Americans tend to fetishize our presidents. We put them on a pedestal often representing entire eras, but they aren't that important. The American Presidency doesn't have that much power. Yet, they serve as a fulcrum to balance our understanding of history. I was at a physical therapy appointment today and the guy working my should asked me about the book I was reading. I told him it was about the assassination of President Garfield (Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Mallard). He said, "hmm, I don't think I knew Garfield was assassinated." That PT does better than most of us, because most people don't even realize that we had a president named Garfield. This is unfortunate because he could have been a great one but because of an assassins bullet, he is relegated to mere footnotes of a very turbulent ear.
He was only president for five months, two of which he spent on his death bed. He was a reluctant candidate, he didn't want to be president, his party nominated him for the 1880 election and the Democratic party at the time was mostly ex-Confederates who had no chance of winning. This was a pivotal time for our nation. The reconstruction of the South, after the Civil War, was badly handled by the Federal Government. After Lincoln was assassinated we had Andrew Johnson who was impeached. After Johnson, we had Ulysses Grant who was a decent president for one term, but all the progress he made in his first term was erased by the drunken stupor of his second. After Grant, there was Rutherford B. Hayes who was the epitome of corruption. With the Confederates populating almost half of our Congress, getting any type of reform done was close to impossible. You think we are divided now. Check out this Electoral Map of the 1880 Presidential Election:
Yeow! It makes our current situation look united.
Garfield was one of our log cabin presidents. He was fatherless at the age of two. He left his home in Ohio at age 16 to work on the Ohio and Erie canals. He was responsible for a mule who pulled ships through the waterways. He got sick less than a year later and returned home. While he was recovering, his mother convince him to return to school. His education was his salvation pulling him out of poverty. He attended college by doing handy man, carpenter and janitorial work. He ended up being an academic, a professor dealing in ancient languages, literature and mathematics. He wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem once that surprised everyone when they discovered it was written by a politician.
It was as a college student where Garfield had a change of heart about politics and the slavery question. He grew up as a Disciples of Christ which was a religious sect that believed that you could not be a Christian if you were involved in politics. In college he attended two lectures where he heard two fiery lectures by abolitionists that blew his mind and changed his beliefs on the subject. College will do that to you. He was eventually made the President of Hiram College. When a member of the Ohio State Senate passed away, he was convince to run for his seat by the, then-liberal, Republican Party. By the time the Civil War starts, his state of mind is that the War is a holy crusade against a Slave Power. He becomes a Colonel in the 42nd Ohio Infantry and by the end of the war, a Brigadier General. Before the end of the war, he is elected to Congress and services as a Congressman, representing Ohio. He did so for 17 years. As a Congressman, he fought for equality of freed slaves. He was considered what they called at the time, a Radical Republican, which was the liberal branch of the party.
Like the party is now, the Republicans were split into two factions, the Radicals (also called the Half Breeds) and the Stalwarts. Stalwarts were mostly from the South who supported Grant to be president again. The 1880 Republican Convention was totally crazy. unlike anything we have seen in modern times. Primaries didn't exist back then, they actually nominated the candidates at the Conventions. In four days, they had 36 rounds of votes for 14 candidates. In the first round, Garfield had received one vote about of a possible 755. The top three were Grant, James Blaine and John Sherman (General Sherman's brother). During the first 33 rounds of voting, Garfield got one or two votes each time. It wasn't until the 34th, when future president, Benjamin Harrison, started promoting Garfield as a happy alternative to both sides of the party. He received 17 votes in the 34th round, 50 in the 35th and eventually 399 in the 36th (well above the 379 needed for the nomination). He may be the first president that had no interest in the job but he took one for the team (in more ways than one).
When Lincoln was assassinated only 16 years earlier, it was thought of as an anomaly, an eccentricity of life during wartime and nothing to be concerned about for future presidents. Presidents were not thought to need security so Garfield had none. When madman, Charles Guiteau shot Garfield while he was standing on a train platform in DC, he had his two young sons and two members of his Cabinet with him. No security! The bullet missed all major organs and if this happened today, he'd be up and about a few days later. We'd find the bullet with an x-ray and would remove it without any infection. The bullet didn't kill him but the infections did. While he was on the platform bleeding, a local doctor was sticking his finger in the wound looking for the bullet. Can you think of anything more unsanitary than a subway platform? He suffered for a couple of months and eventually died after every doctor and their ego chimed in on his health. The one doctor they should have listened to, Joseph Lister, was considered a quack by many. He is now considered the "father of modern surgery" and he tried to get doctors of that era to wash their hands and their instruments, but he was laughed at by the gentry. Fifteen years later, we'd have the x-ray and would understand asepsis.
You really have to wonder what this country would be like if this great man had survived. It wasn't until the early 20th century that we would have another strong president (Teddy Roosevelt). After Garfield we had a string of weak and ineffective executives. Much of the problems we have today stem from the Civil War era from racial inequality to unbridled/unhinged conspiracy theories. Northerners and Southerners still have wide fissures on how we see our country. When the Garfield died, the entire country mourned. Mourning his death was the first thing we did as a country together, reunited after the war. If he had time to use this popularity to actually reconstruct the South, we may not have had a KKK, Jim Crow or the Great Migration. Somewhere, perhaps, there is an alternative universe with Garfield is on Mt. Rushmore, the Proud Boys don't exist and Trump was never President. If so, I'd like to go there.
