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James A. Garfield
James Abram Garfield was the 20th President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1881,
until his assassination later that year.
Garfield had served nine terms in the House of Representatives, and had been elected
to the Senate before his candidacy for the White House,
though he declined the Senate seat once he was elected President.
He is the only sitting House member to be elected president. Garfield was raised
by his widowed mother in humble circumstances on an Ohio farm. He worked at various jobs,
including on a canal boat, in his youth. Beginning at age 17, he attended several Ohio schools,
then studied at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, graduating in 1856. A year later,
Garfield entered politics as a Republican. He married Lucretia Rudolph in 1858,
and served as a member of the Ohio State Senate. Garfield opposed Confederate secession,
served as a major general in the Union Army during the American Civil War,
and fought in the battles of Middle Creek, Shiloh, and Chickamauga. He was first elected
to Congress in 1862 to represent Ohio's 19th District.
Throughout Garfield's extended congressional service after the Civil War,
he firmly supported the gold standard and gained a reputation as a skilled orator.
Garfield initially agreed with Radical Republican views regarding Reconstruction,
but later favored a moderate approach for civil rights enforcement for freedmen.
At the 1880 Republican National Convention, Senator-elect Garfield attended as campaign manager
for Secretary of the Treasury John Sherman, and gave the presidential nomination speech for him.
When neither Sherman nor his rivals – Ulysses S. Grant and James G.
Blaine – could get enough votes to secure the nomination,
delegates chose Garfield as a compromise on the 36th ballot. In the 1880 presidential election,
Garfield conducted a low-key front porch campaign,
and narrowly defeated Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.
Garfield's accomplishments as president included a resurgence of presidential authority against
senatorial courtesy in executive appointments, energizing American naval power,
and purging corruption in the Post Office, all during his extremely short time in office.
Garfield made notable diplomatic and judiciary appointments, including a U.S.
Supreme Court justice. He enhanced the powers of the presidency
when he defied the powerful New York senator Roscoe Conkling by appointing William H. Robertson
to the lucrative post of Collector of the Port of New York, starting a fracas that ended
with Robertson's confirmation and Conkling's resignation from the Senate.
Garfield advocated agricultural technology, an educated electorate, and civil rights
for African Americans. He also proposed substantial civil service reform, eventually passed
by Congress in 1883 and signed into law by his successor, Chester A. Arthur,
as the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. On July 2, 1881, he was shot at the Baltimore
and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington D.C. by Charles J. Guiteau, a lawyer and writer
with a grievance. The wound was not immediately fatal for Garfield, but his doctors' uncleaned
and unprotected hands are said to have led to infection that caused his death on September 19.
Guiteau was convicted of the murder and was executed in June 1882; he tried
to name his crime as simple assault by blaming the doctors for Garfield's death.
With his term cut short by his death after only 200 days, and much of it spent in ill health trying
to recover from the attack, Garfield is little-remembered other than for his assassination;
historians often forgo listing him in rankings of U.S. presidents due
to the short length of his presidency.
Childhood
 [^]  James Garfield was born the youngest of five children on November 19, 1831,
in a log cabin in Orange Township, now Moreland Hills, Ohio.
Orange Township was located in the Western Reserve, and like many who settled there,
Garfield's ancestors were from New England, his ancestor, Edward Garfield immigrating
from Hillmorton, Warwickshire, England, to Massachusetts in around 1630.
James' father Abram had been born in Worcester, New York, and came to Ohio
to woo his childhood sweetheart, Mehitabel Ballou, only to find her married.
He instead wed her sister Eliza, who had been born in New Hampshire. James was named
for an older brother, dead in infancy. In early 1833, Abram
and Eliza Garfield joined the Church of Christ,
a decision that would help shape their youngest son's life. Abram Garfield died later that year;
his son was raised in poverty in a household led by the strong-willed Eliza.
James was her favorite child, and the two remained close for the rest of her life.
Eliza Garfield remarried in 1842, but soon left her second husband, Warren Belden,
and a then-scandalous divorce was awarded against her in 1850. James took his mother's side and
when Belden died in 1880, noted the fact in his diary with satisfaction.
Garfield enjoyed his mother's stories about his ancestry,
especially his Welsh great-great-grandfathers
and his ancestor who served as a knight of Caerffili Castle. Poor and fatherless,
Garfield was mocked by his fellow boys, and throughout his life was very sensitive to slights.
He escaped through reading, devouring all the books he could find. He left home at age 16 in 1847.
Rejected by the only ship in port in Cleveland, Garfield instead found work on a canal boat,
responsible for managing the mules that pulled it. This labor would be used to good effect
by Horatio Alger, who penned Garfield's campaign biography in 1880. After six weeks,
illness forced Garfield to return home and, during his recuperation, his mother
and a local education official got him to promise to postpone his return to the canals for a year
and go to school. Accordingly, in 1848, he began at Geauga Seminary, in nearby Chester Township.
Garfield later said of his childhood, "I lament that I was born to poverty,
and in this chaos of childhood, seventeen years passed before I caught any inspiration.
a precious 17 years when a boy with a father and some wealth might have become fixed in manly ways."
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