The occupants of the White House, from March, 1877, to March, 1881, were Rutherford B. and Lucy Webb Hayes, of Ohio. Mr. Hayes’s nomination by the Republican National Convention, at Cincinnati, was a surprise to his party and the country, and his election was for a long time in doubt. Both the Republicans and the Democrats claimed the electoral votes of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and at one time civil war seemed a not remote possibility, so intense was the partisan excitement, and so inflammable the state of the public mind. But better and wiser counsels prevailed, and by the efforts of leading men of both parties an electoral commission was established to which all doubtful matters were referred, and Mr. Hayes was declared elected by a majority of one electoral vote over Samuel J. Tilden, of New York. Many of Mr. Tilden’s friends and party supporters, and some of those who had opposed his election, questioned the legality of Mr. Hayes’s election, and contended that Mr. Tilden should have had the position. Mr. Hayes’s administration was generally quiet and uneventful, save that it marked the resumption of specie payments, and witnessed the transition from almost unprecedented business depression and industrial inactivity to a period of almost unexampled industrial activity and business prosperity. Mrs. Hayes was perhaps the most popular President’s wife who had ever occupied the White House, and more of the people of the United States saw the inside of the Executive Mansion during her residence there than during any previous administration, or perhaps all of them combined. No one of the many excursion parties that visited Washington while Mrs. Hayes was there was allowed to go away without seeing the “blue room,” the “red room,” and the famous White House conservatory, if any wish to that effect was expressed; and besides opening the White House freely to the people, Mrs. Hayes received her multitude of visitors no less gracefully and cordially than if they had been neighbors who had “dropped in” of an afternoon or evening.
JAMES A. GARFIELD. THE MARTYRED PRESIDENT.
(Engraved from a photograph, expressly for this work.)
The National Republican Convention, which met at Chicago, in 1880, to select a candidate to succeed Mr. Hayes, nominated James Abram Garfield. That Ohio should carry off the first honor of the Republican party for two successive Presidential terms was an extraordinary circumstance, but Gen. Garfield’s nomination, while it pleased Ohio men, electrified the country, and awoke great enthusiasm[enthusiasm].
James Abram Garfield was born in a log cabin at Orange, Ohio, November 19, 1831. His father, Abram Garfield, was born in New York from Massachusetts ancestry, the founder of the Garfield family in the United States, Edward, having emigrated from England in 1736, and settled at Watertown, Mass. Two of Edward Garfield’s sons, Abraham and Solomon, took part in the revolutionary war, and when that war was over Solomon left New England, and fixed his residence in Otsego county, New York. It was there that Abram Garfield was born, and after his marriage with Eliza Ballou, a New Hampshire girl, and a connection of Hosea Ballou, one of the great apostles of Universalism in this country, the young couple went to Ohio and wrested a farm from the primeval forest.
The dwelling of the Garfields was built after the standard pattern of the houses of poor Ohio farmers in that day. Its walls were of logs, its roof was of shingles split with an axe, and its floor of rude thick planking split out of tree-trunks with a wedge and maul. It had only one room, at one end of which was the big cavernous chimney, where the cooking was done, and at the other a bed. The younger children slept in a trundle-bed, which was pushed under the bedstead of their parents in the daytime to get it out of the way, for there was no room to spare; the older ones climbed a ladder to the loft under the steep roof.
The father worked hard early and late to clear his land and plant and gather his crops. No man in all the region around could wield an axe like him. Fenced fields soon took the place of the forest; an orchard was planted, a barn built, and the family was full of hope for the future when death removed its strong support. Just before he died, pointing to his children, he said to his wife: “Eliza, I have planted four saplings in these woods. I leave them to your care.” He was buried in a corner of a wheat-field on his farm. James, the baby, was eighteen months old at the time.
The eldest of Mrs. Garfield’s four children was a daughter, aged eleven; then came Thomas, aged nine; then a daughter of seven, and the baby boy of two summers. A part of the farm was sold to pay off the debt, and Mrs. Garfield and Thomas cultivated the rest, and kept the family together. Mrs. Garfield split rails for fencing with her own hands, slight and delicate woman though she was. Some of her neighbors undertook to give her a “bee” to help her get out rails for fencing, but went home when she declined to treat them with rum, and the brave little woman split her own rails. Mrs. Garfield’s anxiety that her children, and especially James, should have educational advantages was so great that the first school house in that region was built on land which she gave for that purpose.
There, at the age of three, James began his life of study, and that he was enabled to pursue his studies after he reached the age when he could work was largely due to the self-denial of his mother and his brother Thomas. The first pair of shoes which the little fellow had were bought with money which Thomas had earned, and it was the pleasure of this elder brother, who is now living near Grand Rapids, Mich., to do everything in his power to help James along. For that he gave up his own desire for an education, and he always rejoiced in his brother’s advancement and renown as though it had been his own.
James was a precocious boy, both physically and mentally. At four, he received at the district school the prize of a New Testament as the best reader in the primary class. At eight he had read all the books contained in the little log farm-house, and began to borrow from the neighbors such works as “Robinson Crusoe,” Josephus’s “History and Wars of the Jews,” Goodrich’s “United States,” and Pollock’s “Course of Time.” These were read and re-read, until he could relate whole chapters from memory. At the district school James was known as a fighting boy. He found that the larger boys were disposed to insult and abuse a little fellow who had no father or big brother to protect him, and he resented such imposition with all the force of a sensitive nature backed by a hot temper, great physical courage, and a strength unusual for his age. Many stories are told of the pluck shown in his encounters with the rough country lads in defence of his boyish rights and honor. They say he never began a fight and never cherished malice, but when enraged by taunts or insults would attack boys of twice his size with the fury and tenacity of a bull-dog. When he was twelve years old his brother returned from Michigan, where he had been employed by a farmer to make clearings, with money enough to build a frame house for his mother. James assisted him, and did so well that one of the joiners advised him to follow carpentering as a trade. During the next two years he worked regularly as a carpenter, going to school only at intervals, but studying diligently in spare hours at home.