ON THE DEATH OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD.
September 25, 1881.
I wish to lead your thoughts to one of the strangest things—one of the most difficult things to understand, which has ever occurred. On the second day of July last the President of the United States, when about to step into a railway train which was to carry him North, where he was to attend a college commencement, at the college where he was graduated, was shot down by an assassin.
I say it is one of the strangest things, because the President did not know the assassin, and had never injured him nor any of his friends. There was absolutely no motive for the hideous deed.
I say it is most difficult to understand, because we believe that Divine Providence overrules all events, holds all power, and we wonder why He permitted the wretch to do so deplorable a deed.
President Garfield was no ordinary man. He was emphatically a man of the people. He was born in a log-cabin which his father had built with his own hands. It was a very small house, twenty feet by thirty. When James was two years old, his father died, late in the autumn, and this boy with three other children were all dependent upon their mother for a support. How the lone widow passed that winter we do not know; but when the spring came there was a debt to be paid, and part of the farm had to go to pay it. About thirty acres of the clearing were left, and this little farm was worked by the mother and her oldest son. Only those who have lived on a farm in the country know how hard the work is. When James was five years old he was sent to school, a mile and a half away, and as this was a very long walk for so young a boy, his sister often carried the little boy on her back.
After a while the boy tried to learn the carpenter’s trade, and in this effort he spent two years or so, going to school at intervals and studying at spare hours at home. So he mastered grammar, arithmetic and geography. After that he became a sort of general help and book-keeper for a manufacturer in the neighborhood at $14 per month “and found,” and this was to him a very great advance. But not being well treated there, he soon left and took to chopping wood—at one time cutting about twenty-five cords for some $7. Then having read some tales of the sea, sailors’ stories, such as you have often read, he wanted to be a sailor; but when he applied for a place on the great lake, he looked so like a landsman from the country that no captain would engage him. So he went to the canal, and found employment in leading or driving horses or mules on the tow-path. But he was soon promoted to be a deck-hand and steersman, and often falling into the water (once almost being drowned) and meeting some other mishaps, he concluded that “following the water” was not his forte, and he abandoned it. By this time he had saved some money, and his brother Thomas lent him some more, and with another young man and a cousin he went to a neighboring town to the academy. These young fellows rented a room, borrowed some simple cooking utensils, a table and some chairs, made beds and filled them with straw, and set up house-keeping, and went to the academy.
Young Garfield spent three years at this academy, doing odd jobs of carpenter work when he could, and so eking out a living. Then he went to an eclectic institute, and paid his way in part by doing the janitor’s work of sweeping the floor and making the fires. Here he prepared himself to enter the junior class in a higher college, and, after some delay, he entered that class in Williams College, Massachusetts.
While pursuing his college course at Williams he filled his vacations by teaching in district schools in the neighborhood until his graduation, in 1856, at twenty-five years of age—quite advanced, you see, in years for a college graduate.
Then he went back as a teacher to his eclectic institute, became a professor of Greek and Latin, and then at twenty-eight years of age became a Senator in the Ohio Legislature. When the war broke out in 1861, while still a member of the State Senate, the Government commissioned him as colonel of a regiment, and he did good service in the State of Kentucky in driving out the rebels. In a few months he was promoted to be brigadier-general. So he went on distinguishing himself wherever he was placed, and, having been assigned for duty to the Army of the Cumberland, fighting his last battle at Chickamauga, his gallantry was so conspicuous and so successful that within a fortnight he was made a major-general.
While in the army he was elected representative to Congress, and on December 5, 1863, he took his seat in the House, the youngest member of Congress.
Some time after this, the war still going on, he wished to rejoin the army, but President Lincoln would not permit it, on the ground that his military knowledge would be invaluable to the government. After serving seventeen years in the House of Representatives, at times Chairman of most important committees, he was elected to the Senate, but before he took his seat he was nominated for the Presidency, and last November was elected by a large majority to that high office.
On the 4th of March last he was inaugurated, and four months afterwards (July 2d) he fell by the hand of an assassin.
You know how during this long, dry, hot summer he has been lying in Washington until the last two weeks, hanging between life and death; and you know how tenderly and lovingly he has been nursed; how gently he was removed to the sea, in the hope that a change of air and scene would do what the best surgical and medical skill had failed to do; and you know how last Monday night, while you were sleeping soundly in your beds, the bells of our city and all over the land were tolling the tidings of his death.
He was a good man—in many respects as well qualified to fill the Presidential chair as any man who has ever sat in it. So I say it is most difficult to understand why he was taken away.
Like all of you he lost his father by death at an early age; as is the case with all of you his mother was poor. He struggled hard for an education, and he acquired it, who knows at what a cost! He was never satisfied with present attainments; he was always on the advance. At an early age he gave himself to the Lord, joining the church; and as that branch of the church does not believe in the necessity of ordination for the ministry he preached the Gospel as a layman, as the great Faraday preached in London and as Christian laymen preach the same truths to you, and it was my purpose, formed when he was elected in November last, to persuade him, some time when he might be passing through Philadelphia, to come to this chapel and address you boys. This, alas, now can never be.
President Garfield loved his mother. No more touching incident was ever witnessed than that which hundreds of people saw on inauguration day, when, after taking the oath of his high office, he turned immediately to his dear old mother and kissed her.
Our great sorrow is not felt by us alone. All nations mourn with us. The Queen of Great Britain with her own hand sends messages of the sweetest, the most touching sympathy. She, too, is a widow and her children are fatherless. She sends flowers for Mrs. Garfield and puts her court in mourning, a compliment never extended before except in the case of death in a royal family. Other European and Asiatic and African governments send their sympathy—they all feel it—they all deplore it. Emblems of mourning are displayed in every street in our city, and every heart is sad. The people mourn.
Boys, you may not be Presidents—probably not one here will ever be at the head of this nation; nor is this of any moment; but remember it was not only as President of the United States that General Garfield was wise and good—it was in every place where he was put; whether in school, in college, in teaching, in the army, in Congress, in the President’s chair, in his family and on his sick and dying bed, languishing and suffering, wasting and burning with fever, exhausted by wounds cruel and undeserved, he was always the same brave, true, real man.
Some of you know with what profound and tender interest people gathered in places of prayer that Tuesday morning to ask that the journey from Washington to Long Branch might be safe and prosperous, and how the hope was expressed, almost to assurance, that the Saviour would meet his disciple by the sea. The prayer was granted. The Lord did meet his disciple, not, as was so much desired, with gifts of healing; nothing short of a miracle could do that, but by a more complete preparation of the people for the final issue. It came at last. And while many of us were sleeping quietly, telegraphic messages were flashing the sad intelligence everywhere that, at last, he was at rest.
Now that we know that he is taken away, we stand in awe and amazement. We cannot yet understand it.
Shall we gather a few lessons from his life? Some of the most apparent may be mentioned very briefly.
The simplicity of his character is most interesting. Conscious as he must have been of the possession of no ordinary mental force, he was never obtrusive nor self-assertive. What seemed to be his duty he did, with purpose and completeness. And his associates often placed him in positions of high trust and responsibility.
He was an accomplished scholar. Even while engrossed in Congressional duties, to a degree which left him little or no time for recreation, he did not fail to keep himself fresh in classic literature. It is said that a friend returning from Europe, and desiring to bring him some little present, could think of nothing more acceptable than a few volumes of the Latin poets.
When his life comes to be written by impartial hands, it will be found that along with his great simplicity and his high culture there will be most prominent his devotion to principle. This was his great characteristic. I have no time, and this is not the place, to speak of his adherence, under strong adverse influences, to his sound views on the great currency question which has occupied so much the attention of Congress.
In a not very remote sense his death is to be attributed to his devotion to principle. That great and most discreditable contest at Albany might have been settled weeks before it was, although in a very different manner, if the President could have yielded his convictions. He did not yield, and he was slain.
The funeral services in the capitol are over and the men whom Mrs. Garfield chose as the bearers of her husband’s coffin were not members of the cabinet, nor senators, nor judges of the Supreme Court, any of whom would have been honored by such a service, but they were plain men, of names unknown to us, members of his own little church.
They are gone. They have taken his worn and wasted and mutilated form, all that remains in this world of the strong, pure life that was not yet fifty years old, to the beautiful city by the lake, and there within sight and almost within sound of the waves of the great inland sea, they will to-morrow lay him to rest until the morning of the resurrection.
What use shall we make of this deplorable calamity? Shall our faith in the prevalence of prayer be weakened? God forbid that we should so distort his teachings. “Nay, but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God?”
Our prayers are answered, not as we wished, and almost insisted, but in softening the hearts of the people and drawing them as they have never before been drawn towards the Great Ruler of the universe, and in uniting the people, and also in promoting a better feeling between the different sections of our country than has been known for half a century. And if, in addition to this, the people would only learn to abate that passion for office which has been so fatal to peace, and would be content to allow fitness for office to be the only rule of appointment, then a true civil service would be a heritage for the securing of which even the sacrifice of a President would seem not too great a price.
“And the archers shot at King Josiah, and the king said to his servants, Have me away for I am sore wounded. His servants therefore took him out of that chariot, and put him in the second chariot that he had, and they brought him to Jerusalem, and he died and was buried. And all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah.” 2 Chron. xxxv. 23, 24.