slave, now a human rights leader and marshal of the District of Columbia, wasted no time in telling his audience which presidential candidate would receive his vote. “James A. Garfield must be our President,” he said to riotous cheers. “I know [Garfield], colored man; he is right on our questions, take my word for it. He is a typical American all over. He has shown us how man in the humblest circumstances can grapple with man, rise, and win. He has come from obscurity to fame, and we’ll make him more famous.” After pausing once more as the cheers reverberated through the hall, Douglass went on. Garfield, he said, “has burst up through the incrustations that surround the poor, and has shown us how it is possible for an American to rise. He has built the road over which he traveled. He has buffeted the billows of adversity, and to-night he swims in safety where Hancock, in despair, is going down.”
Although Garfield did not allow himself to campaign, he could not resist addressing the thousands of people who traveled to Mentor to see him. In what came to be known as “front porch talks,” he would stand on his wide veranda, talking to enormous groups—from five hundred members of an Indianapolis Lincoln Club, to nine hundred women who had traveled together from Cleveland. On a single day in October, despite the rain, five thousand people converged on Garfield’s farm. When a group of Germans stood before him, he spoke to them in their native language, delivering the first speech by an American presidential candidate that was not in English.
The most stirring moment in the campaign came in late October, when the members of a singing group from an all-black university in Nashville, Tennessee, stood before Garfield’s modest farmhouse and sang for him. “As the singers poured out their melodious and at the same time vibrant but mournful spirituals, the little audience became increasingly emotional,” Garfield’s private secretary later recalled. “Tears were trickling down the cheeks of many of the women, and one staid old gentleman blubbered audibly behind a door.” When the performance ended, Garfield stood to address the group. Squaring his shoulders and straightening his back, he said, in a voice that rang through the still night, “And I tell you now, in the closing days of this campaign, that I would rather be with you and defeated than against you and victorious.”
A few weeks later, on the afternoon of November 2, a bright, cloudless day, Garfield traveled down the dusty road from Lawnfield to the town hall to cast his vote. Aside from this one concession to the election, and an occasional trip to the office behind his house to see what news had come over the telegraph, he went about his normal routine. He wrote some letters, made plans for a new garden near the farm’s engine house, and settled his dairy account in town. That evening, he visited with neighbors.
Although Garfield did not show a great deal of interest in the election, the rest of the country did. Voter turnout was 78 percent, and as the results began to come in, it quickly became clear that it was going to be a close race. Interest was particularly high in the wake of the previous presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes was widely believed to have stolen the presidency from Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden, the governor of New York, had won the popular vote by a clear and undisputed margin, and, with all but four states accounted for, had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. However, when the remaining four states reported two different sets of returns, Congress formed an electoral commission to distribute their votes. The commission, a highly partisan group made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, awarded all twenty of the disputed votes to Hayes, handing him the presidency by one electoral vote.
In 1880, no commission threatened to steal the presidency, but so close was the race that there was uncertainty until the final hours. At 3:00 a.m. on the morning of November 3, with the nation still anxiously waiting to learn who its next president would be, Garfield went to bed. When he woke up a few hours later and was told in no uncertain terms that he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States, he was, one reporter noted with astonishment, the “coolest man in the room.” Later that day, Garfield gave his