The Life and Work of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States / Embracing an Account of the Scenes and Incidents of His Boyhood; the Struggles of His Youth; the Might of His Early Manhood; His Valor As a Soldier; His Career As a Statesman; His Election to the Presidency; and the Tragic Story of His Death.

by John Clark Ridpath

A great battle is a memorable experience to one who takes part. There is nothing like it on earth. Henceforth the participant is different from other men. All his preceding life becomes small and forgotten after such days as those of Chickamauga. From that day he feels that he began to live. When the flames of frenzy with which he was possessed subside, they have left their mark on his being. Ordinarily the flames of battle have burnt out many sympathies. His nature stands like a forest of charred and blackened trunks, once green and beautiful, waving in their leafy splendor, but through which the destroying tempest of fire has passed in its mad career of vengeance. He can neither forget nor forgive the murderous foe. Before the battle he might have exchanged tobacco plugs with the man with whom he would have, with equal readiness, exchanged shots. But after the carnage of the battle, after the day of blood and fury, all this is passed. The last gun is fired on the field of battle. The last shattered line of heroes withdraws into the night. The earth has received its last baptism of blood for the time-being. Only burial parties, with white flags, may be seen picking their way among the fallen brave. The actual battle is over forever. Not so is it with the combatant. In his mind the battle goes on and on. He is perpetually training masked batteries on the foe. The roar of conflict never ceases to reverberate in his brain. Throughout his life, whenever recalled to the subject of the war, his mental attitude is that of the battle-field. In his thought the columns are still charging up the hill. The earth still shakes with an artillery that is never silenced. The air is still sulphurous with gunpowder smoke. The ranks of the brave and true still fall around him. Forever is he mentally loading and firing; forever charging bayonets across the bloody field; forever burying the fallen heroes under the protection of the flag of truce.

This is the law of ordinary minds. The red panorama of the Gettysburg and the Chickamauga is forever moving before his eyes. The wrench or strain given to his mental being by those days is too terrific, too awful, for any reaction in the average mind. This fact has been abundantly proven in the history of the last twenty years. Chickamauga thus became a new birth to many a soldier. His life, henceforward, seemed to date from the 19th of September, 1863. His life was ever afterward marked off by anniversaries of that day. It is found that many soldiers die on the anniversary of some great battle in which they were participants. Such is the influence mental states bear upon the physical organism.

Chickamauga was all this to General Garfield. It was more than this to him. He was not merely a participant in the battle of bullets. He was also in the battle of brains. The field soldier certainly feels enough anxiety. His mental experience has enough of torture to gratify the monarch of hell himself. But the anxieties of the man at head-quarters are unspeakable. He sees not merely the actual horrors and the individual danger. He carries on his heart the responsibility for an army. He is responsible for the thousands of lives. A single mistake, a single blunder, a single defective plan, will forever desolate unnumbered firesides. More than this he feels. Not only the fate of the army, but the fate of the country rests in his hand. The burden is crushing. It may be said this is only upon the Commander-in-chief. But General Garfield, as chief of staff, we have seen, was no figure-head, no amanuensis. He took the responsibilities of that campaign and battle to his own heart. At every step his genius grappled with the situation. Rosecrans was a good soldier; but in nothing was his ability so exhibited as in selecting Garfield for his confidential adviser and trusting so fully to his genius.

DIAGRAM OF THE BATTLE OF CHICKAMAUGA.

Thus the battle of Chickamauga entered into Garfield’s mental experience in its greatest aspects. His profoundly sympathetic nature was subjected to an incalculable strain. The struggle of the first day, the beginning of the second, the fatal order, the appalling catastrophe, the fearful ride, the invincible courage of Thomas, the costly victory, all these things were incorporated into his life. He lived years in a single hour. He was only thirty-one years old. It was only nine years since the boys at Williams College had laughed at him as a green-horn; only seven years since he had graduated. But the education of Chickamauga gave him age. The maturity of the mind is not measured by time, but by experience. Previous to the Chattanooga campaign, General Garfield was a clever man. After the battle of Chickamauga he was a great man.

Of the general results of the battle, we quote from Van Horn’s magnificent but critical History of the Army of the Cumberland: “Whatever were the immediate and more local consequences of the battle, in its remote relations and significance, it has claims to historic grandeur. The Army of the Cumberland, without support on either flank, had leaped across the Tennessee River and the contiguous mountains, and yet escaped destruction, though the armies of the enemy, east and west, were made tributary to a combination of forces to accomplish this end. Paroled prisoners from Vicksburg, regular troops from Mississippi and Georgia, a veteran corps from Lee’s army in Virginia, and Buckner’s corps from East Tennessee, joined Bragg on the banks of the Chickamauga, not simply to retake Chattanooga, but to annihilate the Army of the Cumberland. Nearly half of Bragg’s army consisted of recent reinforcements, sent to Northern Georgia while the authorities at Washington, perplexed with the military situation, were resting under the delusion that General Bragg was reinforcing Lee. But this heavy draft upon the resources of the Confederacy was burdened with the fatality which clung to all the grander efforts of the insurgents in the west. And General Bragg’s broken and exhausted army was a symbol of the fast-coming exhaustion of the Confederacy itself. The issue of the battle was not thus defined to the consciousness of the Southern people, but was, doubtless, one of the most emphatic disappointments of the struggle, and intensified the gloom produced by previous defeats.”

In his report of the battle to the Department of War, General Rosecrans said:

“To Brigadier-General James A. Garfield, chief of staff, I am especially indebted for the clear and ready manner in which he seized the points of action and movement, and expressed in orders the ideas of the general commanding.”

In relating the history of General Garfield’s military career, no mention has been made of a fact which was destined to affect his future. In the fall of 1862, he had been nominated and elected to Congress from his own district. The thing had been accomplished in his absence, and almost without his knowledge. His term did not begin till December, 1863, and his constituents supposed the war would be over before that time. Garfield himself looked at the thing with indifference. It did not interfere with his service in the army, could not do so for a long time, and there was nothing to hurry his decision in the matter. After the Tullahoma campaign, in the summer of 1863, when he had had a taste of successful military strategy, the Congressional question began to force itself to the surface of his thought. There was no prospect of peace. All his inclinations persuaded him to remain in the army. But Congress met in December, and he would have to decide.