Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,40
to devote to my children.”
For Garfield, being able to work from home was one of the few advantages of being president. He could check in on Harry and Jim as their tutor prepared them to attend Williams College, their father’s alma mater, in the fall. He could give fourteen-year-old Mollie a quick hug before she scurried out of the house, books tucked under her arm, on her way to Madame Burr’s School, which she walked to alone every day. His youngest sons, Irvin and Abe, were more easily heard than seen, their laughter echoing through the house. While nine-year-old Abe liked to race his friends through the East Room on his high-wheeled bicycle, with its enormous front wheel, Irvin preferred to ride his bike down the central staircase and over the slippery marble floor, startling visitors and carving deep scratches into the wainscoting his mother was trying to carefully restore.
Garfield adored his children, but he was determined not to spoil them, or allow anyone else to. “Whatever fate may await me, I am resolved, if possible, to save my children from being injured by my presidency,” he wrote. “ ‘Hoc opus, hic labor est.’ Every attempt, therefore, to flatter them, or to make more of them than they deserve, I shall do all I can to prevent, and to arm them against.” In this endeavor, he had the help not only of his wife but of his practical and disciplined mother, Eliza, who had moved into the White House with the family. “I am the first mother that has occupied the White House and her son President,” she wrote to a friend. “I feel very thankful for such a son. I don’t like the word proud, but if I must use it I think in this case it is quite appropriate.”
Although Eliza found the White House “cozy and home like,” settling into it with her usual quiet confidence, she worried for her son’s safety. During the campaign, she had noticed two strangers in Mentor who looked suspicious to her and had warned James about them. “Dear old mother,” Garfield later told a friend, “she takes such an interest in her son.” The new president and first lady, however, were too overwhelmed by political battles and social obligations to worry about anything else. “Slept too soundly to remember any dream,” Lucretia wrote in her diary after her family had spent its first night in the White House. “And so our first night among the shadows of the last 80 years gave no forecast of our future.”
While living in the White House allowed Garfield to see his children more often, it made it impossible for him to escape the long lines of office seekers who waited outside his front door. A few hoped to impress the president with their skills or knowledge, but the great majority of them simply intended to wear him down with dogged determination and lists of influential friends. “This is the way in which we transact the public business of the Nation,” a New York newspaper had recently complained. “No man has the slightest chance of securing the smallest place because of his fitness for it.… If your streets are so unclean to-day as to threaten a pestilence, it is because those in charge were appointed through political influence, with no regard to their capacity to work.”
On March 5, Garfield’s first day at work, a line began to form before he even sat down to breakfast. By the time he finished, it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. When he learned what awaited him, he was dismayed but not surprised. Office seekers had begun showing up at his home in Mentor the day after the election, parking themselves on his front lawn, his porch, and, if they could get in the door, even his living room sofa. Most painful to Garfield was the fact that, within the throng, he often found his own friends. “Almost everyone who comes to me wants something,” he wrote sadly, “and this embitters the pleasures of friendship.”
Those who waited outside the White House, moreover, did not want simply to apply for a position. They wanted to make their case directly to Garfield himself. As the leader of a democratic nation, the president of the United States was expected to see everyone who wanted to see him. In 1863, a journalist close to President Lincoln and his wife had given his readers a tour of the White House.