This honor comes to me unsought. I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
That night, as Guiteau’s steamship collided with the Narragansett, the object of his ambitions, James Garfield, slept in the farmhouse he shared with his wife and five children in Mentor, Ohio, far removed from the tempestuous workings of his presidential campaign. The house, which the reporters who stretched out on its wide lawn that summer christened Lawnfield, sat on 160 acres of land about twenty miles from the log cabin Garfield’s father had built half a century before. Mentor, as one reporter described it, was less a “regular town [than] a thickly settled neighborhood.” A few houses and small farms, encircled by orchards and gardens in heavy bloom, were scattered along a dirt road that ran for two miles between the train station and Lawnfield. While traveling along this road in 1877, Garfield had been impressed with the area’s “quiet country beauty” and decided it would be a good place to teach his sons the lessons he believed they could learn only on a farm.
For the past three years, Garfield had worked on his farm every chance he got. He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house. To the house itself, which was one and a half stories high with a white exterior and a dark red roof, he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room, where documents and speeches are corded up like firewood.”
Although Garfield enjoyed improving the farmhouse, his greatest interest lay in the land, which he approached as if it were an enormous science experiment. His first large project had been to build a dam to irrigate the fields. Then, the summer before his nomination, he experimented with a fertilizer made up of a carefully calibrated combination of pulverized limestone and ground bone. “I long for time,” he lamented in his journal, “to study agricultural chemistry and make experiments with soils and forces.”
Garfield finally got his wish during his presidential campaign. Although he argued that he should “take the stump and bear a fighting share in the campaign,” traveling from town to town and asking for votes was considered undignified for a presidential candidate. Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised Garfield to do the same. “Sit crosslegged,” he said, “and look wise.”
Happily left to his own devices, Garfield poured his time and energy into his farm. He worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, and harvesting crops, and swung a scythe with the confidence and steady hand he had developed as a boy. In July, he oversaw the threshing of his oats. “Result 475 bushels,” he noted. “No[t] so good a yield as last year.”
While Garfield worried over his crops, political war was being waged in his name. The principal target of attack was the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Widely known as “Hancock the Superb,” he was famous for his courage and resounding success during the Civil War, but he had never held an elected office and was perceived to have little more than a clouded understanding of his own platform. The Republicans, naturally, did everything in their power to encourage this perception, including distributing a pamphlet that was titled “Hancock’s Political Achievements” and filled with blank pages.
Hancock’s greatest liability, however, was his own party. Although he had been a Union hero, he could do nothing to change the fact that, in the minds of the American people, the Democratic Party was still inextricably linked to the South. Garfield himself referred to it as the “rebel party” and growled that “every Rebel guerilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.” At every opportunity, Republicans reminded voters of the Democratic Party’s ties to the South, and accused Hancock of having, at best, divided loyalties.
Democrats, in turn, focused their attentions on Garfield, who, unlike Hancock, had a long public career to plumb. As Garfield had known it would be, the Democrats’ first point of attack was the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872. At that time, Garfield had been accused, along with several other members of Congress, of accepting from a fellow congressman a good deal on stock in a railroad company called Crédit Mobilier of America. In fact, Garfield had turned down the stock, but soon after had accepted a $300 loan from the same congressman. Although he had repaid the loan before he was aware of the shadow that had fallen over Crédit Mobilier—which, as well as attempting to bribe congressmen, was involved in fraud—and a congressional committee had absolved him of any intentional wrongdoing, Garfield knew that his name would always be linked with the scandal. “There is nothing in my relation to the case for which [the] tenderest conscience or the most scrupulous honor can blame me,” he wrote to a friend at the time. But “it is not enough for one to know that his heart and motives are pure, if he is not sure but that good men … who do not know him, will set him down among the list of men of doubtful morality.”
In the end, the effort to renew public interest in the scandal failed, but it was not for lack of trying. In an impressive, nationwide campaign to remind voters of Crédit Mobilier, and to exploit any lingering questions about Garfield’s role in it, Democrats covered every available surface in every major city with the numbers 329—the amount of money Garfield had been accused of earning in stock dividends. The numbers were on sidewalks, buildings, streets, and barns. Somehow, they even made their way into the homes and offices of members of the incumbent Republican administration. When the secretary of war sat down to breakfast one morning, 329 was scrawled on his napkin. The secretary of the treasury found the numbers on a piece of mail addressed to him, the secretary of agriculture on a beet someone had placed on his desk, and the secretary of state on his hat and, incredibly, the headboard of his bed.
When dredging up an old scandal proved ineffective, zealous Democrats invented a new one. At the height of the campaign, the editor of a New York newspaper found on his desk a letter supposedly written by Garfield professing his support for Chinese immigration. “Individuals or companys [sic] have the right to buy labor where they can get it cheapest,” the letter, which was written on congressional stationery, read. The issue of Chinese immigration was then highly inflammatory, guaranteed to inflame racist sentiment, incite the anger of American labor forces, and threaten the future of any presidential candidate who argued for it. The signature on the letter, however, did not remotely resemble Garfield’s, and after some investigation, the plot behind the forgery was revealed. After the election, a man from Maryland would confess his role in the plot in a New York courtroom, and be sentenced to the Tombs.
Throughout the campaign, despite an onslaught of attacks and accusations, and Garfield’s silence in the face of them, his supporters steadily grew. In New York, Garfield campaign clubs sprang up among completely disparate groups, from 52 students at the University of the City of New-York, to 150 German immigrants in Manhattan, to 50 young ladies from Jefferson County, who “raised a pole 50 feet high, and swung out a handsome streamer.” The New York Times reported that a judge who had been a lifelong Democrat announced his intention of switching party allegiance so that he could “support Gen. Garfield for President, as the best and fittest thing for an honest and patriotic citizen to do.” In Washington, D.C., a former slave named John Moss lost his job at the Library of Congress when he pummeled a fellow worker who had torn to pieces a lithograph of Garfield that Moss had sitting on his desk.
Freed slaves were arguably Garfield’s most ardent supporters. One of the best-known, and most enthusiastically sung, election songs of the contest was “The Battle Cry of Freemen.” Americans could hear the final stanza ringing through the convention halls and city streets, sung with joy and determination:
Now we’ll use a Freemen’s right, as thinking freemen should.
Shouting the battle cry of Garfield.
And we’ll place our ballots where they’ll do the toiling millions good.
Shouting the battle cry for Garfield.
Hurrah! Boys for Garfield.
On October 25, a political meeting of “colored citizens” at the Cooper Institute in New York filled an entire hall to overflowing. “It could not have been larger,” a reporter said of the gathering, “for every inch of space in the large hall was crowded. The seats were filled almost as soon as the doors were opened, and in a very few minutes all the standing room was taken.” Even more remarkable than the size of the crowd was its complete racial integration, just fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. “Black men and white,” a newspaper reported, “were in almost equal proportion throughout the hall and on the platform.”
The keynote speaker that night, and the cause of all the excitement, was Frederick Douglass. After climbing to the platform, the august former slave, now a human rights leader and marshal of the District of Columbia, wasted no time in telling his audience which presidential candidate would receive his vote. “James A. Garfield must be our President,” he said to riotous cheers. “I know [Garfield], colored man; he is right on our questions, take my word for it. He is a typical American all over. He has shown us how man in the humblest circumstances can grapple with man, rise, and win. He has come from obscurity to fame, and we’ll make him more famous.” After pausing once more as the cheers reverberated through the hall, Douglass went on. Garfield, he said, “has burst up through the incrustations that surround the poor, and has shown us how it is possible for an American to rise. He has built the road over which he traveled. He has buffeted the billows of adversity, and to-night he swims in safety where Hancock, in despair, is going down.”
Although Garfield did not allow himself to campaign, he could not resist addressing the thousands of people who traveled to Mentor to see him. In what came to be known as “front porch talks,” he would stand on his wide veranda, talking to enormous groups—from five hundred members of an Indianapolis Lincoln Club, to nine hundred women who had traveled together from Cleveland. On a single day in October, despite the rain, five thousand people converged on Garfield’s farm. When a group of Germans stood before him, he spoke to them in their native language, delivering the first speech by an American presidential candidate that was not in English.
The most stirring moment in the campaign came in late October, when the members of a singing group from an all-black university in Nashville, Tennessee, stood before Garfield’s modest farmhouse and sang for him. “As the singers poured out their melodious and at the same time vibrant but mournful spirituals, the little audience became increasingly emotional,” Garfield’s private secretary later recalled. “Tears were trickling down the cheeks of many of the women, and one staid old gentleman blubbered audibly behind a door.” When the performance ended, Garfield stood to address the group. Squaring his shoulders and straightening his back, he said, in a voice that rang through the still night, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.”
A few weeks later, on the afternoon of November 2, a bright, cloudless day, Garfield traveled down the dusty road from Lawnfield to the town hall to cast his vote. Aside from this one concession to the election, and an occasional trip to the office behind his house to see what news had come over the telegraph, he went about his normal routine. He wrote some letters, made plans for a new garden near the farm’s engine house, and settled his dairy account in town. That evening, he visited with neighbors.
Although Garfield did not show a great deal of interest in the election, the rest of the country did. Voter turnout was 78 percent, and as the results began to come in, it quickly became clear that it was going to be a close race. Interest was particularly high in the wake of the previous presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes was widely believed to have stolen the presidency from Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden, the governor of New York, had won the popular vote by a clear and undisputed margin, and, with all but four states accounted for, had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. However, when the remaining four states reported two different sets of returns, Congress formed an electoral commission to distribute their votes. The commission, a highly partisan group made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, awarded all twenty of the disputed votes to Hayes, handing him the presidency by one electoral vote.
In 1880, no commission threatened to steal the presidency, but so close was the race that there was uncertainty until the final hours. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 3, with the nation still anxiously waiting to learn who its next president would be, Garfield went to bed. When he woke up a few hours later and was told in no uncertain terms that he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States, he was, one reporter noted with astonishment, the “coolest man in the room.” Later that day, Garfield gave his election to the presidency little more mention in his diary than he had the progress of his oat crop a few weeks earlier. “The news of 3 a.m.,” he wrote, “is fully justified by the morning papers.”
In the days that followed, surrounded by celebrations and frantic plans for his administration, Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring him only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured—his time with his children, his books, and his farm—abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a “bleak mountain” that he was obliged to ascend. Sitting down at his desk in a rare moment to himself, he tried to explain in a letter to a friend the strange sense of loss he had felt since the election.
“There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,” he wrote, “which I can hardly explain.”