History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 26

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443

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USA > Ohio > Geauga County > History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio > Part 26

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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 Cleveland 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 to the gangway-plank, 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 captain, 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 wretch, 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 distressed, awkward silence, which seemed an age before he could recover and walk away.

So far from curing him of his sea longing, it rather strengthened and gave it a new direction ; or rather, it suggested a new and the true mode of entrance upon his career. 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, 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 station.

Poor boy ! Had his career ended with that trip, not a woman but would weep for his fate. He had not the faintest idea of swimming, and knew nothing of water, save as a beverage, and occasionally to wash hands in. On that first and most important tour he fell into 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, he was promoted from the tow-path to the deck, as bowsman. This brought a new experience. On his second trip to Beaver he had his first fight. While in motion, he stood on deck, with a " setting-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 direction 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 a flogging from 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 one side, and dealt him a powerful 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 for another buffet. "Pound the d-d fool to death, Jim !" called the appreciative captain. " If he haint no more sense than to git 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 international code of the canal. At a certain dis- tance 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 lonely 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 one 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 in- furiated 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 cool- ness 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 numerous, resolve themselves to two-his mother and the ague. The memory of one 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 canal, 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 for him ; and hand over hand it paid out, giving him not the least help. His position became perilous. Himself became alarmed, 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 the 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 one thou- sand that a line thus running over the edge of the boat should both 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 indifference he had left her, and under the impression that he was going upon the lake. He remembered that he had not written to her during the three months he had then 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 himself of any especial consequence in the world, and the rope had not now fastened itself for him on his account, 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 figments of which lost their hold upon him. Be a

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HISTORY OF GEAUGA AND LAKE COUNTIES, OHIO.

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. However 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 lay off and get well. From Cleveland he went to Orange. He drew near the old home, consecrated by his mother's presence, in the evening, 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 constitution 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, without the remotest word to 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 summers, 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, either in fitting or passing through college, and went to the Geauga Semi- nary, at Chester.

I have thus rapidly passed from General Garfield's birth, through the mythical and legendary period of his life to that of history, a wider space, in which other matter of interest in those chrysalis years, would throw much strong light on 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 forma- tion of reputation, 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 works in the memories of other persons 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 professor, or so they called him. Young Garfield had never seen a specimen before. He actually 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, an- nounced that " it was time for servants 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 in- tended 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 wonderful 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 eloquent 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 attempted to defraud him of a part of his scant wages, and was only foiled by the youth's spirit. He lived to speak of " Jim Gaffield" 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 aptitude for the use of tools, and was familiar with a jack-plane and jointer. He secured the job of dressing the " 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 autumn he received the examiners' certificate as a teacher. When the call came to " the Ledge," in his honest judgment of himself, he shrank from under- taking 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 Gaffield ;' you must come away as ' 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,-im- minent peril of death, illness, devoted love of mother, her prayers and interces- sions, an abiding thirst for knowledge, newly awakened, his conversion and union with the church. The centre of them all was the sweet, beaming, tender, lovely face of his mother, the light from which brought out all the alluring or repulsive features of the others.

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 Geauga, 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 unconscious workings and in- fluences of the real forces of the young man's mind !

The longings of this strong and still undeveloped nature were in a new direc- tion. 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 roofs of the mere edifice appealed to an imagination which seems early to have exercised a strong influence over him. He seems now to have turned all the energies with which he was so abundantly endowed, in the new direction. The little seminary of Chester, to which he returned from Blue Rock, was sufficient 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 acquisition. An ingenuous 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. As one has said, 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 transcript 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 moulded into unity of sentiment by the remarkable religious movement in which Alexander Campbell

* Gaffield was the common pronunciation of the name.

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was a leader,-a movement hardly possible to have originated save amid a pioneer people, who are always remitted somewhat to the primary conditions of life, which seems to place them nearer nature 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 abun- dant 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 the means of a thorough mastery of this and the Latin tongue. This was a school much in advance of Chester; it was the central literary light of the new, or the reorganization of primitive Christianity, 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 traditions, were yet to occur. With craving sharpened, faculties still wholly immature broadened and strengthened by his course 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 the 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 eccentric, could hardly be otherwise peculiar. He was different from other young men rather in quality and quantity. He ex- hausted Hiram and needed more. He wrote to Yale, Williams, and Mr. Camp- bell'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 uni- versity course. They severally answered two years.

Singularly enough, he turned from Bethany. There was a leaning in it toward slavery, by which it was surrounded. It was less thorough. The youth who would grow up to a sailor, possibly an admiral, from the towpath 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 con. fessedly 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, sym- pathy in these words that touched a nature so responsive, and this decided that Williams and not Yale should graduate him. Through the discovery of life in- surance 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 conven- tionalisms,-stifling, with the artificialities and refinements of city 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.

The youth who, abashed by the manner of a drunken brute, went from the lake to the towpath, 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 intel- lect 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 un- ripe. 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 ; and I have heard of an advocate, not unknown to fame, who managed to defer the closing speech to the jury, in a great case, till he received by express, a fitting pair of dress-boots. He wanted to be his best, and boots were alone wanting. 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 abun- dant grace, 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 supposed that the kind of power and grasp that clutches the particles of the spirit of things, and follows filmy speculation 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, whatever it is, becomes a specialty."

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History of Geauga and Lake Counties, Ohio, Part 26

Author: Williams Brothers Publication date: 1879 Publisher: Number of Pages: 443

Author: Williams Brothers
Publication date: 1879
Publisher:
Number of Pages: 443