17. During the administration of Hayes several eminent Americans passed from the scene of their earthly activities. On the 1st of November, 1877, the distinguished senator, Oliver P. Morton, died of paralysis at his home in Indianapolis. His reputation in his own State and throughout the Union was very great, and his sterling character had won the respect even of his political enemies. As War Governor of Indiana, he had been one of the main pillars of support to the Union in the trying days of the Civil War. After that event he had become one of the foremost men of the nation. Although but fifty-four years of age, he had risen to be a recognized leader in American statesmanship. His death was regarded as a public calamity, and the Nation, without distinction of party, joined with his own State in doing honor to the memory of the great dead.
18. Still more universally felt was the loss of the great poet and journalist, William Cullen Bryant, who on the 12th of June, 1878, at the advanced age of eighty-four, passed from among the living. For more than sixty years his name had been known and honored wherever the English language was spoken. On the 19th of December, in the same year, the illustrious Bayard Taylor, who had recently been appointed American Minister to the German Empire, died suddenly in the city of Berlin. His life had been exclusively devoted to literary work; and almost every department of letters, from the common tasks of journalism to the highest charms of poetry, had been adorned by his genius. On the 1st day of November, 1879, Zachariah Chandler, of Michigan, one of the organizers of the Republican party, and a great leader of that party in the times of the civil war, died suddenly at Chicago; and on the 24th day of April, 1881, the noted publisher and author, James T. Fields, died at his home in Boston.
CHAPTER LIII.
Administration of Garfield and Arthur, 1881-1885.
JAMES A. Garfield, twentieth President of the United J States, was born at Orange, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, November 19, 1831. He was left in infancy to the sole care of his mother and to the rude surroundings of a backwoods home. In boyhood he served as a driver and pilot of a canal boat plying the Ohio and Pennsylvania canal. At the age of seventeen he attended the High School in Chester, was afterwards a student at Hiram College, and in 1854 entered Williams College, from which he was graduated with honor.
James A. Garfield.
2. In the same year, Garfield returned to Ohio, and was made first a professor and afterwards president of Hiram College. This position he held until the outbreak of the Civil War, when he left his post to enter the army. In the service he rose to distinction, and while still in the field was elected by the people of his district to the lower house of Congress. In 1879 he was elected to the United States Senate, and hard upon this followed his nomination and election to the presidency. American history has furnished but few instances of a more steady and brilliant rise, from the poverty of an obscure boyhood, to the most distinguished elective office in the gift of mankind.