From Canal Boy to President; Or, the Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield

Young Garfield was anxious to learn the language of Goethe and Schiller, and embraced the opportunity afforded at college to enter upon the study of German. He was not content with a mere smattering, but learned it well enough to converse in it as well as to read it.

So most profitably the Junior year was spent, but unhappily James had spent all the money which he had brought with him. Should he leave college to earn more? Fortunately, this was not necessary. Thomas Garfield, always unselfishly devoted to the family, hoped to supply his younger brother with the necessary sum, in installments; but proving unable, his old friend, Dr. Robinson, came to his assistance.

"You can pay me when you are able, James," he said.

"If I live I will pay you, doctor. If I do not—"

He paused, for an idea struck him.

"I will insure my life for eight hundred dollars," he continued, "and place the policy in your hands. Then, whether I live or die, you will be secure."

"I do not require this, James," said the doctor kindly.

"Then I feel all the more under obligations to secure you in return for your generous confidence."

It was a sensible and business-like proposal, and the doctor assented. The strong, vigorous young man had no difficulty in securing a policy from a reputable company, and went back to college at the commencement of the Senior year. I wish to add that the young man scrupulously repaid the good doctor's timely loan, for had he failed to do so, I could not have held him up to my young readers as in all respects a model.

There was published at Williams College, in Garfield's time, a magazine called the Williams Quarterly. To this the young man became a frequent contributor. In Gen. James S. Brisbin's campaign Life of Garfield, I find three of his poetic contributions quoted, two of which I will also transfer to my pages, as likely to possess some interest for my young reader. The first is called

"THE CHARGE OF THE TIGHT BRIGADE,"

and commences thus:

"Bottles to right of them,Bottles to left of them,Bottles in front of them,Fizzled and sundered;Ent'ring with shout and yell,Boldly they drank and well,They caught the Tartar then;Oh, what a perfect sell!Sold—the half hundred!Grinned all the dentals bare,Swung all their caps in air,Uncorking bottles there,Watching the Freshmen, whileEvery one wondered;Plunged in tobacco smoke,With many a desperate stroke,Dozens of bottles broke;Then they came back, but not,Not the half hundred!"

Lest from this merry squib, which doubtless celebrated some college prank, wrong conclusions should be drawn, I hasten to say that in college James Garfield neither drank nor smoked.

The next poem is rather long, but it possesses interest as a serious production of one whose name has become a household word. It is entitled

"MEMORY.

"'Tis beauteous night; the stars look brightly downUpon the earth, decked in her robe of snow.No light gleams at the window save my own,Which gives its cheer to midnight and to me.And now with noiseless step sweet Memory comes,And leads me gently through her twilight realms.What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung,Or delicatest pencil e'er portrayedThe enchanted, shadowy land where Memory dwells?It has its valleys, cheerless, lone, and drear,Dark-shaded by the lonely cypress tree.And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathedIn heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs,Robed in the dreamy light of distant years,Are clustered joys serene of other days;Upon its gently sloping hillside's bankThe weeping-willows o'er the sacred dustOf dear departed ones; and yet in that land,Where'er our footsteps fall upon the shore,They that were sleeping rise from out the dustOf death's long, silent years, and round us stand,As erst they did before the prison tombReceived their clay within its voiceless halls."The heavens that bend above that land are hungWith clouds of various hues; some dark and chill,Surcharged with sorrow, cast their sombre shadeUpon the sunny, joyous land below;Others are floating through the dreamy air,White as the falling snow, their margins tingedWith gold and crimson hues; their shadows fallUpon the flowery meads and sunny slopes,Soft as the shadows of an angel's wing.When the rough battle of the day is done,And evening's peace falls gently on the heart,I bound away across the noisy years,Unto the utmost verge of Memory's land,Where earth and sky in dreamy distance meet,And Memory dim with dark oblivion joins;Where woke the first remembered sounds that fellUpon the ear in childhood's early morn;And wandering thence along the rolling years,I see the shadow of my former selfGliding from childhood up to man's estate.The path of youth winds down through many a vale,And on the brink of many a dread abyss,From out whose darkness comes no ray of light,Save that a phantom dances o'er the gulf,And beckons toward the verge. Again, the pathLeads o'er a summit where the sunbeams fall;And thus, in light and shade, sunshine and gloom,Sorrow and joy, this life-path leads along."

During the year 1856 young Garfield was one of the editors of the college magazine, from which the above extracts are made. The hours spent upon his contributions to its pages were doubtless well spent. Here, to use his own words, he learned "to hurl the lance and wield the sword and thus prepare for the conflict of life." More than one whose names have since become conspicuous contributed to it while under his charge. Among these were Professor Chadbourne, S.G.W. Benjamin, Horace E. Scudder, W.R. Dimmock, and John Savary. The last-named, now resident in Washington, has printed, since his old friend's death, a series of sonnets, from which I quote one:

"How many and how great concerns of stateLie at the mercy of the meanest things!This man, the peer of presidents and kings;Nay, first among them, passed through dangers gateIn war unscathed, and perils out of date,To meet a fool whose pistol-shot yet ringsAround the world, and at mere greatness flingsThe cruel sneer of destiny or fate!Yet hath he made the fool fanatic foilTo valor, patience, nobleness, and wit!Nor had the world known, but because of it,What virtues grow in suffering's sacred soil.The shot which opened like a crack of hell,Made all hearts stream with sacred pity's wellAnd showed that unity in which we dwell."

Chapter XVIII—The Canal-Boy Becomes A College President

During his second winter vacation a great temptation assailed James. It was not a temptation to do wrong. That he could easily have resisted.

I must explain.

At Prestenkill, a country village six miles from Troy, N.Y., the young student organized a writing school, to help defray his expenses. Having occasion to visit Troy, his interest in education led him to form an acquaintance with some of the teachers and directors of the public schools.

One of these gentlemen, while walking with him over the sloping sides of a hill overlooking the city, said: "Mr. Garfield, I have a proposition to make to you."

The student listened with interest.

"There is a vacancy in one of our public schools. We want an experienced teacher, and I am sure you will suit us. I offer you the place, with a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. What do you say?"

The young man's heart beat for a moment with repressible excitement. It was a strong temptation. He was offered, deducting vacations, about one hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, while heretofore his highest wages had been but eighteen dollars per month and board. Moreover, he could marry at once the young lady to whom he had been for years engaged.

He considered the offer a moment, and this was his answer:

"You are not Satan and I am not Jesus, but we are upon the mountain, and you have tempted me powerfully. I think I must say, 'Get thee behind me!' I am poor, and the salary would soon pay my debts and place me in a position of independence; but there are two objections. I could not accomplish my resolution to complete a college course, and should be crippled intellectually for life. Then, my roots are all fixed in Ohio, where people know me and I know them, and this transplanting might not succeed as well in the long run as to go back home and work for smaller pay."

So the young man decided adversely, and it looks as if his decision was a wise one. It is interesting to conjecture what would have been his future position had he left college and accepted the school then offered him. He might still have been a teacher, well known and of high repute, but of fame merely local, and without a thought of the brilliant destiny he had foregone.

So he went back to college, and in the summer of 1856 he graduated, carrying off the highest honor—the metaphysical oration. His class was a brilliant one. Three became general officers during the rebellion—Garfield, Daviess, and Thompson. Rockwell's name is well known in official circles; Gilfillan is Treasurer of the United States. There are others who fill prominent positions. In the class above him was the late Hon. Phineas W. Hitchcock, who for six years represented Nebraska in the United States Senate—like Garfield, the architect of his own fortunes.

"What are your plans, Garfield?" asked a classmate but a short time before graduation.

"I am going back to Ohio, to teach in the school where I prepared for college."

"What is the name of the school?"

"Hiram Institute."

"I never heard of it."

"It has only a local reputation."

"Will you get a high salary?"

"No; the institute is poor, and can pay me but little."

"I think you are making a mistake."

"Why so?"

"You are our best scholar, and no one can rival you in speaking in the societies. You should study law, and then go to one of our large cities and build up a reputation, instead of burying yourself in an out-of-the-way Ohio town, where you may live and die without the world hearing of you."

"Thank you for your good opinion of me. I am not sure whether I deserve it, but if I do, I shall come to the surface some day. Meanwhile, to this humble school (it was not yet a college) I owe a large debt of gratitude. I am under a promise to go back and do what I can to pay that debt."

"In doing so you may sacrifice your own prospects."

"I hope not. At any rate, my mind is made up."

"Oh, well, in that case I will say no more. I know that if your mind is made up, you are bound to go. Only, years hence you will think of my warning."

"At any rate," said Garfield, cordially, "I shall bear in mind the interest you have shown in me. You may be right—I admit that—but I feel that it is my duty to go."

I doubt whether any man of great powers can permanently bury himself, no matter how obscure the position which he chooses. Sooner or later the world will find him out, and he will be lifted to his rightful place. When General Grant occupied a desk in the office of a lawyer in St. Louis, and made a precarious living by collecting bills, it didn't look as if Fame had a niche for him; but occasion came, and lifted him to distinction. So I must confess that the young graduate seemed to be making a mistake when, turning his back upon Williams College, he sought the humble institution where he had taught, as a pupil-teacher, two years before, and occupied a place as instructor, with an humble salary. But even here there was promotion for him. A year later, at the age of twenty-six, he was made president of the institution. It was not, perhaps, a lofty position, for though Hiram Institute now became Hiram College, it was not a college in the New England sense, but rather a superior academy.

Let us pause a minute and see what changes have taken place in ten years.

At the age of sixteen Jimmy Garfield was glad to get a chance to drive a couple of mules on the tow-path of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal. The ragged, homespun boy had disappeared. In his place we find James A. Garfield, A.B., president of a Western college—a man of education and culture. And how has this change been brought about! By energy, perseverance, and a resolute purpose—a soul that poverty could not daunt, an ambition which shrank from no hardship, and no amount of labor. They have been years of toil, for it takes time to transform a raw and ignorant country lad into a college president; but the toil has not harmed him—the poverty has not cramped him, nor crippled his energies. "Poverty is very inconvenient," he said on one occasion, in speaking of those early years, "but it is a fine spur to activity, and may be made a rich blessing."

The young man now had an assured income; not a large one, but Hiram was but an humble village. No fashionable people lived there. The people were plain in their tastes, and he could live as well as the best without difficulty. He was employed in a way that interested and pleased him, and but one thing seemed wanting. His heart had never swerved from the young lady with whom he first became acquainted at Geauga, to whom he was more closely drawn at Hiram, and to whom now for some years he had been betrothed. He felt that he could now afford to be married; and so Lucretia Rudolph became Mrs. Garfield—a name loved and honored, for her sake as well as his, throughout the length and breadth of our land. She, too, had been busily and usefully employed in these intervening years. As Mr. Philo Chamberlain, of Cleveland, has told us elsewhere, she has been a useful and efficient teacher in one of the public schools of that city. She has not been content with instructing others, but in her hours of leisure has pursued a private course of study, by which her mind has been broadened and deepened. If some prophetic instinct had acquainted her with the high position which the future had in store for her, she could have taken no fitter course to prepare herself to fulfil with credit the duties which, twenty years after, were to devolve upon her as the wife of the Chief Magistrate of the Union.

This was the wife that Garfield selected, and he found her indeed a helper and a sympathizer in all his sorrows and joys. She has proved equal to any position to which the rising fame of her husband lifted her. Less than a year ago her husband said of her: "I have been wonderfully blessed in the discretion of my wife. She is one of the coolest and best-balanced women I ever saw. She is unstampedable. There has not been one solitary instance in my public career when I suffered in the smallest degree for any remark she ever made. It would have been perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be misinterpreted; but, without any design, and with the intelligence and coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that I ever heard of. With the competition that has been against me, such discretion has been a real blessing."

Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands. But as James A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and sympathetic companion and helpmeet.

They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the college campus; and so their wedded life began. It was a modest home, but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted. As President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of Hiram College, to his family. Greatness has its penalties, and a low estate its compensations.

Chapter XIX—Garfield As A College President

When James Garfield presented himself at Hiram, an awkward, overgrown boy of nineteen, in his rustic garb, and humbly asked for the position of janitor and bell-ringer, suppose the trustees had been told, "In seven years your institute will have developed into a college, and that boy will be the president," we can imagine their amazement.

Yet it had all come true. Nowhere, perhaps, but in America could such a thing have happened, and even here it seldom happens that such an upward stride is made in so short a time.

After all, however, the important question to consider is, "What sort of a college president did this humble canal-boy, who counted it promotion when he was elected a janitor and bell-ringer, become?"

For information upon this point, we go to one of his pupils, Rev. I.L. Darsie, of Danbury, Conn., who writes as follows:

"I attended the Western Reserve Institute when Garfield was principal, and I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me, and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor, and was janitor of the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil in the same college. He was full of animal spirits, and used to run out on the green every day and play cricket with his scholars. He was a tall, strong man, but dreadfully awkward. Every now and then he would get a hit, and he muffed his ball and lost his hat as a regular thing.1 He was left-handed, too, and that made him seem all the clumsier. But he was most powerful and very quick, and it was easy for us to understand how it was that he had acquired the reputation of whipping all the other mule-drivers on the canal, and of making himself the hero of that thoroughfare, when he followed its tow-path, only ten years earlier.

"No matter how old the pupils were, Garfield always called us by our first names, and kept himself on the most intimate terms with all. He played with us freely, 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 up 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 has helped him to advancement. When I was janitor, he used sometimes to stop me, and ask my opinion about this and that, as if seriously advising with me. I can see now that my opinion could not have been of any value, and that he probably asked me partly to increase my self-respect and partly to show that he felt an interest in me. I certainly was his friend all the firmer for it.

"I remember once asking him what was the best way to pursue a certain study.

"'Use several text-books,' he answered. 'Get the views of different authors as you advance. In that way you can plow a deeper furrow. I always study in that way.'

"He tried hard to teach us to observe carefully and accurately. He broke out one day in the midst of a lesson with, 'Henry, how many posts are there under the building down-stairs?' Henry expressed his opinion, and the question went around the class, hardly any one getting it right. Then it was, 'How many boot-scrapers are there at the door?' 'How many windows in the building?' 'How many trees in the field?' He was the keenest observer I ever saw. I think he noticed and numbered every button on our coats. A friend of mine was walking with him through Cleveland one day, when Garfield stopped and darted down a cellar-way, asking his companion to follow, and briefly pausing to explain himself. The sign, 'Saws and Files,' was over the door, and in the depths was heard a regular clicking sound. 'I think this fellow is cutting files,' said he, 'and I have never seen a file cut.

"Down they went, and, sure enough, there was a man recutting an old file; and they stayed ten minutes, and found out all about the process. Garfield would never go by anything without understanding it.

"Mr. Garfield was very fond of lecturing in the school. He spoke two or three times a week, on all manner of topics, generally scientific, though sometimes literary or historical. He spoke with great freedom, never writing out what he had to say, and I now think that his lectures were a rapid compilation of his current reading, and that he threw it into this form partly for the purpose of impressing it upon his own mind.

"His facility of speech was learned when he was a pupil at Hiram. The societies had a rule that every student should take his stand on the platform and speak for five minutes on any topic suggested at the moment by the audience. It was a very trying ordeal. Garfield broke down badly the first two times he tried to speak, but persisted, and was at last, when he went to Williams, one of the best of the five-minute speakers. When he returned as principal, his readiness was striking and remarkable."

Henry James says: "Garfield taught me more than any other man, living or dead, and, proud as I am of his record as a soldier and a statesman, I can hardly forgive him for abandoning the academy and the forum."

So President Hinsdale, one of Garfield's pupils, and his successor as president, testifies: "My real acquaintance with Garfield did not begin till the fall of 1856, when he returned from Williams College. He then found me out, drew near to me, and entered into all my troubles and difficulties pertaining to questions of the future. In a greater or less degree this was true of his relations to his pupils generally. There are hundreds of these men and women scattered over the world to-day, who can not find language strong enough to express their feeling in contemplating Garfield as their old instructor, adviser, and friend.

"Since 1856 my relations with him have been as close and confidential as they could be with any man, and much closer and more confidential than they have been with any other man. I do not say that it would be possible for me to know anybody better than I know him, and I know that he possesses all the great elements of character in an extraordinary degree. His interest in humanity has always been as broad as humanity itself, while his lively interest in young men and women, especially if they were struggling in narrow circumstances to obtain an education, is a characteristic known as widely over the world as the footsteps of Hiram boys and girls have wandered.

"The help that he furnished hundreds in the way of suggestions, teaching, encouragement, inspiration, and stimulus was most valuable. His power over students was not so much that of a drill-master, or disciplinarian, as that of one who was able to inspire and energize young people by his own intellectual and moral force."

An illustration of the interest he felt in his pupils may be given.

A student came to the president's study at the close of a college term to bid him good-bye. After the good-bye was said, he lingered, and Garfield said: "I suppose you will be back again in the fall, Henry?"

"No," he stammered, "I am not coming back to Hiram any more. Father says I have got education enough, and that he needs me to work on the farm; that education doesn't help a farmer along any."

He was a bright boy—not a prodigy, by any means, but one of those strong, awkward, large-headed fellows, such as James Garfield had himself been.

"Is your father here?" asked the young president, affected by the boy's evident sorrow.

"Yes, father is here, and is taking my things home for good."

"Well, don't feel badly. Please tell him Mr. Garfield would like to see him at his study before he leaves the college."

"Yes, sir, I will."

In half an hour the father, a sturdy farmer, entered the study and awkwardly sat down.

"So you have come to take Henry home, have you?" asked the president.

"Yes," answered the farmer.

"I sent for you because I wanted to have a little talk with you about Henry's future. He is coming back again in the fall, I hope?"

"Wal, I think not. I don't reckon I can afford to send him any more. He's got eddication enough for a farmer already, and I notice that when they git too much, they sorter git lazy. Yer eddicated farmers are humbugs. Henry's got so far 'long now that he'd rather have his head in a book than be workin'. He don't take no interest in the stock, nor in the farm improvements. Everybody else is dependent in this world on the farmer, and I think that we've got too many eddicated fellows settin' 'round now for the farmers to support."

To this Garfield answered that he was sorry for the father's decision, since his son, if permitted to come the next term, would be far enough advanced to teach school, and so begin to help himself along. Teaching would pay better than working on the farm in the winter.