James A. Garfield was a good party man; he played the game by the rules. A skilled debater, spellbinding orator, and efficient parliamentarian, he enjoyed his work in the House of Representatives, where he served as Congressman from Ohio between 1863 and 1880. In June 1880 he went to the Republican presidential convention in Chicago committed to the candidacy of his Ohio colleague John S. Sherman. But the "Stalwart" faction of the party, headed by Senator Roscoe Conkling (who was pushing Grant for a third term), and the "Half-Breed" faction (which was backing Garfield's friend James G. Blaine) soon became hopelessly deadlocked. When, at one point, Garfield challenged a Conkling resolution and was cheered by the delegates, "Lord Roscoe" thought the Ohioan was making a bid for the nomination himself. Grabbing a newspaper, he wrote a sarcastic note on the margin and sent it over to him: "I congratulate you on being the dark horse."

Conkling turned out to be right. Though Garfield stubbornly refused to push his own cause, there was a stampede toward him on the thirty-sixth ballot, on which he came out the winner. After receiving the nomination, he sat apparently stunned for a moment. Then he cried, "Get me out of here," to one of the Ohio delegates, and the two pushed their way through the crowd to the street outside. But a group of people already gathered to greet him there tore off the top of the public hack ordered for him before the driver could get the horses moving. After Garfield left, the convention picked Chester A. Arthur (an ally of Stalwart Conkling in New York) as his running mate to appease the Stalwarts.

Garfield's campaign biographies made much of a dramatic speech he was supposed to have given in April 1865. He was in New York City, they reported, when news of Lincoln's assassination arrived. Seeing angry crowds gather in the streets and head for the offices of the anti-Lincoln New York World in an ugly mood, and fearful of what might happen, the Ohio Congressman stepped forward, with a small flag in his hand, beckoned to the mob, lifted his right arm, and cried: "Fellow citizens! Clouds and darkness are round Him! His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies! Justice and judgment are the establishment of his throne! Mercy and truth shall go before His face! Fellow citizens! God reigns, and the Government at Washington still lives!" Garfield's words held the crowd spellbound. People, it was said, "stood riveted to the ground with awe, gazing at the motionless orator, and thinking of God and the security of the Government at that hour... What might have happened had the surging and maddened crowd been let loose, none can tell. The man for the crisis was on the spot, more potent than Napoleon's guns at Paris." It was a good story. Unfortunately, it was apocryphal.

The 1880 campaign was in some ways humiliating for Garfield. One of the main issues was whether he had been involved in the scandals that tarnished Congress during the Grant administration. Among other things, the Democrats charged that in 1868 he had accepted a bribe of $329 from the Credit Mobilier, a corrupt construction company involved in the building of the Union Pacific Railroad. A Congressional investigating committee had decided in 1873 that there was no conclusive evidence that Garfield ever took bribes for political favors, and Garfield himself published a thirty-page pamphlet defending himself; but suspicions lingered which were revived in 1880. By September, the figure 329 began appearing throughout the country: on sidewalks, streets, doors, fences, walls, posts, on the steps of Garfield's home in Washington, on hats, napkins, and even, according to one amused Republican, "on underclothing and the insides of shoes." Garfield won the election despite the attacks on his character, but seems not to have taken much pleasure in victory. He called the Presidency "a bleak mountain." He also looked tired and worn at the inauguration, in contrast to his predecessor, Hayes, who, according to Benjamin Harrison, looked "sweet and lamb like."

In his inaugural address, Garfield paid lip service to civil-service reform but also sought peace with the Stalwarts (who opposed reform) by making it clear that he would consult them on appointments. He even considered the possibility of a Cabinet post for his Stalwart enemy Roscoe Conkling. "If it seems best to make the tender," he said to Blaine (to whom he had promised the State Department), "what would you say to exchanging seats-you for the Treasury, he for State?" Blaine's reply was blunt: "His appointment would act like strychnine upon your administration-first, bring contortions and then be followed by death." Garfield promptly dropped the idea. For years Garfield had taken the spoils system for granted, but when he became President the pressure of office-seekers drove him to distraction. "My God!" he cried shortly after taking office, "what is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?" He took pleasure, though, in appointing General Lew Wallace to office. He had intended sending him to Paraguay, but after reading Ben-Hur, he decided to send him to Constantinople, where he might be inspired to write another exciting book about biblical times.

The spoils system was Garfield's undoing. At the same time that he was trying to please everyone (it was, John Hay decided, his chief defect), a man named Charles J. Guiteau was pestering the State Department for an appointment as consul in Paris. In mid May 1881 he managed to corner James G. Blaine, who-trying to escape-cried angrily, "Never speak to me again about the Paris consulship!" But Guiteau persisted, saying that the new President was sure to want a new man in Paris, and finally Blaine sighed, "Well, if he will ..." waved him off, and got away. A few weeks later, when Garfield, accompanied by Blaine, went to the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington to take a train to Massachusetts, Guiteau was waiting for him. As Garfield entered the waiting room, Guiteau fired two shots at him, then ran out of the station and shouted, "I am a Stalwart and Arthur is President now!" "My God! What is that?" gasped Garfield as he sank to the floor. Guiteau was seized by policemen, and Garfield was carried back to the White House, where he lingered near death for weeks. Late in August, a Washington Star reporter, interviewing Garfield's doctor, D. W. Bliss, said that "some people say that prayer has saved the President." Bliss snapped: "They may think so. In my opinion it was whiskey," and added irritably, "I have received a number of letters today abusing me for using stimulants." To escape the Washington heat Garfield was moved to a seaside cottage in New Jersey early in September. There he died on September 19, eighty days after the shooting. Guiteau was tried, sentenced to death, and hanged on June 30, 1882.

Garfield's assassination produced a nationwide demand for civil service reform. "The assassination of Mr. Garfield," said the New York Evening Telegraph, was a natural "outcome of the debased and debasing machine politics that this nation has suffered from ever since the war closed ..." Across the country there were rallies for reform at which Garfield's portrait was prominently displayed. People who had formerly been lukewarm about the late President also tended to think better of him in retrospect. Exclaimed Henry Adams impatiently: "The cynical impudence with which the reformers have tried to manufacture an ideal statesman out of the late shady politician beats anything in novel-writing." It is ironic that Garfield's successor, Chester A. Arthur, commonly regarded as a political hack, did better in office than had Garfield.

Source: Paul F. Boller Jr., Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 168-72.