The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield / Twentieth President of the United States, Including Full and Accurate Details of His Eventful Administration, Assassination, Last Hours, Death, Etc., Together with Notable Extracts from His Speeches and Letters

by E. E. Brown

III.

SENATOR HOAR'S ADDRESS.

I should indulge myself in a strange delusion if I hoped to say anything of President Garfield which is not already well known to his countrymen, or to add further honor to a name to which the judgment of the world, with marvelous unanimity, has already assigned its place. The public sorrow and love have found utterance, if not adequate, yet such as speech, and silence, and funeral rite, and stately procession, and prayers, and tears could give. On the twenty-sixth day of September, the day of the funeral, a common feeling stirred mankind as never before in history. That mysterious law, by which, in a great audience, every emotion is multiplied in each heart by sympathy with every other, laid its spell on universal humanity. At the touch which makes the whole world kin, all barriers of rank, or party, or State, or Nation disappeared. His own Ohio, the State of his birth and of his burial, New England, from whose loins came the sturdy race from which he descended, whose college gave him his education, can claim no pre-eminence in sorrow.

From farthest south comes the voice of mourning for the soldier of the Union. Over fisherman's hut and frontiersman's cabin is spread a gloom because the White House is desolate. The son of the poor widow is dead, and palace and castle are in tears. As the humble Campbellite disciple is borne to his long home, the music of the requiem fills cathedral arches and the domes of ancient synagogues. On the coffin of the canal-boy a queen lays her wreath. As the bier is lifted, word comes beneath the sea that the nations of the earth are rising and bowing their heads. From many climes, in many languages they join in the solemn service. This is no blind and sudden emotion, gathering and breaking like a wave. It is the mourning of mankind for a great character already perfectly known and familiar. If there be any persons who fear that religious faith is dying, that science has shaken the hold of the moral law upon the minds of men, let them take comfort in asking themselves if any base or ignoble passion could have so moved mankind. Modern science has called into life these mighty servants, press and telegraph, who have created a nerve which joins together all human hearts and pulses simultaneously over the globe. To what conqueror, to what tyrant, to what selfish ambition, to what mere intellectual greatness would it not have refused response? The power in the universe that makes for evil, and the power in the universe that makes for righteousness, measure their forces. A poor, weak fiend shoots off his little bolt, a single human life is stricken down, and a throb of divine love thrills a planet.

Every American State has its own story of the brave and adventurous spirits who were its early settlers; the men who build commonwealths, the men of whom commonwealths are builded. The history of the settlement of Massachusetts, of central New York, and of Ohio, is the history of the Garfield race. They were, to borrow a felicitous phrase, "hungry for the horizon." They were natural frontiersmen. Of the seven generations born in America, including the President, not one was born in other than a frontiersman's dwelling.

Two of them, father and son, came over with Winthrop in 1630. Each of the six generations who dwelt in Massachusetts has left an honorable record still preserved. Five in succession bore an honorable military title. Some were fighters in the Indian wars. "It is not in Indian wars," Fisher Ames well says, "that heroes are celebrated, but it is there they are formed." At the breaking out of the Revolution the male representatives of the family were two young brothers. One, whose name descended to the President, was in arms at Concord bridge, at sunrise, on the 19th of April. The other, the President's great grandfather, dwelling thirty miles off, was on his way to the scene of action before noon. When the Constitution rejected by Massachusetts in 1778 was proposed, this same ancestor, with his fellow-citizens of the little town of Westminster, voted unanimously for the rejection, and put on record their reasons. "It is our opinion that no constitution whatever ought to be established till previously thereto a bill of rights be set forth, and the constitution be framed therefrom, so that the lowest capacity may be able to determine his natural rights, and judge of the equitableness of the constitution thereby." "And as to the Constitution itself, the following appears to us exceptionable, viz, the fifth article," [Excepting negroes, mulattoes and Indians from the right to vote], "which deprives a portion of the human race of their natural rights on account of their color, which, in our opinion, no power on earth has a just right to do. It therefore ought to be expunged the Constitution." No religious intolerance descended in the Garfield race. But the creed of this Westminster catechism they seem never to have forgotten. When the war was over, the same ancestor took his young family and penetrated the forest again. He established his home in Otsego county, in central New York, at the period and amid the scenes made familiar by Cooper, in his delightful tale, The Pioneers. Again the generations moved westward, in the march of civilization, keeping ever in the van, until in 1831, James Garfield was born, in a humble Ohio cabin where he was left fatherless in his infancy. In a new settlement the wealth of the family is in the right arm of the father. To say that the father, who had himself been left an orphan when he was an infant, left his son fatherless in infancy, is to say that the family was reduced to extreme poverty.

I have not given this narrative as the story of a mean or ignoble lineage. Such men, whether of Puritan, or Huguenot, or Cavalier stock, have ever been the strength and the security of American States. From such homes came Webster, and Clay, and Lincoln and Jackson. It is no race of boors that has struck its axes into the forests of this continent. These men knew how to build themselves log houses in the wilderness. They were more skillful still to build constitutions and statutes. Slow, cautious, conservative, sluggish, unready, in ordinary life, their brains move quick and sure as their rifles flash, when great controversies that determine the fate of States are to be decided, when great interests that brook no delay are at stake, and great battles that admit no indecision, are to be fought. The trained and disciplined soldiers of England could not anticipate these alert farmers. On the morning of the Revolution they were up before the sun. When Washington was to be defended in 1861 the scholar, or the lawyer, or the man of the city, dropped his book, left his court-house or his counting-room, and found his company of yeomen waiting for him. They are ever greatest in adversity. I would not undervalue the material of which other republics have been built. The polished marbles of Greece and Italy have their own grace. But art or nature contain no more exquisite beauty than the color which this split and unhewn granite takes from the tempest it withstands. There was never a race of men on earth more capable of seeing clearly, of grasping, and of holding fast the great truths and great principles which are permanent, sure, and safe for the government of the conduct of life, alike in private and public concerns. If there be, or ever shall be, in this country, a demos, fickle, light-minded, easily moved, blind, prejudiced, incapable of permanent adherence to what is great or what is true, whether it come from the effeminacy of wealth or the scepticism of a sickly and selfish culture, or the poverty and ignorance of great cities, it will find itself powerless in this iron grasp.

Blending with this Saxon stock, young Garfield inherited on the mother's side the qualities of the Huguenots, those gentle but not less brave or less constant Puritans, who, for conscience sake, left their beloved and beautiful France, whose memory will be kept green so long as Maine cherishes Bowdoin College, or Massachusetts Faneuil Hall; or New York the antique virtue of John Jay, or South Carolina her Revolutionary history—who gave a lustre and a glory to every place and thing they touched. The child of such a race, left fatherless in the wilderness, yet destined to such a glory, was committed by Providence to three great teachers, without either of whom he would not have become fitted for his distinguished career. These teachers were a wise Christian mother, poverty, and the venerable college president who lived to watch his pupil through the whole of his varied life, to witness his inauguration amid such high hopes, and to lament his death. To no nobler matron did ever Roman hero trace his origin. Few of the traditions of his Puritan ancestry could have come down to the young orphan. It is said there were two things with which his mother was specially familiar—the Bible and the rude ballads of the war of 1812. The child learned the Bible at his mother's knee, and the love of country from his cradle-hymns.

I cannot, within the limits assigned to me, recount every circumstance of special preparation which fitted the young giant for the great and various parts he was to play in the drama of our republican life. It would be but to repeat a story whose pathos and romance are all known by heart to his countrymen. The childhood in the cabin; the struggle with want almost with famine, the brother proudly bringing his first dollar to buy shoes for the little bare feet; the labor in the forest, the growth of the strong frame and the massive brain; the reading of the first novel; the boy's longing for the sea; the canal-boat; the carpenter's shop; the first school; the eager thirst for knowledge; the learning that an obstacle seems only a thing to be overcome; the founding of the college at Hiram; the companionship in study of the gifted lady whose eulogy he pronounced; the Campbellite preaching; the ever-wise guidance of the mother; the marriage to the bright and beautiful schoolmate; we know them better even, than we know the youth of Washington and of Webster. General Garfield said in 1878, that he had not long ago conversed with an English gentleman, who told him that in twenty-five years of careful study of the agricultural class in England he had never known one who was born and reared in the ranks of farm laborers that rose above his class and became a well-to-do citizen. The story of a childhood passed in poverty, of intellect and moral nature trained in strenuous contests with adversity, is not unfamiliar to those who have read the lives of the men who have been successful in this country in any of the walks of life. It is one of the most beneficent results of American institutions that we have ceased to speak of poverty and hardship, and the necessity for hard and humble toil as disadvantages to a spirit endowed by nature with the capacity for generous ambitions. In a society where labor is honorable, and where every place in social or public life is open to merit, early poverty is no more a disadvantage than a gymnasium to an athlete, or drill and discipline to a soldier.

General Garfield was never ashamed of his origin. He

"Did not change, but kept in lofty place
The wisdom which adversity had bred."

The humblest friend of his boyhood was ever welcome to him when he sat in the highest seats, where Honor was sitting by his side. The poorest laborer was sure of the sympathy of one who had known all the bitterness of want and the sweetness of bread earned by the sweat of the brow. He was ever the simple, plain, modest gentleman. When he met a common soldier it was not the general or military hero that met him, but the comrade. When he met the scholar, it was not the learned man, or the college president, but the learner. It was fitting that he who found open the road through every gradation of public honor, from the log cabin to the Presidency, simply at the price of deserving it, should have answered in the same speech the sophistries of communism and the sinister forebodings of Lord Macaulay. "Here," he said, "society is not fixed in horizontal layers, like the crust of the earth, but as a great New England man said years ago, it is rather like the ocean, broad, deep, grand, open, and so free in all its parts that every drop that mingles with the yellow sand at the bottom, may ride through all the waters, till it gleams in the sunshine on the crest of the highest waves. So it is here in our free society, permeated with the light of American freedom. There is no American boy, however poor, however humble, orphan though he may be, that, if he have a clear head, a true heart, a strong arm, he may not rise through all the grades of society, and become the crown, the glory, the pillar of the State. Here there is no need for the Old World war between capital and labor. Here is no need of the explosion of social order predicted by Macaulay."

When seeking a place of education in the East, young Garfield wrote to several New England colleges. The youth's heart was touched, and his choice decided by the tone of welcome in the reply of Dr. Hopkins, the president of Williams. It was fortunate that his vigorous youth found itself under the influence of a very great but very simple and sincere character. The secret of Dr. Hopkins' power over his pupils lay, first, in his own example, profound scholarship, great practical wisdom, perfect openness and sincerity, and humility, second, in a careful study of the disposition of each individual youth, third, justice, absolute, yet accompanied by sympathy and respect, seldom severity, never scorn, in dealing with the errors of boyhood. No harsh and inflexible law, cold and pitiless as a winter's sea, dealt alike with the sluggish and the generous nature. No storm of merciless ridicule greeted the shy, awkward, ungainly, backwoodsman. And, beyond all, Dr. Hopkins taught his pupils that lesson in which some of our colleges so sadly fail—reverence for the republican life of which they were to form a part, and for the great history of whose glory they were inheritors. It was my fortune, on an evening last spring, to see the illustrious pupil, I suppose for the last time on earth, take leave of the aged teacher whose head the frosts of nearly fourscore winters had touched so lightly, and to hear him say at parting, "I have felt your presence at the beginning of my administration like a benediction." The President delighted in his college. He kept unbroken the friendships he formed within her walls. He declared that the place and its associations were to him a fountain of perpetual youth. He never forgot his debt to her. When he was stricken down he was on his way, all a boy again, to lay his untarnished laurels at her feet.

It would have been hard to find in this country a man so well equipped by nature, by experience, and by training, as was Garfield when he entered the Ohio Senate, in 1860, at the age of twenty-eight. He was in his own person the representative of the plainest life of the backwoods and the best culture of the oldest eastern community. He had been used in his youth to various forms of manual labor. The years which he devoted to his profession of teacher and of college president, were years of great industry, in which he disciplined his powers of public speaking and original investigation. Dr. Hopkins said of him: "There was a large general capacity applicable to any subject and sound sense. What he did was done with facility, but by honest and avowed work. There was no pretence of genius or alternation of spasmodic effort and of rest, but a satisfactory accomplishment in all directions of what was undertaken." His sound brain and athletic frame could bear great labor without fatigue. He had a thoroughly healthy and robust intellect, capable of being directed upon any of the pursuits of life or any of the affairs of State in any department of the public service. We have no other example in our public life of such marvellous completeness of intellectual development. He exhibited enough of his varied mental capacity to make it sure that he could have attained greatness as a metaphysician or a mathematician in any of the exact sciences, as a linguist, as an executive officer, as he did in fact attain it as a military commander, as an orator, as a debater and a parliamentary and popular leader.

The gigantic scale on which the operations of our late war were conducted, has dwarfed somewhat the achievements of individual actors. If in the history of either of the other wars in which our people have engaged, whether before or after the Declaration of Independence, such a chapter should be found as the narrative of Garfield's Kentucky campaign, it would alone have made the name of its leader immortal. It is said that General Rosecrans received the young schoolmaster with some prejudice. "When he came to my headquarters," he says, "I must confess that I had a prejudice against him, as I understood he was a preacher who had gone into politics, and a man of that cast I was naturally opposed to." In his official report Rosecrans says:—

"I especially mention Brigadier-General Garfield, ever active, prudent and sagacious. I feel much indebted to him for both counsel and assistance in the administration of this army. He possesses the energy and the instinct of a great commander."

We must leave to soldiers and to military historians to assign then relative historic importance to the movements of the war. But we may safely trust the popular judgment which pronounces Garfield's role at Chickamauga one of the most conspicuous instances of personal heroism, and the Kentucky campaign a most brilliant example of fertility of resource, combined audacity and prudence, sound military judgment, and success against great odds. We may safely trust, too, the judgment of the accomplished historian, who pronounces his report in favor of the advance that ended with the battle of Chickamuauga "the ablest military document submitted by a chief of staff to his superior during the war." We may accept, also, the award of Lincoln, who made him major-general for his brilliant service at Chickamauga, and the confidence of Thomas, who offered him the command of an army corps. Great as was his capacity for military service, the judgment of Abraham Lincoln did not err, when it summoned him to the field of labor where his greatest laurels were won. It is the fashion, in some quarters, to lament the decay of statesmanship, and to make comparisons, by no means complimentary, between persons now entrusted with the conduct of public affairs, and their predecessors. We may at least find consolation in the knowledge that when any of our companions die they do not fail to receive full justice from the hearts of the people.

Suppose any of the statesmen who preceded the war, or some intelligent and not unfriendly foreign observer—some De Tocqueville or Macaulay—to look forward with Garfield to the duties which confronted him when he entered Congress in 1863. With what despair, in the light of all past experience, would he have contemplated the future. How insignificant the difficulties which beset the men of the preceding seventy years compared with those which have crowded the seventeen which were to follow. How marvellous the success the American people have achieved in dealing with these difficulties compared with that which attended the statesmanship of the times of Webster and Clay and Calhoun, giants as they were. The greatness of these men is not likely to be under-valued anywhere, least of all in Massachusetts. They contributed each in his own way those masterly discussions of the great principles by which the Constitution must be interpreted, and the economic laws on which material prosperity depends, which will abide as perpetual forces so long as the republic shall endure. Mr Webster, especially, aided in establishing in the jurisprudence of the country the great judgments, which, on the one hand, asserted for the national government its most necessary and beneficent powers, and, on the other hand, have protected property and liberty from invasion. He uttered in the Senate the immortal argument which convinced the American people of the unity of the republic and the supremacy and indestructibility of the national authority. It has been well said that the cannon of the nation were shotted with the reply to Hayne. But the only important and permanent measure with which the name of Webster is connected is the Ashburton treaty—an achievement of diplomacy of little consequence in comparison with those which obtained from the great powers of Europe the relinquishment of the doctrine of perpetual allegiance, or with the Alabama treaty of 1871. Mr. Clay's life was identified with two great policies—the protection of American industry and the compromise between slavery and freedom in their strife for control of the Territories. When he died the free-trade tariff of 1844 was the law of the land, and within two years the Missouri compromise was repealed. Mr Calhoun has left behind him the memory of a stainless life, great intellectual power and a lost cause.

To each generation is committed its peculiar task. To these men it was given to wake the infant republic to a sense of its own great destiny, and to teach it the laws of its being, by which it must live or bear no life. To the men of our time the abstract theories, which were only debated in other days, have come as practical realities, demanding prompt and final decision on questions where error is fatal. From the time of Jay's treaty no such problem has presented itself to American diplomacy as that which the war left as its legacy. The strongest power on earth, accustomed, in dealing with other nations, to take counsel only of her pride and her strength, had inflicted on us vast injury, of which the honor of this country seemed pledged to insist on reparation, which England conceived hers equally pledged to deny. But in domestic affairs, the difficulties were even greater. For six of the sixteen years that followed the death of Lincoln, the President was not in political accord with either house of Congress. For four others the house was of different politics from President and Senate. During the whole time the dominant party had to encounter a zealous and able opposition, and to submit its measures to a people having apparently the strongest inducements to go wrong. The rights of capital were to be determined by the votes of labor, debtors to fix the value of their payments to their creditors, a people under no constraint but their own sense of duty to determine whether they would continue to bear the weight of a vast debt, the policy of dealing with the conquered to be decided at the close of a long war by the votes of the conquerors, among whom every other family was in mourning for its dead, finance and currency with their subtleties, surpassing the subtleties of metaphysics to be made clear to the apprehension of plain men; business to be recalled from the dizzy and dangerous heights of speculation to moderate gains and safe laws; great public ways connecting distant oceans to be built; commerce to be diverted into unaccustomed channels; the mouth of the Mississippi to be opened; a great banking system to be devised and put in operation, such as was never known before, alike comprehensive and safe, through whose veins and arteries credit, the life-blood of trade should ebb and flow in the remotest extremities of the land; four millions of people to be raised from slavery to citizenship; millions more to be welcomed from foreign lands; a disputed presidential succession to be settled, after an election contest in which the country seemed turned into two hostile camps, by a tribunal for which the founders of the government had made no provision; all this to be accomplished under the restraints of a written Constitution.

When this list has been enumerated the eulogy of Garfield the statesman has been spoken. There is scarcely one of these questions, certainly not more than one or two, which he did not anticipate, carefully and thoroughly study for himself before it arose, and to which he did not contribute an original argument, unsurpassed in persuasive force. Undoubtedly there were others who had more to do with marshalling the political forces of the house. But almost from the time he entered it he was the leader of its best thought. He was ever serious, grave, addressing himself only to the reason and conscience of his auditors.

He lived in a State whose people were evenly divided in politics, and on whose decision, as it swayed alternately from side to side, the fate of the country often seemed to depend. You will search his speeches in vain for an appeal to a base motive or an evil passion. Many men who are called great political leaders are really nothing but great political followers. They study the currents of a public sentiment which other men form. They use as instruments opinions which they never espoused till they became popular. General Garfield always consulted with great care the temper of the house in the conduct of measures which were under his charge. But he was remarkably independent in forming his judgments, and inflexible in adhering to them on all great essential questions. His great friend and commander, General Thomas, whose stubborn courage saved the day in the great battle for the possession of Tennessee, was well-called the "rock of Chickamauga." In the greater battle in 1876 for the nation's honor, Garfield well deserved to be called the "rock of Ohio." Everything he did and said manifested the serious, reverent love of excellent. He had occasion often to seek to win to his opinions masses of men composed largely of illiterate persons. No man ever heard from his lips a sneer at scholarship. At the same time, he never made the scholar's mistake of undervaluing the greatness of the history of his own country, or the quality of his own people.

The limits of this discourse do not permit me to enter into the detail of the variety and extent of his service in debate, in legislation, and in discussions before the people. I could detain you until midnight were I to recount from my own memory the great labors of the twelve years that it was my privilege to share with him in the public service, for four of which I sat almost by his side. Everybody who had a new thought brought it to him for hospitable welcome. Did science or scholarship need anything of the government, Garfield was the man to whom they came. While charged with the duty of supervising the details of present legislation he was always foreseeing and preparing for the future. In the closing years of the war, while chairman of the committee of military affairs, he was studying finance. Later he had prepared himself to deal with the defects in the civil service. I do not think the legislation of the next twenty years will more than reach the ground which he had already occupied in his advanced thought.

General Garfield gave evidence of vast powers of oratory on some very memorable occasions. But he made almost no use of them as a means of persuading the people to conclusions where great public interests were at stake. Sincerity, directness, full and perfect understanding of his subject, clear logic, manly dignity, simple and apt illustration, marked all his discourse. But on a few great occasions, such as that in New York, when the people were moved almost to frenzy by the assassination of Lincoln, or in the storm which moved the great human ocean at the convention at Chicago, he showed that he could touch with a master's hands the chords of that mighty instrument—

"Such as raised
To height of noblest temper heroes old,
Arming to battle, and instead of rage
Deliberate valor breathed, firm and unmoved
With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;
Nor wanting power to mitigate and suage
With solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase
Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain
From mortal or immortal minds."

When General Garfield took the oath of office as President, he seemed to those who knew him best, though in his fiftieth year, still in the prime of a splendid and vigorous youth. He was still growing. We hoped for him eight years of brilliant administration, and then, in some form or place of service, an old age like that of Adams, whom, in variety of equipment, alone of our Presidents he resembled. What was best and purest and loftiest in the aspiration of America seemed at last to have laid its hand on the helm. Under its beneficent rule we hoped, as our country entered on its new career of peace and prosperity, a nobler liberty, a better friendship, a purer justice, a more lasting brotherhood. But he was called to a sublimer destiny. He had ascended along and up the heights of service, of success, of greatness, of glory; ever raised by the people to higher ranks for gallant and meritorious conduct on each field, until by their suffrages he stood foremost among men of the foremost among nations. But in the days of his sickness and death he became the perpetual witness and example how much greater than the achievements of legislative halls, or the deeds of the field of battle, are the household virtues and simple family affections which all men have within their reach; how much greater than the lessons of the college or the camp, or the congress, are the lessons learned at mother's knees. The honors paid to Garfield are the protest of a better age and a better generation against the vulgar heroisms of the past. Go through their mausoleums and under their triumphal arches, and see how the names inscribed there shrink and shrivel compared with that of this Christian soldier, whose chiefest virtues, after all, are of the fireside and the family circle, and of the dying bed. Here the hero of America becomes the hero of humanity.

We are justified, then, in saying of this man that he has been tried and tested in every mode by which the quality of a human heart and the capacity of a human intellect can be disclosed; by adversity, by prosperity, by poverty, by wealth, by leadership in deliberative assemblies, and in the perilous edge of battle, by the height of power and of fame. The essay was to be completed by the certain and visible approach of death. As he comes out into the sunlight, more and more clearly does his country behold a greatness and symmetry which she is to see in their true and full proportions only when he lies in the repose of death.

"As sometimes in a dead man's face,
To those that watch it more and more,
A likeness, hardly seen before,
Comes out, to some one of his race,

So, dearest, now thy brows are cold,
I see thee what thou art, and know
Thy likeness to the wise below,
Thy kindred with the great of old."

Let us not boast at the funeral of our dead. Such a temper would be doubly odious in the presence of such expressions of hearty sympathy from governments of every form. But we should be unfaithful to ourselves if in asking for this man a place in the world's gallery of illustrious names we did not declare that we offer him as an example of the products of Freedom. With steady and even step he walked from the log-cabin and the canal-path to the school, to the college, to the battle-field, to the halls of legislation, to the White House, to the chamber of death. The ear in which the voices of his countrymen, hailing him at the pinnacle of human glory had scarcely died out, heard the voice of the dread archangel, and his countenance did not change. Is not that country worth dying for whose peasantry are of such a strain? Is not the Constitution worth standing by under whose forms Freedom calls such men to her high places? Is not the Union worth saving which gives all of us the property of countrymen in such a fame?