Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,12

much like his father. It was to Garfield that the geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell turned when he needed support for a surveying expedition. Powell, who navigated rapids and climbed cliffs with one arm, having lost the other to a lead bullet in the Civil War, published a full report of his historic exploration of the Colorado River, and the first non-native passage through the Grand Canyon, only after Garfield insisted that he do so.

Garfield even defended enemies of the Union. In his only case as a lawyer, which he argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1866, just a year after the Civil War had ended, he represented five Indiana men who had been sentenced to death for stealing weapons and freeing rebel prisoners. The men, who were fiercely hated throughout the North, claimed not that they were innocent but that, as civilians, their court-martial had been unconstitutional. To the horror and outrage of his Republican friends and colleagues, Garfield agreed, accepted their case, and won.

Inexplicably, it seemed that the only cause for which Garfield would not fight was his own political future. In an early-adopted eccentricity that would become for him a central “law of life,” he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. “I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements,” he admitted. “I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.” From his first political campaign, he had sternly instructed his backers that “first, I should make no pledge to any man or any measures; second, I should not work for my own nomination.” The closest he had come to even admitting that he was interested in a political office was to tell his friends, when a seat in the U.S. Senate became available in 1879, that “if the Senatorship is thus to be thrown open for honorable competition, I should be sorry to be wholly omitted from consideration in that direction.” After a landslide victory, his campaign’s expenses amounted to less than $150.

When it came to the presidency, Garfield simply looked the other way. He spent seventeen years in Congress, and every day he saw men whose desperate desire for the White House ruined their careers, their character, and their lives. “I have so long and so often seen the evil effects of the presidential fever upon my associates and friends that I am determined it shall not seize me,” he wrote in his journal in February 1879. “In almost ever[y] case it impairs if it does not destroy the usefulness of its victim.” Aware that there was talk of making him a candidate in the presidential election of 1880, Garfield hoped to avoid the grasp of other men’s ambitions, and to be given a chance to “wait for the future.” However, he had already lived a long life for a young man, and he knew that change came without invitation, too often bringing loss and sorrow in its wake. “This world,” he had learned long before, “does not seem to be the place to carry out one’s wishes.”

• CHAPTER 3 •

“A BEAM IN DARKNESS”

Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

When Garfield made his way through the crowded streets of Chicago to the Republican National Convention on the evening of June 6, 1880, he felt not excitement, but a heavy sense of dread. The convention was about to begin the second session of its fourth day, and he had no illusions about what it would hold. Each day had been more bruising than the last, as the crowd had grown louder, the tensions higher, and the delegates angrier. The viciousness of the convention dismayed Garfield, but it did not surprise him. His first night in Chicago, he had written home asking for help in the days ahead. “Don’t fail to write me every day,” he wrote to his wife. “Each word from you will be a light in this wilderness.”

In 1880, the Republican Party was sharply divided into two warring factions. At the convention, delegates had little choice but to choose a side—either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation