“My Dear Mrs. Garfield”: What Condolence Letters After President Garfield’s Death Said

James A. Garfield, President of the United States for just 200 days in 1881. He was the second president to be assassinated in office, and his administration was the second-shortest in American history (Library of Congress).

Hundreds of condolence letters came to Lucretia Garfield after her husband's death, from people of all walks of life and from many parts of the world, and the same sentiments appear in them over and over. Writers kept apologizing for intruding on her privacy: they begged pardon for the liberty of writing, for troubling her in her great sorrow, and hoped she would not think the letter an impertinence. Park Ranger Alan Gephardt of James A. Garfield National Historic Site came across them while examining her papers at the Library of Congress, and in the first part of a blog post he shares a small sampling, with spelling and punctuation corrected for ease of reading.

What the letters say

Other themes run through the letters: the President's suffering, his fine character and his eternal fame. Writers hoped his name would hold factions in check and inspire worthy aims, linked it with Lincoln's in history, and compared his sufferings to a fire that had tested them all, praying they would come out of it refined. Many letters use strong spiritual or religious imagery and speak of accepting God's will. Some ask for mementoes from the funerals, or for autographs of Mrs. Garfield, her husband, her daughter and Grandma, and many writers offer help while others ask for it.

Lucretia Rudolph Garfield was 49 when her husband died. She lived another 37 years, dying in March 1918 (Library of Congress).

A sampling

• A twelve-year-old girl in Winfield, West Virginia, wrote on September 24, 1881, that reading an account of the President's heroism and patience in his long illness had overcome her. In every prayer since he was shot, she said, his recovery had come first, and her parents did not know she was writing.
• A nine-year-old English girl, Violet Markham, wrote from Chesterfield on September 23 to ask whether a little English girl might say how sorry she was. She had read in a girls' paper how good Garfield had been as a boy and how he grew up to do his duty. She wrote that everyone at home and the Queen were sorry too, sent her own love though she did not know the widow, and added that a book of hers, “The Lame Prince”, said love always consoles. Markham (1872–1959) became a writer, social reformer and administrator, and during the First World War sat on the executive committee of the National Relief Fund.
• Writers of faith. One wrote that their loss was his gain and urged Mrs. Garfield to prove faithful to the Heavenly Father, promising a joyful meeting with Jesus and dear friends in glory. A woman in Talbotton, Georgia, who called herself a poor country woman, asked forgiveness for writing. A man who signed himself an ex-Confederate soldier said he had prayed often for the President's recovery during his illness and hoped to meet him in the home the Lord had taken him to.
• Writers from a section politically opposed to Garfield sent a floral tribute with a letter dated September 24, two days before the funeral in Cleveland. They hoped the offering might bring the people of the two sections closer, as they had fondly hoped his administration would. The post reads the letter as hope that, had the President lived, the North and South might have been reconciled.
• A teacher at Chiltern Hills, a school in southeast England, wrote on September 23 to invite the Garfields' daughter Mollie to be her guest until the Christmas holidays, among girls her own age, so that she could resume a normal life. She offered to include a Miss Rockwell if Mollie preferred not to travel alone, and sent the school's prospectus by the same mail.
• A woman asking for help wrote on October 21 about a poor, afflicted neighbor who in September had lost her husband to consumption, leaving eight children and thirty acres carrying a mortgage of eight hundred dollars. Paying it off, the neighbor's friends thought, might let her keep the children together. The husband had been a great Garfield man and had named his baby James Garfield a few weeks before he died. The writer asked Mrs. Garfield to help from the abundance the nation had so bountifully supplied. The post gives this letter as an example of pleas that made discreet references to the fund collected in 1881 for the support of the Garfield family.

What they add up to

The letters, the post says, show something of the state of the nation in 1881 and of the reaction in other nations. Many writers saw in Garfield the hope of a nation putting to rest decades-long hatreds, others tied personal calamities to the national tragedy, and all responded with genuine compassion for Mrs. Garfield and her family. The Garfields' grief was the nation's grief, and their own. Part II of the blog offers the condolences of three men whose lives Garfield had touched.

Sources

• National Park Service, “My Dear Mrs. Garfield”: Condolence Letters to Lucretia Garfield After the President’s Death, Part I, by Alan Gephardt, Park Ranger, James A. Garfield National Historic Site, September 2013, for the Garfield Observer; rewritten in hubnx's own words.