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.