His boyhood was a happy, healthy period. He could swim across to Brownsville, discarding both ferry and bridge.
He went nutting with the boys, as is their wont when autumn days are on the woods, and Nature, glorified with a thousand tints of foliage, is, in the poet’s sombre language, “in the sere and yellow leaf.” Black walnuts, butternuts, shellbarks, hickory nuts, and chestnuts rewarded their search, and gladdened winter evenings with their cheer.
There was nothing unnatural about young Blaine. He was no prodigy; no marvel, except of industry and constant training. He was simply a fair exhibition of what a good average boy, well endowed with pluck and brains may become in the hands of good teachers, and under the guidance of intelligent love and the unyielding pressure of a strong paternal will. What his Eulogy says of Garfield is equally true of himself:—“He came of good stock on both sides;—none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of manhood, and of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence to principle.”
Mr. Blaine could also speak of himself as “fifth in descent from those who would not endure the oppression of the Stuarts,” and had fought under Prince Charles in the affair of 1715 and 1723.
So satisfactory had been his progress thus far in the school, that the plan of his education involved, in 1841, sending him to Lancaster, Ohio, where for one term he was in a school taught by a younger brother of Lord Lyons, so long our Minister from England, who according to English law inherited nothing from his father’s estates, the eldest brother receiving all; and so he made his home in the New World, and worthily engaged in training future presidents of the great Republic.
During his term in Lancaster his home was in the family of Hon. Thos. Ewing, his mother’s cousin. Mr. Ewing was a United States Senator when James was born, and entered the Cabinet of President Harrison the year before James’s appearance there as student, as Secretary of the Treasury, and in 1849 in Taylor’s Cabinet as Secretary of the Interior, both of whom died soon after their inauguration. In 1849 Governor Ford appointed him to the Senate in the place of Hon. Thomas Corwin, who entered Fillmore’s Cabinet.
This first and only term of school away from home and out of that little country school-house in preparation for college, under the broadening influences of such a home and the inspiration of such a teacher, was a long stride forward toward the desired goal. It was a great journey in those days for a boy only eleven years old to make, but it added another large chapter to his already wide range of knowledge and experience.
The other James, only a year younger, was living with his mother in the woods of Orange, in the same state of Ohio, improving the modest privileges of school, and maturing slowly, the winter James G. Blaine spent at Lancaster in the spacious home of that distant relative who had enjoyed all the high honors of the government, next to the presidency.
These boys were probably not over one hundred miles apart that winter, and both at school,—investing more largely in themselves than in all besides, using themselves as capital, their own powers and endowments. Surely no course is wiser, as their careers amply prove. It is gathering what is outside that one may get out what is inside, that is the process of education; not getting what is outside regardless of what is within, that may be developed into treasures of transcendent worth, more valuable than the contents of forest and mine.
American history furnishes few examples of the practical value of cultivated brain more illustrious and potent than James A. Garfield and James G. Blaine, and each the opposite in temperament and opportunity, but both brought up on a farm, and both getting their first start up the hill of knowledge in a country school.