Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,120

she wrote, however, were strong and fearless—most often in the protection either of her children’s future, or her husband’s memory. She had become, in the words of Garfield’s mother, James’s “armed defender.”

Although it was a role that Lucretia did not enjoy, she was determined to do it well. She spent countless hours correcting articles about James, keeping private letters out of books and newspapers, and trying to discourage eager but talentless portraitists. She informed one painter that his portrait of Garfield was “not very good” and that she hoped he would not let anyone else see “such an imperfect representation.”

Lucretia’s first concern, however, was for her husband’s papers. She asked Joseph Stanley Brown for his help in organizing them, and she used some of the money from the fund that had been established for her to build an addition to the farmhouse. The second floor of this wing was made into a library, which would become the nation’s first presidential library.

Within the library, Lucretia installed a fireproof vault. Today, that vault still holds the wreath that Queen Victoria sent upon Garfield’s death. Among the first items Lucretia placed in it, however, were the letters that she and James had written to each other over twenty-two years of marriage. She included all that she had, even the most painful. To one small bundle of letters, she attached a note. “These are the last letters and telegrams received from My Darling,” she wrote, “during the five days I remained at Elberon previous to the fearful tragedy of July 2nd, 1881.”

The most precious product of her marriage to James, their children, would, under her firm guidance, grow up to live full and useful lives, lives that would have made their father exceedingly proud. Their oldest son, Harry, would become a lawyer, a professor of government at Princeton, and, like his father, a university president—of Williams College, Garfield’s alma mater. James, also a lawyer, would become Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior in 1907. Of James, Roosevelt would write, “He has such poise and sanity—he is so fearless, and yet possesses such common sense, that he is a real support to me.” Irvin would become a lawyer as well, and Abe, the youngest, an architect. All of Garfield’s sons, no matter where they settled, remained close to their mother, often visiting her and the family farm that had shaped their boyhoods.

Perhaps more than her brothers, Mollie would struggle to accept the loss of their father. “Sometimes I feel that God couldn’t have known how we all loved & needed him, here with us,” she wrote in her diary two months after his death. “I don’t believe I shall ever learn to say ‘Thy will be done’ about that.” The holidays were particularly painful, when she kept expecting to hear the little song, “Ring out wild bells,” that her father used to sing, “to a tune he made himself.” “Oh! me!” she wrote, “How I miss my darling father.”

In the end, Mollie would find comfort and strength in an emotion even more powerful than grief—love. Little more than a year after her father’s death, Mollie, now sixteen, wrote in her diary not a lament, but a confession. She had fallen in love with the young man who had been like a son to her father—Joseph Stanley Brown. “I believe I am in love,” she wrote. “I don’t believe I will ever in my life love any man as I do Mr. Brown—and it can’t be merely like. For I like Bentley, Don, and Gaillard Hunt. And it isn’t infatuation, for when I first knew Mr. Brown I didn’t like him at all. No, I’m sure it is nothing but honest & true love.”

Brown had turned down Arthur’s request to stay on in the White House as the president’s private secretary. He wished, he said, to complete the work he had begun. When he had finished that work—organizing Garfield’s papers and preparing them for binding—he left Mentor for New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

Little more than two years later, Brown returned to Ohio, a college-educated man. When Mollie arrived home after a trip to England with her mother, he was waiting for her at the dock, with a ring in his pocket. The diamond was, Mollie would later tell her daughter, “a small stone, but a very good one.” Three months later, Mollie and Joseph were married, in a double wedding with Harry Garfield and his fiancée, Belle Hartford Mason. The wedding