On November 16, 1877, he made a very able speech on the subject of Resumption of Payments; an address which would serve to perpetuate his fame, if he had no other monument.
In the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1876, appeared an article from his pen, entitled “The Currency Conflict.” On June 4, of the same year, he opposed, in an elaborate address, a tariff bill brought in by Mr. Morrison, of Illinois.
June 22, 1876, was to him the “sad occasion dear” of a revival of precious memories. In the preceding December his old friend and fellow-student of Hiram, Miss Booth, had died, and this day in June was appointed there for a memorial address by General Garfield. As at all such times when he spoke, we are struck with a sense of the wonderful delicacy of this man’s nature, which responded so perfectly to every delicate and holy sentiment known to the human heart. His very first words were:
“Mr. President: You have called me to a duty at once most sad and most sacred. At every step of my preparation for its performance, I have encountered troops of thronging memories that swept across the field of the last twenty-five years of my life, and so filled my heart with the lights and shadows of their joy and sorrow that I have hardly been able to marshal them into order or give them coherent voice. I have lived over again the life of this place. I have seen again the groups of young and joyous students, ascending these green slopes, dwelling for a time on this peaceful height in happy and workful companionship, and then, with firmer step, and with more serious and thoughtful faces, marching away to their posts in the battle of life.
“And still nearer and clearer have come back the memories of that smaller band of friends, the leaders and guides of those who encamped on this training-ground. On my journey to this assembly, it has seemed that they, too, were coming, and that I should once more meet and greet them. And I have not yet been able to realize that Almeda Booth will not be with us. After our great loss, how shall we gather up the fragments of the life we lived in this place? We are mariners, treading the lonely shore in search of our surviving comrades and the fragments of our good ship, wrecked by the tempest. To her, indeed, it is no wreck. She has landed in safety, and ascended the immortal heights beyond our vision.”
The death of Michael C. Kerr having made necessary the selection of a new Speaker, the Democratic majority in the House elected Samuel J. Randall, and the complimentary vote of the Republicans went to General Garfield. He was also their candidate in the two succeeding Congresses. He had divided the honor of leadership pretty evenly with Mr. Blaine, until, in 1877, the latter gentleman went to the Senate, and left Garfield without a rival. Fourteen years of able and faithful service had done their work grandly for his power and his fame.
On February 12, 1878, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, of New York City, presented to Congress that great painting of Carpenter, “Lincoln and Emancipation.” At her request the presentation address was made by General Garfield.
His important speeches during this Congress were even more numerous than usual; especially in the special session held in the spring and summer of 1879. One of the best was that of February 19, 1878, on the “Policy of Pacification, and the Prosecutions in Louisiana.” At this time there were two serious political storms brewing in the air. First, there were divisions in the Republican party, and an alienation of some of its leaders from President Hayes; second, the Democratic party, with its cries of “fraud,” concerning the last election, and its Potter Committee, and its prosecutions against the members of the Louisiana Returning Board, was trying to destroy the people’s confidence in the Government as then constituted. The latter quarrel no doubt was the salvation of the party concerned in the former. Its members rallied and united. Garfield was leader and chief promoter of Republican harmony, as well as the strongest bulwark against the enemy.
This speech of February 19 contains the following pithy paragraph, descriptive of the way in which the nation had passed through the transformations of war:
“There was, first, the military stage—the period of force, of open and bloody war—in which gentlemen of high character and honor met on the field, and decided by the power of the strongest the questions involved in the high court of war. That period passed, but did not leave us on the calm level of peace. It brought us to the period of transition, in which the elements of war and peace were mingled together in strange and anarchic confusion. It was a period of civil and military elements combined. All through that semi-military period the administration of General Grant had, of necessity, to conduct the country. His administration was not all civil, it was not all military; it was necessarily a combination of both; and out of that combination came many of the strange and anomalous situations which always follow such a war.”