test of time and absence, and now that he had made his place in the world and felt that he could support a family, there was nothing to hinder its consummation. The marriage took place at the house of the bride's parents, November 11, 1858. His labors upon the stump, beginning in 1856, with perhaps a score of speeches for Fremont and Dayton in country school-houses and town-halls in the region around Hiram, were extended in 1857 and 1858 over a wider area of territory, and in 1859 he began to speak at county mass- meetings. His first appearance at a big meeting was at Akron, where his name was put upon the bill below that of Salmon P. Chase. There the young teacher met for the first time the great anti-slavery leader whom he had honored and admired from his boyhood, and a friendship sprang up between the two which endured until Chase's death. In January, 1860, he went to Columbus, and took his seat in the State Senate. The campaign of 1860 made him widely known throughout the State. He found time to read law assiduously while he was in the Legislature. In 1858 he made up his mind that his future career should be at the bar. He therefore entered his name as a law student in the office of Williamson & Riddle, in Cleveland, and got from Mr. Riddle a list of books to be studied. In 1861 he applied to the supreme court at Columbus for admission to the bar, was examined by a committee composed of Thomas M. Key, a distinguished lawyer of Cincinnati, and Robert Harrison, afterward a member of the supreme court commission, and admitted. His intention was to open an office in Cleveland, but the breaking out of the war changed his plans. HIS RECORD IN THE WAR. The most complete and comprehensive account of General Garfield's military career is found in Whitelaw Reid's "Ohio in the War," which was written many years before Garfield's nomination for the Presidency. When the time came, says this account, for appointing the officers for the Ohio troops, the Legislature was still in session. Garfield at once avowed his intention of entering the service. He was offered the lieutenant-colonelcy of the Forty-second Ohio regiment, but it was not until the 14th of December that orders for the field were received. The regiment was then sent to Catlettsburg, Kentucky, and Garfield, then made colonel, was directed to report in person to General Buell. On the 17th of December he assigned Colonel Garfield to the command of the Seventeenth brigade, and ordered him to drive the rebel forces under Humphrey Marshall out of Sandy valley, in Eastern Kentucky. Up to this date no active operations had been attempted in the great department that lay south of the Ohio river. The spell of Bull Run still hung over our armies. Save the campaign in Western Virginia and the unfortunate attack by General Grant at Belmont, not a single engagement had occurred over all the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi. General Buell was preparing to advance upon the rebel position at Bowling Green when he suddenly found himself hampered by two co-operating forces skillfully planted within striking distance of the flank. General Zollicoffer was advancing from Cumberland Gap toward Mill Spring; and Humphrey Marshall moving down the Sandy valley, was threatening to overrun eastern Kentucky. Till these could he driven back an advance upon Bowling Green would be perilous, if not actually impossible. To General George H. Thomas, then just raised from his colonelcy of regulars to a brigadier- generalship of. volunteers, was committed the task of repulsing Zollicoffer; to the untried colonel of the raw Forty-second Ohio, the task of repulsing Humphrey Marshall, and on their success the whole army of the department waited. Colonel Garfield thus found himself, before he had ever seen a gun fired in action, in command TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 493 of tour regiments of infantry, and some eight companies of cavalry, charged with the work of driving out of his native State the officer reputed the ablest of those, not educated to war, whom Kentucky had given to the Rebellion. Marshall had under his command nearly five thousand men, stationed at the village of Paintville, sixty miles up the Sandy valley. He was expected by the rebel authorities to advance toward Lexington, unite with Zollicoffer, and establish the authority of the provisional government at the State capital. These hopes were fed by the recollection of his great intellectual abilities, and the soldierly reputation he had borne ever since he led the famous charge of the Kentucky volunteers at Buena Vista. But Garfield won the day. Marshall hastily abandoned his position, fired his camp equipage and stores, and began a retreat which was not ended until he reached Abingdon, Virginia. A fresh peril, however, now beset the little force. An unusually violent rain storm broke out, the mountain gorges were all flooded, and the Sandy rose to such a height that steamboat men pronounced it impossible to ascend the stream with supplies. The troops were almost out of rations, and the rough, mountainous country was incapable of supporting them. Colonel Garfield had gone down the river to its mouth. He ordered a small steamer, which had been in the quartermaster's service, to take on a load of supplies and start up. The captain declared it was impossible. Efforts were made to get other vessels, but without success. Finally Colonel Garfield ordered the captain and crew on board, stationed a competent army officer on deck to see that the captain did his duty, and himself took the wheel. The captain still protested that no boat could possibly stem the raging current, but Garfield turned her head up the stream and began the perilous trip. The water in the usually shallow river was sixty feet deep, and the tree tops along the bank were almost submerged. The little vessel trembled from stem to stern at every motion of the engines; the water whirled her about as if she were a skiff; and the utmost speed that steam could give her was three miles an hour. When night fell the captain of the boat begged permission to tie up. To attempt to ascend that flood in the dark, he declared was madness. But Colonel Garfield kept his place at the wheel. Finally, in one of the sudden bends of the river, they drove, with a full head of steam, into the quicksand of the bank. Every effort to back off was in vain. Garfield at last ordered a boat to be lowered to take a line across to the opposite bank. The crew protested against venturing out in the flood. The Colonel leaped into the boat himself and steered it over. The force of the current carried them far below the point they sought to reach ; but they finally succeeded in making fast to a tree, and rigging a windlass with rails sufficiently powerful to draw the vessel off and get her once more afloat. It was on Saturday that the boat left the mouth of the Sandy. All night, all day Sunday, and all through Sunday night they kept up that struggle with the current, Garfield leaving the wheel only eight hours out of the whole time, and that during the day. By 9 o'clock Monday morning they reached the camp, and were received with tumultuous cheering. Garfield himself could scarcely escape being borne to headquarters on the shoulders of the delighted men. These operations in the Sandy valley had been conducted with such energy and skill as to receive the special commendation of the commanding general and the Government, General Buell had been moved to words of unwonted praise. The War Department had conferred the grade of brigadier-general, the commission bearing the date of the battle of Middle Creek. And the country, without understanding very well the details of the campaign—of which indeed, no satisfactory account was published at the time--fully appreciated the satisfactory re. suit. The discomfiture of Humphrey Marshall was a source of special chagrin to the rebel sympathizers of Kentucky, and of amazement and admiration throughout the loyal West, and Garfield took rank in the public estimation among the most promising of the younger volunteer generals. On his arrival at Louisville, from the Sandy valley, General Garfield found that the army of the Ohio was already beyond Nashville, on its march to Grant's aid at Pittsburg Landing. He hastened after it, reported to General Buell about thirty miles from Columbia, and, under his order, at once assumed command of the Twentieth brigade, then a part of the division under General Thomas J. Wood. He reached 494 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. the field of Pittsburg Landing about r o'clock on the second day of the battle, and participated in the closing scenes The old tendency to fever and ague, contracted in the days of his tow-path service on the Ohio canal, was now aggravated in the malarious climate of the South, and General Garfield was finally sent home on sick leave about the 1st of August. Near the same time the Secretary of War, who seems at this early day to have formed the high estimate of Garfield which he continued to entertain throughout the war, sent him orders to proceed to Cumberland Gap and relieve General George W. Morgan of his command. But when they were received he was too ill to leave his bed. A month later the Secretary ordered him to report in person at Washington as soon as his health would permit. On his arrival it was found that the estimate placed on his knowledge of law, his judgment, and his loyalty had led to his selection as one of the first members of the court-martial for the noted trial of Fitz John Porter. In the duties connected with this detail most of the autumn was consumed. Early in January he was ordered out to General Rosecrans. From the day of his appointment, General Garfield became the intimate associate and confidential adviser of his chief. But he did not occupy so commanding a station as to be able to put restraint upon him. From the 4th of January to the 24th of June General Rosecrans lay at Murfreesboro. Through five months of this delay General Garfield was with him. The War department demanded an advance, and, when the spring opened, urged it with unusual vehemence. Finally General Rosecrans formally asked his corps, division, and cavalry generals as to the propriety of a movement. With singular unanimity, though for diverse reasons, they opposed it. Out of seventeen generals not one was in favor of an immediate advance, and not one was even willing to put himself on record as in favor of an early advance. General Garfield collated the seventeen letters sent in from the generals in reply to the questions of their commander, and fairly reported their substance, coupled with a cogent argument against them and in favor of an immediate movement. This report we venture to pronounce the ablest military document known to have been submitted by a chief of staff to his superior during the war. General Garfield stood absolutely alone, every general commanding troops having, as we have seen, either openly opposed or failed to approve an advance. But his statements were so clear and his arguments so forcible, that he carried conviction. Twelve days after the reception of this report the army moved—to the great dissatisfaction of its leading generals. One of the three corps commanders, Major-general Thomas L. Crittenden, approached the chief of staff at the headquarters on the morning of the advance: "It is understood, sir," he said, "by the general officers of the army, that this movement is your work. I wish you to understand it is a rash and fatal move, for which you will be held responsible." This rash and fatal move was the Tullahoma campaign—a campaign perfect in its conception, excellent in its general execution, and only hindered from resulting in the complete destruction of the opposing army by the delays which had too long postponed its commencement. It might even yet have destroyed Bragg but for the terrible season of rains which set in on the morning of the advance and continued uninterruptedly for the greater part of a month. With a week's earlier start it would have ended the career of Bragg's army in the war: At last came the battle of Chickamauga. Such by this time had come to be Garfield's influence that he was nearly always consulted and often followed. He wrote every order issued that day—one only excepted. This he did rarely as an amanuensis, but rather on the suggestions of his own judgment, afterward submitting what he had prepared to Rosecrans for approval or change. The one order which he did not write was the fatal order to Wood which lost the battle. The meaning was correct ; the words, however, did not clearly represent what Rosecrans meant, and the division commander in question so interpreted them as to destroy the right wing. The general commanding, and his chief of staff were caught in the tide of disaster and borne back toward Chattanooga. Thr chief of staff was sent to communicate %, ith Thomas, while the general proceeded to prepare for the reception of the routed army. Such at least were the statements of the reports, and, in a technical sense, they were true. It should never be forgotten, however, in Garfield's pra:se, that TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 495 it was on his own earnest representations that he was sent—that, in fact, he rather procured permission to go to Thomas, and so back into the battle, than received orders to do so. He refused to believe that Thomas was routed or the battle lost. He found the road environed with dangers ; some of his escort were killed, and they all narrowly escaped death or capture. But he bore to Thomas the first news that officer had received of the disaster on the right, and gave the information on which he was able to extricate his command. At 7 o'clock that evening, under the personal supervision of General Gordon Granger and himself, a shorted salute from a battery of six Napoleon guns was fired into the woods after the last of the retreating assailants. They were the last shots of the battle of Chickamauga, and what was left of the Union army was master of the field.. For the time the enemy evidently regarded himself as repulsed ; and Garfield said that night, and has always since maintained, that there was no necessity for the immediate retreat on Rossville. SERVICE IN CONGRESS. Practically this was the close of General Garfield's military career. A year before, while he was absent in the army, and without any solicitation on his part, he had been elected to Congress from the old Giddings district, in which he resided. He was now, after a, few weeks' service with General Rosecrans at Chattanooga, sent on to Washington as the bearer of dispatches. He there learned of his promotion to a major-generalship of volunteers, "for gallant and meritorious conduct at the battle of Chickamauga." He might have retained this position in the army; and the military capacity he had displayed, the high favor in which he was held by the Government, and the certainty of his assignment to important commands, seemed to augur a brilliant future. He was a poor man, too, and the major- general's salary was more than double that of the Congressman. But on mature reflection he decided that the circumstances under which the people had elected him to Congress bound him up to an effort to obey their wishes. He was furthermore urged to enter Congress by the officers of the army, who looked to him for aid in procuring such military legislation as the country and army required. Under the belief that the path of usefulness to the country lay in the direction in which his constituents pointed, he sacrificed what seemed to be his personal interests, and on the 5th of December, 1863, he resigned his commission, after nearly three years' service. General Garfield continued his military service up to the day of the meeting of Congress. Even then he seriously thought of resigning his position as a Representative rather than his major- general's commission, and would have done so had not Lincoln urged him to enter Congress. He has often expressed regret that he did not fight the war through. Had he done so he would no doubt have ranked at its close among the foremost of the victorious generals of the Republic, for he displayed in his Sandy valley campaign and at the battle of Chickamauga the highest qualities of generalship. A brilliant opening awaited him in the Army of the Cumberland. General Thomas wanted him to take command of a corps. President Lincoln told him he greatly needed the influence in the House of one who had had practical military experience to push through the needed war legislation. He yielded, and on the 5th of December, 1863, gave up his generalship and took his seat in the House. He was appointed on the military committee, under the chairmanship of General Schenck, and was of great service in carrying through the measures which recruited the armies during the closing years of the war. In the summer of 1864 a breach occurred between the President and some of the most radical of the Republican leaders in Congress over the question of the reconstruction of the States of Arkansas and Louisiana. Congress passed a bill for the organization of loyal governments within the Union lines of these States, but Lincoln vetoed it, and appointed governors. Senator Ben Wade, of Ohio, and Representative Henry. Winter Davis, of Maryland, united, in a letter to the New York Tribune, sharply criticizing the President for defeating the will of Congress. The letter became known as the Wade- Davis manifesto, and created a great sensation in political circles. The story got about in the Nineteenth district that General Garfield had expressed sympa by with the position of Wade and Davis. H is constituents condemned the document, and were strongly disposed to set him 496 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. aside and nominate another man for Congress. When the convention met the feeling against Garfield was so pronounced that he regarded his nomination as hopeless. He was called upon to explain his course. He went upon the platform, and everybody expected something in the nature of an apology, but he boldly defended his position, approved the manifesto, justified Wade, and said he had nothing to retract, and could not change his honest convictions for the sake of a seat in Congress. He had great respect, he said, for the opinions of his constituents, but greater regard for his own. If he could serve them as an independent representative, acting on his own judgment and conscience, he would be glad to do so, but if not, he did not want their nomination; he would prefer to be an independent private citizen. Probably no man ever talked that way before or since to a body of men who held his political fate in their hands. Leaving the platform, he strode out of the hall and down the stairs, supposing that he had effectually cut his own throat. Scarcely had he disappeared when one of the youngest delegates sprang up and said: "The man who has the, courage to face a convention like that deserves a nomination. I move that General Garfield be nominated by acclamation." The motion was carried with a shout that reached the ears of the Congressman, and arrested him on the sidewalk as he was returning to the hotel. He was elected by a majority of over twelve thousand. At the beginning of the Thirty-ninth Congress in December, 1865, General Garfield asked Speaker Colfax to transfer him from the committee on military affairs to that of ways and means, saying that in the near future financial questions would occupy the attention of the country, and he desired to be in a position to study them carefully in advance. The military committee having on its hands the work of reorganizing the regular army on a peace basis, was the more important of the two at the time, but Garfield foresaw the storm of agitation and delusion concerning the debt and the currency which was soon to break upon the country, and wisely prepared to meet it. He began a long and severe course of study, ransacking the Congressional library for works that threw light on the experience of other countries, and that gave the ideas of the thinkers and statesmen of all nations on these subjects; his membership of the ways and means also opened up a line of congenial work in connection with the tariff and the system on internal revenue taxation. These two sources of income, gauged to the needs of the war, had to be changed to conform to the conditions of peace. In the course of this work and of the investigations which accompanied it, reached a conclusion upon the tariff question from which he never departed—namely, that whatever may be the truth or falsity of abstract theories about free trade, the interests of the United States require a moderate protective system. In March, 1866, he made his first speech on the currency question, and took strong ground in favor of a speedy return to specie payments. In the summer of 1867 General Garfield went to Europe and made a rapid tour through Great Britain and the Continent. His health failed under the pressure of too much brain work and he took this means of recuperating. This was the only year since he entered public life that he had been absent from a political campaign. He returned late in the fall to find that Pendletonism —a demand for the payment of the bonded debt in irredeemable greenback notes—had run rampant in Ohio, and had taken possession of the Republican party as well as of the Democracy. A reception was given him at Jefferson, in his district, which assumed the form of a public meeting. He was told that he had better say nothing about his financial views, for his constituents had made up their minds that the bonds ought to be redeemed in greenbacks. He made a speech in which he told his friends plainly that they were deluded, that there could be no honest money not redeemable in coin, and no honest payment of the debt could be made save in coin, and that as long as he was their representative he should stand on that ground, whatever might be their views. The speech produced a deep impression throughout the district. The next June the National Republican Convention took sound ground on the debt and currency questions, and most Republicans who had been carried away by Pendletonism grew ashamed of their folly. A LEADER IN FINANCE. In the Fortieth Congress General Garfield was put back on the military committee and made its TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 497 chairman. In 1868 he was renominated without opposition, and chosen a fourth time to represent his district. On the organization of the Forty-first Congress, in December, 1869, General Garfield was made chairman of the committee on banking and currency. The inflation movement was rapidly gathering force in the country, and men of both parties in Congress were swept into it by fear of their constituents. A cry was set up that times were getting bad because there was not money enough to do the business of the people. The West, particularly, clamored for more currency. General Garfield led the opposition to inflation, Fnally, after a long fight in his committee with the men who wanted to throw out a flood of new greenbacks, he brought in and carried through Congress a bill allowing an addition of $54,000,000 to the National bank circulation, and giving preference in the assignment of the new issue to the States which had less than their quota of the old circulation. This measure was a stunning blow to the inflation movement. The new issue was not all taken up for four years, and during all that time it was a sufficient answer to all demands for "more money" to call attention to the fact that there was currency waiting in the Treasury for any one who would organize a bank. Soon after the $54,000,000 was applied for National banking was made perfectly free. The New York gold panic came during General Garfield's chairmanship of the banking committee. Under orders of the House he conducted with great sagacity and thoroughness an investigation which exposed all the secrets of the gold gamblers' plot which culminated in "Black Friday." He made a report which was a complete history of the affair, and the lesson he drew from it was that the only certain remedy against the occurrence of such transactions was to be found in the resumption of specie payments. He became the recognized leader of the honest-money party in the House and the most potent single factor in the opposition to inflation. He helped work up the bill to strengthen the public credit, which failed to get through during the closing days of Johnson's administration, but was passed as soon as Grant came in, and was the first measure to which the new President put his signature. This bill committed Congress fully to the payment of the public debt in coin, and was the fortress around which the financial battle raged in subsequent years. In December, 1871, General Garfield was placed at the head of the important committee on appropriations, a position which made him a leader of the majority side of the House. With his old habit of doing everything he undertook with the utmost thoroughness, he made a laborious study of the whole history of appropriation bills of this country and of the English budget system. He found a great deal of looseness and confusion in the practice concerning estimates and appropriations. Unexpended balances were lying in the Treasury, amounting to $130,000,- 000, beyond the supervision of Congress and subject to the drafts of Government officers. There were besides what was called permanent appropriations, which ran on from year to year without any legislation. Garfield instituted a sweeping reform. He got laws passed covering all old balances back into the Treasury, making all appropriations expire at the end of the fiscal year for which made, unless needed to oarry out contracts, and covering in all appropriations at the end of every second year. At the same time he required the executive committee to itemize their estimates of the money needed to run the Government much more fully than had been done before, so that Congress would know just how every dollar it voted was to be expended. The four years of his chairmanship of appropriations were years of close and unremitting labor. He worked habitually fifteen hours a day. In addition to the demands of his own department of legislation he took part in all the debates involving the principles of the Republican party, fought without cessation a brave battle against inflation and repudiation, and omitted no opportunity to aid in educating the public mind to a comprehension of the importance of returning to specie payments. Five times had General Garfield been chosen to represent the old Giddings district without serious opposition in his own party, and without a breath of suspicion being cast upon his personal integrity. With one exception his nominations had been made by acclamation. In his sixth canvass, however, a storm of calumny broke upon him. A concerted attack was made upon him tor the purpose, if possible, of defeating him in the convention, and failing in that, to 498 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. beat him at the polls. He was charged with bribery and corruption in connection with the Credit Mobilier affair and the DeGolyer pavement contract, and with responsibility for the salary grab. His people, however, resented the slanders, and in the convention he was nominated by a majority of three to one. The opposition to him did not bring forward a candidate, but merely cast blank votes. His enemies then nominated a second Republican candidate. General Garfield met the charges against him before the jury of his constituents. He visited all parts of the district, speaking day and night at township meetings. The verdict of the election was a complete vindication of his character and actions, and in 1876 and 1878 his constituents nominated him by acclamation and elected him by increased majorities. HEADING THE MINORITY. The result of the election of 1874 was to give the Democrats control of the House, which met in December, 1875. Hitherto the legislative work of General Garfield had been constructive. Now he was called upon to defend this work against the assaults of the party which step by step had opposed its accomplishment, and which, by the aid of the solid support of the late rebel element, had gained power in Congress. One of the first movements of the Democrats was for universal amnesty. Mr. Blaine offered an amendment to their bill, excluding Jefferson Davis. Then followed the famous debate about the treatment of prisoners of war, opened by Blaine's dashing attack on Hill, continued by Hill's reply charging that Confederates had been starved in Northern prisons, and closing with Garfield's response to Hill. Garfield, by a brilliant stroke of parliamentary strategy, forced a Democrat to testify to the falsity of Hill's charge. He said that the Elmira, New York, district, where was located during the war the principal prison for captured rebels, was represented in the House by a Democrat. He did not know him, but he was willing to rest his case wholly on his testimony. He called upon the member from Elmira to inform the House whether the good people of his city had permitted the captured Confederate soldiers in their midst to suffer for want of food and clothing during their imprisonment. The gentleman rose promptly and said that to his knowledge the prisoners had received exactly the same rations as the Union soldiers guarding them. While this statement was being made, a telegraph dispatch was handed to General Garfield. Holding it up he said: "The lightnings of heaven are aiding me in this controversy." The dispatch was from General Elwell, of Cleveland, who had been the quartermaster at the Elmira prison, and who telegraphed that the rations issued to the rebel prisoners were in quantity and quality exactly the same as those issued to their guards. Garfield's speech killed the Democrats' bill. They withdrew it rather than risk a vote. Mr. Blaine's transfer to the Senate soon after this debate left Garfield the recognized leader of the Republicans in the House. Mr. Kerr, the Democratic speaker, died in the midst of his term, and in the election of his successor General Garfield received the unanimous Republican vote. Soon after, in August, 1876, came the dispute with Lamar. Lamar was the greatest orator the Democrats had, and was selected by them to make a keynote campaign speech. It was a sharp attack upon the Republican party, an appeal for sympathy for the " oppressed South," and an argument to show that peace and prosperity could come only through Democratic rule. General Garfield took notes of the speech. All his colleagues insisted that he alone was competent to break the force of Lamar's masterly effort. This speech is usually accounted the greatest of his life. It created a furore in the House. All business was suspended for ten minutes after he finished, so great was the excitement. One hundred thousand copies of the speech were subscribed for at once by members who wanted to circulate it in their districts, and during the campaign over a million copies were distributed. It contributed powerfully to the success of the Republican party in the Presidential campaign of that year. After the election arose the dispute about the count of the votes of South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. President Grant telegraphed to General Garfield, under date of November l0th, as follows: I would be gratified if you would go to New Orleans and remain there until the vote of Louisiana is counted. Governor Kellogg requests that reliable witnesses be sent to see that the canvass of the vote is a fair one. U. S. GRANT. Garfield went to Washington, consulted with the President, and then proceeded to New Or- TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 499 leans in company with John Sherman, Stanley Matthews, and a number of other prominent Republicans. While on his way back to Washington, returning from New Orleans, he was again chosen by the unanimous vote of the Republicans of the House as their candidate for speaker. General Garfield opposed the electoral commission bill, but in spite of his opposition, when the bill passed he was selected as a member of the tribunal. The Republicans of the House were to have two members. They met in caucus and were about to ballot, when Mr. McCreary, of Iowa, said that there was one name on which they were all agreed, and which need not be submitted to the formality of a vote—that of James A. Garfield. Garfield was chosen by acclamation. The second commissioner was George F. Hoar, of Massachusetts, who afterwards presided over the Chicago convention which nominated General Garfield for the Presidency. As a member of the electoral commission General Garfield delivered two opinions, in which he brought out with great clearness the point that the Constitution places in the hands of the Legislatures of the States the power of determining how their electors shall be chosen, and that Congress had no right to go behind the final decision of a State. If there was nothing in the constitution or laws of a State touching the matter, its Legislature could appoint electors as Vermont did, after her admission to the Union. Immediately after President Hayes' inauguration the Republicans in the Ohio Legislature desired to elect General Garfield to the United States Senate in place of John Sherman, who had resigned his seat to enter the Cabinet. Mr. Hayes made a personal appeal to him to decline to be a candidate and remain in the House to lead the Republicans in support of the Administration. General Garfield acceded, in the belief that his services would be of more value to the party in the House than in the Senate, and withdrew his name from the canvass, greatly to the disappointment of his friends in Ohio, who, had already obtained pledges of the support of a large majority of the Republican members of the Legislature. In the session of 1878 General Garfield led the long struggle in defence of the resumption act, which was assailed by the Democrats with a vigor born of desperation. He also made a remarkable speech on the tariff question, in opposition to Wood's bill, which sought to break down the protective system. During the extra session of 1879, forced by the Democrats, for the purpose of bringing the issue of the repeal of the Federal election laws prominently before the country, General Garfield led the Republican minority ,with consummate tact and judgment. The plan of the• Democrats was to open the debate with a general attack on the Republican party in order to throw their adversaries upon the defensive as apologists for the course of their party. McMahon, of Ohio, was selected to make the opening speech. Garfield did not wait for him to make his argument, but securing the floor ahead of him, delivered his famous Revolution in Congress speech, in which he attacked the Democrats with such vigor and exposed with so much force their scheme for withholding appropriations for the support of the Government, to compel the President to sign their political measures, that they were thrown into confusion, and instead of taking the offensive, were obliged to resort to a weak, defensive campaign. Driven from position to position by successive vetoes and by the persistent assaults of the Republican minority, they ended with a ridiculous fiasco. Instead of refusing $45,000,000 of appropriations, as they threatened at the beginning, they ended by appropriating $44,000,000 of the amount, leaving only $400,000 unprovided for. The following winter the Democrats recommenced the fight, but in a feeble, disheartened way. They set out to refuse all pay to the United States marshals unless the President would let them wipe out the election laws. General Garfield met them with a powerful speech on Nullification in Congress, in which he showed that while it was clearly the foremost duty of the law-makers in Congress to obey, the Democrats had become leaders in an attempt to disobey them and break them down. General Garfield's last work in Congress was a report on the Tucker tariff bill. In January, 1880, General Garfield was chosen to the Senate by the Legislature of Ohio for the term of six years, beginning March 4, 1881. He received the unanimous vote of the Republican caucus, an honor never before conferred upon a citizen of Ohio by any party. 500 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT. General Garfield went to the Republican National convention at Chicago as a delegate at large from the State of Ohio. His great experience in National politics made him very naturally the leader of the delegation. Ohio had agreed to present the name of Secretary Sherman to the convention as its candidate for President. His speech presenting Sherman's name was universally applauded as a model of dignified oratory, and as a timely effort to prevent the sharp differences of feeling in the convention from weakening the party in the approaching campaign. His short speeches on questions arising before the convention during its long and turbulent session were all couched in the same vein of wise moderation, while adhering firmly to the principle of district representation and the right of every individual delegate to cast his own vote. When the balloting began, a single delegate from Pennsylvania voted for Garfield. No attention was paid to this vote, which was thought to be mere eccentricity on the part of the man who cast it. Later on a second Pennsylvania delegate joined the solitary Garfield man. So the balloting continued, the fight being a triangular one between Grant, Blaine, and Sherman, with Washburne, Edmunds, and Windom in the field, ready for possible compromises. General Garfield's plan, as leader of the Sherman forces, was to keep his candidate steadily in the field, in the belief that the Blaine, men, seeing the impossibility of the success of their favorite, would come to Sherman and thus secure his nomination. After a whole day voting, however, it became plain that a union of the Blaine and Sherman forces in favor of Sherman could not be effected, and that an attempt in that direction would throw enough additional votes to Grant to give him the victory. Some unsuccessful efforts were made on the second day's voting to rally on Edmunds and Washburne. Finally, on the thirty-fourth ballot, the Wisconsin men determined to make an effort in an entirely new direction to break the deadlock. They threw their seventeen votes for Garfield. General Garfield sprang to his feet and protested against this proceeding, making the point of order that nobody had a right to vote for any member of the convention without his consent, and that consent, he said, "I refuse to give." The chairman declared that the point of order was not well taken, and ordered the Wisconsin vote to be counted. On the next ballot nearly the whole Indiana delegation swung over to Garfield, and a few scattering votes were changed to him from other States, making a total of fifty votes cast for him in all. Now it became plain that, by a happy inspiration, a way out of the difficulty had been found. On the thirty-sixth ballot, State after State swung over to Garfield amidst intense excitement, and he was nominated by the following vote: Garfield, 399; Grant, 306; Sherman, 3; Washburne, 5. The nomination was accepted on all hands as an exceedingly fortunate one, and both the friends and opponents of General Garfield vied with each other in the enthusiasm with which they indorsed it. Congratulations poured in from all parts of the country, and on his way from Chicago to his farm in Ohio General Garfield was the recipient of a popular ovation, which repeated itself at every town and railroad station. Outside of his political work, General Garfield was a frequent platform speaker on topics connected with education, finance and social science. In 1878 he delivered a notable address in Fanueil hall, Boston, on Honest Money. In 1874 he delivered six lectures on social science at Hiram college. In 1869 he spoke on the value of statistics before the American Social Science association in New York. In late years he was an occasional contributor to the pages of the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. HOME AND FAMILY LIFE. The first years of General Garfield's married life were passed in Hiram, boarding with families of friends, and it was not until he went to the war that he saved money enough to buy a home. In 1862 he purchased a small frame cottage facing the college green, paying for it $800. About $1,000 more was spent in enlarging it by a wing and fitting it up. The rooms were small and the ceilings low, as was the fashion in village houses of Moderate pretensions, but the young housewife soon made the place cosy and homelike. This was the only home of the family for many years. While in Washington they lived in apartments. The lack of a settled home at the capital, where the children could grow up amid wholesome influences, was seriously felt early in TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 501 General Garfield's Congressional career, but it was not until he had been three times elected that he began to regard that career as likely to continue for an indefinite period, and sought the means of escaping from the disagreeable features of hotel and boarding-house life. He bought a lot on the corner of Thirteenth and I streets, facing Franklin square, and with money loaned him by an old army friend put up a plain, square, substantial brick house, big enough to hold his family and two or three guests. As the boys grew older, however, and needed more range for their activities than the city house could afford, the desire to own a farm which he had always felt grew upon him. When he had paid off the mortgage on his house and had a little money ahead, he thought he could safely gratify his desire, and after a good deal of thought about localities, decided to settle in the vicinity of the Lake Shore railroad on one of the handsome productive ridges that run parallel to Lake Erie. A farm of one hundred and sixty acres was bought in the town of Mentor, Lake county, a mile from a railway and telegraph station, and half a mile from a post-office. The buildings consisted of a tumble-down barn and an ancient farm house a story and a half high; but the land was fertile, the summer climate, tempered by breezes from the neighboring lake, was delightful, and the people in the vicinity were of the best class of farmers to be found in Ohio. Here the General revived all the farming skill of his boyhood days, holding the plow or loading the hay wagon or driving the ox team. Draining, fencing, and other improvements absorbed all the money the place brought in, and the time spent upon it was highly enjoyed by all the members of the household, and every winter they looked forward to the adjournment of Congress and their release from Washington with pleasant anticipations. General Garfield had seven children and five are living. The oldest, Mary, died when he was in the army, and the youngest, Edward, died in Washington about four years ago. Of the surviving children, the oldest, Harry, is fifteen; after him comes James, Molly, Irwin ,(named after General McDowell), and Abraham. Harry and James are preparing for college at St. Paul's school, in Concord, New Hampshire. Harry is the musician of the family, and plays the piano well. James, who more resembles his father, is the mathematician. Molly, a handsome girl of thirteen, is ruddy, sweet-tempered, vivacious, and blessed with perfect health. The younger boys are still in the period of boisterous animal life. All the children have quick brains and are strongly individualized. All learned to read young except Abe, who hearing that his father had years ago said in a lecture on education, that no child of his should be forced to read until he was seven years old, took refuge behind the theory and declined to learn his letters until he had reached that age. The manner of life in the Garfield household, whether in Washington or on the Mentor farm, was simple and quiet. The long table was bountifully supplied with plainly cooked food, and there was always room for any guest who might drop in at meal-time. No alcoholic drinks were used. There was no effort at following fashions in furniture or at table service. No carriage was kept at Washington, but on the farm there were vehicles of various sorts, and two teams of stout horses. Comfort, neatness, and order prevailed, without the least attempt at keeping up with style of dress and living, or any desire to sacrifice the healthful regularity of household customs adopted before the General won fame and position, to the artificial usages of what is called good society. CANDIDATE AND PRESIDENT. General Garfield's conduct during the campaign greatly strengthened his candidacy. He remained upon his farm in Mentor, receiving all who came to see him in a frank, open-handed way, and expressing with clearness and dignity his views on the main lines of topics entering into the canvass. A series of extempore speeches made to various delegations representing many interests and many classes of people, which called upon him, gave new proof of the breadth of his mind, his self control, and his patriotic impulses. All these addresses added to his popularity. In past campaigns candidates had usually been bridled by their friends for fear they would injure their chances. General Garfield allowed no one to be the judge of when he should speak or what he should say, and no word he spoke, from the day of his nomination to that of his election, lost him a vote. He left his farm on two or three occasions to attend re- 502 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. unions of his old army comrades, and in August went to New York to confer with the leaders of the Republican party. The rest of the time he kept open house, receiving during the campaign many thousands of people representing every State in the Union. After his election, of which, by the way, he never had serious doubt, he continued to live in his farm house until the time for his journey to Washington. He was overwhelmed with advice and importuned in regard to his Cabinet appointments, but the advice was welcome whenever it was honest and unselfish, and the importunities he bore with the usual patient courtesy. When the time came for action he made up his Cabinet to suit himself according to his own best judgment. It was generally approved by the public. The administration began with the hearty support of the country, and with high hopes for its success. The President's inaugural was an admirable production. It was eloquent, high-minded, courageous, and patriotic. His bearing and behavior in the White House showed that his strength of mind, knowledge of government and conception of the dignity of his position were such as to fill the full measure of the highest requirements of the executive office. He gave promise of being an ideal President. No one ever came to the Presidential chair before him with such wide knowledge of public men and public affairs. All went smoothly until the unhappy conflict began over the Federal patronage in New York, for which Senator Conkling was responsible. In that controversy President Garfield bore himself with firmness and dignity. It was his right to make appointments in New York as in other States, and he quietly and unyieldingly insisted upon exercising that right. The Senate sustained him by a unanimous vote after the resignation of the two New York Senators, and the people stood by him with almost equal unanimity. President Garfield gave the closest attention to his duties The little time he took for rest he spent in the midst of his family or in the society of a few friends. He gave the customary receptions but he had no love of ceremonies or display. He was serious and sad. The office which had come to him without seeking he regarded as a grave responsibility and a heavy burden. If he ever thought it involved a peril to his life he did not speak on the subject. He was a brave man, who had faced death on many battle-fields, and he was not, like timorous persons, in the habit of dwelling upon possible dangers. No pains were taken to shield him from assassination, although he had received warning that the animosities his action created in the minds of a small political faction might end in an attempt on his life. He was so thoroughly a man of the people, and so firm a believer in the orderly working of Republican institutions in this country, that he suspected no danger to himself from freely mingling with crowds. When he left the White House he went like an ordinary citizen, and no effort was made made to protect his person. He visited Long Branch with his family and a single officer ; he returned to Washington accompanied by one friend only. A little precaution would have saved him from the assassin's bullet, but nobody thought precaution necessary. During the few days General Garfield spent at Long Branch the rapid recovery of his wife from her serious illness and his own comparative rest from the official work produced a marked effect upon him. He spoke of his excellent physical health and talked cheerfully of having got through with the severest strain likely to come upon him during his administration. Much of his old, hearty, genial, frank manner, of which the cares of office had seemed to be robbing him, came back in his intercourse with his friends. He showed much pleasure at the near prospect of revisiting the scenes of his college life in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and promised himself the delight of reviving old memories with his classmates, and being for a little time in thought a boy again. His habitual mental state at that time was, however, one of great gravity. A friend who saw him said to him: "I saw the roof of your house the other day while traveling on the Lake Shore railroad." "I wish I could see it again," replied the President in a solemn tone of voice, as if he felt for the moment that he was destined never to see the home that was so dear to him. ASSASSINATION AND DEATH. By close attention to the duties of her position as hostess of the Executive mansion and assistant to the President in the onerous duties devolving upon him in putting into active operation TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO - 503 the machinery of the new Government, in a building subject to the influence of the malaria ansing from the low grounds near the Whitehouse, Mrs. Garfield was attacked by a well nigh fatal disease that finally compelled her removal to the sea shore for complete recovery. She was taken to Long Branch before June was fairly opened, leaving the President to his multifarious duties, which he carried on with his wonted vigor,his mind at the same time filled with thoughts of her he missed in his every task. A few weeks of rest and quiet at the sea shore had almost restored her to her usual health, and preparations had been made by the President to take a short respite from the daily cares of official life. Arrangements had been made for his trip to Long Branch on the morning of the 2d of July, accompanied by Secretary Blaine and Colonel Rockwell, as well as his two sons, Harry and James Garfield, and their tutor, with two others of the family, members of the Cabinet also being of the party. The carriage containing the President, Secretary Blaine, and Colonel Rockwell arrived at the depot a short time before departure of the train. The Secretary preceded the President into the ladies' waiting room. The President had advanced but a few steps into the room when a man stepped behind him, drew a revolver, and fired directly at his back. The President threw his hand to his back, tottered, and fell forward upon his face. As he fell the assassin fired a second shot, but with no further injury. He was immediately seized and hurried away to close confinement. Sympathizing hands lifted the stricken President, placed him on a mattress, and conveyed him up the stairs to a private room connected with the officers' quarters of the railroad. There his wound was examined by Dr. Townsend, health officer of Washington, .Surgeon-general Barnes of the United States army, and Dr. D. W. Bliss, of Washington. It was thought best to at once remove the President to the White house, and an ambulance was called in which, guarded by a force of police, he was quickly conveyed to the place he had so lately left in perfect health, and in the full strength of his manhood. A telegraph message was at once sent to Mrs. Garfield, at Long Branch, acquainting her with the disaster that had befallen the President. A special train conveyed the grief stricken wife to the bedside of her husband, which she left only when absolutely necessary during the eleven long and sad weeks that followed. The report of the assassination of President Garfield produced great demonstrations of sorrow throughout the country, as well as in foreign lands. In no place was the grief deeper or more heartfelt than among his friends and neighbors in the district he had for so many years represented in Congress. The premature report of his death came like a clap of thunder in a clear sky. No one could imagine any cause why such a man should be laid low by an assassin's bullet, and the report could not be believed. Subsequent reports confirmed the shooting, but as life continued hope began to revive, and many expressed the belief that he might yet recover and resume his place among men. The wearisome watching and hope against hope were prolonged week after week, the stricken man gradually growing weaker as day followed day. As the weeks passed by the President frequently expressed a desire to return to his home near the quiet country village of Mentor, where he might rest. A consultation of the attending surgeons was held on the 4th of September, and on the morning of the 6th he was carefully conveyed 1n an express wagon to the car prepared to take him to the seaside cottage at Elberon. In the afternoon of the same day he was resting quietly in the cottage, listening to the ceaseless murmur of the waves upon the shore, and from his cot watching through the window the white sails of passing vessels. The days resumed their wearisome round, the sufferer each day becoming weaker. At length the end came. On the 12th of September it became evident to the attendants that the dreaded change was not far distant. Still he lingered on, brave and patient through all, until the night of the 19th. He had rested as well as usual during the day and at evening fell asleep. About 10 o'clock he was awakened by a terrible pain in the region of the heart. All was done that could be done, and at 10:35 the end had come. The noble, self-sacrificing man and President, James A. Garfield, had breathed his last. The rest is soon told. A post mortem examination demonstrated that death must surely have taken place from the nature of the wound. 504 - TRUMBULL AND MAHONING COUNTIES, OHIO. The ball had fractured the right eleventh rib, passed through the spinal column in front of the spinal canal, fracturing the body of the first lumbar vertebra, driving pieces of bone into the adjacent soft parts, and finally became encysted. Death was immediately caused by hemorrhage of one of the mesenteric arteries, a large quantity of blood finding its way into the abdominal cavity, which was probably the cause of the pain in the chest complained of a few moments before death. The body of the dead President was embalmed, and lay in view in the cottage where he passed his last hours until Wednesday morning, September 21st, when it was taken to the capitol at Washington. There the honors due the Chief Magistrate of a great nation were shown by his successor, his Cabinet, the members of both houses of Congress, besides vast multitudes of people—his friends and admirers. Friday the funeral train left the capital of the Nation for Cleveland, where the last resting place of the dead statesman had been selected. Along the line of the sad journey were gathered sympathizing men, women, and children to drop a tear to his memory as the swiftly-moving train passed by. The procession reached Cleveland Saturday, the 24th, and debarking at Euclid Avenue station, proceeded to the Public square, where appropriate arrangements had been made to render honor to him who living was honored and dead was not forgotten. The final exercises were held Monday, the 26th of September, the greatest concourse of people ever gathered in Cleveland being present on the occasion. The remains were deposited in a vault in the beautiful Lake View cemetery, where they were placed under the watchful guardianship of a company of United States soldiers. The man who fired the fatal shot, Charles J. Guiteau, was confined under a strong guard, and in due course of law was tried for the crime of murder; found guilty after a fair and impartial trial, and sentenced to be hung on the 30th of June, almost a year after the fatal shot was fired. While the memory of the assassin Guiteau will be forever execrated, the memory of the good and noble Garfield will be revered and kept fresh in the minds of childrens' children of those who knew and loved him.