History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 118

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574

USA > Iowa > Buchanan County > History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches > Part 118

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JaGarfield,

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

BY A. G. RIDDLE.

CHAPTER I. BIRTH AND EARLY INCIDENTS.

The Generations of the Garfields .- The Mother Birth .- Loss of His Father .- The Home .- Eagerness for Books .- Case vs. a Schoolmas- ter .- Rape of a Lock .- What Eliza Thought .- Growth and Size. -- A Dream of the Sea .- Repulse by a Lake Captain .- Begins on the Tow-path .- Promotion .- First Fight .- How the Second was not Fought .- Reflection and Return .- Overhears His Mother's Prayer. -An Ague Cake.

GREAT men rarely, perhaps never, appear under similar circumstances. A man and woman under common con- ditions, and yet marked with minor variations, wed, and a genius is born of them. The vulgar observers of his advent look to see it repeated from other twos, under similar conditions. So men who observe something mean or common in the early years of a great man's life usual- ly attribute his success to that. In the boyhood of General Garfield, he drove the horses that dragged a canal-boat on an Ohio canal one or two trips, and his biographers have usually set this forth as the leading event of his youth, and as quite all that is known of him, and this is supposed to have given the bent and impetus which launched him on the world as one of the great men of his time.

The birth of a great man is a thing of accident to the parents, and this enhances the wonder in the eyes of men. Nature has no accidents, nor is she surprised at her own work. All are equally prepared for and of equal importance to her. It matters not whether we say Providence had certain results to work out, and prepared a specially endowed man for its accomplishment, or that certain particles of organic matter-protoplasm-have certain properties, which flowing along the vital channels, gathering and losing as they flow, unite, when those channels coincide, with a certain result. The ordinary incidents of human life push the ordinary man along the usual courses. He does the common work of life, works their processes, because he has the power to do it. because he can do no other. The same incidents push

the extraordinarily-endowed man along the same avenues, and he grapples with the unusual, the extraordinary, and both lives are necessary results of natural causes.

A herd of men, strangers to each other, enter the Am- erican house of representatives. Two or three, half a dozen, go sooner or later to the lead, become creators and directors, because it is in them to do that work. The rest are led, because it is in them to be conducted by the others. What has produced the difference, and whence was derived the leading elements and qualities of the men, is the problem.

In the instance with which I am to deal I shall not attempt its solution. I can only hint at scanty antece- dents. We know that much, many unusual qualities, went to the making up of the subject of this sketch. Just what they antecedently were, and how they were united in his production, is a matter of the vaguest speculation. The conditions of such an inquiry are not in our hands, and the science which should guide it is of the unborn.

Some popular delusions must vanish in reference to him. He did not grow up a stalwart, unlettered, good- natured Orson of the wood, nursed by a bear till seven- teen or eighteen, and then under sudden inspiration rush through school and college in an intellectual rage, rav- ishing from the sciences their sweets and secrets, drawing from books their blood and souls, and devouring and assimilating teachers and professors.

Most men who become remarkable finally, have a kind of mythology constructed about their obscure early years. All the curious things of fact or fancy in the region where they live are conferred on them. General Garfield is an eminent example of this fortune, and the busy hand of fiction is supplementing the natural growth with works of its own.

One tradition assigns the origin of the Garfields to Wales, and mainly on the ground of the similarity of the name to that of a venerable ruin in that country. The

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

better opinion is that they are of Saxon descent. The family had its seat at Tuddington, Middlesex county, as early as the twelfth century. The crest of the house is a heart, with a hand rising out of it, grasping a sword. The legend, vincit amor patria. The name is inscribed on the roll of Battle Abbey, as that of a crusader, which the arms are said to indicate.

The family first appeared in this country at Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1635, of which Edward Garfield was one of the proprietors, and where he died in 1672. He had a son, Edward, who became the father of Captain Ben- jamin Garfield, a very conspicuous man, who represented Watertown many years in the general court, and died in 1717. One of his sons was Lieutenant Thomas Garfield, who bore on the tide of descent, imparting it to a son Thomas, who, in turn, became the father of a Solomon Garfield. Solomon comes within lingual reach of the gen- eral, being his great-grandfather. He also had a brother, Abraham, who fought at Concord and Lexington, and joined with John Hoar and John Whitehead in a deposi- tion, proving that the British fired the first gun of the war. This Solomon married Sarah Stimson, and pushed off for the wooded hills of Otsego, New York, where his son Thomas was born. His wife, when he grew to have one, was Aseneath Hill, of Sharon. To these were born Abram Garfield, father of the general, and Thomas, ot Newburgh, Ohio.

Abram was a man of heroic proportions, endowed with marvelous physical strength; one of those large- souled, generous-hearted men who, notwithstanding they might overcome by weight and strength, nevertheless win by the sweetness and richness of their natures. Many legends exist of his great strength. A laboring man, all his implements and tools had to be of a corresponding size and weight; and, though, the best-natured man in the world, his courage matched his strength, and on more than one occasion he employed it in resisting others. Once on the Ohio canal, where he had a large job, and was living with his young wife, a gang of hands, the roughs of a neighboring job, led by two bullies, the terror of the whole line, came to get up a row with his men. At the first demonstration of these leaders he sprang upon and overeame them effectually ere their fel- lows came to their aid, and thus secured peace. He was from that moment the acknowledged monarch of the line of work, and ruled generously. Abram had a half-brother, Amos Boynton, his mother's son by another husband, whose fortunes were connected with his.

At the foot of Mount Monadnock, in New Hampshire, lived a brother of Hosea Ballou, and of this family were two daughters, Eliza and a sister. Highly endowed in-

tellectually, reared with the care and circumspection of New England, with its thrift and prudent economies, these sisters became the wives of these brothers, Eliza wedding with Abram. Of these two - this grandly- formed, large-natured, large-souled, kindly man, and this slight, intellectual, spirited, high-souled, and pions woman-was born James A., their fourth and last child, and ninth in descent from Edward, of Watertown-born to the heart and sword of the Crusader. The event oc- curred in the woods of Orange, Cuyahoga county, No- vember 19, 1831. A picture of the humble dwelling in which our hero was born may be seen on the following page. It has a rustic look. Although long since torn down and removed, it can be relied upon as a faithful representation of General Garfield's birthplace, as it was drawn from a full description given by Mr. Garfield him- self.

FMG

BIRTHPLACE OF GENERAL GARFIELD.

After the canal job, the brothers took their families to make for them permanent homes in Orange, built their cabins near each other, and, save one, there was then no human habitation within six miles of them. The Gar- fields were alive with a generous ambition to win more than a bare subsistence. The implements of work were to be the weapons with which to conquer labor, and not whips in the hands of necessity to scourge them as the slaves of toil. Work, hard, long continued, and unre- mitting, to make a home of intelligence and virtue for their children, and, with the leisure and opportunity, for better culture for themselves. The forest rapidly yielded to the eight-pound axe of Garfield. In time an exten- sive field, surrounded by the woods, was ripening its wheat in the summer sun. A fire in the forest threatened its destruction. By a desperate exercise of strength and activity the crop was saved. The overtaxed man, over- come by heat, sat in the cool wind, and contracted a vio- lent sore throat. A quack came, placed a blister upon it, and the strong man was strangled. He only said, "Eliza, I have planted four saplings in these woods. ]

BIRTH AND EARLY INCIDENTS.

leave them in your care." He walked to the window, called his faithful oxen by name, and died.

When the earth was placed over him, the battle of life for Eliza began. The eldest child was a stout lad of ten. The first work was to complete the unfinished fence, to protect the wheat. The rails for this were split by the slender Eliza, and the two laid them up. The land was unpaid for. Food was to be won from the earth.

At his father's death, James was less than two years old; the second and third children were daughters. The eldest inherited his father's generous and devoted nature in large measure. With him, till he was thirty years of age, there was but one purpose in life,-to help his mother, and do all within his power for his sisters and younger brother.

The Garfields and Boyntons, isolated from others, by neighborhood, education, and habits of life, were greatly dependent on each other for society, and grew up almost one family. The young Boyntons, as the Garfields, espe- cially the daughters and James, were of quick parts and great intelligence. They had between them a few books. They generally managed to have a school at least during the winters. So far as the future statesman was con- cerned, instead of growing up untutored until the divine frenzy seized him, he became a good reader when he was three years old, and could almost repeat the contents of some of the volumes at his command, at an age when the children of to-day are thought first eligible to the alphabet. Eliza knew her responsibility, and entered upon the task of his education. He early made great proficiency, and the man who fancies that the stupidity of his son is the counterpart of the child or boyhood of General Garfield is sadly misinformed on a vital matter. So emulous were the young people that, mastering all the branches taught in their early schools, they annoyed and worried their teachers about studies and lessons, and with questions quite beyond their reach. At an early day, and when James was advanced enough to take part in it, they established among themselves a class of critics, to examine and determine the accuracy of the use and pronunciation of words and the construction of sen- tences. To this class and its critical labors General Garfield expresses his obligation for the habit of care- fully scanning the use of words, and their arrangement in sentences and paragraphs, written or spoken.

His cousin Harriet and himself associated the most in their literary labors. Somewhere they came across a volume of tales of the sea,-some kind of "Pirates' Own Book," -- with which they became fascinated. They went over with the worn, but never worn-out, stories, till the young boy's imagination took fire, and he read and

dreamed a boy's impossible career on the ocean. Some vein of a love of roving sea-life and adventure had come to him with his other gifts from some Norse ancestor,- some old viking,-which this book kindled, and which has never quite burned out or been extinguished. What came of it may be seen later.

His father and mother had early become interested in the religious movement on the Reserve, which resulted in the organization of the Disciple churches, and this gave to her maternal care and admonition the religious sanc- tion of her convictions of duty and destiny. A woman of spirit, with a capacity to manage and control children ; to all a mother's solicitude and anxieties was added some apprehension on account of James, a frank, natural, tender-hearted, loving boy. Every fibre of his large frame was redolent of a love of fun, and not without a spirit of mischief, while his eldest cousin, Boynton, was the embodiment of ingenious hectoring. There was one notable winter, in which the boys convicted a teacher, in the then populous district, of incapacity to parse a sentence of ordinary English. They agitated against him, demanded his expulsion, and made so clear and strong a case on him that a school-meeting was called of the patrons, before which they appeared as prosecutors, and sustained their charges. Despite the popular voice, he managed to retain his place, and most of the scholars, with the Boyntons and Garfields, were withdrawn. These were in the habit of holding their lyceum debates and other exercises in the school-house each week. To pre- vent this, the door was locked against them. Boys, under such circumstances, show as little respect for locks as does love. The youths held their meeting inside the house as usual. A man was dispatched to Cleveland, twelve or fourteen miles, for another lock, which was out of the way in time. Never was there such a door or such locks, though, doubtless, the world is full of such boys. At the fifth and last of these failures of the locks, careful Mrs. Eliza discovered that the handle of her fire- shovel showed marks of a strange usage, and there is a tradition that the new-fallen snow retained the imprint of a foot-of two feet-that always turned back to her house as home. The good woman was greatly disturbed. She still looks grave at every reference to that magical school-house door. James escaped Middle Creek and Chickamauga, the greater perils of Congress, but expia- tion may still be required for the "rape of a lock."

He largely inherited the proportions, strength and per- sonal qualities of his father, and in the open-air life, active exercise, simple fare, and regular habits of such a boy, he grew rapidly, and at sixteen was a full-blooded, rollicking, spirited, light-hearted boy, living and growing.

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

Though quick-witted, with considerable power of mimicry, more exercised than now, we can fancy him a very green- looking boy, with the untrained, uncouth ways of the youth of the country of that day. One would like to know what he thought of himself. Of couse, he sometimes looked in the glass, where he met a broad, round, laughing, richly florid face, laughing blue eyes, expressive of little but animal good nature. What did he think of that immense head? Of course, he tried on the hats of other boys- of men-and could get it into none of them. Did he ever think of that? Did he all the time carry around that callow mass of brain, without a suspicion of what it might become? Did he think he was like other boys- one of the common sort to work and play, be kind, love mother, sister, brother, cousins, especially cousin Harriet ; chop wood and clear land, hoe corn, dig potatoes, run and jump, throw down all the boys, live and vegetate in Orange-hilliest and remotest of townships-with no thought or suspicion to the coming? The mule carries alike a sack of coals, a casket of gems, or precious gums, as a horse bears a clown or prince, not knowing the dif- ference. A boy is not a mule-is something better than a horse. When does it dawn upon a man of remarkable parts, not that he is unlike others-every one feels his unlikeness to his fellows-but that he has parts in excess of others. The fool, perhaps, always thinks that. I am not dealing with a fool. A man is as much of a mystery and a revelation to himself as others. It is probably best that impending superiority be hidden from young mor- tals of the male species.

His principal business-whatever his ultimate destiny -of these years, was to live and grow strong and healthy. Growing wise was not then in order. It never becomes so to the mass apparently. He was to strengthen and develop, broaden and deepen ; must be wide in the shoul- ders, deep in the chest, straight in loin, strong and straight in leg and thigh, with immense lung and heart power. The base of the brain was of more consequence then; no matter what Humphrey Marshall, Senator Lamar, or Judge Kelley might severally be doing in those years, it was his business to grow; by and by he will ripen, and at an early day, for use. And so, in his sixteenth year, in the spring, he went to Newburgh to chop one hundred cords of wood-I don't know what he was to receive for it. It is not of the least consequence whether it was twenty or twenty-five dollars. It was not money that was of the chief use to him, though he worked for it.

From the margin of the wood where was his work, there was an outlook of the wide lake, on which under the deep blue of the March and April sky, went the white-winged ships. Day by day there to the North was

the bright ridge of slaty-blue, "the high seas" of the books. It was like the sea of which he had always dreamed. It was the sea, and there were ships and sailors and sailor-boys. All the latent longings of his nature, quickened and fed by his childish reading, were aroused. Here lay the sea beckoning to him. Here he would begin and master the rudiments,-a funny idea for a boy at his age, this of thoroughness of begin- ning at the bottom. When he had mastered these fields of fresh water, he would go and take the boundless ocean,-that which is itself the boundary. And so he chopped and split and piled his hundred cords of wood, pausing to gaze and sigh and resolve. He was to be a sailor, not "a fisher of men." In one of these mysteri- ous coming and going, never staying, weird phantoms of the blue, he would come and go, toss and beat, and see the far-off regions of the east, which lay in his ardent imagination like colored bubbles or painted dreams, only he knew they were real. And over the wide Pacific, the world of sundown seas and living islands, these should rise out of the blue and come to meet him, and his feet should tread their shores. All this should be his; and thus he dreamed as he chopped and piled his wood.

He afterwards hired out to a Mr. Treat during the haying and harvesting season, and still dreamed of the sea. With his small earnings, putting by the persuasions and entreaties of his mother, he made his way to Cleve- land to begin at the bottom and work up. In the harbor he found but a single vessel which he thought he would like to go on. To that he made his way, stepped lightly up the gangway, and asked eagerly for the captain; was told that he was below, but would be on deck in a minute. He had never, save in dreams and pictures, seen a cap- tain, a poetic hero, a cross of angel and pirate, in feather and spangles,-instead of which there stepped on deck a hardened, red-faced, brutal wrctch, half drunk. He was evidently in a towering rage. The nascent rover of the blue modestly asked him if he wanted a hand. The enraged brute turned and poured upon him his pent wrath in curses, oaths, and made no other answer. The men on deck heard this with illy suppressed chuckles. The poor boy, struck dumb, endured one minute of dis- tressed awkward silence, which seemed an age before he could recover and walk away.

So far from curing him of his sea longing, it strength- ened and gave it a new direction, or rather, it suggested a new and the true mode of the entrance upon his ca- reer. The captain's treatment showed him that he was too young and green to become a sailor without some initiatory process. In turning the matter over in his mind, the canal presented itself as the true starting-point,

BIRTH AND EARLY INCIDENTS.

and from the canal he would graduate to the lake, and so flow out to the ocean. On the canal the lowest point was that of driver. For this post he would compete. To a canal-boat he went. The first boat he applied to wanted a driver, and he secured the situation.

Poor boy! Had his career ended with that trip, as it came near doing, not a woman but would weep for his fate. He had not the faintest idea of swimming, and knew noth- ing of water, save as a beverage, and occasionally to wash hands in. On that first and most important tour he fell in- to the canal fourteen times, and had fourteen miraculous escapes from drowning. After all he showed his quality, and on return to port, the end of his first and last round trip as driver from Cleveland to Beaver, he was promoted from the tow-path to the deck, as bowsman. This brought a new experience. On his second trip he had his first fight. While in motion, he stood on deck, with a "set- ting-pole" on his shoulder, some twenty feet from Dave, a great, good-natured, hulking boatman, with a quick temper, with whom he was on good terms. The boat gave a lurch, the pole was sent with violence in the di- rection of Dave, and reached him before the warning cry. It struck him midships. Garfield expressed his sorrow promptly. Dave turned upon the luckless boy with curses, and threatened to thrash him. Garfield knew he was innocent even of carelessness. The threat of flogging by a heavy man of thirty-five roused the hot Garfield and Ballou blood. Dave rushed upon him with his head down, like an enraged bull. As he came on, Garfield sprang to one side, and dealt him a power- ful blow just back of and under the left ear. Dave went to the bottom of the boat with his head between two beams, and his now heated foe went after him, seized him by the throat, and lifted the same clenched hand- the left-for another buffet. "Pound the d-d fool to death, Jim !" called the appreciative captain. "If he haint no more sense than to get mad at an accident, he orto die." And as the youth hesitated-"Why don't you strike?" D-n me if I'll interfere." He could not. The man was down, helpless, in his power. Father, as well as mother, stayed the blow. Dave expressed regret at his rage. Garfield gave him his hand, and they were better friends than ever.

The victory gave him as much prestige along the canal as that accorded him through the North for thrashing Humphrey Marshall at Middle Creek. The general says that not long after he came near being thrashed himself, and for cause deemed sufficient by the interna- tional code of the canal. At a certain distance each way from either gate of a lock is set what is called a "distance- post." If it happens that two boats approach a lock at

the same time, the one that first reaches his distance- post has the first use of the lock, and the other must lie to and wait. The bowsman who violates this rule of reasonable law does so at the peril of immediate war. At a loncly place in the canal one night, Garfield's boat and one from the other way approached a lock at the same time. The other reached his distance-post first. In an instant's rashness, Garfield, disregarding the other's rights, dashed on, opened the lock-gates at his end, and thus took possession of it. The insult was appreciated. The rival bowsman, a burly infuriated Irishman, leaped from his boat and made for his foe, illuminating his approach with a shower of Irish threats and curses. Being in for it, Garfield awaited his approach, leaning against the gate with seeming coolness, replying not a word. When the enraged man had approached within a few feet, the youth, in a commanding voice and manner, ordered him to halt then and there, on peril of being instantly awfully whipped. The audacity of taking the lock, the coolness and authority of this command, the height of the young man, looming on the amazed sight of the enemy, arrested his approach, and he contented himself with announcing certain punishment for any future outrage of the kind, and the boats passed. The general admits that his conduct in the first instance was the rashest folly, and in disregard of duty. In the second, it seemed the best way out of a difficulty. He was but sixteen.

Garfield himself attributes his early abandonment of the canal and the change of his cherished plans to a combination of circumstances, which, though more nu- merous, resolve themselves to two-his mother and the ague. The memory of his tributes to Neptune in the muddy waters of the canal lingered in his boyish mind, with the refrain, "It might have been." He had taken one of his many tumbles into the mud, and grasped the dangling end of a drag-rope which hung over the stern. It seems to have been in the night. Hand over hand he sought to pull himself from the water, too deep tor him; and hand over hand it paid out, giving him not the least help. His position became perilous. Himself be- came alarmcd, as he struggled seemingly more and more helplessly. Finally the rope became fixed, and lent itself to his aid, and he drew himself on board. Curious to know the cause of its mysterious conduct, he found on examination that it lay in a loose coil, and in running over the edge of the boat, in his grasp, it had been drawn into a crack with a sort of kink, like a knot, at that point, which alone prevented it paying out its whole treacherous length. In his wet clothes he sat down in the cold of the empty night, to contemplate and construe the matter. It seemed then, to him, that there was but one chance in

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History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 118

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902 Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers Number of Pages: 574

Author: Williams bros., Cleveland, pub. [from old catalog]; Riddle, A. G. (Albert Gallatin), 1816-1902
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Cleveland, Williams brothers
Number of Pages: 574