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inverarityPOTUS #20: The end of the Republican-born-in-a-log-cabin era.
Simon & Schuster, 2023, 624 pages
The Gilded Age presidents in the post-Civil War era were mostly uninteresting and forgotten; in an era of relative peace and growing income inequality, names like Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, etc., are mostly known for bits of trivia about them and not for anything major they accomplished. Yet reading through their biographies, especially as they overlap and sometimes conflict with each other, has been very helpful in rounding out my understanding of American history. So I am to the twentieth president, James Garfield, mostly known for a cat and because of his grisly, lingering death.
Garfield was the last president to literally be born in a log cabin, and is mostly famous as the second president to be assassinated. For a man who was president for such a short time (only William Henry Harrison died earlier in his term), I found him to be pretty interesting (he had a long political career before he was elected president), and despite being a historical C-lister, this book was one of the better presidential biographies I've read. C.W. Goodyear's President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier is thorough and while the title gives you a clue as to his bias (it's a mostly flattering portrait), the author mostly tries to remain objective and only occasionally ventures an opinionated statement or criticism.
Was Garfield the Cat named after James Garfield? Kind of. Jim Davis named Garfield after his grandfather, James A. Garfield, who was named after the president.
In the post-Civil War era, most politicians had launched their careers during or as a result of the war, and new political tribes were forming in the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination and the collapse of Reconstruction. As the Southern states reintegrated into the Union and formed a new, very Southern Democratic party, Republicans became the party of Northern machine politics. James Garfield was probably about the best that could be expected of this era: personally a friendly and likeable man, with some genuine progressive convictions that had not changed since his pre-war abolitionist sentiments, he was honorable but not to a fault, and politically opportunistic.
Hidden Talents - yes, Garfield was multilingual, and he also published a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
Garfield was born in a log cabin in Ohio's "Western Reserve" (modern northeast Ohio), at that time a very backwoods place with a strong abolitionist sentiment. His father died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by a tough, strong-willed mother. Garfield showed himself to be both bookish and ambitious early on. As a youngster, he tried to run away to find work on his own. When he sought employment at the port in Cleveland, he was laughed off a ship by the captain and crew, but he did get a job as a canal boat driver. He had to return home after a few weeks due to illness; his mother persuaded him to at least finish another year of school before he set off again.
James and Lucretia's engagement photo
He attended a seminary school, and then was admitted to the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a liberal college founded by the Disciples of Christ church which still exists today as Hiram College. He became born-again during this time, and even worked part-time as a preacher. He also met his future wife, Lucretia Rudolph, who was also a student at the coed school. He would eventually go to university back east in Massachusetts, and then return to Ohio to become a teacher and then a principal at the Institute. He remained very religious throughout his life.
Lucretia, known as "Crete" to her friends and family, would become Garfield's long-suffering wife. She was intelligent, bookish like her husband, and like him not exactly the most romantic soul. The author's description of their relationship sounded at times like a pair of awkward school friends who decided to get married because it seemed the thing to do. Both James and Lucretia expressed reservations that they didn't feel like the other one was really passionate. Eventually it would be Crete who missed and pined for James during his military and political campaigning, begging him to write to her more (he always promised to but rarely did), while James would make decisions about his career and where they were moving with little thought to how she felt about it. Eventually, they would become closer and their later years seemed much happier, with James speaking very affectionately and admiringly about his wife, but she had to put up with a lot of loneliness, the deaths of several of their children, and an affair (which he admitted to her). She admitted at times to feeling trapped, unhappy, and constrained by her position, especially given her obvious intellectual abilities, and would almost certainly have welcomed the feminism of later generations.
Garfield entered politics as an Ohio state senator, but like most presidents of his era, the Civil War made his career. When the South seceded, he joined the Union Army out of genuine conviction; he had always been an abolitionist. He had no military experience, but like many politicians of the time, he became a "political officer" who received a commission just because of his status. He was aware that the troops generally did not have a high opinion of such political officers, so he spent a lot of time studying military strategy and tactics, and ended up being fairly competent and well-liked. He was initially commissioned as a Colonel in an Ohio infantry regiment, and would end the war as a Major General, so that he could forever after be referred to as "General Garfield" during political campaigning.
Garfield was present at many of the famous battles of the Civil War, from Shiloh to Chickamauga, and this book spends quite a few chapters on Garfield's war years. Garfield spent the first part of the war chasing Confederate General Humphrey Marshall around Kentucky, and the latter part of the war as a chief of staff. Some of the details covered in other biographies (such as George McClellan's insubordinate behavior towards Lincoln, and Grant's performance as a general) are only briefly mentioned here, but Garfield comes off looking quite good, especially at Chickamauga, where he showed more courage and strategic sense than his commanding officer, General Rosecrans.
Friends back in Ohio urged him to run for Congress. Like Rutherford Hayes, Garfield was interested, but he did not want to abandon his commission to run for office while the war was still on. Eventually Lincoln himself persuaded Garfield that he'd be more useful as a congressman than a general, and Garfield agreed to resign from the Army and began his congressional career.
Garfield would spend almost 20 years in Congress, and become the only sitting Congressman to be elected President. One of the "Radical Republicans" who wanted harsh terms imposed on the South and supported black suffrage, he thought Lincoln was too soft. After Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president, Garfield would consider Johnson a disaster and voted in favor of impeaching him.
Garfield became increasingly influential in Congress. He had a tense relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, going back to the war when Grant had passed him over for promotion, and survived several scandals, notably the Crédit Mobilier scandal (a number of Congressmen, including Garfield, were accused of being offered Union Pacific/Crédit Mobilier stock at below-market price in exchange for appropriating public funds for the railroad), and a "salary grab" in which Congress voted itself a retroactive 50% pay increase.
Garfield was never found guilty of anything, and Goodyear seems to consider him to have been innocent of willful corruption, but as other biographers have pointed out, he wasn't naive and could not have been completely unaware of the nature of the some of the deals he was offered.
Goodyear depicts Garfield as a mostly honest man, but someone willing to make compromises and political deals to his own advantage, the sort of politician who would rationalize reversing an earlier position as "changing his mind based on new circumstances." Almost certainly he never considered himself to have behaved dishonorably, and he was far less cynical than many of his contemporaries, who were more nakedly power-seeking and grifting machine politicians. Garfield was a willing part of the machine, though. He supported negro suffrage and was disappointed when Reconstruction failed, but while he was very progressive for the time, he was still willing to compromise with Southern Democrats when push came to shove.
Garfield's career as a lawyer gets little coverage; despite being a former Union general and a Congressman Garfield was never very wealthy and he entered into law practice while contemplating leaving politics. As with his military career, Garfield proved to be a pretty capable lawyer despite his lack of experience, and even argued a case before the Supreme Court.
In 1871 he traveled to Montana to try to work out an agreement with the Bitterroot Salish Indians. He found that contrary to what he'd been told, the Salish were not willing to be relocated. Garfield persuaded two of the three Salish chiefs to sign an agreement to move their reservation, but when the third chief refused, his signature somehow wound up forged on a treaty. Although Garfield considered himself a progressive with regard to Indian affairs, according to the author the Salish to this day remember Garfield as a villain who screwed them over.
I kind of want to read a biography of Roscoe Conkling.
In the post-Grant era, when Rutherford Hayes became president, the Democrats regained control of the House for the first time since before the war. Garfield's influence was reduced but he was widely seen as a future presidential contender. The Republican Party was split between "Stalwarts" who were loyal to Grant (who would attempt a third term as president in 1880) and who wanted to preserve the existing patronage system in the federal government, and "Half-Breeds" who wanted civil service reform. Patronage would be a defining issue for Republicans, and ironically, the reason Garfield would eventually be assassinated. Powerful politicians like New York Senator Roscoe Conkling liked the patronage system, which gave them immense power to hand out plum jobs to their political allies. Reformers pointed out that this amounted to a huge graft at taxpayer expense, and that many government jobs literally existed for no other purpose than to give a paycheck to politicians' friends.
Garfield was a reformer, but he wasn't really committed to reform, nor to using patronage to reward his own allies, and he considered the Half-Breeds to be unreasonable and moralizing. He got along with members of both factions, however, which is how he wound up being positioned as he was during the Republican National Convention in 1880.
Goodyear goes deep into the weeds on the Republican Convention of 1880. Going into the convention, there were several strong contenders: former president Ulysses S. Grant, who was seeking a third term; Senator Roscoe Conkling, the vain political boss of New York; Roscoe's arch-nemesis James Blaine, a "Half-Breed" Senator from Maine (Goodyear describes how Conkling held a grudge against Blaine for years after the latter called him a turkey on the floor of Congress); and John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Grant started out the front-runner, but after several ballots and a lot of political maneuvering, Blaine and Sherman supporters realized neither of them could win, and to oppose Conkling and Grant's Stalwarts, switched their support to James Garfield, who emerged as the dark horse winner of the nomination.
Roscoe Conkling as he was seen by the press and Congress.
There's a theme here...
James Blaine, Conkling's arch-nemesis and Garfield's Secretary of State.
I actually found the ins and outs of 19th century Republican machine politics to be really interesting; even if labels like "Stalwarts" and "Half-Breeds" are quaint political relics today, the factional disputes echo.
Garfield, with his desire to please everyone by forcing compromises that gave everyone only part of what they wanted, made the fateful choice of Chester Arthur as his running mate. Arthur, a crony of Roscoe Conkling and very much a cog in the New York political machine, was meant to placate the Stalwarts. Conkling made the mistake of believing that this meant he basically owned Chester Arthur and was now practically co-president. Garfield would soon disabuse Conkling of this, proving to have more of a spine than anyone expected once he was in the White House. Ironically, Chester Arthur would do likewise when he succeeded Garfield.
Garfield ran against another Civil War general, Winfield Scott Hancock. With the war and Reconstruction over, there weren't actually a lot of differences between the parties, though the Republicans tried to stir up antagonism against the Southern Democrats by "waving the bloody shirt" and accusing the Democrats of still being Confederates. The Republicans carried every Northern state and the Democrats carried every Southern state. Garfield won a very slim majority of the popular vote but a decisive victory in the Electoral College.
Garfield's presidency was not historically very consequential because it was so short. Much of his time was spent trying to smooth over factional discord in the Republican Party, and I again found the minutiae of Garfield's cabinet appointments to be surprisingly interesting. Civil service reform would be one of his biggest headaches, as was the constant flood of office-seekers. Garfield was plagued much as Lincoln was, by men accosting him day and night demanding he give them a government job. It's pretty wild to think that people would literally walk into the White House and line up to demand an audience with the President, sometimes for hours, because the President had the power to personally give out appointments for Postmaster of Podunk County or Chief Registrar of Bumfuck, Virginia.
While he had never been a firebreathing reformer, he showed his progressive bonafides once he was in the White House. He rejected Roscoe Conkling's demands that he hand out patronages on demand. As Goodyear goes into in some detail, though, Garfield was actually pretty generous with the Stalwarts, contrary to their bitter claims of being betrayed; he felt he had more than compromised with them, while they were unsatisfied with not getting everything they wanted. He supported black suffrage and while he didn't really do much to improve civil rights in the South, he was a big believer in education, and believed this was the key to uplifting blacks. He tried to start a National Department of Education, and while Congress did not support him, he spoke at Howard University, one of the first historically black universities, and handed out diplomas to graduating students. He also appointed many black constituents to key positions in the government.
James Garfield became the second president to be assassinated, but his assassin was probably not wrong that it was really his doctors who killed him. Presidents still didn't have much personal security and Garfield often walked around town without protection, so when he was shot on July 2, 1881, it was in public, at a train station in Washington, D.C., right in front of his Secretary of State and his Secretary of War — the latter being Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.
Charles Guiteau; did he have crazy eyes or what?
Charles J. Guiteau was one of the many office-seekers Garfield had turned away. A Republican who believed he was owed a federal position because of his efforts on their behalf, he approached Garfield, and then Secretary of State Blaine, demanding to be made consul in France, even though he was completely unqualified and basically a nobody. Both men politely turned him down and probably forgot about him.
Guiteau came to believe that he had been refused a position because he was a Stalwart, and the solution was to kill Garfield so that Chester Arthur would become president. He stalked Garfield for weeks, before shooting him and making a half-hearted attempt to escape. He would likely have been lynched on the spot if the police hadn't grabbed him first.
He even declared upon being arrested: "I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President."
Guiteau was almost certainly crazy (his behavior after his arrest and during his trial proved it). But Garfield took two long months to die. Even though he knew he was dying, he tried to continue performing his duties until he was no longer able to. He was the subject of intense attention from medical doctors, and had Alexander Graham Bell at his bedside, who invented the first metal detector to try to find the location of the bullet. His medical team also invented a crude early air conditioner to try to cool his room.
With modern medicine, he would probably have been up and walking around in a few days. But even by the standards of his time, his chief doctor, Doctor Willard Bliss, was something of a crank. The germ theory of disease was not yet widely accepted, but many doctors had figured out that poking your dirty fingers into a wound was not good for the patient, and that gangrene was not a healthy sign. Bliss, however, egotistical and certain of his theories, not only made Garfield's condition worse but also caused him weeks of agony by poking and prodding him, sticking fingers and tubes into the suppurating wound, and insisting that the increasing volume of puss coming out of the president was a sign of healing. The descriptions of Garfield's suffering and deteriorating condition on his prolonged deathbed are pretty harrowing, and that he was able to bear it, and even keep signing papers and talking to people, is pretty amazing.
I found Goodyear's account of the entire nation waiting and praying for the President's recovery touching; it was an era when even a president's political enemies would be shocked and distraught by someone trying to kill him.
Garfield's friends and family kept the severity of his condition a secret from his still-living mother, until he finally passed away in the New Jersey cottage where he'd been taken to recover, after two agonizing months.
I did not expect to find James Garfield so interesting. He was only president for less than a year, and he was basically a laissez fair moderate who had little impact. His death, however, had a major impact on civil service reform: the public blamed the Stalwarts for Garfield's assassination and turned against Roscoe Conkling and his minions and the entire patronage system. Congress blamed the office-seekers who had hounded Garfield on the events that led to his death. Chester Arthur, shaken by Garfield's murder, became a reformer.
Goodyear writes a thorough and mostly flattering portrait of Garfield; it's obvious that like many biographers, he chose to write a book about a man he admired. Garfield was not perfect; he was willing to compromise, keep his options open, and act out of political expediency rather than conviction. But he was intelligent, educated, and mostly principled; had he not been killed, he might have had a very successful presidency. This was unexpectedly one of my favorite presidential biographies so far, especially for a C-list president.
My complete list of book reviews.
Simon & Schuster, 2023, 624 pages
An “ambitious, thorough, supremely researched” (The Washington Post) biography of the extraordinary, tragic life of America’s twentieth president—James Garfield.
In “the most comprehensive Garfield biography in almost fifty years” (The Wall Street Journal), C.W. Goodyear charts the life and times of one of the most remarkable Americans ever to win the Presidency. Progressive firebrand and conservative compromiser; Union war hero and founder of the first Department of Education; Supreme Court attorney and abolitionist preacher; mathematician and canalman; crooked election-fixed and clean-government champion; Congressional chieftain and gentleman-farmer; the last president to be born in a log cabin; the second to be assassinated. James Abram Garfield was all these things and more.
Over nearly two decades in Congress during a polarized era—Reconstruction and the Gilded Age—Garfield served as a peacemaker in a Republican Party and America defined by divisions. He was elected to overcome them. He was killed while trying to do so.
President Garfield is American history at its finest. It is about an impoverished boy working his way from the frontier to the Presidency; a progressive statesman, trying to raise a more righteous, peaceful Republic out of the ashes of civil war; the tragically imperfect course of that reformation, and the man himself; a martyr-President, whose death succeeded in nudging the country back to cleaner, calmer politics.
The Gilded Age presidents in the post-Civil War era were mostly uninteresting and forgotten; in an era of relative peace and growing income inequality, names like Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, etc., are mostly known for bits of trivia about them and not for anything major they accomplished. Yet reading through their biographies, especially as they overlap and sometimes conflict with each other, has been very helpful in rounding out my understanding of American history. So I am to the twentieth president, James Garfield, mostly known for a cat and because of his grisly, lingering death.
Garfield was the last president to literally be born in a log cabin, and is mostly famous as the second president to be assassinated. For a man who was president for such a short time (only William Henry Harrison died earlier in his term), I found him to be pretty interesting (he had a long political career before he was elected president), and despite being a historical C-lister, this book was one of the better presidential biographies I've read. C.W. Goodyear's President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier is thorough and while the title gives you a clue as to his bias (it's a mostly flattering portrait), the author mostly tries to remain objective and only occasionally ventures an opinionated statement or criticism.
Was Garfield the Cat named after James Garfield? Kind of. Jim Davis named Garfield after his grandfather, James A. Garfield, who was named after the president.
In the post-Civil War era, most politicians had launched their careers during or as a result of the war, and new political tribes were forming in the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination and the collapse of Reconstruction. As the Southern states reintegrated into the Union and formed a new, very Southern Democratic party, Republicans became the party of Northern machine politics. James Garfield was probably about the best that could be expected of this era: personally a friendly and likeable man, with some genuine progressive convictions that had not changed since his pre-war abolitionist sentiments, he was honorable but not to a fault, and politically opportunistic.
Backwoods Seminary Student and Preacher
Hidden Talents - yes, Garfield was multilingual, and he also published a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
Garfield was born in a log cabin in Ohio's "Western Reserve" (modern northeast Ohio), at that time a very backwoods place with a strong abolitionist sentiment. His father died when he was young, leaving him to be raised by a tough, strong-willed mother. Garfield showed himself to be both bookish and ambitious early on. As a youngster, he tried to run away to find work on his own. When he sought employment at the port in Cleveland, he was laughed off a ship by the captain and crew, but he did get a job as a canal boat driver. He had to return home after a few weeks due to illness; his mother persuaded him to at least finish another year of school before he set off again.
James and Lucretia's engagement photo
He attended a seminary school, and then was admitted to the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a liberal college founded by the Disciples of Christ church which still exists today as Hiram College. He became born-again during this time, and even worked part-time as a preacher. He also met his future wife, Lucretia Rudolph, who was also a student at the coed school. He would eventually go to university back east in Massachusetts, and then return to Ohio to become a teacher and then a principal at the Institute. He remained very religious throughout his life.
Lucretia, known as "Crete" to her friends and family, would become Garfield's long-suffering wife. She was intelligent, bookish like her husband, and like him not exactly the most romantic soul. The author's description of their relationship sounded at times like a pair of awkward school friends who decided to get married because it seemed the thing to do. Both James and Lucretia expressed reservations that they didn't feel like the other one was really passionate. Eventually it would be Crete who missed and pined for James during his military and political campaigning, begging him to write to her more (he always promised to but rarely did), while James would make decisions about his career and where they were moving with little thought to how she felt about it. Eventually, they would become closer and their later years seemed much happier, with James speaking very affectionately and admiringly about his wife, but she had to put up with a lot of loneliness, the deaths of several of their children, and an affair (which he admitted to her). She admitted at times to feeling trapped, unhappy, and constrained by her position, especially given her obvious intellectual abilities, and would almost certainly have welcomed the feminism of later generations.
General Garfield
Garfield entered politics as an Ohio state senator, but like most presidents of his era, the Civil War made his career. When the South seceded, he joined the Union Army out of genuine conviction; he had always been an abolitionist. He had no military experience, but like many politicians of the time, he became a "political officer" who received a commission just because of his status. He was aware that the troops generally did not have a high opinion of such political officers, so he spent a lot of time studying military strategy and tactics, and ended up being fairly competent and well-liked. He was initially commissioned as a Colonel in an Ohio infantry regiment, and would end the war as a Major General, so that he could forever after be referred to as "General Garfield" during political campaigning.
Garfield was present at many of the famous battles of the Civil War, from Shiloh to Chickamauga, and this book spends quite a few chapters on Garfield's war years. Garfield spent the first part of the war chasing Confederate General Humphrey Marshall around Kentucky, and the latter part of the war as a chief of staff. Some of the details covered in other biographies (such as George McClellan's insubordinate behavior towards Lincoln, and Grant's performance as a general) are only briefly mentioned here, but Garfield comes off looking quite good, especially at Chickamauga, where he showed more courage and strategic sense than his commanding officer, General Rosecrans.
Friends back in Ohio urged him to run for Congress. Like Rutherford Hayes, Garfield was interested, but he did not want to abandon his commission to run for office while the war was still on. Eventually Lincoln himself persuaded Garfield that he'd be more useful as a congressman than a general, and Garfield agreed to resign from the Army and began his congressional career.
A Morally Flexible Congressman
Garfield would spend almost 20 years in Congress, and become the only sitting Congressman to be elected President. One of the "Radical Republicans" who wanted harsh terms imposed on the South and supported black suffrage, he thought Lincoln was too soft. After Lincoln was assassinated and Andrew Johnson became president, Garfield would consider Johnson a disaster and voted in favor of impeaching him.
Garfield became increasingly influential in Congress. He had a tense relationship with Ulysses S. Grant, going back to the war when Grant had passed him over for promotion, and survived several scandals, notably the Crédit Mobilier scandal (a number of Congressmen, including Garfield, were accused of being offered Union Pacific/Crédit Mobilier stock at below-market price in exchange for appropriating public funds for the railroad), and a "salary grab" in which Congress voted itself a retroactive 50% pay increase.
Garfield was never found guilty of anything, and Goodyear seems to consider him to have been innocent of willful corruption, but as other biographers have pointed out, he wasn't naive and could not have been completely unaware of the nature of the some of the deals he was offered.
Goodyear depicts Garfield as a mostly honest man, but someone willing to make compromises and political deals to his own advantage, the sort of politician who would rationalize reversing an earlier position as "changing his mind based on new circumstances." Almost certainly he never considered himself to have behaved dishonorably, and he was far less cynical than many of his contemporaries, who were more nakedly power-seeking and grifting machine politicians. Garfield was a willing part of the machine, though. He supported negro suffrage and was disappointed when Reconstruction failed, but while he was very progressive for the time, he was still willing to compromise with Southern Democrats when push came to shove.
Garfield's career as a lawyer gets little coverage; despite being a former Union general and a Congressman Garfield was never very wealthy and he entered into law practice while contemplating leaving politics. As with his military career, Garfield proved to be a pretty capable lawyer despite his lack of experience, and even argued a case before the Supreme Court.
In 1871 he traveled to Montana to try to work out an agreement with the Bitterroot Salish Indians. He found that contrary to what he'd been told, the Salish were not willing to be relocated. Garfield persuaded two of the three Salish chiefs to sign an agreement to move their reservation, but when the third chief refused, his signature somehow wound up forged on a treaty. Although Garfield considered himself a progressive with regard to Indian affairs, according to the author the Salish to this day remember Garfield as a villain who screwed them over.
Stalwarts and Half-Breeds
I kind of want to read a biography of Roscoe Conkling.
In the post-Grant era, when Rutherford Hayes became president, the Democrats regained control of the House for the first time since before the war. Garfield's influence was reduced but he was widely seen as a future presidential contender. The Republican Party was split between "Stalwarts" who were loyal to Grant (who would attempt a third term as president in 1880) and who wanted to preserve the existing patronage system in the federal government, and "Half-Breeds" who wanted civil service reform. Patronage would be a defining issue for Republicans, and ironically, the reason Garfield would eventually be assassinated. Powerful politicians like New York Senator Roscoe Conkling liked the patronage system, which gave them immense power to hand out plum jobs to their political allies. Reformers pointed out that this amounted to a huge graft at taxpayer expense, and that many government jobs literally existed for no other purpose than to give a paycheck to politicians' friends.
Garfield was a reformer, but he wasn't really committed to reform, nor to using patronage to reward his own allies, and he considered the Half-Breeds to be unreasonable and moralizing. He got along with members of both factions, however, which is how he wound up being positioned as he was during the Republican National Convention in 1880.
Goodyear goes deep into the weeds on the Republican Convention of 1880. Going into the convention, there were several strong contenders: former president Ulysses S. Grant, who was seeking a third term; Senator Roscoe Conkling, the vain political boss of New York; Roscoe's arch-nemesis James Blaine, a "Half-Breed" Senator from Maine (Goodyear describes how Conkling held a grudge against Blaine for years after the latter called him a turkey on the floor of Congress); and John Sherman, the brother of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Grant started out the front-runner, but after several ballots and a lot of political maneuvering, Blaine and Sherman supporters realized neither of them could win, and to oppose Conkling and Grant's Stalwarts, switched their support to James Garfield, who emerged as the dark horse winner of the nomination.
Roscoe Conkling as he was seen by the press and Congress.
There's a theme here...
James Blaine, Conkling's arch-nemesis and Garfield's Secretary of State.
I actually found the ins and outs of 19th century Republican machine politics to be really interesting; even if labels like "Stalwarts" and "Half-Breeds" are quaint political relics today, the factional disputes echo.
Garfield, with his desire to please everyone by forcing compromises that gave everyone only part of what they wanted, made the fateful choice of Chester Arthur as his running mate. Arthur, a crony of Roscoe Conkling and very much a cog in the New York political machine, was meant to placate the Stalwarts. Conkling made the mistake of believing that this meant he basically owned Chester Arthur and was now practically co-president. Garfield would soon disabuse Conkling of this, proving to have more of a spine than anyone expected once he was in the White House. Ironically, Chester Arthur would do likewise when he succeeded Garfield.
The Election of 1880
Garfield ran against another Civil War general, Winfield Scott Hancock. With the war and Reconstruction over, there weren't actually a lot of differences between the parties, though the Republicans tried to stir up antagonism against the Southern Democrats by "waving the bloody shirt" and accusing the Democrats of still being Confederates. The Republicans carried every Northern state and the Democrats carried every Southern state. Garfield won a very slim majority of the popular vote but a decisive victory in the Electoral College.
Garfield's presidency was not historically very consequential because it was so short. Much of his time was spent trying to smooth over factional discord in the Republican Party, and I again found the minutiae of Garfield's cabinet appointments to be surprisingly interesting. Civil service reform would be one of his biggest headaches, as was the constant flood of office-seekers. Garfield was plagued much as Lincoln was, by men accosting him day and night demanding he give them a government job. It's pretty wild to think that people would literally walk into the White House and line up to demand an audience with the President, sometimes for hours, because the President had the power to personally give out appointments for Postmaster of Podunk County or Chief Registrar of Bumfuck, Virginia.
While he had never been a firebreathing reformer, he showed his progressive bonafides once he was in the White House. He rejected Roscoe Conkling's demands that he hand out patronages on demand. As Goodyear goes into in some detail, though, Garfield was actually pretty generous with the Stalwarts, contrary to their bitter claims of being betrayed; he felt he had more than compromised with them, while they were unsatisfied with not getting everything they wanted. He supported black suffrage and while he didn't really do much to improve civil rights in the South, he was a big believer in education, and believed this was the key to uplifting blacks. He tried to start a National Department of Education, and while Congress did not support him, he spoke at Howard University, one of the first historically black universities, and handed out diplomas to graduating students. He also appointed many black constituents to key positions in the government.
"Yes, I shot the President, but his physicians killed him."
James Garfield became the second president to be assassinated, but his assassin was probably not wrong that it was really his doctors who killed him. Presidents still didn't have much personal security and Garfield often walked around town without protection, so when he was shot on July 2, 1881, it was in public, at a train station in Washington, D.C., right in front of his Secretary of State and his Secretary of War — the latter being Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln.
Charles Guiteau; did he have crazy eyes or what?
Charles J. Guiteau was one of the many office-seekers Garfield had turned away. A Republican who believed he was owed a federal position because of his efforts on their behalf, he approached Garfield, and then Secretary of State Blaine, demanding to be made consul in France, even though he was completely unqualified and basically a nobody. Both men politely turned him down and probably forgot about him.
Guiteau came to believe that he had been refused a position because he was a Stalwart, and the solution was to kill Garfield so that Chester Arthur would become president. He stalked Garfield for weeks, before shooting him and making a half-hearted attempt to escape. He would likely have been lynched on the spot if the police hadn't grabbed him first.
He even declared upon being arrested: "I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President."
Guiteau was almost certainly crazy (his behavior after his arrest and during his trial proved it). But Garfield took two long months to die. Even though he knew he was dying, he tried to continue performing his duties until he was no longer able to. He was the subject of intense attention from medical doctors, and had Alexander Graham Bell at his bedside, who invented the first metal detector to try to find the location of the bullet. His medical team also invented a crude early air conditioner to try to cool his room.
With modern medicine, he would probably have been up and walking around in a few days. But even by the standards of his time, his chief doctor, Doctor Willard Bliss, was something of a crank. The germ theory of disease was not yet widely accepted, but many doctors had figured out that poking your dirty fingers into a wound was not good for the patient, and that gangrene was not a healthy sign. Bliss, however, egotistical and certain of his theories, not only made Garfield's condition worse but also caused him weeks of agony by poking and prodding him, sticking fingers and tubes into the suppurating wound, and insisting that the increasing volume of puss coming out of the president was a sign of healing. The descriptions of Garfield's suffering and deteriorating condition on his prolonged deathbed are pretty harrowing, and that he was able to bear it, and even keep signing papers and talking to people, is pretty amazing.
I found Goodyear's account of the entire nation waiting and praying for the President's recovery touching; it was an era when even a president's political enemies would be shocked and distraught by someone trying to kill him.
Garfield's friends and family kept the severity of his condition a secret from his still-living mother, until he finally passed away in the New Jersey cottage where he'd been taken to recover, after two agonizing months.
Reviewing the Biography
I did not expect to find James Garfield so interesting. He was only president for less than a year, and he was basically a laissez fair moderate who had little impact. His death, however, had a major impact on civil service reform: the public blamed the Stalwarts for Garfield's assassination and turned against Roscoe Conkling and his minions and the entire patronage system. Congress blamed the office-seekers who had hounded Garfield on the events that led to his death. Chester Arthur, shaken by Garfield's murder, became a reformer.
Goodyear writes a thorough and mostly flattering portrait of Garfield; it's obvious that like many biographers, he chose to write a book about a man he admired. Garfield was not perfect; he was willing to compromise, keep his options open, and act out of political expediency rather than conviction. But he was intelligent, educated, and mostly principled; had he not been killed, he might have had a very successful presidency. This was unexpectedly one of my favorite presidential biographies so far, especially for a C-list president.
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