The Story of Garfield / Farm-boy, Soldier, and President

by William G. Rutherford

Though he had been slow to accept nomination, he did not hold back when once the battle had begun, and some few who looked with doubt on his youth and inexperience soon found that they had in their midst a bold though prudent leader. He won the seat by a large majority, and entered the Senate in the month of January 1860.

The United States of America consisted then of thirty-eight States and ten Territories. Each State is governed by its own parliament, which consists of a House of Senate and a House of Representatives. The whole of these States and Territories are again united under a Federal Government, at the head of which is the President of the United States. Each State sends to the Federal Government two Senators and from one to thirty Representatives, according to its population.

The State of Ohio, in whose Senate Garfield took his seat for the first time, is considerably larger than Ireland, and contains a more numerous population. It was organised into a State and admitted into the Union in 1803. Its population then was less than fifty thousand. Twenty years afterwards it had become ten times as great, and at the time of Garfield's election to its Senate, numbered nearly two and a half millions. Garfield had won his spurs as a politician in the discussion of the slavery question, and very soon he was called to give practical form to his opinions. For years there had been a conviction among many of the people of the Northern States that slavery was wrong, that it was a crime against man and a sin against God. The Southern States where slavery existed defended the institution without shame and without fear. They bitterly resented any discussion of the subject by the North, and they took effectual means to suppress any adverse opinions in the South.

In the very year of Garfield's election, nearly a thousand white persons in the slave States were robbed, whipped, imprisoned, tarred and feathered, or murdered, on suspicion of sympathy with the slaves.

New and bitter laws were passed in the Southern States against teaching or helping the negroes; and in several States it was calmly proposed to deprive the free blacks also of their liberty, to sell them back into bondage in order to raise money for the support of the elementary schools. In defiance of the laws of the Federal Government, the slave trade also was reintroduced, and negroes stolen from the West Coast of Africa were once more landed and sold into slavery.

Negroes stolen from the west coast of Africa were sold into slavery.

This open and insolent growth of the spirit of slavery in the South was slowly rousing the rest of the great nation from its slumber. Statesmen had been silent too long, politicians and preachers had apologised for the evil, and the people as a whole had given no sign, until provoked by those flagrant attempts to carry the vile system into those newer parts of the country called Territories, vast districts of only partly occupied land which had not yet been erected into States.

Then the controversy became sharp and bitter, and the men of the North began to speak out. To the younger men especially was the system hateful, and it was plain that in the free States a new generation had risen up which was prepared to wash its hands of the curse of slavery. Some of the Southern States, afterwards known as the Confederates, formed themselves into an association, and threatened to withdraw from the Federal Union; and civil war between the slave States and the free was by the more thoughtful and far-seeing deemed inevitable.