President Garfield’s Dream Deferred

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was President of the United States and I was in the fourth grade, I memorized and could recite the names in full of every US President. I learned brief facts about the great ones and others who came and went from office having achieved little worth noting in my classroom history books.  I’d recite—

“There was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison…Monroe, Quincy Adams, Jackson, Van Buren…Harrison, Tyler, Polk, and Taylor…Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, and Lincoln…Johnson, Grant, Hayes, and then…For only 200 days, there was James A Garfield (1881)….”

But who was Garfield?  Sixteen years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War, President James A. Garfield was shot in the back --just four months after taking office.  He lingered for the next 79 days before dying at the age of 49 of blood poisoning and infections caused by the archaic, unsanitary and questionable medical practices of his doctor.  When he died, his funeral was attended by more than had gathered for Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.

Author: Candice Millard.
Photo credit: CandiceMillard.com

As a student, I’d never learned a single thing about this gifted President’s early life or how he came to be elected to the highest office in the land.  So it was with interest that I watched the PBS American Experience documentary “Murder of a President” when it aired February 2, 2016.  The documentary was based on “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine & the Murder of a President” by Candice Millard—an author and former writer/editor for National Geographic.  The title alone was reason enough for me to want to fill in the historical backstory missing in my knowledge of Garfield—the man and his dreams for the United States.

Born in a rural Ohio log cabin in 1831 and losing his father as an infant, Garfield worked his way up from hardscrabble poverty with the support of by a mother who encouraged his efforts to get an education. He not only excelled in academics—learning both Latin and Greek—he became a professor of classics and administrator of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. 

A gifted orator who spoke publicly in support of abolition and the Republican Party, Garfield became a lawyer, and served in the Ohio State Senate. During the Civil War, he rose to the rank of brigadier general in the Union Army.  After resuming his political career, he won a seat in Congress and in 1880, though he never sought the nomination, was elected President of the United States. 

Garfield who was committed to the cause of civil rights recommended a universal education system funded by the federal government—part of his plan to empower Black Americans.  His senseless assassination by a mentally unstable man named Charles Guiteau was but one part of a tragic tale. Garfield’s doctor dismissed the use of antisepsis recently discovered by British surgeon Joseph Lister, ignored basic sanitary measures, and interfered with young Alexander Graham Bell’s efforts to locate the bullet in Garfield’s back with a metal detector Bell invented in hopes of saving the ailing President.

In 2016 historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote “Garfield had come to represent that vision for which the Union had fought…. He believed that everybody should have equality of opportunity and that the Government should help them get that.  With the assassination of Garfield, that vision died.”

Why is Garfield and his tragic death significant today?  If you don’t yet read historian Heather Cox Richardson’s brilliant daily blog “Letters from an American,” consider adding them to your daily reading.  In her letter dated March 29, 2021, she explains the long history of voter suppression in America since the Civil War, beginning with what Republicans under Lincoln set in motion that gave Black Americans a say in society.  The Military Reconstruction Act of 1867 permitted Black men in the South to vote for delegates to write new state constitutions—constitutions that confirmed the right of Black men to vote.  

However, most former Confederates wanted no part of this new system.  What followed was the organization of the Ku Klux Klan to suppress voting by Black men.  When that didn’t work, Richardson points out, “there were efforts to make sure Black people could not vote by requiring educational tests, poll taxes, or a grandfather who had voted, effectively getting rid of Black voting.”

Richardson concludes, “Today Republicans talk about ‘election integrity,’ but their end game is the same as that of the former Confederates after the war:  to keep Black and Brown Americans away from the polls.”

Had Garfield lived to champion the dream for which the Union fought, voter suppression in America might not be still dominating politics in former Confederate states like Georgia today.  Richardson’s gift as a historian is her ability to see the long history.  It behooves all Americans to strive to do the same.