James A. Garfield

James A. Garfield: The Scholar Who Died Too Soon

On 1 April 1876, a sitting member of the United States House of Representatives published an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem in the *New-England Journal of Education*. He built it from a trapezoid with bases *a* and *b* and a height of *a+b*, computed the figure's area twice — once whole, once as the sum of three right triangles — and let the algebra do the rest. The congressman was James Abram Garfield. Five years later he was president of the United States; eleven weeks after that he was dying of infections his own doctors had put into him.

A Fatherless Farm Near Cleveland

Garfield was the youngest of three surviving children born on 19 November 1831 in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. His father, Abram, died while James was an infant, leaving his widowed mother Eliza to hold together a failing farm outside Cleveland. The poverty was not sentimental; it was structural, and it shaped everything that followed.

At sixteen he ran away to work the canal boats plying the route between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. The adventure lasted six weeks, during which he fell overboard fourteen times and finally contracted a fever that sent him home. The Miller Center records the episode as the hinge of his life: it convinced him his future lay in intellectual rather than manual labour.

Janitor, Student, College President

He enrolled at Geauga Academy, paying his way as a carpenter and schoolteacher. From 1851 to 1854 he studied at the Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, supporting himself as the school's janitor. In 1854 he entered Williams College in Massachusetts as a junior and graduated with honours in 1856. In 1850 he had undergone a religious conversion and joined the Disciples of Christ, a commitment that would make him a lay preacher as well as a scholar.

The Eclectic Institute took him back as an instructor in classical languages, and by 1857 — at twenty-five, one year out of college — he was its president, a post he held until 1861. In 1858 he married Lucretia "Crete" Rudolph, a former classmate at the Institute and, by the Miller Center's description, an intellectually accomplished woman in her own right. In 1861 he passed the Ohio bar on the strength of private study alone, having attended no law school.

The Youngest Major General

Politics arrived early. He campaigned for the Republican John C. Frémont in 1856 and in 1859 became the youngest member of the Ohio legislature. In mid-August 1861 he organised the 42nd Ohio Infantry, and in January 1862 he won a victory at Middle Creek with an outnumbered brigade that helped secure eastern Kentucky for the Union. At Chickamauga in September 1863 he made a celebrated ride under enemy fire. He served as chief of staff to General William S. Rosecrans and rose to major general — the youngest officer to hold that rank.

He had been elected to the House in November 1862 without campaigning for the seat. In December 1863 he resigned his commission to take it.

Eight Terms and a Reputation for Arithmetic

Garfield sat in Congress for eight terms and made himself the chamber's authority on money. He was a hard-money man who wanted currency backed by gold, opposed unlimited silver coinage and unbacked paper, argued for moderate tariff rates suited to his rural constituents, and set his face against labour unions and federal relief programmes. He accepted $329 in Credit Mobilier stock, the construction-company scandal that shadowed a generation of Republicans. On the electoral commission of 1876 he voted to award the disputed Southern electors to Rutherford B. Hayes. Under Hayes he became Republican minority leader and built a reputation as a broker between the party's warring Stalwart and Half-Breed factions.

Two Hundred Days

At the 1880 Republican convention Garfield was a dark horse who accumulated an ever-increasing share of the balloting until the nomination fell to him. He beat the Democrat Winfield S. Hancock in what the Miller Center calls the closest election on record, won by the narrowest of margins — and won it only because the New York boss Roscoe Conkling backed him, after Garfield agreed to consult Conkling on party appointments.

He then refused to cave in to Stalwart pressure when he chose his cabinet. Conkling resigned his Senate seat in protest. It was the defining act of the presidency, an assertion that the president, not the machine, distributed federal office. Historians have not treated the whole record as heroic: the historian Justus Doenecke argues that Garfield's replacement of Merritt showed him "not only lacking judgment but acting as a spoilsman himself," and that he grew increasingly dependent on his secretary of state, James G. Blaine.

Eighty Days of Doctors

On the morning of 2 July 1881, at half past nine, Charles Julius Guiteau shot the president twice in the back with a .442 British Bulldog revolver at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington. Guiteau was a delusional office-seeker convinced that a campaign speech of his had won Garfield the election and that a consulship in Vienna or Paris was owed him; he claimed divine instruction and said, "I leave my justification to God."

One bullet grazed the shoulder. The other passed near the spine and lodged behind the pancreas. It need not have been fatal. Physicians led by D. W. Bliss probed repeatedly for it with unsterilised instruments; Alexander Graham Bell built a metal detector to locate the bullet and was confined by Bliss to searching the wrong side of the body. Over seventy-nine days Garfield fell from 210 pounds to 130, hallucinating, septic, unable to keep food down. He died at Elberon, New Jersey, on 19 September 1881 of a ruptured splenic artery aneurysm following sepsis and bronchial pneumonia. The autopsy showed the doctors had opened an entirely new channel of infection. Guiteau was convicted of murder on 25 January 1882 and hanged on 30 June.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The word attaches to Garfield for a reason unusual among presidents: he left behind a piece of original mathematics. His 1876 trapezoid proof of the Pythagorean theorem is not a schoolboy exercise but a genuinely elegant construction, described by the mathematician and historian Howard Eves as a "very pretty proof" — high praise in a field that has catalogued hundreds of proofs of the same theorem. The underlying quality is a rare intellectual velocity: a canal-boat runaway who taught himself into Williams, mastered Latin and Greek well enough to teach them, ran a college at twenty-five, read himself into the Ohio bar without a law school, and became his party's leading expert on currency — all before he was fifty.

The counter-case is severe and must be stated. Garfield governed for barely two hundred days, and Doenecke's verdict is that he died "politically untested." Doenecke doubts he could have coped with the recession that began in 1881 given his hard-money, laissez-faire convictions, and finds him behaving as a spoilsman in the very patronage fight that made his reputation. Garfield had also taken Credit Mobilier money. No serious historian ranks him among the great presidents, because there is almost no presidency to rank. Doenecke's sharpest point is the coldest: an early death may have served Garfield's reputation, letting him be remembered as a martyr rather than judged on results. The genius is real, and it is documented on paper — but it is the genius of a scholar and a self-teacher, not a proven statesman.

Legacy

His death did what his life could not. The national revulsion at a president killed by a disappointed office-seeker broke the patronage system's political defences and carried the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law on 16 January 1883, replacing spoils with merit examination. It remains, as the Miller Center puts it, Garfield's greatest legacy — the impact of his dying.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1881–1881)
• United States representative (1863–1880)
• President-elect of the United States (1880–1881)
• member of the State Senate of Ohio
• Educated at Hiram College and Williams College