Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,11
war, determined that it would end in Confederate defeat. “By thundering volley, must this rebellion be met,” he wrote, “and by such means alone.” For Garfield, however, the Civil War was about more than putting down a rebellion or even preventing the country from being torn in two. It was about emancipation.
Throughout his life, Garfield had been an ardent abolitionist. As a young man, he had written feverishly in his diary that he felt “like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant evil.” In an attempt to help a runaway slave, he had given him what little money he could spare and urged him to “trust to God and his muscle.” In the darkest days of the Civil War, he had wondered if the war itself was God’s punishment for the horrors of slavery. “For what else are we so fearfully scourged and defeated?” he had asked.
Although Garfield had chosen a life of calm, rational thought, when it came to abolition he freely admitted that he had “never been anything else than radical.” He found it difficult to condemn even the most violent abolitionists, men like John Brown whose hatred of slavery allowed for any means of destroying it. In 1856, Brown had planned and participated in the brutal slaying of five proslavery activists near the Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas. Three years later, he raided the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in a desperate attempt to form an “army of emancipation.”
Garfield had felt a profound sense of loss when, in 1859, he learned that Brown was to be hanged. “A dark day for our country,” he wrote in his diary. “John Brown is to be hung at Charleston, Va.… I do not justify his acts. By no means. But I do accord to him, and I think every man must, honesty of purpose and sincerity of heart.” On the day of the execution, Garfield wrote in his pocket diary, “Servitium esto damnatum.” Slavery be damned.
Despite the fact that, since winning his state senate seat two years earlier, Garfield had spent far more time on the battlefield or in a military encampment than in his office, his political career continued to take on a life of its own. In the fall of 1862, just ten months after the Battle of Middle Creek, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, receiving nearly twice as many votes as his opponent, although he had done nothing to promote his candidacy. Before the results were even announced, he had set out for Washington—not to prepare himself for Congress, but to seek his next military appointment.
Garfield would not take his congressional seat until more than a year later, when Abraham Lincoln asked him to. “I have resigned my place in the army and have taken my seat in Congress,” Garfield wrote home, clearly conscious of his unique role. “I did this with regret, for I had hoped not to leave the field till every insurgent state had returned to its allegiance. But the President told me he dared not risk a single vote in the House and he needed men in Congress who were practically acquainted with the wants of the army. I did not feel it right to consult my own preference in such a case.”
Although he worried that it would seem as if he were abandoning the war, and his men, Garfield soon learned that he could fight more effectively, and win more often, on the floor of Congress. He introduced a resolution that would allow blacks to walk freely through the streets of Washington, D.C., without carrying a pass. Appealing to reason and the most basic sense of fairness, he asked, “What legislation is necessary to secure equal justice to all loyal persons, without regard to color, at the national capitol?” After the war ended, he gave a passionate speech in support of black suffrage. By denying freedmen the right to vote, he argued, the United States was allowing southerners extraordinary and unconscionable power over the lives of their former slaves. They were placing every black man at the mercy of the same people “who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat.”
Having known intimately the cruelties and injustices of poverty, Garfield found ways to help not just the despairing, but even the despised. As head of the Appropriations Committee, he directed funds toward exploration and westward expansion, the only hope for thousands of men