“One point in General Garfield’s course of study, worthy of remark, was its evenness. There was nothing startling at any one time, and no special preference for any one study. There was a large general capacity applicable to any subject, and sound sense. As he was more mature than most, he naturally had a readier and firmer grasp of the higher studies. Hence his appointment to the metaphysical oration, then one of the high honors of the class. What he did was done with facility, but by honest and avowed work. There was no pretense of genius, or alternation of spasmodic effort and of rest, but a satisfactory accomplishment in all directions of what was undertaken. Hence there was a steady, healthful, onward and upward progress.”
To pass over Garfield’s college life without mention of the influence of President Hopkins upon his intellectual growth, would be to omit its most important feature. No man liveth to himself alone. The intellectual life of great men is largely determined and directed by the few superior minds with which they come in contact during formative periods. The biography of almost any thinker will show that his intellectual growth was by epochs, and that each epoch was marked out and created by the influence of some maturer mind. The first person to exercise this power is, in most cases, the mother. This was the case with Garfield. The second person who left an indelible impression on his mental life, and supplied it with new nourishment and stimulant, was Miss Almeda Booth. The third person who exercised an overpowering personal influence upon him was Mark Hopkins. When Garfield came to Williams, his thought was strong, but uncultured. The crudities and irregularities of his unpolished manners were also present in his mind.
He had his mental eye-sight, but he saw men as trees walking. But under the influence of Hopkins, the scales fell from his eyes. The vast and powerful intellect of the man who was stepping to the front rank of the world’s thinkers, imparted its wealth of ideas to the big Ohioan. Through President Hopkins, Garfield’s thought rose into the upper sky. Under the inspiration of the teacher’s lectures and private conversation, the pupil’s mind unfolded its immense calyx toward the sun of speculative thought. From this teacher Garfield derived the great ideas of law, of the regularity and system of the Universe, of the analogy between man and nature, of God as the First Cause, of the foundation of right conduct, of the correlation of forces, of the philosophy of history. In after years, Garfield always said that whatever perception he had of general ideas came from this great man. One winter in Washington the National Teacher’s Association was in session, and Garfield frequently dropped in to take a share in the discussion. One day he said: “You are making a grand mistake in education in this country. You put too much money into brick and mortar, and not enough into brains. You build palatial school-houses with domes and towers; supply them with every thing beautiful and luxuriant, and then put puny men inside. The important thing is not what is taught, but the teacher. It is the teacher’s personality which is the educator. I had rather dwell six months in a tent, with Mark Hopkins, and live on bread and water, than to take a six years’ course in the grandest brick and mortar university on the continent.”
With graduation came separation. The favorite walks around Williamstown were taken for the last time. The last farewells were said, the last grasp of the hand given, and Garfield turned his face toward his Ohio home. He was at once elected instructor in the ancient languages at the Western Eclectic Institute, later known as Hiram College. Two years later he became president of this institution, overrun with its four hundred pupils. The activities of the man during this period were immense. Following his own ideas of teaching, he surcharged the institution with his personality. The younger student, on entering, felt the busy life which animated the place. With his teaching, Garfield kept up an enormous amount of outside reading; he delivered lectures on scientific and miscellaneous subjects, making some money by it; he engaged in public debates on theologic and scientific questions; he took the stump for the Republican party; on Sundays he preached in the Disciples Church; in 1857 he took up the study of the law, mastered its fundamental principles, and was admitted to practice at the Cleveland bar on a certificate of two years’ study. Yet with all this load on him, he impressed himself on each pupil in Hiram College as a personal friend. One of these, Rev. J. L. Darsie, gives a vivid picture of Garfield at this time:
“I recall vividly his method of teaching. He took very kindly to me, and assisted me in various ways, because I was poor and was janitor of the buildings, and swept them out in the morning and built the fires, as he had done only six years before, when he was a pupil at the same school. He was full of animal spirits, and he used to run out on the green almost every day and play cricket with us. He was a tall, strong man, but dreadfully awkward. Every now and then he would get a hit on the nose, and he muffed his ball and lost his hat as a regular thing. He was left-handed, too, and that made him seem all the clumsier. But he was most powerful and very quick, and it was easy for us to understand how it was that he had acquired the reputation of whipping all the other mule-drivers on the canal, and of making himself the hero of that thoroughfare when he followed its tow-path ten years earlier.
“No matter how old the pupils were, Garfield always called us by our first names, and kept himself on the most familiar terms with all. He played with us freely, scuffled with us sometimes, walked with us in walking to and fro, and we treated him out of the class-room just about as we did one another. Yet he was a most strict disciplinarian, and enforced the rules like a martinet. He combined an affectionate and confiding manner with respect for order in a most successful manner. If he wanted to speak to a pupil, either for reproof or approbation, he would generally manage to get one arm around him and draw him close up to him. He had a peculiar way of shaking hands, too, giving a twist to your arm and drawing you right up to him. This sympathetic manner has helped him to advancement. When I was janitor he used sometimes to stop me and ask my opinion about this and that, as if seriously advising with me. I can see now that my opinion could not have been of any value, and that he probably asked me partly to increase my self-respect, and partly to show me that he felt an interest in me. I certainly was his friend all the firmer for it.
“I remember once asking him what was the best way to pursue a certain study, and he said: ‘Use several text-books. Get the views of different authors as you advance. In that way you can plow a broader furrow. I always study in that way.’ He tried hard to teach us to observe carefully and accurately. He was the keenest observer I ever saw. I think he noticed and numbered every button on our coats.
“Mr. Garfield was very fond of lecturing to the school. He spoke two or three times a week, on all manner of topics, generally scientific, though sometimes literary or historical. He spoke with great freedom, never writing out what he had to say, and I now think that his lectures were a rapid compilation of his current reading, and that he threw it into this form partly for the purpose of impressing it on his own mind.
“At the time I was at school at Hiram, Principal Garfield was a great reader, not omnivorous, but methodical, and in certain lines. He was the most industrious man I ever knew or heard of. At one time he delivered lectures on geology, held public debates on spiritualism, preached on Sunday, conducted the recitations of five or six classes every day, attended to all the financial affairs of the school, was an active member of the legislature, and studied law to be admitted to the bar. He has often said that he never could have performed this labor if it had not been for the assistance of two gifted and earnest women,—Mrs. Garfield herself, his early schoolmate, who had followed her husband in his studies; and Miss Almeda A. Booth, a member of the faculty. The latter was a graduate of Oberlin, and had been a teacher of young Garfield when he was a pupil; and now that he had returned as head of the faculty, she continued to serve him in a sort of motherly way as tutor and guide. When Garfield had speeches to make in the legislature or on the stump, or lectures to deliver, these two ladies ransacked the library by day, and collected facts and marked books for his digestion and use in the preparation of the discourses at night.”
In the canvass of 1877, after one of his powerful stump speeches, Garfield was lying on the grass, talking to an old friend of these Hiram days. Said he: