Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,27
along a dirt road that ran for two miles between the train station and Lawnfield. While traveling along this road in 1877, Garfield had been impressed with the area’s “quiet country beauty” and decided it would be a good place to teach his sons the lessons he believed they could learn only on a farm.
For the past three years, Garfield had worked on his farm every chance he got. He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house. To the house itself, which was one and a half stories high with a white exterior and a dark red roof, he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room, where documents and speeches are corded up like firewood.”
Although Garfield enjoyed improving the farmhouse, his greatest interest lay in the land, which he approached as if it were an enormous science experiment. His first large project had been to build a dam to irrigate the fields. Then, the summer before his nomination, he experimented with a fertilizer made up of a carefully calibrated combination of pulverized limestone and ground bone. “I long for time,” he lamented in his journal, “to study agricultural chemistry and make experiments with soils and forces.”
Garfield finally got his wish during his presidential campaign. Although he argued that he should “take the stump and bear a fighting share in the campaign,” traveling from town to town and asking for votes was considered undignified for a presidential candidate. Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised Garfield to do the same. “Sit crosslegged,” he said, “and look wise.”
Happily left to his own devices, Garfield poured his time and energy into his farm. He worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, and harvesting crops, and swung a scythe with the confidence and steady hand he had developed as a boy. In July, he oversaw the threshing of his oats. “Result 475 bushels,” he noted. “No[t] so good a yield as last year.”
While Garfield worried over his crops, political war was being waged in his name. The principal target of attack was the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Widely known as “Hancock the Superb,” he was famous for his courage and resounding success during the Civil War, but he had never held an elected office and was perceived to have little more than a clouded understanding of his own platform. The Republicans, naturally, did everything in their power to encourage this perception, including distributing a pamphlet that was titled “Hancock’s Political Achievements” and filled with blank pages.
Hancock’s greatest liability, however, was his own party. Although he had been a Union hero, he could do nothing to change the fact that, in the minds of the American people, the Democratic Party was still inextricably linked to the South. Garfield himself referred to it as the “rebel party” and growled that “every Rebel guerilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.” At every opportunity, Republicans reminded voters of the Democratic Party’s ties to the South, and accused Hancock of having, at best, divided loyalties.
Democrats, in turn, focused their attentions on Garfield, who, unlike Hancock, had a long public career to plumb. As Garfield had known it would be, the Democrats’ first point of attack was the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872. At that time, Garfield had been accused, along with several other members of Congress, of accepting from a fellow congressman a good deal on stock in a railroad company called Crédit Mobilier of America. In fact, Garfield had turned down the stock, but soon after had accepted a $300 loan from the same congressman. Although he had repaid the loan before he was aware of the shadow that had fallen over Crédit Mobilier—which, as well as attempting to bribe congressmen, was involved in fraud—and a congressional committee had absolved him of any intentional wrongdoing, Garfield