Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,46

to tamp down a growing terror. “My anxiety for her dominates all my thoughts,” he wrote on the night of May 8, “and makes me feel that I am fit for nothing.”

Lucretia was the center of Garfield’s world. They had met thirty years earlier, while attending the same rural school in Ohio when he was nineteen and she was eighteen. Like Garfield’s mother, Lucretia’s parents were determined that their children would receive a good education. Her father, Zeb Rudolph, was a farmer and carpenter, but he was also one of the founders of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. When the school opened in 1850, he enrolled Lucretia in its first class, watching with pride as she edited the school magazine, helped to start a literary society, and studied Latin with a discipline, if not a passion, that would rival Garfield’s.

When Garfield arrived on campus the following year, the boy Lucretia had known in high school transformed before her eyes. She would tell her daughter years later that James at first seemed to her just a “big, shy lad with a shock of unruly hair … as awkward and untutored as he was dead in earnest and determined to learn any and everything that came his way.” As he immersed himself in his studies, however, the last traces of his life in the log cabin and on the canal seemed to vanish, not just from his mind, but from his face. “Mental development and culture,” Lucretia marveled, “seemed, literally, to chisel fineness and delicacy into features that were, if not rugged, at least unformed.”

Although Lucretia and James shared a common background and desire for education, they were very different people. Bighearted and cheerful, Garfield was nearly impossible to resist. Throughout his life, he was just as likely to give a friend, or even a determined enemy, a bear hug as a handshake, and he had an enormous, booming laugh that was unfailingly contagious. Years later, the son of a friend of Garfield’s would remember watching as his father and Garfield laughed their hearts out, literally rolling “over and over upon the ground and stirring the very trees with their Olympian laughter.”

Lucretia, in stark contrast, was soft-spoken and very private. Her parents, although kind and deeply interested in her education, had never been demonstrative. Zeb Rudolph’s neighbors would remember him as being almost without emotion, “never elated and never greatly depressed.” Although Lucretia would at times complain that James let the “generous and gushing affection of your warm impulsive nature” affect his good judgment, she worried that she leaned too far in the opposite direction. “The world,” she feared, would judge her to be “cold,” even “heartless.”

Their courtship was long, awkward, and far more analytical than passionate. It began with a painfully polite letter from Garfield to Lucretia when he was on a trip to Niagara Falls in 1853. “Please pardon the liberty I take in pointing my pen towards your name this evening,” he began stiffly, “for I have taken in so much scenery today I cannot contain it all myself.” As the years passed and they slowly moved toward marriage, Garfield waited impatiently for Lucretia to express her love for him, but she remained distant. Finally, in frustration, he wrote to her, “It is my desire to ‘know and be known.’ I long to hear from you … to know your heart and open mine to you.… Let your heart take the pen and your hand hold it not back.” Lucretia, however, could only ask James to try to understand. “I do not think I was born for constant caresses, and surely no education of my childhood taught me to need them,” she would one day tell him. “I am only sorry that my own quiet and reserve should mean to you a lack of love.”

In 1855, when Garfield returned to Ohio from Massachusetts, where he was attending Williams College, Lucretia seemed to him as cold and remote as the first time he met her. “For the past year, I had fears before I went away, that she had not that natural warmth of heart which my nature calls so loudly for,” he wrote dejectedly in his diary. “It seems as though all my former fears were well founded and that she and I are not like each other in enough respects to make us happy together.… My wild passionate heart demands so much.” When he visited her again the following day, however, Lucretia bravely handed him her diary. To