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

The Greeks had a story that their god Jupiter, when an infant, was tumbled down from the heavens to a secluded place on earth, where he was carefully watched while he grew. It shall be our easy task to show that the Western Reserve is a good place for a public man to grow in and make preparation to rule in a higher sphere.

The Reserve is a place of great natural resources, and, under almost any conditions, would have a well-to-do population. But it is not advantages of this kind which make it an unusually good place for the growth of a great man. If we should presume to say so, all the facts of history would rise to protest its falsity. The arts and literature and eloquence and political glory of Athens and her sister states clung close to barren hillsides. Switzerland rose to be the first free state of Europe among the wild fastnesses of her unfertile mountains. The American Revolution was fought out and the Union established by the finest generation of statesmen and warriors ever produced on the continent, before the extent or the wealth of our broad, level empire was dreamed of. New England and Virginia were not rich; but they were great, and they were free, and so were their statesmen in those days.

The Western Reserve was largely settled by people of New England. And, since it is not the character of the soil, but the composition of the people, which chiefly influences the man who grows there, it will be profitable to see of what sort these settlers and their descendants were.

One of the first things the first settlers of the Western Reserve did was to build a church. They brought the plan of their altars with them. Religion was the corner-stone of their new civilization. Religion was the solid rock on which they built a high morality and an earnest intelligence. Somehow or other they rested calmly on a God who made the forest his temple, and walked through it with them to the very end of the earth. They have their religion with them to this day, and it seems to round out their lives to a fuller completeness, and gives them solidity of character, and with its divinely sanctioned maxims creates such a standard of morality as a good man would aspire to to make his rule of life. This kind of community is a good place in which to grow a public man, if you want him to hold fast to principle unchangeably at all times.

The very next thing after a church, when this district was settled, came the common school. The race of which the settlers came was brainy. Their families always had more than a thimbleful of sense apiece. Hence the demand for education, and, therefore, a school-house and a school-teacher. These schools have grown and multiplied. The Reserve has not only common-schools, but colleges, which are already first-class, and are destined to become famous seats of learning. The nation itself has come to recognize in the people of the Reserve a higher average of intelligence than exists anywhere in the Union, except in a very few sections. Here is a very good place to seek for a public man who shall have the kind of intellect to grapple with great questions of statesmanship, and master them.

The Reserve was first peopled by a set of men who were not only religious, moral, and intelligent; but who possessed in themselves two requisites of a great people—courage and strength. Their own ancestors had braved untold dangers in coming to the American shores, and had endured hardships and privations innumerable to gain a footing on the rocky coast. Upborne by the tradition of these experiences, the pilgrimage and the work of founding a new State had been gone over by them again. They were a race who sailed unknown seas, climbed unexplored mountains to get into a new country, and cut down a primeval forest. Their descendants would be neither pigmies nor poltroons. This would certainly be a fine place for the production of a statesman who would have the courage to stand by his convictions and the power to successfully push his measures through.

The political institutions and political habits of this people deserve consideration. They brought their ideas of how to construct and conduct a State from New England, where the town is a political unit, and the town-meeting a great event. So, from the very earliest time, the Reserve has been a region where every body was personally interested in public affairs. They put a man in office because they thought, on actual investigation, that he was equal to its duties. And, more than that, they held their appointees to strict account. The unfortunate man who proved incapable or dishonest never got their support again, and never heard the last of their censures. These causes have made their political history good reading. Its chapters are pure and strong and healthy.

The Nineteenth Congressional District of Ohio, at the time of Garfield’s election, included six counties—Portage, Ashtabula, Lake, Geauga, Trumbull, and Mahoning. They are the eastern half of the Western Reserve. Before Garfield’s first election this district had been represented for many years by Joshua R. Giddings, one of the ablest antislavery leaders of the period just before the war.

In 1858, Giddings was displaced. Overconfidence in his hold on the people had made him a little reckless, and an ambitious politician took advantage of the opportunity. A flaw, very slight indeed, was searched out in Giddings’s record. It was proved that his mileage fees were in excess of what the shortest route to Washington required. He had made the people pay his expenses to New York. The convention having been skillfully worked up on this peccadillo of its old favorite, a Mr. Hutchins was sent to Congress in his stead.

A little time only was required to display the difference between Mr. Hutchins and his predecessor. Mr. Giddings was requested at the next election to return. But that old patriot had been rewarded by the Government with a consulate at Montreal, and preferred to remain there; which he did until his death in 1864. In this situation the people of the Nineteenth District began to search for a man who could represent them according to their desire. They felt that it was due to themselves and to the Nation that they send to Congress a leader; some man with ability and force sufficient to deal with the great questions of the day, and solve the problems of the war.