Garfield: from Congress to a 200-day presidency, with a front porch campaign between

At the 1880 Republican convention, sixteen Wisconsin delegates voted for James Garfield on the 34th ballot, and he stood up to protest the use of his name. On the 36th ballot he was nominated anyway. This National Park Service biography, a continuation of its life of Garfield, follows him from the House of Representatives to the presidency, which lasted 200 days.

Image from the National Park Service's page.

Seventeen years in the House

Garfield had been elected in 1862 to represent Ohio's 19th district, and the source calls him conscientious and hardworking. He used the Library of Congress for information. In seventeen years representing northeast Ohio he served on the Military Affairs, Banking and Currency, and Ways and Means Committees, and chaired Appropriations from 1871 to 1875.

He devised a schedule for the 1870 Census that went unused then but became the model for 1880, and he wrote legislation for a Bureau of Education to study how well states and regions educated their citizens. In the long currency debate he wanted the paper "greenbacks" of the Civil War withdrawn and the country returned to the gold standard, which he called honest money. The Credit Mobilier, DeGolyer Pavement and "Salary Grab" scandals of 1873 and 1874 threatened his reputation but did nothing to derail his career.

1879: a stand against riders

Through the 1870s the South saw rising racial tension, with Black citizens denied housing, jobs and the vote, and Garfield condemned these injustices. In late March 1879 President Rutherford B. Hayes called a special session to fund army appropriations. House Democrats attached riders that would have defunded the federal marshals who oversaw elections in the South, which meant no one to stop intimidation of voters, especially Black voters. The source reads this as an attempt to force Hayes and the Republican Senate to accept the riders or shut down the government. Hayes vetoed five appropriations bills carrying them.

As leader of the House Republicans, Garfield backed the vetoes in a speech, "Revolution in Congress", and Republicans prevented overrides. He was mobbed by well-wishers in the House and praised in the press, and the episode brought him attention as a possible presidential candidate in 1880.

The 1880 nomination

Image from the National Park Service's page.

In January 1880 the Ohio legislature handily elected Garfield to the Senate, helped by Treasury Secretary John Sherman. Sherman's price was that Garfield nominate him for president at the Republican convention. Garfield did not think Sherman would win, since Sherman was not an inspiring figure, and the party was divided, with loyalties split between Ulysses S. Grant and Senator James G. Blaine.

After 33 ballots there was no nominee. On the 34th, Wisconsin's sixteen delegates voted for Garfield; he protested; on the 36th he was nominated. He telegraphed his wife, Lucretia, that he would be content if the result had her approval. Some of Sherman's and Grant's supporters believed he had angled for the nomination all along, and Garfield denied it. The source cites biographer Allan Peskin, who found that Garfield had known of plans to nominate him for almost a year and a half and done nothing to discourage them, yet did not act like a man who wanted to be president. In an October 31 letter to his two older sons, then at school in New Hampshire, Garfield wrote that he had neither sought nor wished the nomination and would have preferred the Senate.

The front porch campaign

Image from the National Park Service's page.

Garfield went home to his farm in Mentor, Ohio, where a large gathering welcomed him. Tradition held that nominees did not campaign in public. Garfield respected it, yet his warm nature and enjoyment of speaking led him to greet visitors from his front porch. Farmers, businessmen, students, Civil War veterans, suffragists and the curious came. It was estimated that between 15,000 and 17,000 people walked the path through his farm or along the "Cleveland to Buffalo Road" by the end of the year. Garfield and Arthur Clubs spread across the country, and Garfield Guards led torchlight parades. A dozen campaign biographies presented his life as a "common man" success story. The 1880 front porch campaign made history, since later candidates took increasingly active public roles.

The Democratic nominee, Civil War General Winfield Scott Hancock, ran a traditional campaign, staying secluded. September state elections in Indiana, Ohio and Maine went well for Democrats, but Republican prospects improved after a late misstep by Hancock on the tariff, and Republicans beat back an "October surprise", a letter misrepresenting Garfield's stand on Chinese immigration, which proved a forgery. The election came fifteen years after the Civil War, and the source calls it the closest in the popular vote in American history, with a margin of less than one-tenth of one percent for Garfield.

Image from the National Park Service's page.

A short presidency, a long death

Garfield took over a Republican Party divided by the rivalry of Maine's Blaine and New York's Roscoe Conkling. Conkling pressed him on posts for New Yorkers, and after months Garfield challenged him by appointing William Robertson, a Conkling adversary, Collector of the Port of New York. Public opinion seemed to favor the President.

Charles Guiteau saw it differently. The source calls him emotionally disturbed. He believed a speech he gave at a New York rally had helped Garfield win and that he deserved a post, such as one at the consulate in Paris, though he had no training for it. He never got an interview with the President, nursed his resentment through the spring, and claimed God told him in dreams to "remove" Garfield. On July 2 he waited at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station, and as Garfield walked through the Ladies Waiting Room with Secretary of State Blaine he fired twice. The first bullet grazed Garfield's right arm; the second entered his back.

Garfield was taken to the White House and cared for by Dr. D. Willard Bliss, whose measures the source says were ineffective at best and contributed to the decline at worst. On September 6 he was moved to Long Branch, New Jersey, in hope that sea air would help. After a brief rally, he died at 10:35 p.m. on Monday, September 19, with his wife and daughter beside him, after what the source calls a mere 200 days as President.

Image from the National Park Service's page.

Summing up

The source lists his careers as preacher, teacher, debater, state senator, military man and Congressman, and says it is impossible to know whether he would have been a great president. It asks how he would have managed without clear majorities in Congress through unresolved debates over finances, money, farmers, immigration and industrial labor, the railroads' expansion and moral concerns over the destruction of Native American tribes, the echoes of the Civil War, and how far the United States should go on the world stage. Dying, he asked his Williams classmate Almon F. Rockwell whether his name would have a place in history. The reply: yes, a grand one, but a grander place in human hearts.

Sources

• National Park Service, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, "James A. Garfield" (continued biography), https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/james-a-garfield.htm; rewritten in hubnx's own words.