Garfield, James

Garfield, James (1831–1881), twentieth president of the United States.Born in poverty in a log cabin near Cleveland, Ohio, Garfield graduated from Williams College, taught at the Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio (later Hiram College), in 1857–1861, and was a lay preacher in the Disciples of Christ church. Rising from colonel to major general in the Civil War, he helped create the Forty‐second Ohio Volunteer Infantry and saw action at Shiloh and Chickamauga. As a Republican Congressman (1863–1880), Garfield like his contemporary James G. Blaine identified with the younger element of the party, oriented toward economic issues rather than residual matters from the Civil War. Although implicated in the 1873 Crédit Mobilier scandal, involving bribery of politicians by railroad interests, he survived politically. In 1880, he supported Ohio's favorite son, John Sherman, for the Republican presidential nomination, opposing a third term for Ulysses S. Grant. A deadlocked convention chose Garfield himself, however, with Chester A. Arthur as his running mate, in order to represent both factions in a bitterly divided party. Narrowly defeating the Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock in the popular vote, Garfield won overwhelmingly in the electoral college.

The major issue confronting the new administration was the divisive matter of civil service reform, which Garfield generally favored, even though he was preoccupied with distributing jobs to party loyalists. On 2 July 1881, at the Washington, D.C., railroad station, a delusional office‐seeker, Charles J. Guiteau, shot Garfield. Lingering in pain through the summer, the president died on 19 September. Guiteau's plea of not guilty by reason of insanity sparked much discussion of the nature of mental disorder. He was convicted and hanged on 30 June 1882. Though himself immersed in the politics of patronage, Garfield after his death was widely viewed as a martyr to a corrupt political system, and his assassination helped spur passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883.
See also Gilded Age; Railroads; Republican Party.

Bibliography

Allan Peskin , Garfield: A Biography, 1978.
Justus Doenecke , The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, 1981.

H. Wayne Morgan