James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831 – September 19, 1881) is most famous for having the same name as a cartoon cat.note
Well, that and being assassinated.
Garfield was known for being President of the United States of America in 1881, right after Rutherford B. Hayes and before Chester A. Arthur. His father died before Garfield's second birthday, and Garfield grew up in poverty. After a brief stint as a sailor in his youth, he put himself through college by working on the janitorial staff.
In his early career, he served as college president and a preacher before joining the army once civil war broke out due to ardent abolitionist beliefs. He distinguished himself enough to rise to the rank of Brigadier General before serving as Chief of Staff to the commander of Ohio's Army of the Cumberland. Garfield was only the overall commander of the Union forces in one battle, the Battle of Middle Creek, which helped secure Kentucky for the Union, paving the way to push forward into Tennessee. Less than thirty of Garfield's men died in the battle. Midway through the war, he started a 17-year career as a Member of Congress for Ohio.note In 1880, he was elected to the presidency straight from his seat as a Representative, becoming the only American ever to do so. Garfield did not overtly campaign for the 1880 Republican nomination and claimed to be unhappy to receive it—he was a compromise candidate against former President Ulysses S. Grant and Maine senator James G. Blaine, neither of whom could muster majority support at the party's convention—but he represented his party against Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock, winning the presidency by 59 electoral votes and approximately 7,000 popular votes. He won election to a US Senate seat for Ohio (chosen by his home state's legislature) at roughly the same time as he won the presidency, declining that office to serve in the executive branch.
As President, Garfield had the second shortest term, 199 days, beaten only by William Henry Harrison. On July 2, 1881, he was shot in a New Jersey train station by Charles Guiteau, a mentally ill man who believed in his insanity that he was owed a government job by having given speeches that had been essential to Garfield's victory, and that Garfield was refusing to appoint him.
The wound would not have killed him if it were left alone, but then the doctors got involved. Their terribly botched treatment (as Louis Pasteur had not yet discovered germ theory, they tried to remove the bullet with their bare hands, and as they refused to believe Joseph Lister's theories of contamination, they used unsterilized tools several times) turned a minor bullet wound into a massive, fatal infection, which left the president in intense pain for eighty days before killing him. Garfield died on Monday, September 19, 1881.
Despite Guiteau claiming the doctors had killed the president, not him ("I only shot him," more than a little correct),note he was duly found guilty and executed.
Some people credit this incident with convincing future Presidents that perhaps using government jobs as rewards was not a great idea. Garfield himself had complained before his shooting about how many would-be officeholders were requesting a handout, and the fact a would-be appointee gunned him down spurred a reform. He also notably lamented that being in politics cut down on his free time—in a commencement address. While not often portrayed in popular culture, he was, naturally, a subject of the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins. He was also discussed in Sarah Vowell's book Assassination Vacation, with none other than Jon Stewart playing his voice in the audiobook. Michael Shannon played Garfield in the Netflix series Death by Lightning alongside Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau.
While Garfield's presidency was too short, by itself, to make a serious impact on American history, Garfield himself was both popular and well-respected in his day as an extremely honest, well-meaning politician. He had a consistently progressive record on economic and racial issues and was a leading proponent of civil service reform. The earliest version of what would become the Department of Education was created during his tenure, though it would be almost a century before it took its current form. Some historians have suggested Garfield would have made a great president had he lived; these arguments can only be conjectural.
He could write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other at the same time. Garfield was also the first President ever to talk on the phone—the man on the other end was Alexander Graham Bell, no less! Bell would later invent one of the first known metal detectors to try to locate the bullet lodged in Garfield's body, only for the detector to be rendered useless when Garfield's doctors refused to allow him to be moved from the metal-framed bed where he was resting. He also derived a new original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem while serving in Congress.
Appears in the following works:
- His presidency and assassination is the focus of the miniseries Death by Lightning, where he's portrayed by Michael Shannon.
