"No one who saw President Garfield after his installation in the White House can fail to have observed the great change which his accession to power had occasioned in him. Only at intervals did his bright joyousness shine out again, as at the pleasant home at Mentor. The very day after he became President, the struggle for the spoils of office began with a fierceness hitherto unparalleled in all the strife of that kind which has been seen at Washington. He was half-maddened by his desire to do justice to all the contending factions. It was this feeling which made him slow to give irrevocable decisions. I was at the White House one morning, and he referred to his anxiety not to take a step in haste which he might repent at leisure. The humor of his own cautious slowness brought back the twinkle in his eye, the smile on the rosy lip. 'I don't know when I shall get around to that,' he said. 'You know, there's no telling when the Mississippi River will reach a given point.' The sluggish movement of the great Father of Waters was hit off to the life by this impromptu epigram."
Hardly had Garfield been nominated for the presidency, when his neighbors, those who had known him from boyhood, together with his kinsmen, gathered, and raised upon his old home, near the spot where he was born, a pole, and placed thereon the candidate's name. The pole was erected where the house stood which Garfield with his brother erected for their mother and sisters with their own hands, after the log hut, a little farther out in the field nearer the wood, had become unfit for habitation. Thomas Garfield, an old man eighty years of age, the one who was killed in a railroad accident soon after Gen. Garfield had been inaugurated President, directed the manual labor of rearing the shaft, and was proud of his work. Soon after it was erected Garfield himself came from Mentor to look over the old place again, and with proud satisfaction looked upon this expression of friendship of his old neighbors. There is nothing except this pole left to mark his birthplace, and the old well, not two rods off, which he and his brother dug to furnish water for the family. On the day of the funeral services, the torn and tattered banner which those who knew him from childhood to manhood had erected in his honor, was lazily floating in the breeze half-way down the pole, showing in its plain way the sorrow of those who so gladly erected it less than twelve months ago. In the little maple grove to the left, children played about the country school-house, which has replaced the log one where the dead President first gathered the rudiments upon which he built to such purpose. The old orchard in its sere and yellow leaf, the dying grass, and the turning maple-leaves, seemed to join in the general mourning.
Adjoining the field where the flag floats is an unpretentious farm almost as much identified with General Garfield's early history as the one he helped to clear of the forest timber while he was a child, but it is now free of buildings. Near by is the home of Henry B. Boynton, cousin of the dead President, and a brother of Dr. Boynton, who has been so conspicuously connected with the Garfield family since Mrs. Garfield's illness last spring. "General Garfield and I were like brothers," said he to a visitor, as he turned from giving some directions to his farm hands, now sowing the fall grain upon ground which the dead President first helped to break. He looked off tearfully, as he spoke, toward the flag at half-mast, marking the birthplace of his life-long friend. "His father died yonder, within a stone's throw of us, when the son was but one and a half years old and I was but three and a half. He knew no other father than mine, who watched over the family as if it had been his own. I bore a peculiar relation to the general. His father and my father were half-brothers, and his mother and my mother were sisters. This very house in which I live was as much his home as it was mine." They walked toward the house as he spoke, and had here reached the plain mansion which was the house of the speaker's ancestors, as well as General Garfield's, and passed inside, to find his good housewife silent and tearful, and whose swollen eyes told plainer than words the terrible sorrow they all felt.
"Over there," said he, pointing to the brick schoolhouse in the grove of maples, around which the happy children were playing, "is where he and I first went to school. I have read a statement that he could not read or write until he was nineteen. He could do both before he was nine; and before he was twelve, so familiar was he with the Indian history of the country, that he had named every tree in the orchard, which his father planted before he was born, with the name of some Indian chief. One favorite tree of his he named 'Tecumseh,' and the branches of many of those old trees have been cut since his promotion to the presidency by relic hunters and carried away. General Garfield was a remarkable boy, sir, as well as man. It is not possible to tell you the fight he made amid poverty for a place in life, and how gradually he obtained it. When he was a boy he would rather read than work. But he became a great student. He had to work after he was twelve years of age. In those days we were all poor, and it took hard knocks to get on. He worked clearing the fields yonder with his brother, and then cut cordwood and did other farm labor to get the necessaries of life for his mother and sisters.
"His experience upon the canal was a severe one, but perhaps useful. I can remember the winter when he came home after the summer's service there. He had the chills all that fall and winter, yet he would shake, and get his lessons at home; go over to the school and recite, and thus keep up with his class. The next spring found him weak from constant ague. Yet he intended to return to the canal. Here came the turning point in his life. Mr. Bates, who taught the school, pleaded with him not to do so, and said that, if he would continue in school until the next fall, he could get a certificate. I received my certificate about the same time. The next year we went to the seminary at Chester, only twelve miles distant. Here our books were furnished us, and we cooked our own victuals. We lived upon a dollar a week each. Our diet was strong, but very plain; mush and molasses, pork and potatoes. Saturdays we took our axes and went into the woods and cut cordwood; during vacations we labored in the harvest field, or taught a district school, as we could. Yonder," said he, pointing off toward a beautiful valley, "about two miles distant stands the school-house where Garfield first taught school. He got twelve dollars a month and boarded around. I also taught school in a neighboring town. You see," continued the farmer, "that the general and myself were very close to one another from the time either of us could lisp until he became President. He visited me here just before election, and looked with gratification upon that pole yonder and its flag, erected by his neighbors and kinsmen. He wandered over the fields he himself had helped clear, and pointed out to me trees, from the limbs of which he had shot squirrel after squirrel, and beneath the branches of which he had played and worked in the years of his infancy and boyhood.
"I forgot to say that one of General Garfield's striking characteristics while he was growing up was that, when he saw a boy in the class excel him in anything, he never gave up until he reached the same standard, and even went beyond it. It got to be known that no scholar could be ahead of him. Our association as men has been almost as close as that of boys, although not as constant. The general never forgot his neighbors or less fortunate kinsmen, and often visited us, as we did him.
"Just before he was inaugurated I had a conversation with him, which impressed me more than any other talk of our lives. He said: 'Henry, I approach the duties of the Presidency with much reluctance. I had thought that at some future time it might be possible for me to aspire to that position, but I had been elected to the Senate, and should have preferred to serve the six years in that body to which my own State people had elected me. It would have been six years of comparative rest, for service in the Senate is much easier than in the House. I hope I may discharge the duties of the Presidency with satisfaction. There is one thing, however, that distresses me more than all else. All my life I have been making friends, and I have a great many sincere ones. But from the hour I assume the Presidency I must necessarily begin making enemies. Any man who wants an office and does not get it, will feel himself aggrieved.' Our conversation at this time was long and earnest, and seemed like returning to the days when we were schoolboys together."
Garfield was made a Mason in Magnolia Lodge, No. 20, at Columbus, Nov. 22, 1861, while he was commander at Camp Chase. His affiliation at the time of his death was with Pentalpha Lodge, No. 23, and Columbia Commandery, No. 2, Knights Templars, at Washington, D. C. Suitar says that he was the eighth Mason, but the first Knight Templar, who was ever honored with the Presidency. He was a true and courteous knight, and was not only an earnest supporter, but a charter member of Pentalpha Lodge. After his election to the Presidency, his commandery sought to express their esteem for him by attending the inauguration, and, although the Masonic law forbids any interference with or participation in politics, the occasion was regarded by the right eminent grand commander as sufficiently important and devoid of partisan coloring to grant the desired permission for five platoons of sixteen knights each to attend President Garfield. On the 19th of July, 1881, he was elected an honorary member of Hanselmann Commandery, No. 16, at Cincinnati, and they sent him handsomely engraved resolutions of sympathy, which were brought to his personal notice during his sickness, to which he appropriately replied through his private secretary.