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U.S Presidents — James A. Garfield | |||||||||||||||||
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OVERVIEW
Name: James A. Garfield
President: # 20 Term Number(s): 24 Term Length: 0.5 Took Office: March 4, 1881 Left Office: September 19, 1881 Age when Elected: 49 Party: Republican Also Known As: "The Preacher President" BIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Education: Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, Williams College
Occupation: Lawyer, Educator, Minister Other Governmental Position: Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio's 19th District. Military Service: Major General Religion: Church of Christ Spouse(s): Lucretia Rudolph Garfield (November 11, 1858) Children: Eliza Arabella Garfield, Harry Augustus Garfield, James Rudolph Garfield, Mary Garfield Stanley Brown, Irvin McDowell Garfield, Abram Garfield, Edward Garfield
Birthdate: November 19, 1831
Birthplace: Moreland Hills, Ohio Deathdate: September 19, 1881 Deathplace: Elberon (Long Branch), New Jersey Age at Death: 49 Cause of Death: infection and internal hemorrhage Place of Internment: Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, Ohio  Signature FIRST ELECTION
Election Year: 1880
Main Opponent: Winfield Hancock Voter Participation: N/A
CABINET AND COURT APPOINTMENTS
Vice President: Chester A. Arthur
Secretary of State: James G. Blaine (1881) Secretary of the Treasury: William Windom (1881) Secretary of War: Robert Todd Lincoln (1881) Secretary of the Navy: William H. Hunt (1881) Secretary of the Interior: Samuel J. Kirkwood (1881) Attorney General: Wayne MacVeagh (1881) Postmaster General: Thomas L. James (1881) Supreme Court Assignments: Stanley Matthews (1889) PRESIDENT'S BIOGRAPHY Garfield was born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1831. Fatherless at two, he later drove canal boat teams, somehow earning enough money for an education. He was graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1856, and he returned to the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College) in Ohio as a classics professor. Within a year he was made its president. Garfield was elected to the Ohio Senate in 1859 as a Republican. During the secession crisis, he advocated coercing the seceding states back into the Union. In 1862, when Union military victories had been few, he successfully led a brigade at Middle Creek, Kentucky, against Confederate troops. At 31, Garfield became a brigadier general, two years later a major general of volunteers. Meanwhile, in 1862, Ohioans elected Garfield to Congress. President Lincoln persuaded him to resign his commission: It was easier to find major generals than to obtain effective Republicans for Congress. Garfield repeatedly won re-election for 18 years, and became the leading Republican in the House. At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield failed to win the Presidential nomination for his friend John Sherman. Finally, on the 36th ballot, Garfield himself became the "dark horse" nominee. By a margin of only 10,000 popular votes, Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee, General Winfield Scott Hancock.  But Garfield would not submit. He stated, "This...will settle the question whether the President is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States... shall the principal port of entry... be under the control of the administration or under the local control of a factional senator." Conkling maneuvered to have the Senate confirm Garfield's uncontested nominations and adjourn without acting on Robertson. Garfield countered by withdrawing all nominations except Robertson's. The senators would have to confirm him or sacrifice all the appointments of Conkling's friends. In a final desperate move, Conkling and his fellow senator from New York resigned, confident that their legislature would vindicate their stand and re-elect them. Instead, the legislature elected two other men; the Senate confirmed Robertson. Garfield's victory was complete. In foreign affairs, Garfield's Secretary of State invited all American republics to a conference to meet in Washington in 1882. But the conference never took place. On July 2, 1881, in a Washington railroad station, an embittered attorney who had sought a consular post shot the president. Mortally wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for weeks. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed. On September 6, Garfield was taken to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating, but on September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage. FIRST LADY'S BIOGRAPHY Lucretia Rudolph Garfield Her love of learning she acquired from her father, Zeb Rudolph, a leading citizen of Hiram, Ohio, and devout member of the Disciples of Christ. She first met "Jim" Garfield when both attended a nearby school, and they renewed their friendship in 1851 as students at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, founded by the Disciples. But "Crete" did not attract Garfield's special attention until December 1853, when he began a rather cautious courtship, and they did not marry until November 1858, when he was well launched on his career as a teacher. His service in the Union Army from 1861 to 1863 kept them apart; their first child, a daughter, died in 1863. But after his first lonely winter in Washington as a freshman representative, the family remained together. With a home in the capital as well as one in Ohio they enjoyed a happy domestic life. A two-year-old son died in 1876, but five children grew up healthy and promising; with the passage of time, Lucretia became more and more her husband's companion. In Washington they shared intellectual interests with congenial friends; she went with him to meetings of a locally celebrated literary society. They read together, made social calls together, dined with each other and traveled in company until by 1880 they were as nearly inseparable as his career permitted. Garfield's election to the Presidency brought a cheerful family to the White House in 1881. Though Mrs. Garfield was not particularly interested in a first lady's social duties, she was deeply conscientious and her genuine hospitality made her dinners and twice-weekly receptions enjoyable. At the age of 49 she was still a slender, graceful little woman with clear dark eyes, her brown hair beginning to show traces of silver. In May Mrs. Garfield fell gravely ill, apparently from malaria and nervous exhaustion, to her husband's profound distress. "When you are sick," he had written her seven years earlier, "I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes." She was still a convalescent, at a seaside resort in New Jersey, when he was shot by an assassin on July 2, 1881. She returned to Washington by special train—"frail, fatigued, desperate," reported an eyewitness at the White House, "but firm and quiet and full of purpose to save." During the three months her husband fought for his life, Mrs. Garfield's grief, devotion, and fortitude won the respect and sympathy of the country. In September, after his death, the bereaved family went home to their farm in Ohio. For another 36 years she led a strictly private but busy and comfortable life, active in preserving the records of her husband's career. She died on March 14, 1918. MAJOR EVENTS
1881: Clara Barton establishes the American Association of the Red Cross in Washington D.C.
1881: Tuskegee University is established in Tuskegee, Alabama. Booker T. Washington is the first president of the school.
1881: President Garfield is shot by Charles Julius Guiteau and dies of blood poisoning.
TRIVIA
1. Garfield was the first president to be assassinated. Charles J. Guiteau, his assassin, was convicted in one of the first high-profile cases where the insanity defense was used. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, created a metal detector to try to locate where the assassin's bullet had lodged in Garfield's body. Because he was lying in a metal bed, the machine did not work properly.
2. On January 12, 2010, a life insurance policy on Garfield's life was discovered in a family scrapbook. It had been submitted by Garfield's wife, Lucretia Garfield, and Joseph Stanley-Brown 45 days prior to his being shot by Charles Guiteau.
3. Garfield enjoyed juggling Indian clubs for physical fitness. This was a popular form of excercise during the health-obsessed Victorian age.
4. Garfield was ambidextrous and would entertain friends by writing simultaneously in different languages with each hand.
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