CHAPTER 7

Ambition’s Sterner Stuff—Johnsons to Arthurs

Mary and Jacob Johnson

Was there ever a less likely hero than Jacob Johnson? He saved two men from drowning. Because one of them was the publisher of the local newspaper, Jacob’s posthumous reward was an obituary of uncommon length for one of his humble station in life. Jacob was praised for his “honesty, sobriety, industry, and his humane, friendly disposition.” His hard-pressed widow, Polly, had little time to dwell on such qualities—she couldn’t read, in any case—or even the luxury to mourn. She had two sons to care for and a paucity of resources.

Energy and ambition are not necessarily synonymous. It is not difficult to determine which American presidents came from backgrounds of affluence. However, with so many real and reconstructed log cabins dotting the electoral landscape, which chief executive came from a background of the direst deprivation? Andrew Johnson was surely the most self-made man who ever rose to the presidency. When he was selected to run with Abraham Lincoln on a ticket of national unity in the extraordinary wartime election of 1864, much was made of the similarity of their humble origins—“the railsplitter and the tailor.” Born six weeks apart, both overcame hardships in their rise to prominence. In all, Lincoln had perhaps one year of formal schooling, but, as Lately Thomas points out, “Johnson did not attend school a single day in his life.” Of his extraordinary career, a childhood friend remarked, “I reckon he started underground.”

Andrew Johnson was the son of a porter and a chambermaid. However, Andrew’s father, Jacob Johnson, never lacked for energy. He had emigrated from England around the end of the eighteenth century with no particular goal in mind. Wandering around the countryside, doing all sorts of odd jobs to support himself, Jacob finally came to Raleigh, North Carolina, and found it to his liking. The capital of a state only recently admitted to the Union, Raleigh was bustling with lawyers and legislators. There was already an acquisitive new aristocracy of sorts in place, with the means to employ anyone willing to work. That suited Jacob, who would try almost anything. He quickly established a reputation for availability, reliability, and honesty, serving as everything from county constable and sexton to porter of the state bank. He even tolled the town bell, announcing major events in the community. Much of his time was spent helping out at Cassio’s, the lively new inn and tavern that had opened opposite the bank.

There he met and fell in love with an attractive eighteen-year-old chambermaid named Mary McDonough, known to all as “Polly.” As industrious as Jacob Johnson, Polly was also a skilled seamstress. In 1801 they wed, signified by making their marks in the town registry. The couple then moved into a small log house adjacent to the inn, where Polly took in washing and mending to supplement her husband’s modest income. Their first child, a girl, died in infancy. Their second survived, a sturdy fair-haired boy born in 1803, whom they called William.

It would be six years before the arrival of their next child, fated to be their last. Polly Johnson gave birth on December 29, 1808, to another boy. Sounds of fiddles accompanied the child’s first cries. Thomas writes, “This boy was as dark as the other was light, and he too gave promise of being strong and hearty.” News of the birth spread to the revelers in the adjacent tavern, some of whom were from Tennessee. Invading the Johnson cabin, they reportedly insisted that the boy be named for Andrew Jackson.

On one of the coldest days of December 1811, three prominent local citizens planned a fishing outing and hired Jacob to accompany them, probably to clean their catch and bring along food and drink. Some of these spirits must have been consumed prematurely, because one of the men, Colonel Thomas Henderson, owner of the Raleigh Star, engaged in a bit of horseplay, rocking the fishing skiff he had boarded with his two friends. All three fell overboard. One made it back to the shore. A second, who could not swim, frantically clung to Henderson, taking them both down to the icy depths. Jacob promptly dived in, and with immense effort managed to pull both men back to safety. He contracted pneumonia but subsequently appeared to be making a recovery. However, when he was at his post two months later, on February 4, 1812, ringing the town bell for another’s funeral, Jacob Johnson collapsed and died. He was only thirty-three. There would be no marker on the grave of this “humane, friendly” man for fifty-five years, until the unlikely presidency of his younger son.

Polly’s friends contributed whatever aid they could, but it hardly relieved the financial burdens of even so energetic a widow. The adult Andrew Johnson recalled grappling “with the gaunt and haggard monster called hunger.” Polly finally settled for the only solution really available to one in her circumstances—she married again. Had it been to someone like Jacob there might at least have been some hope of educating her sons. Instead, she had the misfortune to wed shiftless Turner Dougherty (or Doughtry), who apparently possessed neither skills nor the inclination to use them.

To relieve some of the pressure, both sons were apprenticed to a Raleigh tailor to learn a trade. When Andrew Johnson finally established his own tailoring shop in Tennessee, he still wasn’t quite on his own. His mother and stepfather were by then in such dire financial straits that at the age of seventeen he was their sole means of support. His older brother, William, had vanished to Texas. He cared for his mother and stepfather for the rest of their lives, eventually settling them on a farm.

Yet Johnson went on to one of the most improbable and controversial careers in American history. Of course, his mother would have liked to help. Unfortunately, her first husband was a good man who died too soon; her second, from all accounts, a wastrel who lingered too long. At least she was able to witness a measure of Andrew’s remarkable political success, his election to Congress and as governor of Tennessee, before she passed away on February 13, 1856, at the age of seventy-two. Somehow Andrew had learned to read such basic texts as the Bible but was essentially taught to both read and write by the remarkable woman he met and wed in Tennessee, Eliza McCardle Johnson, with whom he would have five children.

Johnson’s mother was still alive when, during an especially bitter reelection campaign for Congress, he was opposed by William “Parson” Brownlow, whose rhetorical restraint little reflected his nickname. How was it possible, Brownlow queried, for someone of such undeniable consequence as Andrew Johnson to have been the son of an “illiterate loafer” like Jacob Johnson? His birth must have been illegitimate. Overcoming his ire, Johnson gathered the legal affidavits regarding his birth and detailed them in an open letter to the voters, characterizing Brownlow as a “hyena,” “vandal,” “devil,” “coward,” and other less moderate epithets. Johnson won. His combative temperament did little to diminish controversy during his tumultuous political career, although the issues he faced after the Civil War would have tried the talents of a Lincoln.

Yet a decade after being thrust into his sole presidential term, dominated by Reconstruction and his impeachment trial, Johnson made an impressive political comeback. He was reelected to the Senate from Tennessee, although he served for only one session. To Johnson, reuniting the nation through reintegrating its Southern states transcended any other considerations. Claude Bowers reflects that Andrew Johnson’s “was a complex nature … honest, inflexible, tender, able, forceful, and tactless…. It was fortunate for the Republic that he had two passions—the Constitution and the Union.”

Immaculately attired in clothes of his own cut, Johnson was anything but embarrassed by his origins. Once, on the floor of the Senate, he reminded a colleague, “Sir, I do not forget that I am a mechanic, neither do I forget that Adam was a tailor … or that our Savior was the son of a carpenter.” Johnson himself was the son of a man of many humble vocations, more energetic than ambitious but in the end also a hero.

Andrew Johnson died at the home of one of his daughters on July 31, 1875, at the age of sixty-six. At his request, his body was wrapped in an American flag and a copy of the Constitution placed under his head.

Hannah and Jesse Grant

Young Ulysses Grant couldn’t bear to see bloodshed. He had a more natural affinity with animals, particularly horses, than with people. The notable exception was his equally understated mother, Hannah Simpson Grant, with whom he had a sort of silent communion, a relationship too deep for words. He particularly hated being around his father’s tannery. All this mystified garrulous Jesse Root Grant. How could his oldest son, “my Ulyss,” the favorite of his six children, be so utterly unlike him? And so Jesse made the decision that would change everything. Without it there would never have been a general, let alone a president, named Ulysses S. Grant.

At the outset of his memoirs, Grant observed, “My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.” Matthew and Priscilla Grant, from Dorsetshire in England, arrived in Plymouth, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, on the John and Mary in 1630, only ten years after the Mayflower. By the time of the Revolution, the Grants were established as a prosperous farm family throughout Connecticut, active in community affairs.

Something went wrong with the advent of “Captain” Noah Grant, Jesse’s father, who was born in 1748. His first wife bore him two sons before she died. A cobbler and a land speculator as well as a farmer, but addicted to strong spirits, Noah managed to lose all of his inheritance and set out on foot to find a fresh start to the west, in Pennsylvania. He began to trade in animal skins, a much-needed frontier commodity, and married a young widow named Rachel Kelley, who bore him seven children. The fourth, Jesse Root Grant, was born on January 23, 1794. After Rachel’s death in 1804, restless Noah Grant dispersed his family. Jesse, only ten, had the good fortune to be sent to work on the farm of Ohio Supreme Court Judge George Tod. Taking a liking to the boy, Tod taught Jesse to read and sent him to the local school. At the Tod residence, Jesse glimpsed the components of a new life, laid out for him not only in its comparative opulence, with china, silverware, fine furniture, and all the books in Tod’s library, but also in a close-knit family. Encouraged by Tod, Jesse, at sixteen, devised a plan for his own life, the foundation of which was to be as unlike the father who had abandoned him as possible.

But what calling should he pursue? He only knew about farming and selling animal skins. There was nothing particularly appealing about this bloody business of working with hides, but leather in all its forms was absolutely essential to western expansion. It had about it the odor of wealth—and on the frontier, wealth, whatever its source, led to social acceptance. Managing to avoid service in the War of 1812, Jesse thoroughly learned the business until he finally opened his own tanning yard in Point Pleasant, Ohio.

The plan for his life was set: to be financially secure by twenty-five, to marry well and build a fine home, to improve his education and become a community leader, to raise a loving family in comfortable circumstances, and then to retire by sixty. Only an attack of malaria set him back a year. And so he was twenty-six when he met Hannah Simpson.

On a business trip nearby, brash young Grant swept into a household that seemed ideally suited to hasten his ambitions. It harbored a daughter nearing twenty-three, on the verge of spinsterhood, named Hannah Simpson. An unpretentious country girl, Hannah was described in later years by Dwight and Nancy Anderson as a “well-groomed, smallish woman with an open face and smooth, dark hair” and by Jean Edward Smith as “slim, above medium height, handsome … serious, steadfast, and supremely reserved.” Jesse could find little fault with neat Hannah’s seeming reticence. He could talk enough for both of them.

Jesse was also impressed by the attractive stability he saw in her family. Jesse Grant was hardly handsome himself, with a long face and his sandy brown hair slicked to one side. Later he would grow chin-whiskers and sideburns, in the fashion of the Pennsylvania Dutch, and read with the small, wire-rimmed spectacles Hannah also favored. But he had a keen look in his blue eyes, a healthy glow, an energetic manner, and a sturdy frame almost six feet in height. Jesse’s aggressiveness failed to put off Hannah’s father, John Simpson. He saw instead the young man’s yearning for knowledge and his obvious ambition.

The Simpsons, devout Scotch Presbyterians, had come to Philadelphia in 1762, established a fertile farm in Berks County, fought in the Revolutionary War, and like so many others moved further west after the War of 1812, where they prospered. They were a loving, close-knit family. Hannah’s mother had died when she was three, but her stepmother, Rebecca, utterly devoted to her, insisted she attend the local school while they were still in Pennsylvania. After moving to Ohio, the Simpsons had retained their propriety, piety, and love of learning.

On July 24, 1821, Hannah and Jesse were married, and they moved to the small frame house he had built at Point Pleasant. It represented only a way station on his road to respectability. Here, ten months later, on April 22, 1822, their first child was born, a large, healthy son weighing almost eleven pounds. For six weeks he had no name. To Jesse, his first son merited something special. Hannah’s pious father was partial to Hiram, the Phoenician king from the Old Testament who helped King Solomon build his temple. Hannah’s mother admired the ancient Greek hero Ulysses. That was fine with Jesse Grant, affirming that he was also acquainted with both religious history and mythology. So the rather unique name Hiram Ulysses Grant was settled on. His strong son, “my Ulyss,” Jesse would boast, “is a most beautiful child.” Geoffrey Perret writes, “With his russet hair, blue eyes, and pink complexion, Ulysses Grant looked in childhood like a glowing miniature of his robust energetic father.”

By the time the boy was eighteen months old, Jesse moved his family to a larger brick home, a tangible symbol of his status, in Georgetown, Ohio, the new county seat, on the White Oak River. The town was surrounded by a hardwood forest of oak trees, the prime source of tanbark. As McFeely writes, “In one way or another, Jesse Grant was always struggling to establish himself.” He wrote letters to newspapers on every conceivable subject, particularly in favor of abolition. His own treasured library grew. He became master of the local Masonic lodge and for one term was even elected mayor of Georgetown.

He and Hannah had two more boys and three girls, each blessed with a more normal name: Simpson, Clara, Jennie, Orvil, and Mary. But to Jesse, his first-born son remained special. Only, as he grew, Ulysses didn’t feel all that heroic. Despite her unpretentiousness, Hannah dressed him in rather a fastidious fashion, very different from other boys in what was still the American frontier. Nor did he look very robust. Ulysses was undersized for his age, given to colds and other ailments, and as a teenager he stood only five-foot-one and weighed only 115 pounds. He would grow sturdier and stronger but would never rise to the height of his father. Yet apparently other children never made him the object of ridicule. Jesse later remarked, “He never had a personal controversy with man or boy in his life.”

Something about young Ulysses seemed almost intimidating. He said little but appeared to be taking everything in, his steady gaze much like his mother’s. Jesse tried to make sense of it all, noting that Ulysses “rarely ever laughs, never sheds a tear or becomes excited … never says a profane word or indulges in jokes.” Similarly, the Andersons write that Hannah “seldom smiled and spoke only when she had to…. No one played cards in Hannah Grant’s house and no one danced or played music there either.” If the somber setting depressed Jesse, there is no record of it. After all, hadn’t he longed for a home life of serenity and security? Indeed, Jesse wrote of Hannah, “Her steadfastness, firmness, and strength of character have been the stay of the family through life.”

Hannah’s form of child-rearing, however, was the talk of Georgetown. Even when Ulysses was an infant, she let him crawl without supervision between the feet of horses tethered outside the tannery. God will provide. Despite the lack of parental direction, all the children were well behaved, and after school each of them worked hard to help their parents. Ulysses did everything for his father’s business that involved horses and avoided everything else. Eventually, his sisters made good marriages and his brothers each entered the business with their father, never an option for Ulysses.

Although seeming to prefer the company of adults and solitary pursuits, Ulysses entered into games with his classmates and enjoying fishing but never hunting. His parents provided him with the best education possible in the region, including Marysville Academy in Kentucky. He proved to be a dutiful if not exceptional student, although he dreaded speaking in public. What he most enjoyed was to drive his neighbors on their trips out of town, in a coach with his own horses. Precisely where, his perplexed father wondered, was Ulysses himself heading?

That Ulysses was scrupulously honest and truthful reflected the way he’d been raised. But how, Jesse pondered, had this favored son inherited so little of his father’s instinctive shrewdness? In one notable instance, Jesse had sent Ulysses to buy a colt, instructing him to offer twenty-two and a half dollars but adding that if necessary he could go as high as twenty-five. Ulysses instead revealed everything to the seller at the outset and of course paid the higher price. By now his father knew there was no possibility that Ulysses would join him in expanding the tannery. How suitable would he be for any potential business?

Jesse Grant made the decision that would resonate for a lifetime. He approached his local congressman, with whom he had become acquainted, and sought an appointment for his son to enter the United States Military Academy at West Point. His goal was not so much a military career for Ulysses as to direct his unfocused son toward a productive future of some sort. When Jesse told his startled son, the boy blurted out, “But I won’t go!” In a tone of unusual assertiveness, his father replied, “I think you will go,” and then calmly outlined all the potential advantages, most of all the opportunity to make something of himself.

McFeely observes how this represented the growing ambivalence between the two. He writes, “Ulysses spent his life alternately repudiating Jesse Grant’s bleak world and trying to prove himself worthy of it.” His father’s attitude would prove equally cyclical, excessive praise alternating with perplexed disappointment. The matter settled, Ulysses’s uncertainty mingled with undeniable excitement. For one thing, he had never traveled so far from home. In his haste, the local congressman had submitted his appointment in the name of “Ulysses S. Grant,” assuming that his middle name must be Simpson, for his mother’s family. So it would remain. The neighbors gave Ulysses a tearful sendoff, but the farewells at home were predictably less emotional. “They don’t cry at our house,” Ulysses explained.

He did better than anyone expected at the academy, including himself. Moreover, he grew physically, both taller (to five-foot-eight) and broader, as well as in self-confidence. Yet his first visit home elicited little more overt excitement from his parents than had his departure. His father, perhaps finally conditioned to domestic restraint, initially simply asked, “How are you, son?” His mother noted that he seemed to be standing much straighter.

Yet Ulysses’s letters home from West Point to his mother are surprisingly tender, the only tangible evidence of the depth of his feelings for her. “I seem alone in the world without my mother…. I cannot tell you how much I miss you. I was so often alone with you, and you so frequently spoke to me in private, that the solitude of my situation here … is all the more striking. It reminds me the more forcibly of home, and most of all, dear Mother, of you…. Your kindly instructions and admonitions are ever present with me.”

His close friendship with his senior class roommate, Frederick Dent of St. Louis, was one of a number he formed with classmates. Grant was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry, not quite the glamorous cavalry appointment he had coveted, but his first posting, and Dent’s, at Jefferson Barracks in Missouri, carried an unexpected bonus. Grant met Dent’s sister, Julia, and fell in love.

Seventeen-year-old Julia Boggs Dent was reputedly rather plain, suffering in comparison with her graceful, aristocratic mother, but Julia had two qualities that were immediately appealing to Ulysses S. Grant. She, too, loved to ride, and her sociable nature brought the lonely, still rather shy young lieutenant out of his shell. The Dents lived in a Missouri imitation of a Southern plantation. Its proprietor, self-styled “Colonel” Frederick Dent the elder, was a boorish, slave-owning businessman turned country squire, whose fortunes fluctuated more than his limited energies. He was as opinionated as Jesse Grant—but of entirely different convictions. It had little impact on Ulysses or Julia. She had sensed a kind of inner resolve in her sandy-haired suitor and even extravagantly praised her future mother-in-law as “like a rose in the sun.”

However, Julia and Ulysses did not marry until August 1848, over five years after they had met. Grant’s regiment was sent to Louisiana, as tensions with Mexico escalated, and then to Texas. Grant opposed the Mexican War, but, as he later put it, “With a soldier the flag is paramount.” Lieutenant Grant’s regiment was awarded ten battle honors, and his personal heroism and cool leadership were much praised. When he and Julia were finally able to wed, all his groomsmen would serve as future officers of the Confederacy, a position also urged on him by his father-in-law.

Despite the vast new territory to be defended, the size of the army was reduced, and Grant’s new postings were disappointing. He was sent to Detroit; to Sackets Harbor, New York; and then back to Michigan to be, of all things, a quartermaster. Julia loyally accompanied him, but in the fall of 1849 she became pregnant and returned home to have the first of their four children. A boy, he was named Frederick Dent Grant, after Julia’s father. One can imagine Jesse’s reaction. It was at about this time that, bored and lonely, Ulysses turned to the solace of alcohol. His drinking became so excessive that he joined the Sons of Temperance to try to overcome a potential addiction.

Pregnant with a second son, who would be named Ulysses Jr., Julia couldn’t accompany her husband as he moved from one dismal assignment to another. By then, under a commander he particularly disliked, Grant wrote Julia, “How forsaken I feel here.” He simply hadn’t the means to bring his family to be with him. In 1854 he was finally commissioned a permanent captain. After sending in his acceptance, assured of the rank, Ulysses dispatched a second letter, resigning from the United States Army.

In Covington, Kentucky, where he had moved, Jesse Grant was thunderstruck. True, West Point had not been intended solely to lead to a permanent military career, but it seemed to suit his son. Jesse wrote to his local congressman to intervene, and then, with an irony that could only be appreciated in future years, wrote directly to the secretary of war, Jefferson Davis himself. In Jesse’s view, Ulysses, after “spending so many years in the servic (sic) … would be poorly equipped for the pursuit of private life.” Davis replied that a resignation, once tendered, could not be reconsidered. Ulysses arrived home, dejected and penniless but anxious to make a fresh start with his family. The month he returned, Julia became pregnant with their third child, Nellie, their only girl.

In 1854 Jesse Root Grant turned sixty, the age he had settled on for his retirement so many years earlier. By any measure he was wealthy, and his children were well settled—all but Ulysses. In an awkward meeting with his oldest son, Jesse offered him a job in his store in Galena, Illinois, initially without his family. Ulysses indignantly refused, and instead he decided to go into farming. Julia’s father had given her a modest farm as a wedding gift. To Jesse’s credit, he put up most of the money needed to buy stock and build a house. At first the farm, which Ulysses called “Hardscrabble,” seemed to prosper. Ulysses wrote his father around the end of 1856, “Every day I like farming better.” Only a few months later, however, the Depression of 1857 demolished his dreams. In 1858 the couple’s fourth and last child was born, finally (and thankfully) another Jesse. By the end of the year, dispirited and ailing, Ulysses gave up farming for good.

Perhaps Julia’s helpful performance in the ill-fated enterprise had impressed Jesse. He renewed his offer to employ Ulysses at Galena, this time with his entire family in residence. It was the summer of 1860. Ulysses was not only to be a clerk at the store but also a buyer of hides, which must have struck him as a supreme irony, and would eventually become a partner in the business. Ulysses made an honest effort, but his heart was never in it.

In the presidential election of 1860 he voted for Stephen A. Douglas, one of the two Democratic candidates. The party’s suicidal divisiveness helped assure the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln, the enthusiastic choice of Jesse Grant. His son understood what it meant. “The South will fight,” he calmly predicted, and wrote his father, suggesting he had best leave the slaveholding state of Kentucky. When Ulysses’s prediction came true, as the only man in Galena who had actually commanded troops, he declined an offer to lead a regiment of local militia—although he trained them—and then sought a command in the regular army. His feelings conflicted, he might now validate his worth, but he had little enthusiasm for the carnage he knew was coming. Grant finally obtained command of a notoriously undisciplined regiment of volunteers from Ohio and was named a colonel.

His father no longer controlled his future but never gave up trying. For the last twelve years of Jesse’s life, the positions of father and son were reversed. Now it would not be Jesse urging Ulysses to become more ambitious but Ulysses remonstrating with his father to please exercise some restraint in his unsolicited outbursts. One acquaintance remarked that Grant “could remain silent in several languages.” His father couldn’t remain silent in any.

As Grant’s role in the Union army escalated, rumors circulated that perhaps a military leader should oppose embattled Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864. Grant denied any such ambition, writing his father, “Nothing personal could ever induce me to accept a political office.” His victories, however, helped assure Lincoln’s triumph over politically minded General George B. McClellan. Now a commanding general himself, Grant accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House.

Just as victory was finally at hand, an assassin’s bullet denied the nation Lincoln’s leadership. Named Secretary of War in the transitional administration of Andrew Johnson, Grant tried to stay above the partisan turmoil. Despite the fearsome toll of casualties under his command, Grant had been anointed the foremost of national heroes. Having become a nominal Republican during the war, he seemed to many Americans a logical candidate for president in 1868, the personification of restored national unity. A steady stream of prominent visitors asked him to permit his name to be placed in nomination at the Republican national convention in Chicago. He repeated to Julia that he harbored no such ambition, but were he nominated under these circumstances, he could hardly refuse. Grant’s personal platform was no more specific than “Let us have peace.”

His father, devoid of doubt, was already campaigning. He tirelessly planted “inside accounts” in major newspapers, bearing such titles as “The Early Life of General Grant by His Father.” When the patriotic procession opening the Republican convention was led in by one-legged General Dan Sickles, there was Jesse Root Grant, seated prominently among the dignitaries on the stage waiting to welcome the delegates. Grant was nominated on the first ballot. The election, against Democrat Horatio Seymour, was surprisingly close, at least in the popular vote. Grant’s reelection in 1872 was by a wider margin.

Despite his good intentions, Grant was not among the more successful of American presidents. The scandals that plagued his two terms, however, failed to diminish his personal popularity. A subsequent tour around the world was a triumph. But the failure of Grant and Ward, a New York brokerage firm to which he lent his name but paid too little heed, ruined thousands, including the demolition of Grant’s own savings. Perhaps those earlier conclusions of Jesse Grant that his son simply had no head for business and too trusting a nature had been on the mark after all.

Jesse had attended both of his son’s presidential inaugurations and came, invited or not, for extended stays several times a year at the White House, always avoiding Colonel Dent, who had virtually taken up residence there. As McFeely writes, publicity-minded Jesse could always be counted on “to the delight of reporters” and the embarrassment of his son “for outlandish comments” about personalities and policies. He even managed to be appointed to his own public office, postmaster of Covington.

At the inauguration of 1873, Jesse Root Grant slipped on some ice and fell. He died in Covington three months later, on June 29, 1873, at the age of seventy-nine. The fall had only weakened the tough old tanner. The real cause of death was cancer. When he heard the news, Ulysses was inconsolable. Perret writes that Grant “was so prostrated by grief he couldn’t utter a word in reply” to other mourners who tried to comfort him. Exploring a more complex web of emotions, McFeely notes, “We can only speculate about the sense of relief, mingled with guilt that Grant must have felt at being at last not beholden to such a father.” When Ulysses became a major general, the ambivalence was still evident. He asked of his wife, “Is father yet afraid that I will not be able to sustain myself?”

By contrast, there was only undiluted grief when Hannah Simpson Grant died a decade later, on May 11, 1883, at the age of eighty-four, at a daughter’s home in Mt. Vernon, New York. She never visited the White House or attended either of her son’s presidential inaugurations. President Grant would surely have welcomed her warmly, but she may have felt a visit would have only added an unnecessary burden to those he already carried. She knew her place in his heart. In her stoical way, she had supplied the inner strength that enabled her oldest son to transcend the triumphs and tragedies of this world. It was from personal experience that General Grant had concluded, “How much American soldiers are indebted to good American mothers! When they go to the front, what prayers go with them!”

Two years later, as he was dying of inoperable throat cancer, Ulysses S. Grant’s final act of quiet heroism was a race against time. At the urging of Mark Twain, he completed his memoirs, two volumes still viewed as among the most informative ever written. As he sat bundled up on his front porch, working away, occasionally groups of veterans would march past in silent tribute. They viewed the investment debacle as his misfortune, due to the deviousness of others. Hiram Ulysses Grant died on July 23, 1885, at the age of sixty-three, four days after completing his manuscript. His memoirs would sell over 300,000 copies, rescuing his wife and family from financial ruin.

As he grew older, Grant reflected fondly on his years at West Point. “If a man graduates from here,” he wrote a cousin, “he is set for life.” Of course, that was not always the case. His father’s decision, however, surely set up his own life and the one triumph they both could share.

Sophia and Rutherford Hayes Jr.

“Rud” Hayes could describe his father vividly. He was “of medium height—about five feet, nine inches, straight, slender, healthy, and active,” ambitious, always busy, yet a loving husband, a devoted father, and a community leader. Such a description was all the more remarkable in that the younger Hayes had never set eyes on his father. “Ruddy” Hayes had died ten weeks before his son was born. The boy’s mother, Sophia, had supplied all of the details. She would mourn Rutherford Hayes Jr. for the rest of her life and was intent that her son live up to his legacy.

Sophia Birchard Hayes is reminiscent of many other strong-willed presidential mothers—pious, protective, and resolute. That she carried such qualities to extremes is little wonder. She had lost so many loved ones that she virtually willed her sole remaining son to survive. To Sophia, any good news was a precursor of calamity. Yet even as she strived to protect young Rud from potential peril, she urged him to emulate his father’s example in every way possible.

Certainly Rutherford Hayes Jr., known to everyone as Ruddy, was among the most attractive, most admired men who fathered future American presidents. Ruddy’s father, Rutherford Hayes Sr., followed the tradition of multiple careers common in the American colonies. He was a blacksmith, a farmer, and eventually an innkeeper. From a Scottish family originally named Haie, renowned for their valor, Hayes didn’t exactly duplicate his highland heritage. His earliest American ancestor had come to Connecticut in 1625, and others in the family later fought for independence. Hayes avoided such involvement by moving to Vermont, where there was no conscription, and was one of the signers of the subsequent “Plea of Conciliation” between Vermont and New York. He simply wanted to live in peace. His popular Brattleboro Tavern was really run by his more practical wife, Chloe.

Their fourth child and second son, Rutherford Hayes Jr., dubbed Ruddy, was born on January 4, 1787. He was frail as a child and would always be slender, but by his teens he was strong-bodied. What struck everyone about Ruddy, beyond his flaming red hair, was an unusual combination of energy and amiability, an amalgam of both his parents. Named for his father, Ruddy was sent across the river to New Hampshire to attend the select school at Atkinson and did well, winning academic awards. His parents might have sent him on to Dartmouth, but he preferred to get started in business. Ruddy went into retailing as a clerk for the growing firm of Noyes and Mann. John Noyes had married Ruddy’s sister, Polly.

Noyes and his partner, John Mann, had decided to expand their business. First, they went to Putney and then opened a general store in Wilmington, sending young Ruddy to manage it. He made his customary favorable impression, on no one more than an early customer named Sophia Birchard. Harry Barnard describes her as “attractive in a clean and chaste way,” with a trim figure. She had rather a long “Yankee face,” tightly combed brown hair, and blue eyes. Her other memorable feature was her extremely rosy cheeks, which caused her no end of embarrassment, implying artificial embellishment. Despite her aversion to crimson, when Sophia glimpsed Ruddy behind the counter, the sparks were instantaneous. Later Ruddy would write her, in the florid fashion of the time, that “the lass with the roseate cheeks shall not be long forgotten by the lad with the rubicund hair.”

The first American Birchard brought his family to Roxbury in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. There were Birchards at Bunker Hill, and Sophia’s maternal grandfather, “Old Captain” Daniel Austin, lived long enough to regale her with stories of the Revolution. Sophia was born in Wilmington, Vermont, on April 15, 1792. Her father, a farmer and merchant, died when she was only thirteen. Her mother remarried and then divorced, a scandalous occurrence in nineteenth-century Vermont. She died of spotted fever when Sophia was eighteen, an epidemic that also cost her a younger brother and sister and a number of other relatives. Her acquaintance with grief came early. From her formative years Sophia was devoutly religious and read endlessly by candlelight—not frivolous books, but such weighty works as Pilgrim’s Progress. Like Ruddy Hayes, she had excelled at the district school, but each undertook early responsibilities.

As Ruddy was transferred to another location, they carried on an affectionate correspondence, and on September 13, 1813, twenty-one-year-old Sophia married twenty-six-year-old Ruddy. They moved to the bustling Vermont town of Dummerston. Two of the brothers Sophia had been caring for moved in with relatives, and a third, twelve-year-old Sardis, came to live with them. In August 1814, their first child was born, but he lived for only a matter of minutes. For the first time, Sophia witnessed a terrible melancholy in her normally lighthearted husband. Of course, she was already no stranger to tragedy, but stemming her own tears, she pulled them through. Many years later her daughter Fanny defined it as Sophia’s “singular trait.” She was disposed to “look on the dark side when others are joyous, and rising when others are depressed … thus preserving the equilibrium of our family.”

The next year should have been a time for joy. In 1815 Sophia gave birth to another son. Thankfully, this one was healthy, his hair as bright red as his father’s. They named him Lorenzo. It was a different sort of depression that determined Ruddy to take his family west. In 1814, John Noyes was elected to Congress, and Jonas Mann withdrew from the partnership. The end of the War of 1812 had brought not only rejoicing but also a severe economic depression, extending to the Panic of 1819. In New England, retailing was as hard hit as manufacturing and farming.

Ruddy had heard of “golden opportunities” in Ohio. Although many of their friends and relatives had already caught the western fever, Sophia was particularly reluctant to abandon the surroundings she had always known. Nor was Ruddy anxious to leave, but he had to see these new lands for himself. And Sophia was pregnant again. Ruddy set out on horseback, ultimately riding throughout Ohio. Following a new stagecoach route, he found a large tract of land to his liking near the settled town of Delaware. It already had some four hundred residents, many of them fellow Vermonters. She had already given birth to a daughter, whom they named Sarah Sophia, and agreed to the move.

In 1817 the firm of Noyes & Hayes was dissolved and its assets sold. That fall, Sophia, Ruddy, and their two children set out for what Ruddy’s mother called “a distant land,” a trip that would take forty days, their belongings in three wagons. They stopped first to visit Ruddy’s parents in Brattleboro. On the day of their departure, Chloe Hayes wrote in her diary, “Sept. 10, 1817. With tender emotions and feelings which cannot be erased from my mind I will reckon the transactions of this day…. I hope a kind Providence will protect them thru all the dangers they may have to pass.” Chloe Hayes was convinced she would never again see her son, the “glory and pride” of her family.

From the day he arrived in Delaware, as Sophia recounts, Ruddy was “always busy.” After some five rigorous years in Ohio, Sophia had reason to feel a sense of satisfaction in a handsome home, abundant fruit orchards, congenial company, fulfilling work in community activities, a loving husband, and a growing family. She had given birth to a second daughter, Fanny, a delightful child, and was pregnant yet again. It must be time for things to go bad. This time the epidemic was typhoid fever. In the summer of 1822, a pervasive strain of the contagious disease swept through Ohio. First, little Sarah Sophia died. In only three days, her father, too, was gone. He was only thirty-five. Although virtually everyone else in the household and throughout the community was sick, Ruddy was mourned by the largest assemblage of residents who had ever attended a local funeral. Sophia would mourn him the rest of her life.

On October 4, 1822, still feverish, she gave birth to a frail baby boy. With undaunted faith, she named him Rutherford Birchard Hayes for the father and older brother he would never know. However, Sophia’s succession of personal tragedies was not yet at an end. Only three years later, while skating, Lorenzo fell through the ice and drowned. At home, young Rud would have only his surviving sister, Fanny, to be his childhood companion. Is it any wonder his mother cherished and protected him against every peril, real or imagined?

Sophia’s bachelor brother, Sardis, whom Ruddy had generously adopted, became a supportive surrogate father figure. However, it was essentially a little world of women, particularly after Sophia’s spinster aunt, Arcena Smith, came to reside with them. Characteristically, Sophia wrote to relatives, “My dear children are perfectly well, but I am filled with fear for them.” It would never leave her.

As Harry Barnard observes, Rud’s much-loved sister Fanny was so superior at sports that she became the equivalent of a stronger, more secure older brother. He writes, “It was no wonder that neighbors considered him ‘timid as a girl’ … and not even forty years later could his mother see him as other than a boy in need of sheltering.” Rutherford was not really separated from his mother until he was nearly fourteen. She had been his primary instructor in almost every subject. Sardis had recommended an excellent boys’ boarding school—Norwalk Academy—and Sophia was obliged to agree that it was time for some institutional education. Rud found that he loved the school, and despite his sheltered childhood, it was remarkable how readily he adapted to the male world outside his home. Now Sophia’s concerns were reduced to whether his manners might be less polished away from her influence. At sixteen he went on to Kenyon College, graduating in 1842 as valedictorian, the acknowledged leader of his class. For once, his mother’s joy was unalloyed, proudly witnessing his commencement oration. How much like his father he seemed now, self-confident and assertive, the solace for so much suffering.

What path would he follow? Fanny, now married, welcomed her brother to her new home in Columbus, where he had decided to read law. Surprisingly, Sophia was pleased. Law was a respectable profession, so long as it didn’t lead to politics. All being elected to Congress had done for her husband’s brother-in-law was turn him into an alcoholic. When a now-affluent Sardis paid Rud’s tuition at Harvard Law School, Sophia was hardly upset, only saddened by another separation. Her correspondence never ceased. To Rud, now financially secure and fully his own man, his mother remained a perceptive observer. With respect to President Polk’s expansionist agenda, she wrote Rud this timeless admonition, “If the time wasted talking about Oregon had been spent in educating the ignorant or in improving the moral condition of the young of this land, instead of inflaming their minds about ‘war and honor,’ it would be better.”

Rutherford’s choice of a bride, unlike his transition to politics, met with Sophia’s unqualified approval. In 1852 he wed Lucy Ware Webb, a college-educated young woman so devout and morally attuned that she might have been related to Sophia. They were to have eight children, although three of their sons died in infancy. Nor were Sophia’s personal blows yet at an end. Her daughter, Fanny, so loved by both her mother and brother, lived only to be thirty-five, the same age at which her father had died. Rud was now Sophia’s sole surviving child.

The Civil War came like a specter from the past. Sophia’s mind filled with new premonitions of death. She hated the war but viewed secession and slavery as “more wicked,” writing Rud, “If I had ten sons, I would rather they were with you.” This time there was no looking at the bright side of disaster. With her daughter-in-law, Lucy, she could only pray and share the ordeal. When Ohio Republican leaders suggested he take a furlough to campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, Hayes replied, “An officer fit for duty, who at this crisis would abandon his post to electioneer for a seat in Congress, ought to be scalped.” Somehow he survived, despite being wounded four times. He ended the war as a brigadier general and a genuine hero. Sophia felt pride, relief, and probably puzzlement. How was it possible he had not been taken from her?

Sophia Birchard Hayes died on October 30, 1866, at the age of seventy-four. A decade later, her son became president of the United States in the most controversial election since that of John Quincy Adams. A congressional commission, by a vote of eight to seven, awarded the election to an incredulous Hayes over Samuel Tilden. One pivotal condition was that he, although a Republican, oversee the final end of Reconstruction in the South.

It is ironic that such a deal dominated the tenure of so well-intentioned a man as Hayes, overshadowing his espousal of broad-based reform and sound money. Perhaps his occupancy in the White House is popularly most remembered for the decision of his wife, “Lemonade Lucy,” to ban alcoholic beverages—even wine—from the premises, going Sarah Polk one better. Well, Rud’s mother had warned him of “the vice and frivolous company” that infested Washington.

Rutherford Birchard Hayes died of the results of a heart attack in Fremont, Ohio, on January 17, 1893. He was seventy. Even though Hayes had never joined his mother’s church, Barnard concludes that, “from his tender attentions” to her, his “clean look,” the contentment with his wife and family, and “the absence of any scandal in his affairs,” even Sophia would have concluded that he had not been corrupted by his chosen career path. Most of all, after so much loss in her life, this favored child she had sheltered had somehow managed to survive to a career worthy of his father’s honored name.

Eliza and Abram Garfield

Just as Rud Hayes carried with him a vivid depiction of the father he had never known, so did James Abram Garfield. However, Garfield’s father had been dead for three decades when, in her sixties, his widow Eliza felt she finally must take the time to compose a “brief sketch of my early life for the Gratification of my Children after I am laid in the Grave.” Her “early life” included an understandably excessive appraisal of her husband.

“Your father,” she wrote, “was five feet and eleven inches high, large head, broad shoulders and chest, high forehead, brown hair, blue eyes, light complexion, as beautiful a set of teeth as any man ever had … cheeks very red, lips tolerably full but to me very handsome…. His bearing noble and brave, his benevolence was finely developed, fond of his friends, everybody liked him, his judgment was very good.” In short, another Ruddy Hayes. Unfortunately, Garfield left his wife with so much less than Hayes did that it rendered Eliza Garfield’s subsequent struggles virtually a matter of survival.

In particular, she sought to inspire the youngest, brightest, and most rambunctious of her sons to a more positive purpose. It was to his mother that the twenty-one-year-old James Garfield expressed his gratitude, reflecting, “In reviewing the varied scenes of my short yet eventful life, I can see the golden thread running through the whole—my mother’s influence on me.” Of course, to an appreciative Eliza Garfield, it was also an inheritance from his father. In the thirteen years of their marriage they had given so much to each other that any reflection of it to their children must be from both parents. Although Eliza had been left with a small farm, her husband had died as suddenly as had Jacob Johnson, leaving her with four children to support. For sheer fortitude in the face of adversity, Eliza Ballou Garfield has few if any equals in the mothers of American presidents.

Her family and her husband’s, so seemingly different, had kept running into each other across the expansive American frontier, from New York State to the Western Reserve of Ohio. The Garfields, as Theodore Smith writes, were “typical New England stock” of Norman-English extraction, arriving in 1630 among the earliest settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They tended to be tall and sturdy, given to action and evincing little in the way of intellectual curiosity.

Following the Revolutionary War, in which Garfields had fought, Abram’s grandfather left New England for Worcester, in central New York. Abram was born there on December 28, 1799. He was christened Abraham but always went by Abram. Shortly thereafter his father, Thomas, died, and his mother married a similarly solid man named Caleb Boynton. As a youth, Abram, described by Margaret Leech and Harry Brown, was a “warm, open-hearted boy, stamped with the Garfield pattern of exceptional muscular strength,” as typical a representation of his family as Eliza Ballou was of hers.

The Ballous were of French Huguenot extraction, noted for their diminutive size and quick wit. They settled in Rhode Island around the end of the seventeenth century and then moved throughout New England. Many were creative and intellectual. Hosea Ballou founded Universalism, forerunner of the Unitarian Church. Eliza’s father died in 1808, when she was only six, leaving his widow in dire straits. However, she was a skilled weaver and put her talents to use, taking her five children to New York State, where she had relatives near the town of Worcester. There Eliza first ran into Abram Garfield. He was fourteen; she was twelve. Initially, she didn’t like this “green boy” very much, who had so little use for learning. However, because of the increased mobility after the War of 1812, they would meet again.

Eliza, a true Ballou, was as much the physical embodiment of her family as Abram was of his. In her late teens she is described by Allen Peskin as having “features perhaps already sharp and set” and also as having inherited her mother’s bright coloring as well as her clever hands. “Her fine singing voice made her welcome in any gathering…. She was small and quick … fond of company and chatter.” Hendrick Booraem adds that Eliza was short in stature but noted for her “saucy” wit and energy by her many friends. Abram Garfield sought to be numbered among them. His stepfather, Caleb Boynton, had brought his vast brood of Garfields and Boyntons to Ohio in 1814, seeking land and opportunity in an area only recently wrested from Chief Tecumseh and his Indian allies. After the Ballous had also moved to Ohio, Abram set out to renew his acquaintance with them. Something in his more confident demeanor finally won Eliza over. She surely shared his sense of adventure. Eliza and Abram were married on February 3, 1820. He was twenty, she eighteen.

Joining thousands of like-minded pioneers, they set out with high spirits to seek their fortune in the Western Reserve, Ohio’s northwest frontier. The newlyweds settled on forty acres of land, but before Abram could even use his woodworking skills to build them a snug log home, both he and Eliza fell ill. It was that common frontier ailment called “ague,” probably a form of malaria. For portions of their first four years together, even hearty Abram was terribly weak. Fortunately, a number of Boyntons who lived nearby provided a ready refuge. Despite everything, Eliza gave birth to four children, two boys and two girls.

When Abram, anxious to improve their circumstances, was finally up to working, he used his Garfield charm to talk twenty other men into joining him in taking on a contract to construct part of the new Erie Canal. Unfortunately, a second, larger contract was compromised by rising costs and wiped out all his profits from the first. After eight years of marriage, initiated with such high hopes, he was back where he started, but now with a family to support. His strength and his wife’s undiminished confidence remained his only assets. Eliza helped out by weaving for others.

Assistance, emotional and physical, came from the Boyntons. Before long, they helped Abram raise the roof of a substantial log house. Just constructing it buoyed his spirits. Abram cleared new acres and planted wheat and other crops. Things seemed to be looking up. It remained in Eliza’s memory as “a golden time.” Abram’s energy supplemented Eliza’s spirit, and they were soon living as well as their neighbors.

Then tragedy struck without warning, as it so often did on the frontier, breaking their family circle. Their two-year-old son, Jimmy, died of an undisclosed ailment in his mother’s arms. Soon, Eliza gave birth again. Her final child, another boy, was born in their log cabin in Orange, Ohio, on November 19, 1831. Named for both his father and a departed brother, a not uncommon practice in those times, James Abram Garfield was, in his mother’s words, “the largest Babe I ever had.” He “looked like a red Irishman, a very large head and shoulders…. He was a very good natured child.” James, even in infancy, seemed so like his father, with dimensions appropriate to a Garfield. Unlike so many presidential parents who favored their oldest sons, the Garfields saw something special in their youngest.

James would know neither of those for whom he had been named. In the dry, dangerous spring months of 1833, a fire broke out in the woods surrounding the Garfield home and the acres Abram had cleared. To keep it from spreading, he fought the blaze all day. Coming home drenched and exhausted, Abram caught a violent cold, probably pneumonia. Two days later, on May 3, 1833, he was gone, dying at the age of only thirty-three. Reputedly, realizing that the end was near, Abram said to his wife, “Eliza, I have brought you four young saplings into these woods. Take care of them.” That she did. James was eighteen months old.

Many years later, in a campaign biography, James Garfield recalled what he had learned of his mother’s reaction: “She lost no time in irresolution, but plunged at once into the roughest sort of men’s labor. The wheat field was only half-fenced, the precious harvest still ungathered.” A slight woman of thirty-two, with her four children to provide for, Eliza had little time for the luxury of grief. Her neighbors would help her bring in the spring crop. But what then? She and her son Tom, who grew up quickly under the circumstances, split rails, truly “man’s labor,” from timber Abram had cut for that purpose. Together they completed the fence enclosing their fields, protecting the ripening wheat from roaming cattle that had been let loose during the forest fire. If the family were to remain intact, it must be self-sustaining. The only Garfield exempted from farm chores, of necessity, was baby James.

A skilled seamstress, the vocation of so many first mothers, Eliza bartered her handiwork with the local cobbler for shoes. Wheat was traded for corn. From their few sheep Eliza made all the family’s garments. Eliza insisted to her children that they were not a poor family. Perhaps sustenance was not abundance, but the family and a loving God would provide. Eliza led daily Bible readings, and the family walked together, as James grew, to the Christian meetinghouse every Sunday. Upon their return they reflected on everything they had heard.

None of this was done, however, in a sanctimonious spirit. The young widow would be recalled by her children as joyful, cheerful, and affectionate, as well as vigorous. After all, she was a Ballou as well as a Garfield. With her beautiful singing voice she led them not only in hymns but also in sea chanteys, ballads of the day, and patriotic songs from the War of 1812. She held them all spellbound with stories and song. Certainly, Eliza loved all four of her children, but as Margaret Leech and Harry Brown suggest, “She could see her handsome husband in the fair, square-shouldered little man who frolicked at her knee.” Even when he grew old enough to help out, picking berries, herding their few livestock, and the like, James was always encouraged by his mother to take time to read. Not entirely because of age—he was the chosen one. Perhaps, despite the best of intentions, too much so.

If James owed his intellectual interests to his mother, he continued to physically resemble his father. The “red Irishman” at ten or twelve towered over other children, was immensely powerful, and had a great, unruly shock of brown hair. In practical skills and temperament, however, he was growing up to be little like his father. James had no more love for farming than had Abraham Lincoln. Wielding an axe, he was a danger to himself and anyone else in the vicinity. It is a wonder he could hunt without accident. Already a restless bundle of contradictions, into his teens he was becoming mercurial, clumsy yet hyperactive, with a temper little like his father’s. Yet, as soon as his love for reading became apparent, Eliza brought him every book she could find—history, the classics, adventure. An early indication of his restlessness was that he particularly loved stories of the sea. Clearly, James had the potential Eliza had foreseen, but how was it to be harnessed? Fortunately, as the Western Reserve developed, Eliza was not alone in her love of learning. When the township of Orange looked about to establish its own schoolhouse, Eliza was happy to oblige, offering a corner of her farm for the school’s location.

His sisters married and his brother Tom departed to his own farm, finally James and his mother were living alone, the glow of their hearth undiminished, their modest domain at least stabilized. Most of their neighbors enjoyed a relative prosperity in which even the thrifty Eliza Garfield was still unable to share. Despite his disdain for farming, James had helped her diversify the property, raising corn and potatoes as well as wheat. He took on odd jobs, even farming for neighbors, but his restlessness increased. All those books he had read about nautical adventures only fueled his wanderlust.

At sixteen, James announced to his incredulous mother that he, too, was leaving home to seek his fortune—if not on the seven seas, at least on a vessel plying the Great Lakes. She did not protest excessively. After all, it was her own sense of adventure, joined with Abram’s, that had brought them to the Western Reserve. Rebuffed in his attempt on the Cleveland waterfront to be hired on a large vessel, James settled for a berth on a humble canal boat, following the route his father had helped construct. The next few months were the most harrowing of his life. He nearly drowned on three occasions. At about the same time, in 1848, he started writing a personal journal. When he returned home, still intent on going back to the canal boat for a second tour, his mother welcomed him without a word of reproach. James promptly fell terribly ill. While his mother nursed his now “haggard and forbidding” frame back to health, she also adroitly suggested at least a “short-term” alternative. Why not consider going back to school until he had fully recovered his strength? Even sailors could use some education. Eliza brought over a gifted young teacher named Samuel Bates, who instructed students in advanced mathematics at Geauga Academy in nearby Chester. The two men got on very well, as Eliza had hoped.

Garfield later wrote of this time, “My mother captured me…. She simply went about her duties quietly and permitted things to work themselves out.” Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. She had been convinced from the first that this special son was her “child of high destiny, born to be good and great.” Channeling him from the canal to the classroom had to be done gradually. Eliza suggested that if James would commit to taking only two semesters at Geauga, she would talk several of his old friends into accompanying him there. After she had somehow managed to do this, and he finally agreed to go, she also scraped together the seventeen dollars for his first year’s board and tuition.

On the day her son departed, she was already certain her prayers had been answered. “Her plans for James were unfolding just as she had hoped,” Booraem writes. As James progressed at Geauga, memories of his free life as a sailor receded, and his future spread out before him. He became “very industrious in his studies…. He was willing to work long hours just to get back” to school. He even labored as a custodian to earn the second year’s tuition.

His path led all the way to Williams College in Massachusetts, to heading a school in Ohio that became Hiram College, to becoming a lay preacher for the Disciples of Christ, to studying law, and to heroic service in the Civil War, where he would end up a major general. His political career led from the Ohio Senate to eighteen years in the U.S. Congress to nomination and election, however closely contested, as the twentieth president of the United States.

In 1853 Eliza finally sold the farm she had struggled so tenaciously to maintain. Her children returned for a last meal together at the old homestead, when Eliza insisted on serving them personally. In later years, James was able to take her back to her childhood home in New Hampshire, gaining pleasure in sharing her enjoyment at being “a girl once more” and evoking such memories of Abram, whom she had viewed initially as a “green boy.”

It was only a little more than a decade after going off to Geauga that Garfield was leading Union troops into battle. His mother truly believed in the “Era of Universal Peace” her son had spoken of, but she hated slavery more. “By now,” as Doris Faber writes, “James was married to a sweet and steadfast former teacher who might have been Eliza’s own daughter, and together the two women trembled for him when he was away.” They also prayed, and their prayers were answered. James and Lucretia Rudolph Garfield of Hiram, Ohio, whom everyone called “Crete,” had been wed in 1858. They had five sons and two daughters, but two of their children died in infancy.

Although not the first presidential mother to experience the election of her son, Eliza was the first to attend his inauguration. “From the tow path to the White House,” Garfield’s campaign literature had trumpeted, but it was really more from the schoolhouse to the White House. Nearing her eightieth year, Eliza was “proud and happy” but perhaps not all that surprised to see her son take the oath of office. As Peskin recounts, wearing the relative finery of “black silk, under her demure bonnet, her bright eyes … taking in everything,” Eliza was a small but striking figure at the ceremonies. If, as Peskin adds, James Garfield “would be more remembered for what he was than what he did,” that only enhances the role his mother played in his life.

Only a few months later, while awaiting a train that was to take him to deliver the commencement address at Williams, Garfield was shot by a deranged, disappointed office seeker. One bullet lodged near his spine, a second grazed his arm. Garfield was rushed back to the White House, where he remained for two months while doctors probed unsuccessfully for the bullet in his back. He then asked to be moved to his shore-side cottage in Elberon, New Jersey, in hope that the sea air might prove beneficial. At first the news of his condition had been kept from his increasingly frail mother, who had returned to Ohio. As James’s life ebbed away, one of his final letters assured her that he was on the way to recovery. James Abram Garfield died on September 19, 1881, two months short of his fiftieth birthday. The nation’s outpouring of grief rivaled that accorded to Lincoln.

Eliza’s physical and emotional strength as a slight young widow had astonished her neighbors and sustained her children. Now even tinier and enfeebled by age, her only desire was to join the youngest of them. Instead, she endured more than another six years of sorrow. Her final prayer was answered on January 21, 1888, at the age of eighty-six. James Garfield had matured through the ceaseless efforts of a mother he knew, but also through the reflection of a father he knew only through her. Their dedication transcended their time together.

Malvina and William Arthur

As Vice President Chester Alan Arthur anxiously awaited news of Garfield’s condition, there were still rumors that Arthur had been born in Canada, making him ineligible to ascend to the presidency. American political history is replete with such colorful complications. The Republicans of that era, split between “Stalwarts” and “Half-Breeds,” offered some lucrative opportunities. In 1871 President Grant named Arthur to one of the most coveted posts, collector of the port of New York. In 1878, President Hayes fired him as part of his campaign against the “spoils system.” Then his fortunes took another turn. Although Arthur had never held elective office, he accepted running with Garfield in 1880 to balance the ticket, and they narrowly defeated the Democrats.

Chester was one of the nine children of Malvina and William Arthur. In effect, William was born twice—first in Ulster in 1796, and then “born again,” as it is put today, in Vermont in 1827, called to preach the gospel. The first of the three first fathers who became ministers, he had turned to religion in his thirties, after pursuing very different careers. Born a Presbyterian, he was also a lay reader in the Episcopal Church, and he married a Methodist, but it was as a Baptist that he preached to parishioners in a succession of pulpits. He and his equally devout wife, Malvina, sought to impart the certainty of their faith to their children, particularly as their increasingly worldly son Chester matured. Even more significant was their fundamental honesty.

The Arthurs were from Scotland, tracing their lineage as far back as the MacArthurs in the fifteenth century and then to the Campbell clan. Like many Scots, they ultimately found their way to the north of Ireland. William Arthur was born to a farming family in 1796, located, in the mellifluous words of Thomas Reeves, “in the townland of Dreen, across the bridge from the village of Cullybackey in County Antrim.” At eighteen he graduated from Belfast College. In 1818 or 1819, with prosperity receding in Ulster, he emigrated to Canada.

To get started, he worked at a series of jobs in Quebec, notably teaching in Dunham, fifteen miles north of the Vermont border. He also discovered eighteen-year-old Malvina Stone, whose English forebears had settled in northern New Hampshire in the mid-1700s and then moved throughout New England. Her grandfather, a veteran of the French and Indian War, lived an eventful life. He ran a ferry over the Connecticut River, developed a prosperous farm, and sired twelve children. One of them, George Washington Stone, Malvina’s father, decided to move his family north, over the border, and settled in Dunham, Quebec, where he lived for the rest of his life. Accordingly, Malvina enjoyed the heritage of two countries, although her own birth in Vermont is a matter of record. She had met William Arthur in Quebec. They fell in love, eloped in 1821, and had a daughter, the first of four. Torn between teaching and the law, William decided that the latter would constitute a more productive vocation and moved his family south to Burlington, Vermont, where he could pursue his legal studies.

In Burlington, William readily found a clerkship in a lawyer’s office, taught school to help support his family, and looked forward to an eventually prosperous career. Instead, he had an epiphany. Always interested in religion, he happened to attend a Baptist revival meeting in nearby Waterville and felt the call, as had Malvina’s Uncle John, to personally preach the gospel. The emotional preacher at the meeting seemed to be talking directly to him. William decided on the spot that his life, too, must be devoted to saving souls for the Lord. He went on to be licensed as a “Free Will” Baptist preacher in 1827 and, after a rigorous clerical examination, was ordained in the regular Baptist clergy in 1828. William brought eloquence and energy to his new calling, but his spellbinding sermons were to bring him more converts than comfort, and his uncompromising nature led him during the next three decades to eleven different congregations.

The first of them was in the small farming community of Fairfield, Vermont. Already in his thirties, William and his perpetually supportive wife now had those four daughters to support. With an annual salary of only $250, to come even reasonably close to making ends meet, William was obliged to also teach school, fulfill his pastoral duties in Fairfield, and serve as a visiting preacher at other small congregations on both sides of the Canadian border.

On the night of October 5, 1830, the Arthurs finally gave birth to a son, a healthy nine-pound boy they named Chester Alan Arthur. Reportedly, his father, hard-pressed or not, was so carried away that he literally danced for joy, naming his son for the doctor who had delivered him. William Arthur didn’t view the new arrival as an extra mouth to feed but rather as the heir of a legacy of faith more precious than riches. Eventually, the Arthurs had nine children, although a later son died at two and a favorite daughter at eighteen. Of Chester’s upbringing, William Judson Hampton writes, “In youth there had been the training and influence of the Christian home; the start of life with no other endowments than health, character, courage, and honorable ambition.” Financial problems would dog Malvina and William Arthur throughout their life together.

Moving from parish to parish in Vermont and New York may have given him the aspect of an itinerant preacher, but William possessed a formidable intellect. During his uncommonly lengthy five-year tenure in Greenwich, New York, William was so renowned for scholarship that he was awarded an honorary master of arts degree from Union College. In Schenectady he edited for four years a magazine of “popular knowledge” called the Antiquarian and General Review. He spoke Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. As time allowed, he took in students to tutor and prepare for college, augmenting his always meager income.

Reeves describes William as “of medium size,” clean-shaven, with a thatch of dark hair, and “a keen, penetrating eye.” He was a man who left a strong impression—articulate, witty, passionate—but whose sarcasm could be cutting. He never lost his thick Irish accent. Although a man of the cloth, he had a rather unclerical temper and argumentative spirit. Sometimes it seemed almost as if he enjoyed shocking his parishioners with hard truths about what leading a Christian life really entailed. His uncompromising attitude led to frequent disputes with the deacons and trustees of his churches. It is little wonder that he was obliged to move so frequently.

To someone of William’s convictions, one had not only to espouse the literal lessons of the Bible but, whether comfortable or not, to live them without compromise. He viewed slavery as an abomination no Christian could possibly sanction, and he didn’t mind saying so in his sermons. He is believed to have cofounded the New York Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, before such abolitionist views were widely shared, even in the North.

He and Malvina suffered many sorrows, but whatever problems dogged the devout couple, they helped their remaining children in every way possible, none more than Chester. Always an amiable child, “Chet,” as he was called, started school at the Union Village Academy, went on to the local lyceum, where he edited the student newspaper, and finally entered renowned Union College as a sophomore. He pursued a demanding classical education. Although seemingly more sociable than scholarly, he graduated in 1848 Phi Beta Kappa, near the top of his class. A paper he wrote denouncing the practice of slavery anywhere as “disgraceful” particularly pleased his father.

They had some physical similarities, although the mature Chester Alan Arthur featured sideburns and a mustache. He stood six-foot-two, taller than his father, was slender but quite strong physically, and is often described as “strikingly handsome.” An early teacher referred to Chester’s “dark and brilliant eyes,” much like his father’s, but also noted the already profound difference in their temperaments. Chester was “frank and open in his manners and genial in his disposition.” William may have been similarly frank and open, but he was only genial if you agreed with him. It was on the basis of that geniality, and his adaptability, that Chet Arthur launched his political career.

There was only one problem. Was he an American? Unfortunately, most of Arthur’s private papers had been destroyed in a fire. Had his birth really taken place in Fairfield or Waterville, Vermont, in 1830? As his political star ascended, some of his opponents found his family’s Canadian connections too tempting to ignore. Finally a thorough investigative reporter for the New York Sun put all the rumors to relative rest, and it was good enough for the U.S. government. When James Garfield expired after those traumatic 199 days, Arthur was duly sworn in as president, after which he would surprise everyone.

The 1850s had seemed a promising decade even for Parson William Arthur. While his son taught for a time in Vermont, went on to study law, and was admitted to the bar with bright prospects in 1854, William contemplated his own future. Need piety always be accompanied by privation? Contemplating retirement from the final location of his peripatetic ministry at the Calvary Baptist Church in Albany, William settled his family in nearby Newtonville, New York. It looked as if he might be able to expand his well-regarded boarding school for college-bound students to a level of profitability, but, of course, something intervened—the Civil War.

As Chester went off to serve, although his cushy assignment would be no more dangerous than as inspector general and quartermaster general in New York (ever after, he still liked to be called “General”), his father’s advice followed him. “Pray daily,” William exhorted, “for you know not, when called to meet the enemy, you may fall in Battle.” By then, Chester had become increasingly sophisticated in his urban environment and far removed from the literal Christianity epitomized by what seemed the simple country faith of his parents. However, it never diminished his appreciation of how much they had sacrificed for him. Amiable Chester Arthur’s legal and evolving political career, in apparent alliance with some thoroughly venal New York Republican political factions, could be characterized by the titles of his two major biographies: A Quarter Century of Machine Politics and Gentleman Boss.

He became renowned for his opulent, luxurious lifestyle—attired elegantly and residing in a handsome brownstone. Yet all those warm memories of his childhood must have returned whenever Arthur visited his parents, which he did as often as he could. Neither lived to see him in the White House. William Arthur died of stomach cancer on October 27, 1875, at the age of seventy-nine. Malvina had passed away on January 16, 1869, at the age of sixty-seven. Late in her life, she too had appealed in a letter to both her remaining sons, “Oh that God would answer my prayer, that before I am taken from life, you … may come out publicly and confess Christ…. I know He will lead you to everlasting life and glory, if you are willing.” Although their most prominent son never went that far, his support had helped to ease his parents’ final years, and he had never quite forsaken their values. As Howe testifies, habits of generosity and kindness “were included throughout his boyhood” and guided him throughout his life.

When he became president, Arthur surprised both his friends and his critics. As he explained when refusing to grant political favors to an incredulous visitor, “Since I came here I have learned that Chester A. Arthur is one man and the president of the United States is another.” Among other reforms, he backed the investigation of post-office scandals, supported the civil service, and reduced the national debt. His wife having died before him, a sister had served as White House hostess. Chester Alan Arthur died of Bright’s disease in New York City on November 18, 1886, at the age of fifty-seven. A son and daughter survived him. He had served a creditable tenure in fulfilling Garfield’s term. When granted for a time the greatest power he would ever possess, President Chester Alan Arthur came to represent the most important quality he had inherited from his parents—an honesty transcending the pragmatism of politics.