NOMINATION TO THE PRESIDENCY.
Garfield’s nomination to the Presidency, while not predicted or anticipated, was not a surprise to the country. His prominence in Congress, his solid qualities, his wide reputation, strengthened by his then recent election as Senator from Ohio, kept him in the public eye as a man occupying the very highest rank among those entitled to be called statesmen. It was not mere chance that brought him this high honor. “We must,” says Mr. Emerson, “reckon success a constitutional trait. If Eric is in robust health, and has slept well and is at the top of his condition, and thirty years old at his departure from Greenland, he will steer west and his ships will reach New Foundland. But take Eric out and put in a stronger and bolder man and the ships will sail six hundred, one thousand, fifteen hundred miles farther and reach Labrador and New England. There is no chance in results.”
As a candidate, Garfield steadily grew in popular favor. He was met with a storm of detraction at the very hour of his nomination, and it continued with increasing volume and momentum until the close of his victorious campaign:
No might nor greatness in mortality
Can censure ’scape; back-wounding calumny
The whitest virtue strikes. What king so strong
Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?
Under it all he was calm, and strong, and confident; never lost his self-possession, did no unwise act, spoke no hasty or ill-considered word. Indeed nothing in his whole life is more remarkable or more creditable than his bearing through those five full months of vituperation—a prolonged agony of trial to a sensitive man, a constant and cruel draft upon the powers of moral endurance. The great mass of these unjust imputations passed unnoticed, and, with the general debris of the campaign, fell into oblivion. But in a few instances the iron entered his soul and he died with the injury unforgotten if not unforgiven.
One aspect of Garfield’s candidacy was unprecedented. Never before in the history of partisan contests in this country had a successful Presidential candidate spoken freely on passing events and current issues. To attempt anything of the kind seemed novel, rash, and even desperate. The older class of voters recalled the unfortunate Alabama letter, in which Mr. Clay was supposed to have signed his political death-warrant. They remembered also the hot-tempered effusion by which General Scott lost a large share of his popularity before his nomination, and the unfortunate speeches which rapidly consumed the remainder. The younger voters had seen Mr. Greeley in a series of vigorous and original addresses, preparing the pathway for his own defeat. Unmindful of these warnings, unheeding the advice of friends, Garfield spoke to large crowds as he journeyed to and from New York in August, to a great multitude in that city, to delegations and deputations of every kind that called at Mentor during the summer and autumn. With innumerable critics, watchful and eager to catch a phrase that might be turned into odium or ridicule, or a sentence that might be distorted to his own or his party’s injury, Garfield did not trip or halt in any one of his seventy speeches. This seems all the more remarkable when it is remembered that he did not write what he said, and yet spoke with such logical consecutiveness of thought and such admirable precision of phrase as to defy the accident of misreport and the malignity of misrepresentation.