Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,8

education—and Thomas wholeheartedly agreed. “Whatever else happens,” they said, “James must go to school.”

James, unfortunately, had different dreams. Although he could not swim, and admitted that he “knew almost nothing about the water except what I had read,” he longed for a life at sea. As he was hundreds of miles from any ocean, the best he could do was the Erie and Ohio Canal, the canal his father had helped to build. At sixteen years of age, he left home to become a canal man, breaking his mother’s heart and, she feared, putting an end to her hopes for him.

Garfield’s first job on the canal was as a driver, the lowliest position among a group of rough, and occasionally violent, men. As the months passed, he became increasingly comfortable with the life he had fashioned for himself. He knew that the work he was doing, and the men he met along the way, likely made him “ripe for ruin,” but he was willing to take that chance.

Before he could “drink in every species of vice,” however, the course of his young life took a sudden turn. As he stood alone at the bow one night, struggling with a coiled rope, he lost his balance and, before he could right himself, fell into the canal. He had fallen in before, more than a dozen times, but each time it had been daylight, and there had been men on the deck to pull him out.

Now it was midnight, and Garfield was certain that he would drown. He cried out for help although he knew it was useless. Everyone on the boat was fast asleep. As he searched frantically and blindly for something to save his life, his hands suddenly struck the rope that had been the cause of his fall. Gripping it tightly, he found that, with a “great struggle,” he could use it to slowly pull himself up until, finally, he fell heavily onto the boat.

As he sat, dripping and scared, on the deck of the canal boat, Garfield wondered why he was still alive. The rope was not secured to anything on the boat. When he had pulled on it, it should have fallen off the deck, slipping to the bottom of the canal and leaving him to drown. “Carefully examining it, I found that just where it came over the edge of the boat it had been drawn into a crack and there knotted itself,” he would later write. “I sat down in the cold of the night and in my wet clothes and contemplated the matter.… I did not believe that God had paid any attention to me on my own account but I thought He had saved me for my mother and for something greater and better than canaling.”

Although his life would change dramatically in the years to come, Garfield would never be able to tell the story of that night without wonder. Looking back on it, moreover, he would have a much clearer and broader understanding of its importance than he could have hoped to have at sixteen. “Providence only could have saved my life,” he wrote years later, struggling to understand all that had happened to him in the intervening years. “Providence, therefore, thinks it worth saving.”

Garfield returned home soon after his near drowning a changed man, but also a very sick one. He had contracted malaria on the canal, and by the time he reached his family’s log cabin, he could barely walk. “As I approached the door at about nine o’clock in the evening,” he later recalled, “I heard my mother engaged in prayer. During the prayer she referred to me, her son away, God only knew where, and asked that he might be preserved in health to return to her.” When Eliza ended her prayer, her son quietly stepped into the cabin.

James had returned, but so ill was he that his family now feared they would lose him for good. Although his fever broke after ten days, three weeks later it was back, stronger than before. For two months, no one knew if he would survive. When he finally began to recover, his mother dared to hope that his canal days were behind him. After asking him to consider returning to his studies rather than to the canal, she told him that she had more than advice to offer. Since he had been gone, she and Thomas had managed to save seventeen dollars, and they hoped that he would use it