James Abram Garfield, the twentieth President of the United States, was a large, athletic man with blonde hair and a well-kept beard. He was a talented orator and writer, who spent most of his time in pursuit of academics. Driven by a desire to please everybody, he was warm and friendly to the extreme. His indecisiveness and need for social acceptance made him fodder for the rival factions of the Republican Party, the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds, to use against one another. In the end it was the Half-Breeds who won the majority of appointments to his cabinet. When President Garfield was assassinated by an emotionally disturbed Stalwart who believed he had been wrongfully passed over for a position in government, the nation began to seriously reexamine the practice of doling out government jobs on the basis of political patronage.
James Abram Garfield was born on November 19, 1831, in Orange, Cuyahoga County, Ohio. He was the youngest of five children born to Eliza and Abram Garfield, who owned a small farm on the frontier. Abram died when his youngest son James was only one year old. Eliza was forced to sell the majority of the family's land to pay off debts. The family survived by farming a small portion of what had been an already small farm. James went to elementary school during the three winter months and worked on the farm the rest of the year. James had a romantic sensibility that craved adventure. When he was seventeen, he took a job driving the horse and mule trains that towed barges up and down the Ohio and Erie canals. In 1849 James entered Geauga Seminary in Chester, Ohio where he received his secondary education. He worked as a carpenter to pay his tuition. In 1851 James enrolled in the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College) and was soon hired as an English teacher. James taught and studied at Western until he had saved up enough money to attend Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. In 1856, James A. Garfield graduated with honors from Williams College. He returned to Hiram, Ohio, where he assumed the position of president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute and began studying law. Garfield was elected to the Ohio Senate as a Republican in 1859. The following year he passed the Ohio bar.
On November 11, 1858, James A. Garfield married Lucretia Randolph, one of his students at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. The couple had five sons and two daughters. James Rudolph Garfield served as Secretary of the Interior under President Theodore Roosevelt. Harry Augustus Garfield became the president of Williams College and served as fuel administrator under President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.
When Southern troops attacked Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, President Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion. James A. Garfield joined the forty-second regiment of the Ohio Volunteers and was commissioned with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. After the Battle of Middle Creek, Kentucky on January 10,1862, Garfield was promoted to colonel. The Battle of Shiloh, on April 7,1862, earned Garfield a promotion to brigadier general. Garfield fell ill in July of 1862 and returned to Ohio for a few months. Just after Garfield returned to the army in September of 1862, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, but refused to leave the army for a seat in Congress. Though the Union forces were defeated at the Battle of Chickamauga in September of 1863, Garfield was cited for bravery and promoted to major general.
James A. Garfield resigned his army commission on December 5, 1863 and took his seat in Congress two days later. He served seventeen years in Congress, being re-elected eight times. In Congress he was an eloquent speaker for Republican policies. He supported the harsh Reconstruction plan offered by the more radical members of the Republican Party. He served on the Military Affairs committee, on the Committee of Ways and Means, and was chairman on the first committee of Banking and Currency. In 1876 and 1877, he served on the Electoral Commission that pronounced Rutherford B. Hayes President over Samuel J. Tilden. While the Democrats held the majority in the House from 1877 to 1879, Garfield served as Republican minority leader.
President Hayes did not seek the nomination for re-election at the Republican National Convention of 1880. At the convention, the Republican Party was split between the radical Stalwarts, headed by the New York Senator Roscoe Conkling who supported former President Grant for the nomination, and the Half-Breeds, headed by Senator James G. Blaine whose nomination was Senator James G. Blaine. When it became clear that neither the Stalwarts nor the Half-Breeds were going to be able to pull a two thirds majority to secure the nomination, the party began to look for a dark horse. Garfield nominated John Sherman of Ohio, but was nominated himself by someone else. On the thirty-sixth ballot James A. Garfield was nominated for the Presidency by the Republican Party. To quell the objection of the Stalwarts, Chester A. Arthur was nominated as the Vice President.
The Democrats nominated Winfield Scott Hancock of Pennsylvania, who had distinguished himself at the Battle of Gettysburg, as their candidate for the Presidency. Meanwhile, Garfield had been implicated in the Credit Mobiler Scandal of the Grant Administration. He had been convicted of receiving minor kickbacks on the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad. But despite the efforts of the Democrats to exploit Garfield's involvement in Credit Mobiler, Garfield won by a narrow margin in both the popular election and the electoral college. James A. Garfield became the twentieth President of the United States on March 4, 1881.
President Garfield's cabinet heavily favored the Half-Breed faction of the Republican Party. The Stalwarts, under Conkling, objected loudly, and even tried to block some of the appointments. On March 23, 1881, President Garfield appointed William Robertson, a major political rival of Senator Conkling, collector of the Port of New York. Conkling and a small number of Stalwart Senators resigned their seats in protest of Robertson's appointment. Conkling also asked voters to show their disapproval of all of the President's appointments by re-electing the protesting Stalwarts to the Senate. Conkling and his supporters failed to regain their seats in the midterm election.
On July 2, 1881 President Garfield was in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington D.C., waiting to board a train that would take him to Massachusetts where he planned to deliver the Commencement address at Williams College, when a man approached the President from behind and yelled, "I'm a Stalwart; now Arthur is President!" before firing two shots. The first bullet entered the President's back, while the second hit his arm. The President was taken to the White House where he lived for two months while doctors tried repeatedly tried to remove the bullet lodged near his spine. On September 6, President Garfield moved to Elberon New Jersey where he hoped the sea air would help his recovery. President James A. Garfield died on September 19, 1881 of an infection.
The assassin turned out to be Charles J. Guiteau, a Stalwart who had worked on the Garfield campaign, but who was not directly connected to Roscoe Conkling. Guiteau had become incensed when he failed to receive a diplomatic position for his efforts on the President's campaign. Guiteau's attorney pleaded innocent by way of insanity, but Guiteau was found guilty. He was executed in Washington D.C. on June 30, 1882.
