History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 119

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 119

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LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

one thousand that a line thus running over the edge of the boat should run into a crack and knot itself; and that one chance had saved him. Then came the thought of home and mother, and how with seeming in- difference he had left her, and under the impression that he was going upon the lake. He remembered he had not written to her during the three months he had been absent, and he pondered over the pain and distress his misconduct had doubtless caused her; and he knew of the constant prayers with which her love had surrounded him, as with an atmosphere, from the dawn of being. He had, in his modest self-abnegation, never regarded him- self of any especial consequence in the world, and the rope had not now fastened itself for him on his own ac- count, but solely at the intercession of that mother.

Morning light and the life of the next day came with new thoughts. The peril and escape of the last night faded to the memory of an unpleasant dream, the fig- ments of which lost their hold upon him. Be a sailor he would. Then he had broken with home; had gone for himself; had a right to shape his own life, provided he did well, worked, and earned money, and avoided vicious courses. But the drenching, the malaria of the canal, were too strong for the health and will of sixteen. He began to shake incontinently. He called up his will and determination; set, or tried to set, his teeth. How- ever firm his will, his body would shake and his teeth would chatter. The boat was on its way to Cleveland, and he determined there to lie off and get well. From Cleveland he went to Orange. He drew near the old home, consecrated by his mother's presence, in the eve- ning, and weak and shattered stole to the door. Her voice came from within in prayer. With uncovered head he bowed and listened, as the fervent prayer went on. He heard her pray for him, her son, away from her, and only in the providence of God. "Would He preserve him in health of body, and purity of life and soul; and return him to be her comfort and stay." When the voice ceased, he softly raised the latch and entered. Her prayer was answered. Not till after that time did he know that his going away had quite crushed her.

He was at once prostrated with the "ague cake," as the hardness of the left side is popularly called. One of the old school M. D.'s salivated him, and for several awful months he lay on the bed with a board so adjusted as to conduct the flow of saliva from his mouth, while the cake was dissolving under the influence of calomel, as the doctor said. Nothing but the indissoluble consti- tution given him by his father carried him through. However it fared with that obdurate cake, his passion for the sea survived, and he intended to return to the canal. The wise, sagacious love of the mother won. She took

counsel of other helps. During the dreary months of drool, with tender watchfulness she cared for him, with- out the remotest word of his immediate past. She trusted in his noble nature. She trusted in God that, although he constantly talked of carrying out his old plans, he would abandon them. Not for years did he know the agony these words cost her. She merely said, in her sweet, quiet way, "James, you're sick. If you return to the canal, I fear you will be taken down again. I have been thinking it over. It seems to me you had better go to school this spring, and then with a term in the fall, you may be able to teach in the winter. If you can teach winters, and want to go on the canal or lake sum- mers, you will have employment the year around." Wise woman that she was.

In his broken condition it did not seem a bad plan. While he revolved it, she went on. "Your money is now all gone, but your brother Thomas and I will be able to raise seventeen dollars for you to start to school on, and you can perhaps get along after that is gone upon your own resources."

He took the advice and the money, the only fund ever contributed by others to him, towards a collegiate edu- cation, and went to the Geauga seminary at Chester.

CHAPTER II.

EDUCATIONAL LIFE.

A Professor. - The servant retires .- Whirligigs of Time .- Grand River Institute .- A call to the Ledge .- Goes as Jim Gaffil .- Returns Mr. Garfield .- Is Converted .- Rides Seventy Miles to see a College .- Hiram .- Course there .- Chooses Williams. - Experience there .- First in Metaphysics .- Indifference to Money .- Professor of Lan- guages. President of Hiram College .- Preaches.

I have thus rapidly passed from General Garfield's birth, through the mythical and legendary period of his life, which others have enriched with absurd fables, to that of history. A wider space, in which other matter of interest in those chrysalis years might find place would throw much strong light upon the structure and growth of his character and mind.

The period of his school education, with the unfolding of his mental powers, and the development of the latent traits of character which go also to the formation of a life, are of the greatest importance to a correct appreciation of the matured man, but must yield to a more rapid treatment. At the close of the spring term at Chester, he had so far recovered as to enable him to work as a day laborer at haying and harvesting. It is curious the fantastic changes which time and the after- success of a man work in the memories of other persons

EDUCATIONAL LIFE.

concerning him, and of their own agency in bringing him forward. At an earlier period young Garfield had worked for a merchant at boiling black salts. While so employed, the daughter of the house came home from the Geauga seminary, actually attended by a real pro- fessor, or so they called him. Young Garfield had never seen a specimen before. He really sat at the same table, and was permitted to linger in the same room in a remote corner, where the effulgence was not too strong, until nine o'clock in the evening, when the good mother, in a decided voice, announced that "it was time for serv- ants to retire." Soon after, he found himself in his little bedroom, up stairs, without being conscious of the details of the journey thither. "Servant." It was not a good word for the ears of even an intended sailor boy. His term was quite out; the merchant sympathized with him, said what he might, and offered an increase of wages, but the servant retired at the end of the month.

Ah, "the whirligigs of time," and the compensations they bring! The daughter became the wife of the won- derful professor, and a few brief years later, when on a visit to the lady mother, the three went to a reception tendered to the popular president of a college and elo- quent young senator, when the mother congratulated him with cordiality, and herself warmly, for once having him a member of her family. The servant had retired. .

And so this summer, a farmer of the neighborhood for whom he did yeoman's service in the harvest field at- tempted to defraud him of his scant wages, and was only foiled by the youth's spirit. He lived to speak of "Jim Gaffil"* as one of his boys whom he had raised and helped forward in his day of penury.

With the money thus earned the young man purchased more decent raiment. When he reached Chester for the fall term, he had just six cents, and these he cast into the contribution box on the ensuing Sunday at church, and so he resumed his education.

In the neighborhood of the school there was a large two-story house in the course of construction; to the master builder he applied for work, as he had an apti- tude for the use of tools, and was familiar with a jack- plane and jointer. He secured the job of dressing "clap-boards" for the weather boarding at two cents each, and one vacation day he dressed fifty, the first time in his life that he received a full dollar for a day's work. He made his way through easily, and in the au- tumn he received the examiner's certificate as a teacher. When the call came to "the Ledge," (a neighborhood in Orange), in his honest judgment of himself, he shrank from undertaking the school. In his doubt, he applied to his Uncle Boynton. After a moment's thought, he

replied, "Take it. You will go as 'Jim Gaffil;' you must come back 'Mr. Garfield,'" and he did.

That winter Father Lillie, a Disciple preacher of local fame, held a protracted meeting in the neighborhood, and yielding his assent to the faith of his ever-hopeful mother, he united with her church organization, and this severed the last strand of the cord which bound him to the dream of the ocean. All these it took-imminent peril of death, illness, devoted love of motner, her prayers and intercessions, an abiding thirst for knowl- edge newly awakened, his conversion and union with the church. The center of them all was the sweet, beaming, tender, lovely face of his mother, the light from which brought out all the alluring or repulsive fea- tures of the other.

Not many years since in speaking of these trials and temptations of his early years, he said, half regretfully, "But even now, at times, the old feeling (the longing for the sea) comes back ;" and walking across the room, he turned with a flashing eye, "I tell you, I would rather now command a fleet in a great naval battle than do anything else on this earth. The sight of a ship often fills me with a strange fascination; and when upon the water, and my fellow-landsmen are in the agonies of sea-sickness, I am as tranquil as when walking the land, in the serenest weather." But the sea lost her lover.

At the close of his school on "the Ledge," he went with his mother to visit a brother of hers, in the south part of the State. Save on the canal, this was his longest journey and made on the railroad, his first ride on the cars. They stopped at Columbus, where Mr. Kent, the representative of Geanga, showed them much attention, and young Garfield saw the wonders of that capital. At Blue Rock an unfortunate school-master had just been disciplined by the scholars of one of the districts and dismissed, and he was induced to take them in hand for two months, and did. During the time he rode on horseback seventy miles to Athens to see a real college, the first he had ever seen.

What a strong light this incident throws on the uncon- scious working and influence of the real forces of the young man's mind !

The longings of his strong and still undeveloped na- ture were in a new direction. It was no longer the sea, the remote shores of old lands, the lonely islands, and pictured archipelagoes, but the cloisters of learning, its abode. The walls and roof of the mere edifice appealed to an imagination that seems early to have exercised a strong influence over him. He was now to turn all the energies with which he was so abundantly en- dowed, in the new direction. The little seminary of

* The popular pronunciation at the time in Orange.

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

Chester, to which he returned from Blue Rock, was suf- ficient for the present. This must have been the summer of 1850. The ensuing winter he taught school again; thus enlarging his own powers and thoroughness of acqui- sition. An ingenious mind never acquires so surely as where it masters for the purpose of imparting. A man must find his learning so roomy that he can turn in it, and still find it at his hand. A man's soul must be large enough to turn round in, or it cannot be much of a soul.

The story of this school life has been told with fair amplitude in history and fiction. Rich and useful as it is, my purpose is more to help finish out the artist's tran- script of the noble head and face, to furnish forth the complete idea of the man, than to tell a tale, however graphic, of the details of a very interesting career. - to show, if I may, what he was and is, rather than what he said and did. There is such incompleteness in a life, running at full tide like a river on whose banks you stand, that even this is scarcely possible. At mid career, per- haps, one can at best furnish a conception of what a man seems, rather than what he really is. That can possibly only be known when his years are completed.

Some intelligent, hard-working farmers, caught up and molded into unity of sentiment by the remarkable relig- ious movement in which Alexander Campbell was a leader-a movement hardly possible save amid a pio- neer people, who are remitted somewhat to the primary conditions of life, which seem to place them nearer na- ture and God-had worked into accomplishment their idea of an institute of learning, needed for the education of their own youth. They had found in the scriptures, pure and simple, not only an abundant formula of faith, but a code for church government as well. They knew it was written in an original language, and, among other things to be provided for, was a means of the thorough mastery of this and the Latin tonguc. This was a school much in advance of Chester; it was the central literary light of the new, or the re-organization of primitive Chris- tianity, and to this the young scholar would necessarily make his way. It was an event in the history of Hiram rather than in that of Garfield, when he entered her new fresh halls and rooms. The incidents of school life, which with the passage of time were to become tradi- tions, were yet to occur. With cravings sharpened, facul- ties still wholly immature, broadened and strengthened at Chester, and a capacity for study greatly enlarged, the large-headed, broad-shouldered, deep-chested young giant, with his surplus of life, finding vent in loud gushes of laughter, and the thousand ways in which an overflood of young male animal vitality finds innocent outlets, he concentrated his energies on Greek and Latin.

One can almost fancy that a thrill from the grasp of his warm, strong hand, must have run back to the ashes of the old writers, whose thoughts he was to master, with their language. Two years at Hiram and he was largely the best scholar she had, and he became the standard by which to measure her future prodigies. We are not told what were his methods and peculiarities of study. We know very well that he had no peculiarities. A direct nature of his breadth and force can never become eccen- tric, could hardly be otherwise peculiar. He was differ- ent from other young men rather in quality and quantity. He exhausted Hiram and needed more. He wrote to Yale, Williams, and Mr. Campbell's young college at Bethany, gave a modest account of his acquisitions, and wished to know what time it would require in their classes to complete the university course. They sever- ally answered, two years.

Singularly enough, he turned from Bethany. There was a leaning in it toward slavery, by which it was sur- rounded. It was less thorough. The youth who would grow up to a sailor, possibly an admiral, from the tow-path of a canal, would be content with nothing less than the most complete. Beside, he was quick enough to see that his religious association was a little exclusive, though confessedly as broad as the scheme of salvation, and he wished to see and mix with a body more cosmopolitan, - preferred the older and more advanced East. "If you come here, we shall be glad to do what we can for you," was the conclusion of President Hopkins' letter from Williams. There was a little warmth, sympathy in these words that touched a nature so responsive, and this de- cided that Williams and not Yale should graduate him. Through the discovery of life insurance the young student raised the necessary means, on a policy he secured on his own life, which was a good risk, and the summer of 1854, in his twenty-third year, saw him in the junior class of Williams.

At Williams, the air was warm and close with the styles, fashions, and conventionalisms,-stifling, with the artifi- cialities and refinements of eastern life. A young man, the product of a city, can never apprehend the emotions and confusions experienced by the country-bred youth who finds himself suddenly in their midst. He is afraid of a great town, and patronizes a third-rate hotel rather than face the monsters of a first. It is not in nature that the elegant students from the wealthy homes of the East should not note and comment upon the western speci- men. Let it not be supposed that the young athlete, on whom canal water made little impression, was impervious to the glances that ran him over or took him in. He was the most sensitive of mortals.

EDUCATIONAL LIFE.

The youth who, abashed by the manner of a drunken brute, went from the lake to the tow-path, had but the humblest conception of himself. What mattered it though he was intellectually a giant, and a genius so large and general that it had no special tendency, and therefore not recognized as genius,-that his intellect had the fashion of Cicero, of Demosthenes, his imagination was Athenian, his thought moulded and polished by Virgil and the classics? He knew he was rural. He thought he might be rustic. He could see that he still looked unripe. The full blood was all too near the thin, fine-fibred skin of the face, and that was too broad. He never could see why that head, disproportionately large even for those shoulders and chest, need be quite so big, light as he carried it. He had not thought much of his dress. Now it was impressed upon him that his coat was of Hiram. His boots were Hiramy, and so were his pantaloons. His hat he purchased in Ravenna, but was not Williams fashion. Why had he not gone to Bethany? Alas ! it is both Darwinian and Taineian that man is the servant of his environments, and more than one man has been made unhappy by his coat. Surely there are crosses enough without putting a man at feud and disadvantage by his garments. Better that he be without. The loftiest ambition, the highest soul has its weaknesses. Young Garfield's nature was roomy enough to absorb Williams, faculty and students, and his magnetism made them his own. They and he forget the lack of grace in his dress in his other abundant graces, and he wore his garments as he might. He kept his place in his class to the close.

At the end of two years he received the award for metaphysics, the best honor of Williams. Metaphysics ! who would have suspected that? Who would have sup- posed that the kind of power and grasp that clutches the particles of the spirit of things, and follows filmy specula- tion to shadowless, atomless conclusions in the abstract, and so sets Williams wondering, were his? "Metaphysics, after all, may be a specialty with Mr. Garfield." Yes, I have observed that the subject in hand with him, what- ever it is, becomes a specialty.

Mention has been made of the slenderness of his means and meagreness of compensation he earned, where it seemed to reflect light on his character. Had I ever heard of his higgling over the price of a Barlow-knife, or woodchuck-skin whip-lash, I should mention the oft-re- peated scantiness of his expenditures, and the sum total of his debt when he took metaphysical leave of Williams. . It might then help to a better understanding of the man. Great men may be small in money matters; when they are, it may as well be known. It helps to equalize great

and common men. Mr. Garfield seems rather of the temper of the knight who twisted off an unweighed quan. tity of his golden chain, and threw it in silent disdain to the churl who asked wages for hospitality.

On his return to Ohio he was honored with the post of languages in the Hiram institute. The next year he became its president. As an instructor, he was famous, so far as such a post can confer distinction. Doubtless there are minds gifted with a special aptitude for instruct- ing. It was now thought this was his gift. He never had any of the pedagogue. He never would have real- ized any man's idea, save his own, of a professor. I doubt whether there was any one or two things that peculiarly fitted him for teaching. I think there are few things to which, if he turned and concentrated himself, that he would not do about as well as the best in that line, and shortly. It is said that Greek and Latin, in his mouth, ceased to be dead languages, in a manner. That the secrets of most of the sciences revealed themselves to him, and so were freely translated. The power lay in the warmth and magnetism of his nature. A gift to ani- mate things, make them move and take color. In some sense a born orator, his rank as such I do not speak of. His mastery of language gave him a copious vocabulary. He was full of enthusiasm. Anything which engaged his attention five minutes awakened it. Never was there such talkings up of lessons as his; nor had any studies ever before seemed so attractive to the pupils. They saw them through his medium, which was warmth as well as light.

He was born-had all his days save his Williams days-lived at the heart-beat of the common people, and knew exactly the influences which control them, and that they measure everything by the money standard of cost, and what could be got for it in cash. He knew that they even estimated him by the money he could earn at teaching, and hence the eagerness to know the money cost of his education. A young farmer, in the emulation which the young professor's name produced, would se- cure a quarter in the institute, and became charmed at the world of letters opened to him. His father would refusc, hesitate, was seen and talked with by the young president, who made it clear, to even his apprehension, that a more thorough education enhanced the cash value of the youth. Would it have been better on the whole that Garfield had remained a college professor or presi- dent? It is pretty certain he would not long have remained at Hiram. His proportions were not suited to that, and he would have grown much faster else- where. Would it have been better if his plans of life had embraced the idea of adhering to some one thing ?

LIFE OF JAMES A. GARFIELD.

Was he incapable of that? Is here the weakness in him? Or is there too much of him or of something,-too much or too little ?

The years of his teaching coincide with the years of his preaching. Whatever may have been the effect on others, which must have been salutary, and although it was a useful training-school to the young men, the draw- back-less hurtful to him than to most-is the half-odium attaching to an ex-clergyman. Most of the callings a man may turn from to others, without a shadow of dis- credit. The clerical is not one of them. He was at the most a lay-preacher. Under the Disciple rule any brother may offer his views. Of all peoples they were most given to discussions, public, private, and all the time; of reading, discussing, and expounding the Scriptures. A young man of Garfield's gifts and temperament, dealing with Scripture texts and lessons, would become a public speaker on the themes of such universal interest. Of course he excelled. I have no doubt he liked to preach. All true artists love to practice their art. For a real born speaker, with warmth of temperament and imagination, the exercise of his gift has a great charm. To feel every fibre alive and tremulous with a theme, and rise and launch himself with fearless confidence on speech, "wreak himself on expression," kindle and glow, lift the audi- ence and be lifted till the sentiment and emotion of all become one, and his the utterance of it, give to the speaker a rare delight. The pleasurable glow remains though the physical frame may become exhausted. Gar- field had no call to preach; felt none. Had none of the intense religious enthusiasm that has made so many smaller men famous. He had natural enthusiasm, warmth, sympathy, sensibility, language, rare powers of speech,-had faith. He lacked the kindling inspiration of an intense evangelical spirit that hears the voice of the strong necessities of its own nature. He was never set apart for the ministry of the word by the authority of his people. Though he spoke often, in many places, was famous among his people, who have produced so many able and some widely-famous ministers, few of whom have much of the clergyman about them. Ear- nest, zealous, able, eloquent Christian teachers are they, with a very small modicum of the parson. Perhaps had Garfield remained a college professor or president he would have continued to preach, with what success is not difficult to forecast. In the superabundance of him he did other things beside. Among them, it is even said that in 1858-59 he saved some money, which was a thing he would be less likely to succeed in than in any other field of human enterprise that occurs to me. A weakness in this matter is doubtless amiable; it is a great personal inconvenience, and not by any means

necessarily allied to excellence of mind, character, or morals. Money values are not to be ruled out as vulgar or vicious. They are the only measures of property, and should be kept in their place. To estimate a man by his worth in money provokcs a guffaw of the gods. Whatever he may have done in the way of this acquisi- tion, he made many political anti-slavery speeches. Here was a field broad and standing thick with material, the use of which could not fail to be most effective in his hands. Since the pre-revolutionary period no cause has done so much for American oratory, as we still miscall our public speaking. The other two together, temper- ance and woman's rights, save with the sex, do not approach it. Most of the good platform speakers of middle life of the North were formed in this school, so nearly allied to the more vulgar and very useful political speaking common to all parts of the country.

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History of Buchanan County, Iowa, with illustrations and biographical sketches, Part 119

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