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42 chapters
PREFACE.
PREFACE.
Dean Swift describes the tomb as a place where savage enmity can rend the heart no more. Here, in the ominous shadow of the cypress, the faults and foibles of life are forgotten, and the imagination builds a shining pathway to the stars. Ascending this with rapid flight, the great dead is transfigured as he rises; the clouds close around him, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he is set afar on the heights with Miltiades and Alexander. The tendency to the deification of men is strongest when a sud
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CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND ANCESTRY.
CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND ANCESTRY.
Men, like books, have their beginnings. James Abram Garfield was born on the 19th day of November, 1831. His first outlook upon things was from a cabin door in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. The building was of rough logs, with mud between the cracks, to keep out the winter cold. The single room had a puncheon floor, and on one side a large fire-place, with a blackened crane for cooking purposes. In winter evenings, a vast pile of blazing logs in this fire-place filled the cabin with a cheerful warmth a
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CHAPTER II. THE STRUGGLE OF BOYHOOD.
CHAPTER II. THE STRUGGLE OF BOYHOOD.
Socrates. —Alcibiades, what sayest thou that is, passing between us and yon wall? Alcibiades. —I should call it a thing; some call it a boy. Soc. —Nay, I call it neither a thing nor a boy, but rather a young man. By Hercules, if I should go further, I should say that that being is a god in embryo! Alc. —You are my master, Socrates, or I should say that nature would have hard work to hatch a god out of such an object. Soc. —Most men are fools, Alcibiades, because they are unable to discover in th
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CHAPTER III. THE MORNING OF POWER.
CHAPTER III. THE MORNING OF POWER.
College life, as we have it in this country, is a romance. In the midst of an age in whose thought poetry has found little lodgment; in which love has become a matter of business, and literature a trade, the American college is the home of sentiment, of ideas, and of letters. The old institutions of romance have crumbled into ruins. The armed knight, the amorous lady, the wandering minstrel, the mysterious monastery, the mediæval castle with its ghosts and legends exist only in history. But behi
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CHAPTER IV. A SOLDIER OF THE UNION.
CHAPTER IV. A SOLDIER OF THE UNION.
Honor to the West Point soldier! War is his business, and, wicked though wars be, the warrior shall still receive his honor due. By his devotion to rugged discipline, the professional soldier preserves war as a science, so that armies may not be rabbles, but organizations. He divests himself of the full freedom of a citizen, and puts himself under orders for all time. One of our ablest leaders in the Civil War was General George H. Thomas. Of Thomas we learn, from an address of Garfield, that “i
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CHAPTER V. HERO AND GENERAL.
CHAPTER V. HERO AND GENERAL.
On the 23d of March, 1862, orders reached General Garfield, in Eastern Kentucky, to report at once, with his command, to General Buell at Louisville. It had been determined to concentrate the Army of the Ohio under Buell, move southward to Savannah, Tennessee, there effect a junction with the Army of the Tennessee, which, under General Grant, was on its way up the Tennessee River, after the victories at Forts Donelson and Henry, and, with the united force, move forward to Corinth, Mississippi. G
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CHAPTER VI. IN THE ASCENDANT.
CHAPTER VI. IN THE ASCENDANT.
On the 5th of December, 1863, General Garfield took his seat in the Thirty-Eighth Congress. The reader who has gone over the preceding chapter will know in part what brought him there, and will be prepared to judge what was expected of him. But in order clearly to understand what actually was to be looked for from this Congressional neophyte, it will be of advantage to consider who sent Garfield to the House. Congressmen generally represent their districts; and a people may not unfairly be judge
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BLACK FRIDAY.
BLACK FRIDAY.
“On the first of September, 1868, the price of gold was one hundred and forty-five. During the autumn and winter it continued to decline, interrupted only by occasional fluctuations, till in March, 1869, it touched one hundred and thirty and one-fourth (its lowest point for three years), and continued near that rate until the middle of April, the earliest period to which the evidence taken by the committee refers. At that time, Mr. Jay Gould, president of the Erie Railroad Company, bought seven
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THE RAILWAY PROBLEM.
THE RAILWAY PROBLEM.
“We are so involved in the events and movements of society that we do not stop to realize—what is undeniably true—that during the last forty years all modern societies have entered upon a period of change, more marked, more pervading, more radical than any that has occurred during the last three hundred years. In saying this, I do not forget our own political and military history, nor the French Revolution of 1793. The changes now taking place have been wrought, and are being wrought, mainly, al
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THE CREDIT MOBILIER.
THE CREDIT MOBILIER.
“There is a large number of people in the United States who use these words without any adequate idea of what they mean. I have no doubt that a great many people feel about it very much as the fishwoman at Billingsgate market felt when Sidney Smith, the great humorist of England, came along and began to talk with her. She answered back in a very saucy way, and he finally commenced to call her mathematical names; he called her a parallelogram, a hypothenuse, a parallelopipedon, and other such ter
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THE COMMITTEE OF INVESTIGATION.
THE COMMITTEE OF INVESTIGATION.
“Now what was the investigation? You will remember that before the investigation had gone far a feeling of alarm and excitement swept over the whole country that has hardly been paralleled in American history. Some men whose names were connected with the charges of the Credit Mobilier matter, shocked at the terrible charge of bribery thrown at them, in the hurry of the moment so far forgot themselves as to give equivocal answers as to whether they knew any thing about the matter or not, and the
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THEIR REPORT
THEIR REPORT
there was one thing in that report to which I personally took exception, and only one. I understand that a gentleman occupied this room a few nights ago who undertook to make the impression upon his audience that Mr. Garfield was found guilty of some improper relation with the Credit Mobilier. Let me read you a sentence or two from that report. The committee say: “Concerning the members to whom he had sold or offered to sell the stock, the committee say that they ‘do not find that Mr. Ames, in h
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THE INCREASE OF OFFICIAL SALARIES,
THE INCREASE OF OFFICIAL SALARIES,
one year and a half ago. First, what are the accusations concerning me? “There are several citizens in this town who have signed their names to statements in the newspapers during that discussion, declaring that Mr. Garfield had committed a theft, a robbery; that, to use the plain Saxon word, he was a thief,—that any man who took, or voted for a retroactive increase of salary, was a thief. In one of these articles it was argued in this wise: ‘If I hire a clerk in my bank on a certain salary, and
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THE SO-CALLED DE GOLLYER PAVEMENT.
THE SO-CALLED DE GOLLYER PAVEMENT.
“Now, I have tried to state that in the broadest way, with the broadest point forward. I ask the attention of this audience for a few moments to the testimony. In the first place, I want the audience to understand that the city of Washington is governed, and has always been governed so far as its own improvements are concerned, by its own laws and its own people, just as much as Warren has been governed by its own corporate laws and authority. I remember perfectly well what has been paraded in t
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THIS IS A NATION.
THIS IS A NATION.
“The word ‘State’, as it has been used by gentlemen in this discussion, has two meanings, as perfectly distinct as though different words had been used to express them. The confusion arising from applying the same word to two different and dissimilar objects, has had very much to do with the diverse conclusions which gentlemen have reached. They have given us the definition of a ‘state’ in the contemplation of public or international law, and have at once applied that definition and the conclusi
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THE FORCE BILL.
THE FORCE BILL.
“Mr. Speaker: I am not able to understand the mental organization of the man who can consider this bill, and the subject of which it treats, as free from very great difficulties. He must be a man of very moderate abilities, whose ignorance is bliss, or a man of transcendant genius whom no difficulties can daunt and whose clear vision no cloud obscures. “The distinguished gentleman [Mr. Shellabarger] who introduced the bill from the committee, very appropriately said that it requires us to enter
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EQUIPOISE OF OUR GOVERNMENT.
EQUIPOISE OF OUR GOVERNMENT.
“The records of time show no nobler or wiser work done by human hands than that of our fathers when they framed this Republic. Beginning in a wilderness world, they wrought unfettered by precedent, untrammeled by custom, unawed by kings or dynasties. With the history of other nations before them, they surveyed the new field. In the progress of their work they encountered these antagonistic ideas to which I have referred. They attempted to trace through that neutral ground the boundary line acros
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“‘A BILL TO PROVIDE FOR A GRADUAL RETURN TO SPECIE PAYMENTS.
“‘A BILL TO PROVIDE FOR A GRADUAL RETURN TO SPECIE PAYMENTS.
“‘ Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled : That on and after the first day of December, 1868, the Secretary of the Treasury be, and he is hereby, authorized and directed to pay gold coin of the United States for any legal-tender notes of the United States, which may be presented at the office of the Assistant Treasurer, at New York, at the rate of one dollar in gold for one dollar and thirty cents in legal-tender notes. On
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ENGLISH PRECEDENT.
ENGLISH PRECEDENT.
“I have not been ambitious to add another to the many financial plans proposed to this Congress, much less have I sought to introduce a new and untried scheme. On the contrary, I regard it a strong commendation of this measure, that it is substantially the same as that by which Great Britain resumed specie payments, after a suspension of nearly a quarter of a century. “The situation of England at that time was strikingly similar to our present situation. She had just emerged from a great war in
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CURRENCY AND THE BANKS.
CURRENCY AND THE BANKS.
“I wish first to state a few general propositions touching the subjects of trade and its instruments. A few simple principles form the foundation on which rests the whole superstructure of money, currency, and trade. They may be thus briefly stated: “ First. Money, which is a universal measure of value and a medium of exchange, must not be confounded with credit currency in any of its forms. Nothing is really money which does not of itself possess the full amount of the value which it professes
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THE REPEAL OF THE RESUMPTION ACT.
THE REPEAL OF THE RESUMPTION ACT.
“We are engaged in a debate which has lasted in the Anglo-Saxon world for more than two centuries, and hardly any phase of it to which we have listened in the course of the last week is new. Hardly a proposition has been heard on either side which was not made one hundred and eighty years ago in England, and almost a hundred years ago in the United States. So singularly does history repeat itself. “That man makes a vital mistake who judges of truth in relation to financial affairs from the chang
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THE TARIFF.
THE TARIFF.
“A few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Virginia, who now occupies the chair [Mr. Tucker], made a speech of rare ability and power, in which he placed at the front of his line of discussion a question that was never raised in American legislation until our present form of Government was forty years old; the question of the constitutionality of a tariff for the encouragement and protection of manufacturers. The first page of the printed speech of the gentleman, as it appears in the Cong
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PUBLIC EXPENDITURES
PUBLIC EXPENDITURES
“It is difficult to discuss expenditures comprehensively without discussing also the revenues; but I shall on this occasion allude to the revenues only on a single point. Revenue and the expenditure of revenue form by far the most important element in the government of modern nations. Revenue is not, as some one has said, the friction of a government, but rather its motive power. Without it the machinery of a government can not move; and by it all the movements of a government are regulated. The
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HOW SHALL EXPENDITURES BE GAUGED?
HOW SHALL EXPENDITURES BE GAUGED?
“Such, in my view, are the relations which the expenditures of the revenue sustain to the honor and safety of the nation. How, then, shall they be regulated? By what gauge shall we determine the amount of revenue that ought to be expended by a nation? This question is full of difficulty, and I can hope to do little more than offer a few suggestions in the direction of its solution. “And, first, I remark that the mere amount of the appropriations is in itself no test. To say that this government
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TEST OF POPULATION.
TEST OF POPULATION.
“The first and most important is the relation of expenditure to the population. In some ratio corresponding to the increase of population it may be reasonable to increase the expenditures of a government. This is the test usually applied in Europe. In an official table I have before me the expenditures of the British government for the last fifteen years, I find the statement made over against the annual average of each year of the expenditure per capita of the population. The average expenditur
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TEST OF TERRITORIAL SETTLEMENT AND EXPANSION.
TEST OF TERRITORIAL SETTLEMENT AND EXPANSION.
“But in a country like ours there is another element besides population that helps to determine the movement of expenditures. That element can hardly be found in any other country. It is the increase and settlement of our territory, the organic increase of the nation by the addition of new States. To begin with the original thirteen States, and gauge expenditure till now by the increase of population alone, would be manifestly incorrect. But the fact that there have been added twenty-four States
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EXPENDITURES OF ENGLAND.
EXPENDITURES OF ENGLAND.
“In England, for example, where the territory is fixed, and they are remitted to the single law of increase of population, the increase of expenditure during the last fifteen years of peace has been only about one and three-quarter per cent. compounded annually. I believe nobody has made a very careful estimate of the rate in our country; our growth has been too irregular to afford data for an accurate estimate. But a gentleman who has given much attention to the subject expressed to me the beli
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EFFECTS OF WAR ON EXPENDITURES.
EFFECTS OF WAR ON EXPENDITURES.
“Thus far I have considered the expenditures that arise in times of peace. Any view of this subject would be incomplete that did not include a consideration of the effect of war upon national expenditures. I have spoken of what the rate ought to be in time of peace, for carrying on a government. I will next consider the effect of war on the rate of increase. And here we are confronted with that anarchic element, the plague of nations, which Jeremy Bentham called ‘mischief on the largest scale.’
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WAR EXPENDITURES OF THE UNITED STATES.
WAR EXPENDITURES OF THE UNITED STATES.
“As the second example of the effect of war on the movement of national expenditures, I call attention to our own history. “Considering the ordinary expenses of the Government, exclusive of payments on the principal and interest of the public debt, the annual average may be stated thus: “Beginning with 1791, the last decade of the eighteenth century showed an annual average of three million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. During the first decade of the present century, the average was
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DURATION OF WAR EXPENDITURES.
DURATION OF WAR EXPENDITURES.
“Throughout our history there may be seen a curious uniformity in the movement of the annual expenditures for the years immediately following a war. We have not the data to determine how long it was, after the war of independence, before the expenditures ceased to decrease; that is, before they reached the point where their natural growth more than balanced the tendency to reduction of war expenditure; but in the years immediately following all our subsequent wars, the decrease has continued for
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WHEN SHALL WE REACH OUR NEW LEVEL OF EXPENDITURES?
WHEN SHALL WE REACH OUR NEW LEVEL OF EXPENDITURES?
“It is, perhaps, unsafe to base our calculations for the future on these analogies; but the wars already referred to have been of such varied character, and their financial effects have been so uniform, as to make it not unreasonable to expect that a similar result will follow our late war. If so, the decrease of our ordinary expenditures, exclusive of the principal and interest of the public debt, will continue until 1875 or 1876. “It will be seen by an analysis of our expenditures, that, exclu
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THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLIC.
THE FUTURE OF THE REPUBLIC.
“What do men mean when they predict the immortality of any thing earthly? “The first Napoleon was one day walking through the galleries of the Louvre, filled with the wonders of art which he had stolen from the conquered capitals of Europe. As he passed the marvelous picture of Peter Martyr, one of the seven masterpieces of the world, he overheard an enthusiastic artist exclaim: ‘Immortal work!’ Turning quickly upon his heel, the Emperor asked: ‘What is the average life of an oil-painting?’ ‘Fiv
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ON THE RELATION OF THE GOVERNMENT TO SCIENCE.
ON THE RELATION OF THE GOVERNMENT TO SCIENCE.
“What ought to be the relation of the National Government to science? What, if any thing, ought we to do in the way of promoting science? For example, if we have the power, would it be wise for Congress to appropriate money out of the Treasury to employ naturalists to find out all that is to be known of our American birds. Ornithology is a delightful and useful study; but would it be wise for Congress to make an appropriation for the advancement of that science? In my judgment manifestly not. We
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REVOLUTION IN CONGRESS.
REVOLUTION IN CONGRESS.
“Let me, in the outset, state as carefully as I may, the precise situation. At the last session, all our ordinary legislative work was done, in accordance with the usages of the House and the Senate, except as to two bills. Two of the twelve great appropriation bills for the support of the Government were agreed to in both Houses as to every matter of detail concerning the appropriation proper. We were assured by the committees of conference in both bodies that there would be no difficulty in ad
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THE VOLUNTARY POWERS OF THE GOVERNMENT.
THE VOLUNTARY POWERS OF THE GOVERNMENT.
“I had occasion, at a late hour of the last Congress, to say something on what may be called the voluntary element in our institutions. I spoke of the distribution of the powers of Government. First, to the nation; second, to the States; and third, the reservation of power to the people themselves. “I called attention to the fact that under our form of government the most precious rights that men can possess on this earth are not delegated to the nation, nor to the States, but are reserved to th
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FREE CONSENT THE BASIS OF OUR LAWS.
FREE CONSENT THE BASIS OF OUR LAWS.
“Our theory of law is free consent. That is the granite foundation of our whole superstructure. Nothing in this Republic can be law without consent—the free consent of the House; the free consent of the Senate; the free consent of the Executive, or, if he refuse it, the free consent of two-thirds of these bodies. Will any man deny that? Will any man challenge a line of the statement that free consent is the foundation rock of all our institutions? And yet the programme announced two weeks ago wa
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CHAPTER X. THE CLIMAX OF 1880.
CHAPTER X. THE CLIMAX OF 1880.
The fathers of the Republic had no suspicion of the form which American politics has assumed. The thing which we know as a political party is new under the sun. No other country or age ever had any thing like what America understands by the word party. When we speak of a party, we do not have in mind a mere sect, or class, distinguished by peculiar opinions, and composed of individuals whose only bond of union is their harmony of opinion, passion, or prejudice. We do not mean a caste, nor a pecu
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CHAPTER XI. CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.
CHAPTER XI. CANDIDATE FOR THE PRESIDENCY.
A candidate for public office has a difficult part to play. There is constant and imminent danger that he will commit some blunder, and thereby put himself on the defensive. The fear of doing or saying something which shall put a club into the hands of the enemy haunts both himself and his friends. He is obliged to stand for some months on a high platform in the market-place, saying to the whole world: “Now get out your microscopes and your telescopes; with the one examine me, and with the other
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CONGRESS AND THE EXECUTIVE.
CONGRESS AND THE EXECUTIVE.
“In the main, the balance of powers so admirably adjusted and distributed among the three great departments of the Government have been safely preserved. It was the purpose of our fathers to lodge absolute power nowhere; to leave each department independent within its own sphere, yet, in every case, responsible for the exercise of its discretion. But some dangerous innovations have been made. “And first, the appointing power of the President has been seriously encroached upon by Congress, or rat
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CHAPTER XIII. SHOT DOWN.
CHAPTER XIII. SHOT DOWN.
The Senate had adjourned. The bitterness of the political contest at Albany had subsided. Washington was deserted for the summer. Mrs. Garfield, slowly recovering from her long illness, was regaining health and courage at Long Branch. It was the purpose of the President, as soon as the pressing cares and anxieties of his great office could be put aside, to join his wife by the sea-side, and to enjoy with her a brief respite from the burdens and distractions which weighed him down. His brief life
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CHAPTER XIV. GAZING ON THE SEA.
CHAPTER XIV. GAZING ON THE SEA.
The finger of hope pointed unmistakably in the direction of Long Branch, and as the morning of September 6th dawned upon the White House, all conditions appeared favorable for the removal of the beloved President beyond the malarial influences of the Capital. Preparations for this event were complete. The anxiety of the President to leave Washington had been imparted to all his friends and attendants. Even the physicians were convinced that nothing would bring relief to the sufferer so effective
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CHAPTER XV. THE SOLEMN PAGEANT.
CHAPTER XV. THE SOLEMN PAGEANT.
The President was dead. The curtain had fallen at last between an anxious people and the first citizen of the Republic. It only remained for fifty millions of freemen to take him up with tender hands and bear him away to the narrow house prepared for all living. It was a sad duty which the Nation was not likely to neglect or leave to others to perform. In the preparations made for the President’s funeral there was neither passion nor excitement. When Cæsar fell there was an uproar. The benches o
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