“Garfield would later tell a friend,” Millard writes, “that ‘something went out of him. In his spare time, he passed the Ohio bar.Įxcelling both in combat and as a top staff officer, he rose to the rank of major general during the Civil War but was sickened by the carnage of battle.

Returning there to teach, he became the school’s president at 26. For the next few years, he worked his way up through local schools and Williams College at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College), a preparatory school, he mastered his studies so thoroughly that he was promoted from janitor to assistant professor. James was taught to consider himself the equal of any man - to walk “with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back,” a trait he would always possess.Ī near drowning while he labored on the Erie and Ohio Canal convinced him that God “had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canalling,” he wrote. The boy’s mother struggled desperately to make a living for James and his three siblings but donated some of her farmland so their community would have a schoolhouse. His father died when James was just 1, succumbing to “exhaustion and fever” after fighting a wildfire that had threatened his home. He was the last president to be born in a log cabin. Yet it is one of the many pleasures of Candice Millard’s new book, “Destiny of the Republic,” that she brings poor Garfield to life - and a remarkable life it was. At their best, they presided over some years of prosperity at their worst, they gave us two of the most corrupt administrations in our history. Garfield was one of the “Ohio Seven,” that spate of singularly undistinguished presidents from the Buckeye State who served between 18. the presidency of Chester Alan Arthur, of whom the best anyone could say was that he was more honest than expected. Kennedy allowed the ascent of two of our most dynamic presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, both of whom pushed through long overdue social and economic reforms. The later shootings of William McKinley and John F. The death of Abraham Lincoln, 16 years earlier, was seen as a Christlike sacrifice - and left generations of historians guessing what his continued presence might have meant for Reconstruction. If an obscure 19th-century president falls, does he make a noise?Ī cruel thing to ask, but historically the assassination of James A.

Stephen Sondheim 'The Ballad of Guiteau,' from 'Assassins' 'Charlie said, 'Hell, If I am guilty, Then God is as well.' But God was acquitted And Charlie committed Until he should hang.'

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