Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
When Garfield made his way through the crowded streets of Chicago to the Republican National Convention on the evening of June 6, 1880, he felt not excitement, but a heavy sense of dread. The convention was about to begin the second session of its fourth day, and he had no illusions about what it would hold. Each day had been more bruising than the last, as the crowd had grown louder, the tensions higher, and the delegates angrier. The viciousness of the convention dismayed Garfield, but it did not surprise him. His first night in Chicago, he had written home asking for help in the days ahead. “Don’t fail to write me every day,” he wrote to his wife. “Each word from you will be a light in this wilderness.”
In 1880, the Republican Party was sharply divided into two warring factions. At the convention, delegates had little choice but to choose a side—either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation with the South; or the men whose values Garfield shared, a determined group of reformers who would become known as the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts had nothing but contempt for their rivals within the party, particularly Rutherford B. Hayes, who was about to complete his first term in the White House. President Hayes’s attempts to replace government patronage with a merit system had been met with such fury from the Stalwarts, and had led to such bitter contention and open rebellion, that he had made it clear to anyone who would listen that he did not want to be nominated for a second term. “The first half of my term was so full of trouble and embarrassments as to be a continual struggle,” Hayes wrote, “and I do not propose to invite a new season of embarrassment.”
Hayes’s abdication and the escalating battle for control of the party had aroused such intense interest in the nomination that, for the first time in Republican history, every state had sent a representative to the convention. The Half-Breeds had two top candidates: John Sherman, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s younger brother and secretary of the treasury under Hayes, and James G. Blaine, who had been speaker of the house and was now a senator of such charm and influence that he was known as the Magnetic Man from Maine. The Stalwarts, on the other hand, had only one serious candidate—Ulysses S. Grant.
If anyone was considered a safe bet in this turbulent convention, it was Grant. The idea of a third term, for anyone, was controversial, and the two terms Grant had already served as president had been notoriously rife with corruption. He was, however, still a national hero. Not only had he commanded the Union Army in the Civil War, but he had personally accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In 1868, and again in 1872, he had been given the Republican nomination for president on the first ballot. No one believed he would win the nomination as easily this time, but few believed he would lose.
Although the Republican Party had controlled the White House for more than ten years, and their leading candidates in 1880 were all widely known and well worn, they had wisely chosen as the setting of their convention a city that, more than any other city in the nation, then symbolized rebirth and renewal. Less than ten years earlier, Chicago had been devastated by the worst natural disaster in the country’s 104-year history—the Great Chicago Fire. Since then, the city had not only recovered, but had literally risen from the ashes to become one of America’s most modern metropolises.
As Garfield made his way toward the convention hall, he saw all around him evidence of the path the fire had taken. The street he was walking on, Michigan Avenue, had been leveled for ten blocks, from Congress Avenue north to the Chicago River. Every building, every lamppost, even the sidewalks themselves had been destroyed.
At the time of the fire, in the fall of 1871, Chicago had been a tinderbox. A hundred days had passed with little more than an inch of rain. The buildings were made of wood, wooden planks covered the streets and sidewalks, and, in anticipation of the coming winter, cords of wood, gallons of kerosene, and mounds of hay had been stockpiled throughout the city. The fire, which had started in a cow barn on the city’s west side, raged for almost two days, destroying thousands of buildings and more than seventy miles of street, killing at least three hundred people, and leaving a hundred thousand homeless.
As wide-ranging and devastating as the damage had been, Chicago had sprung back to life with astonishing speed. Rebuilding efforts started so quickly that the ground was still warm when the first construction began. Within a year of the fire, nearly $50 million worth of buildings had been erected, and by 1879 the city had issued some ten thousand construction permits. By the time Garfield saw Chicago, its skyline was dotted with beautiful modern buildings, and it was just five years away from being home to the world’s first skyscraper.
While Chicago brought a sense of progress and innovation to the Republican convention, the convention in turn brought money, excitement, and worldwide attention to the city. Delegates, reporters, and curious citizens streamed in by the thousands. There were no vacant rooms at the hotels, no free tables in the restaurants. The streets were clogged with people, horses, and carriages. “Fresh crowds arriving by every train,” Garfield marveled, “and the interest increasing every hour.”
When Garfield finally reached the convention hall, he stood before one of Chicago’s most extravagant buildings. The Interstate Industrial Exposition Building, the city’s first convention center, had been built in 1872, on the heels of the great fire. Instead of wood, it was made of gleaming, fire-resistant glass and metal. It was a thousand feet long and seventy-five feet high, with elaborate ornamental domes inspired by the grand exposition halls of London and New York.
Leaving the warmth of a mild summer evening, Garfield stepped into the hall’s vast, richly decorated interior. Hundreds of red-white-and-blue flags papered the walls and swung from the arched, raftered ceiling. From huge, open windows, “the cool air of the lake poured in,” one reporter wrote. It “shook the banners, bathed the heated galleries, and then fought for mastery with the sewer-gas, which, in some mysterious way, seemed ‘entitled to the floor.’ ” In the center of the hall was a long, narrow stage bordered on one side by rectangular tables covered in heavy white cloths. On the other side of the tables, facing the stage, were tight rows of chairs arranged in alphabetical order for the more than 750 delegates. Above the delegates’ heads swayed enormous portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and along the hall’s curved back wall stretched a wide banner bearing the final words from the Gettysburg Address: “And that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Although the hall could accommodate thousands of people, it was full to overflowing. Every seat was taken—both on the floor and in the balcony, which rose to the ceiling in steep, vertiginous layers—and every inch of standing room had been claimed. Mortal enemies sat shoulder to shoulder. Reporters hunched over six long tables, elbowing for room. Men even sat on the edge of the stage, their black, highly polished shoes dangling over the side, threatening to tear the bunting with every swing.
As crowded as the hall was, it sounded as if it held twice as many people as it actually did. Beyond the typical raucous, partisan singing and chanting that took place at every convention, a deafening vitriolic battle was being waged between the party’s opposing factions. The day before, a woman from Brooklyn, who, despite her great girth, had somehow managed to hoist herself onto the stage, had to be forcibly removed from the hall as she shrieked, over and over again, “Blaine! Blaine! James G. Blaine!” Whenever a Stalwart spoke, whether to argue a position or simply to note a minor point of order, he was met by angry hisses from the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts, in turn, greeted declarations from Half-Breeds with a chorus of boos so loud they drowned out every other sound in the hall, from the thunderous scuffing of wooden chairs on the wooden floor to the jarring screeches of trains along a track just a few blocks away.
As Garfield quietly found his seat on the convention floor, he took in the spectacle around him with weary eyes. Not only had he already spent four days in the crowded, roaring hall, but his hotel room offered no refuge at night. So crowded was the city that many people who wanted to attend the convention, and even some who were obliged to attend, found themselves with no place to sleep. At one in the morning following the convention’s opening day, just as he was finally about to collapse into bed, Garfield had heard a knock on his door. He opened it to find a friend with a favor to ask. He “asked me to allow his brother (a stranger) [to] sleep with me,” Garfield sighed in a letter home the following day. He could not bring himself to say no, but he wished he had. “My bed is only three quarter size and with a stranger stretched along the wall,” he wrote. “I could not [get]… a minute of rest or sleep.”
Perhaps even more to blame for keeping Garfield up at night was the nominating speech he knew he had to give for John Sherman. Before becoming secretary of the treasury, Sherman had been a powerful senator from Ohio, and he was keenly aware that there was more enthusiasm within his state for Garfield’s nomination than his own. Nicknamed the “Ohio Icicle,” Sherman had been determinedly working behind the scenes for years, waiting for an opportunity to win the White House. He was confident that, this time, it was his turn. “It is evident,” said William Henry Smith, a former Ohio state secretary, that Sherman “thinks Heaven is smiling upon him.” First, however, Sherman had to dampen interest in Garfield, and the best way to do that, he reasoned, was to have Garfield nominate him at the convention.
Nor, certainly, had it escaped Sherman’s notice that Garfield was one of the best speakers in the Republican Party. From a very young age, Garfield had realized that he had one skill above all others—the ability to capture a crowd. When he was just twenty-one, he had humiliated a well-known traveling philosopher named Treat who made his living by going from town to town attacking Christianity and those who would defend it. After Treat had addressed one of the professors at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, with taunting disrespect, Garfield had stood up and, to the surprise of no one but Treat, quietly and calmly eviscerated him. “It is impossible,” a man who attended the debate would later recall, “for me to give any idea of his speech or of its effect upon his audience.… The applause was constant and deafening. He spoke with readiness and power and eloquence which were perfectly overwhelming. I do not think that Mr. Treat ever attempted another speech at Hiram.”
By the time Garfield entered Congress, he was a highly skilled rhetorician. The only problem was that, as good as he was at speaking, he enjoyed it even more, perhaps too much. It was not unheard of for him to speak on the floor of Congress more than forty times in a single day, and when he gave a speech, it was rarely a short one. Over the years, he had tested his colleagues’ patience on more than one occasion, prompting some of them to complain that he was “too fond of talking.” Even Garfield himself admitted that, when it came to words, he had a “fatal facility.”
However, when the fate of a bill lay in the balance or there was a moment of grave national importance, Garfield’s colleagues often turned to him to speak for the Party. On the first anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, he had been asked to give an impromptu eulogy, even though he was then one of the most junior members of Congress. Garfield had resisted, arguing that someone with substantially more seniority should give the address, but his colleagues would not relent. With only a few minutes to prepare, he delivered a speech that would be remembered not only for its eloquence but also for the powerful emotion it conveyed. At one point, he recited from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which he had not read in many years. “We have but faith: we cannot know; / For knowledge is of things we see / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.”
Yet despite his ability, Garfield dreaded the speech he was about to give. He was obliged to support Sherman, a fellow Ohioan, but he did not believe Sherman was the best candidate for the nomination. So reluctant was Garfield to deliver the speech that he had hardly given any thought to what he would say. “I have arisen at 7 this morning to tell you the peril I am in,” he had written home in desperation just a few days earlier. “I have not made the first step in preparation for my speech nominating Sherman and I see no chance to get to prepare. It was a frightful mistake that I did not write [it] before I came. It now seems inevitable that I shall fall far below what I ought to do.”
Garfield’s agonizing situation was made far worse by the fact that he would be competing for the attention and sympathies of the rabidly partisan crowd with Roscoe Conkling, a senior senator from New York and the undisputed leader of the Stalwarts. Conkling was not only a famously charismatic speaker, but arguably the most powerful person in the country. Ten years earlier, then President Grant had given Conkling, his most fiercely loyal supporter, control of the New York Customs House, which was the largest federal office in the United States and collected 70 percent of the country’s customs revenue. Since then, Conkling had personally made each appointment to the customs house. Any man fortunate enough to receive one of the high-paying jobs had been expected to make generous contributions to the Republican Party of New York, and to show unwavering loyalty to Conkling. So powerful had Conkling become that he had cavalierly turned down Grant’s offer to nominate him to the U.S. Supreme Court six years earlier.
Like Garfield, Conkling had been an outspoken abolitionist and was a powerful defender of rights for freed slaves. He had helped to draft the Fourteenth Amendment, which gave African Americans citizenship and equal rights under the Constitution, and he argued vehemently for taking a hard line toward the defeated South. To no cause, however, had Conkling committed himself more passionately than the spoils system, the source of his personal power. When Rutherford B. Hayes, as part of his sweeping efforts at reform, had removed Conkling’s man, Chester Arthur, from his position as the collector of the New York Customs House, Conkling had attacked Hayes with a vengeance, ensuring that he was thwarted at every turn for the rest of his presidency. Finally, defeated and exhausted, Hayes had bitterly complained that Conkling was a “thoroughly rotten man.”
Hayes was not alone in his assessment of Conkling’s character. As is true of most men who wield their power like a weapon, Conkling was widely feared, slavishly obeyed, and secretly despised. He offended fellow senators with impunity, ignoring their red-faced splutters even when they threatened to challenge him to a duel.
Conkling was also exceedingly vain. He had broad shoulders and a waspishly thin waist, a physique that he kept in trim by pummeling a punching bag hanging from the ceiling of his office. He wore canary-yellow waistcoats, twisted his thick, wavy blond hair into a spit curl in the center of his high forehead, used lavender ink, and recoiled at the slightest touch. When he had worked as a litigator, he had often worried that he would lose a case after flying into a rage when “some ill-bred neighbor” put a foot on his chair.
Conkling’s most open detractor was James Blaine, with whom he had had a famous fight on the floor of Congress fourteen years earlier, and to whom he had not spoken since. In front of the entire House of Representatives, Blaine had attacked Conkling as no man had ever dared to do, ridiculing “his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut.” Clutching a newspaper article that compared Conkling to a respected, recently deceased congressman, Blaine, brimming with sarcasm, spat, “The resemblance is great. It is striking. Hyperion to a satyr, Thersites to Hercules, mud to marble, dunghill to diamond, a singed cat to a Bengal tiger, a whining puppy to a roaring lion.”
Conkling, with cold fury, had vowed that he would “never overlook” Blaine’s attack, and he had since done everything in his power to deny Blaine the one thing he wanted most in this world: the presidency. Even Garfield, who admired Blaine and considered him a friend, believed that the senator had become “warped” by his all-consuming quest for the White House, willing to sacrifice any cause, even his own honor, in the pursuit of this one, overriding ambition. Four years earlier, at the last national convention, Conkling and Blaine had both been candidates for the presidential nomination. When it became clear that he could not win, Conkling had made sure his votes went to Hayes, not because he liked Hayes but because he hated Blaine. Conkling was now determined to win the nomination for Grant. He was fighting for his own benefit as much as Grant’s, but he would have done it for the pure pleasure of watching Blaine lose.
That night in the convention hall, all eyes were on Conkling, as he expected them to be. Every morning, he had entered to wild cheers. Each time he had risen to speak, he had been “cool, calm, and after his usual fashion, confident and self-possessed,” breaking into his “characteristic sneer” only when he could no longer suppress it. Sitting in an aisle seat at the front of the New York delegation, he now looked, in the words of one reporter, “serene as the June sun that shone in at the windows.” He slowly ran his fingers through his thick hair, which, but for the ever-present spit curl, was swept dramatically up from his head in carefully styled waves. Occasionally, he glanced around coolly or leaned over, almost imperceptibly, to consult with Edwin Stoughton, the minister to Russia, to his right, or Chester Arthur, who sat directly behind him.
From his seat, Conkling watched the proceedings with growing delight. The session was called to order at 7:15 p.m. with the sharp rap of a gavel, the head of which was fashioned from the doorsill of Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois home and the handle made of cane from George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. Soon after, James Joy, a little known delegate from Michigan, walked reluctantly to the podium to give Blaine’s nominating speech. Blaine’s heart must have sunk, and Conkling’s sung, as Joy mournfully began: “I shall never cease to regret the circumstances under which the duty is imposed on me to make the nomination of a candidate in the Convention.” Complaining that he had been out of the country for months and, since arriving in Chicago, had been very busy on the convention floor, he vowed to bring Blaine before the convention in “as brief a manner as possible.” After an extremely modest, stumbling assessment of his candidate’s qualities, Joy quickly concluded by nominating for president “that eminent statesman, James S. Blaine,” prompting howls of frustration from Blaine’s supporters, who screamed that his middle initial was “G! You fool, G!”
After Joy had scurried back to his seat in profound relief and another man had nominated William Windom of Minnesota, Conkling at last had the floor. Hardly waiting for New York to be called, he sprang from his seat and strode down the aisle—shoulders back, chest out, face already arch with victory. Leaping onto one of the tables where reporters sat, astonished and delighted, Conkling “folded his arms across his swelling breast, laid his head back with a kingly frown upon his cleanly washed face, and settling his left foot with a slight stamp of his right,” said, in a slow, clear, supremely confident voice, “When asked whence comes our candidate we say from Appomattox.”
As the crowd roared its approval, Conkling went on, never deigning to qualify or explain, never hesitating to ridicule the competition or to use the most extravagant praise for his candidate. “New York is for Ulysses S. Grant. Never defeated—in peace or in war—his name is the most illustrious borne by living man.… Show me a better man. Name one, and I am answered.” When his attacks on the other candidates evoked shouts of outrage, he pulled a lemon from his pocket and, striking a regal pose, calmly sucked it until the hall had quieted enough for him to continue his blazing theatrical speech. When he had finished, Grant’s supporters abandoned themselves to sheer hysteria.
It was in the midst of this mania that Garfield was called upon to give his nominating speech for John Sherman. He rose slowly and walked to the stage, the hall still reverberating with screams of “Grant! Grant! Grant!” Earnest and modest, Garfield was Conkling’s opposite in every respect, and he had no intention, or desire, to compete with the flamboyant senator.
Those in the hall who knew Garfield, however, did not underestimate him for a minute, least of all Conkling. Earlier in the week, Conkling had tried to have expelled from the convention three delegates from West Virginia who had defied him. Garfield had spoken in their defense, forcing Conkling to withdraw his motion and winning widespread admiration for his courage and eloquence. After this very public defeat, Conkling had kept his silence, but handed Garfield a biting note: “New York requests that Ohio’s real candidate … come forward.”
Although Garfield had entered the hall that night with essentially nothing to say, Conkling’s nominating speech for Grant had inspired even him—if not in the way Conkling had intended. “Conkling’s speech,” he would write home that night, “gave me the idea of carrying the mind of the convention in a different direction.” Stepping onto the same reporters’ table that Conkling had just left, its white cloth still creased by Conkling’s expensive shoes, Garfield looked calmly into the sea of flushed faces before him and began to speak in a measured voice.
“I have witnessed the extraordinary scenes of this Convention with deep solicitude,” he said. “Nothing touches my heart more quickly than a tribute of honor to a great and noble character; but as I sat in my seat and witnessed the demonstration, this assemblage seemed to me a human ocean in tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured.”
As the crowd, which just moments before had been whipped into an almost helpless frenzy by Conkling, grew quiet, Garfield continued. Counseling the steady hand of reason, asking for reflection rather than fervor, he said, “Gentlemen of the Convention,… when your enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find below the storm and passion that calm level of public opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which final action will be determined. Not here, in this brilliant circle, where fifteen thousand men and women are gathered, is the destiny of the Republic to be decreed for the next four years … but by four millions of Republican firesides, where the thoughtful voters, with wives and children about them, with the calm thoughts inspired by love and home and country, with the history of the past, the hopes of the future, the reverence for the great men who have adorned and blessed our nation in days gone by, burning in their hearts—there God prepares the verdict which will determine the wisdom of our work to-night.”
His voice echoing in the now silent hall, Garfield asked a simple question. “And now, gentlemen of the Convention,” he said, “what do we want?” From the midst of the crowd came an unexpected and, for Garfield, unwelcome answer. “We want Garfield!”
Although caught off guard by this interruption, and the rush of cheers that followed it, Garfield quickly regained control of his audience. “Bear with me a moment,” he said firmly. “Hear me for my cause, and for a moment be silent that you may hear.” After a short pause, he picked up the thread of his narrative and went on, detailing the triumphs of the Republican Party and sending out a clear and unwavering message to the South: “This is our only revenge—that you join us in lifting into the serene firmament of the Constitution … the immortal principles of truth and justice: that all men, white or black, shall be free, and shall stand equal before the law.”
By the time Garfield finally began to talk about Sherman, he was speaking to an utterly tamed and transfixed audience. Every man and woman in the hall listened to him intently until his final words, and then, as he said, “I nominate John Sherman, of Ohio,” the crowd burst into the kind of ovation that, until that moment, only Conkling had received. When a reporter leaned over to Conkling to ask him how he felt after Garfield’s speech, with its stirring analogy of the storm-tossed sea, Conkling answered snidely, “I presume I feel very much as you feel—seasick!”
Not only did the applause that followed Garfield’s speech rival Conkling’s in intensity, it lasted even longer. The convention chairman, George Hoar, who secretly believed that Garfield should be the nominee, sat motionless and silent on the stage, his gavel within easy reach, as the cheers continued unabated. “The chair,” wrote one reporter, “did not seem to feel called upon to make any effort to check [the applause], and so, much additional time was wasted, until finally a storm of hisses reduced the unruly to comparative quiet.”
By the time the final nominating speeches were given, it was nearly midnight, and the Stalwarts, nervous now that their victory could be stolen from them, pressured Hoar to allow the balloting to begin, even though the following day was a Sunday. “Never,” he responded indignantly. “This is a Sabbath-keeping nation, and I cannot preside over this convention one minute after 12 o’clock.”
This particular Sunday, however, was a day of rest for no man in the Republican Party, least of all Garfield. While Conkling and his men battled Blaine and Sherman supporters in fierce, behind-the-scenes negotiations, and frightened delegates were coaxed, flattered, bribed, and threatened, Garfield spent the day desperately trying to tamp down a growing movement to make him the nominee. Over the course of the day, three different delegations from three different parts of the country came to him, asking him to allow his name to be put into contention. Finally, a concerned friend spoke to Garfield in confidence. “General,” he said, “they are talking about nominating you.” Garfield, feeling his duty to Sherman pressing heavily on him, replied, “My God, Senator, I know it, I know it! and they will ruin me.” To his would-be supporters he said simply, “I am going to vote for [Sherman] and I will be loyal to him. My name must not be used.”
The balloting began at ten on Monday morning. After the vitriol they had witnessed the preceding week, no one in the convention hall believed that their candidate, or any candidate, would receive on the first ballot the 379 votes necessary to win. Neither did they imagine, however, that they were at the beginning of a grueling process that would stagger on for two days, requiring far and away the most ballots ever taken in a Republican convention.
Grant, as had been expected, came closest to the winning number after the first ballot, receiving 304 votes to Blaine’s 284 and Sherman’s 93. Three other, lesser known, candidates together received 74 votes. Little changed on the second ballot, but on the third, two new names suddenly appeared—a single vote for Benjamin Harrison, a senator from Indiana who would become president of the United States nine years later, and another for James A. Garfield.
As the balloting continued, the solitary delegate from Pennsylvania who had cast his vote for Garfield refused to withdraw it, even though his candidate did not give him the slightest encouragement, or even acknowledgment. He shifted his vote to another candidate for five ballots—the fourteenth through the eighteenth—while the Grant and Blaine men fought tooth and claw over every delegate, but then rededicated himself to Garfield on the nineteenth ballot, and never wavered again.
While tensions rose to an excruciating level inside the convention hall, outside, crowds watched the proceedings with equal intensity. Hundreds of men and women, largely Grant and Blaine supporters, but also those who had no interest beyond mere curiosity, gathered in Printing House Square, where Chicago’s biggest newspapers had promised to post the balloting results as they received them. “By high noon, the time when the first returns were expected,” a reporter wrote, “the whole of the square, including the space about the Franklin statue, was filled with an eager throng, who awaited the appearances of the vote with ill-concealed impatience. The sun shown out hotly, and the buzz increased each minute.”
A reporter from the Boston Globe, who had been forced to “elbow [his] way through the throng” to enter the convention hall, watched the balloting with growing astonishment. As the results of the nineteenth ballot were announced, he listened with the feverish interest of a man at a racetrack, his last dollar on a horse hurtling toward a receding finish line. “Grant holds his own and gains one,” he wrote, as fast as he could. “Blaine has dropped down to 279, the lowest figure he has struck yet. Sherman gained a bit, and scores 96…. The twentieth ballot follows rapidly. It runs much the same as the others. Blaine loses three votes in Indiana, and the remark seems sound that Blaine is breaking up. Grant gains a notch in Tennessee, which is important, and the vacillating North Carolina delegate happens to swing on to Grant’s aid this time, making a gain of two. The call is over, and still there is no result.” The voting continued for twelve hours, with twenty-eight ballots, but when the convention hall finally emptied at nearly ten that night, the party was no closer to a nominee than it had been that morning.
The next day, as the delegates made their weary way back to the hall, few of them held out any hope for a quick conclusion. They could not have helped but be dismally reminded of the Democratic convention of 1860, which took not only fifty-nine ballots but two conventions in two different cities before it had a nominee—a nominee who would go on to lose to the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln. When the first ballot of the day, the twenty-ninth, showed little change from the day before, their fears were only confirmed. The thirtieth through thirty-third were equally stagnant, and the hall was filled with a thick feeling of desperation.
On the thirty-fourth ballot, however, an extraordinary thing happened. As the votes were being taken, the delegates from Wisconsin made a shocking reversal. Their eighteen votes, which on the preceding ballot had been distributed between Grant, Blaine, Sherman, and Elihu Washburne, who had served briefly as Grant’s secretary of state, were now divided between just two men—Grant and Garfield. More extraordinary still, Grant received only two of those votes. Suddenly, the single vote from Pennsylvania that Garfield had chosen simply to ignore had grown to seventeen, which was a serious bid for the nomination and a situation of genuine concern for Garfield.
Stunned, Garfield leaped to his feet to protest the vote. “Mr. President,” he began. Hoar, who was privately delighted by this unexpected turn of events, reluctantly acknowledged Garfield. “For what purpose does the gentleman rise?” he sighed. “I rise to a question of order,” Garfield replied. “I challenge the correctness of the announcement. The announcement contains votes for me. No man has a right, without the consent of the person voted for, to announce that person’s name, and vote for him, in this convention. Such consent I have not given …” Cutting Garfield off midsentence, Hoar responded stiffly, “The gentleman from Ohio is not stating a question of order. He will resume his seat.”
Hoar quickly ordered another ballot to be taken, leaving Garfield no choice but to do as he was told and sit back down. As each state was called, nothing more changed until Indiana stood to give its thirty votes. Two for Blaine, its chairman announced, one for Grant, and twenty-seven for Garfield. Before Garfield could even absorb this news, Maryland had given him four more votes, and Minnesota and North Carolina one each. With Pennsylvania and Wisconsin holding steady at seventeen, Garfield suddenly had fifty votes—still far less than Grant or Blaine, but uncomfortably close to Sherman. At this point, several men rushed to Garfield, begging him to speak, but he quickly waved them away. “No, no, gentlemen,” he said sternly. “This is no theatrical performance.”
When Hoar called for the thirty-sixth ballot and the convention clerk cried out, “No candidate has a majority,” a hush fell upon the great hall. “Instinctively, it was known, perhaps felt would be a better word,” a journalist wrote, “that something conclusive was about to be done.” The Ohio delegation was suddenly surrounded by the chairmen of other delegations, demanding to know if they were going to shift their allegiance to Garfield. Garfield, horrified, insisted that they remain loyal to Sherman. “If this convention nominates me,” he said, “it should be done without a vote from Ohio.”
The votes for Garfield, however, continued to mount. Eleven from Connecticut, one from Georgia, seven from Illinois. “And then,” a reporter wrote with awe, “then the stampede came.” Iowa stood and declared all twenty-two of its votes for James A. Garfield. Kansas then gave him six, Kentucky three, and Louisiana eight. The tension in the hall continued to grow until Maine, before a shell-shocked crowd, utterly abandoned Blaine, its native son. “Slowly came the call of the State of Maine,” the reporter wrote, “and [Senator] Eugene Hale, white of face but in a clear, sharp, penetrating voice replied, ‘Maine casts her fourteen votes for James A. Garfield.’ ”
Blaine was finished, and Sherman, who had been waiting miserably in his office in the Treasury Department, desperately studying every ballot as it came across his telegraph, finally admitted that he was as well. Sitting down at his desk, he wrote a telegram to be sent to the Ohio delegation on the convention floor. “Whenever the vote of Ohio will be likely to ensure the nomination for Garfield,” it read, “I appeal to every delegate to vote for him. Let Ohio be solid. Make the same appeal in my name to North Carolina, and every delegate who has voted for me.”
When the telegram was received, Garfield frantically shouted, “Cast my vote for Sherman!” But it was too late. He could not stop what was happening. The last state was called, and Garfield was left with 399 votes, 20 more than were needed to win. Having never agreed to become even a candidate—on the contrary, having vigorously resisted it—he was suddenly the nominee.
All that was left was to make it official. Hoar, standing before the breathless crowd, shouted, “Shall the nomination of James A. Garfield be made unanimous?” and none other than Roscoe Conkling slowly stood. In a hoarse whisper almost unrecognizable as the voice that had so brazenly nominated Grant just three days before, he said, “James A. Garfield of Ohio, having received a majority of all the votes, I arise to move that he be unanimously presented as the nominee of this convention.”
As soon as the nomination was seconded, the hall exploded in a cheer so deafening the very air seemed to tremble. “The delegates and others on the floor of the Convention hall seemed to lose all control of themselves,” a reporter wrote. “Many of them cheered like madmen. Others stood upon their seats and waved their hats high above them.… ‘Hurrah for Garfield’ was cried by a thousand throats.” The band began to play “The Battle-Cry of Freedom,” and the delegates joined in singing as they grabbed their state banners and joyfully marched them through the hall. Faintly, through the tall windows, they could hear the battery of guns on the shore of Lake Michigan that announced the news to the crowds waiting in suspense outside.
The Ohio delegation was immediately engulfed by a sea of grinning men, eager to shake the candidate’s hand or pound his back. Garfield, shocked and sickened, turned in desperation to a friend and asked if it would be inappropriate for him to leave. Told in no uncertain terms that he must stay, he did, sitting quietly in his seat, looking at the floor and responding with a simple “Thank you” to the hearty congratulations showered upon him from every direction. “Only once,” a reporter recalled, “did he express anything like emotion, and that was when Frye of Maine came up and said: ‘General, we congratulate you.’ Garfield replied: ‘I am very sorry that this has become necessary.’ ” Across the hall, in the New York delegation, another man sat in stony silence. As the celebration whirled around him, Senator Conkling was “an unmoved spectator of the scene.”
Finally, as the crowd threatened to crush Garfield, his friends decided that it was time for him to make his escape. Simply getting out the door, however, was much more difficult than they had anticipated. As crowded as the hall was, the sidewalk outside was even worse. They managed to find a carriage and step inside, but the throng was not about to let Garfield go that easily. “As Garfield entered the carriage in company with [Ohio] Gov. Foster,” a reporter wrote, “the crowd surged around in a state of intense enthusiasm, and shouted: ‘Take off the horses; we will pull the carriage.’ The driver, who at the time was not aware whom he was carrying, whipped up to get away from the men, who had already commenced to unfasten the harness. He cleared the space several feet, but was overhauled again, and the dazed driver, now thoroughly frightened, applied his whip with renewed energy, and, clear[ed] the crowd.”
Violently bounced along the brick streets by the nervous horses and terrified driver, Garfield sat in silence, a “grave and thoughtful expression” on his face. He would not talk about the nomination, or even respond to the congratulations offered by the men seated next to him. “He has not recovered from his surprise yet,” one man said. When the carriage pulled into the Grand Pacific Hotel, where Garfield and most of the Republicans had been staying, everyone in the carriage could see the new york solid for grant banner still waving from its roof.
Garfield quickly made his way to his room, although he knew that if it had offered no refuge in the past, it certainly would not now. The small room in which, just the night before, he had struggled to sleep as he shared his three-quarter-size bed with a stranger, was already filled with six hundred telegrams and seemingly as many people. As men talked excitedly all around him, Garfield, “pale as death,” sat down in a chair and stared at the wall, absentmindedly holding a GARFIELD FOR PRESIDENT badge that someone had thrust into his hands.