Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,7

New York, but as a very young man Abram had set his sights on the West. In 1819, he and his half brother Amos packed their bags and moved to Ohio. After several years of struggling to make a living, Abram took a job helping to build the Ohio and Erie Canal, as he had helped to build the Erie Canal when he was a teenager.

In the early 1800s, Ohio was the American frontier. Wild and largely unmapped, it had not joined the Union until 1803, becoming the country’s seventeenth state. Ohio was the first state to be created out of the Northwest Territory. Iroquois and Shawnee tribes were still scattered throughout the Ohio Valley, fiercely fighting for the little land they had left, but time was running out. They had lost their British allies after the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson would pass the Indian Removal Act less than twenty years later, forcing them all onto reservations.

Although land was available for two dollars an acre, ten years would pass before Abram and Amos had saved enough money for a farm. Soon after their arrival, they met and married a pair of sisters from New Hampshire named Eliza and Alpha Ballou. In 1829 the two couples, now with children of their own, bought a hundred acres of heavily wooded land in Cuyahoga County. They were just sixteen miles from Cleveland but two miles from the nearest road, surrounded by a vast, thick forest. It was the life they had hoped for, but it was far from easy.

When Abram had seen the wildfire racing toward his cabin, he had met it with equal ferocity. He worked all day, digging ditches, hacking away brush, and fighting back the roaring, choking flames. Somehow, miraculously, he had saved his farm, but his victory came at a high cost. Although he was young and strong, he was also poor and isolated. With no medical care beyond an unlicensed, itinerate doctor, he quickly succumbed to exhaustion and fever. Within days, he would die, keenly aware that he was leaving Eliza with four children to feed. Their youngest, James, not yet two years old.

There would come a time when the story of James Garfield’s early life would be widely admired. Throughout the nation and around the world, his extraordinary rise from fatherlessness and abject poverty would make him the embodiment of the American dream. Garfield himself, however, refused ever to romanticize his childhood. “Let us never praise poverty,” he would write to a friend, “for a child at least.”

Even by the standards of the hardscrabble rural region in which he lived, Garfield was raised in desperate circumstances. His mother, left with debts she could not hope to pay after her husband’s death, was forced to sell much of their land. What was left, she farmed herself with the help of her oldest son, James’s eleven-year-old brother, Thomas. Between them, working as hard as they could, they managed to avoid giving the younger children to more prosperous families to raise, as their relatives had advised them to do. So little did they have to spare, however, that James did not have a pair of shoes until he was four years old.

Although Garfield understood clearly, and at times painfully, that he was poor, he had inherited from his mother an innate dignity that never failed to inspire respect. His mother was fiercely proud that she and her children had “received no aid, worked and won their living and could look any man in the face.” Even as a child, Garfield walked with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back. “If I ever get through a course of study I don’t expect any one will ask me what kind of a coat I wore when studying,” he wrote to his mother while attending a nearby school, “and if they do I shall not be ashamed to tell them it was a ragged one.”

Eliza Garfield’s greatest ambition for her second son was a good education. She came from a long line of New England intellectuals, including a president of Tufts College and the founder and editor of a Boston newspaper. She donated some of her land for a small schoolhouse so that her children, as well as her neighbors’ children, could have a place to learn. Even when James turned eleven years old, the age at which his brother had begun helping the family by working on neighboring farms, she insisted that he stay home and concentrate on his