Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,9

to go back to school. “I took the money,” Garfield wrote, “as well as the advice.”

By the fall of 1851, Garfield had transformed from a rough canal man into a passionate and determined student. After studying at local schools, he was accepted to a small preparatory school in northern Ohio called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. The school’s entire campus consisted of a wide cornfield and, on the crest of a hill, a modest three-story redbrick building with a white bell tower. “It was without a dollar of endowment, without a powerful friend anywhere,” Garfield would later write, but to him, it was a chance to become an educated man.

Unable to afford tuition, he convinced the school to allow him to work as a janitor in exchange for his education. He swept floors, hauled wood, and made fires, and he never tried to hide his poverty from his fellow students. As he walked to the tower every morning, having left the first lecture of the day early so he could ring the school’s enormous bell, his “tread was firm and free,” a friend would recall years later. “The same unconscious dignity followed him then that attended him when he ascended the eastern portico of the Capitol to deliver his Inaugural address.”

Garfield quickly realized that he was an extraordinarily talented student, and the more he learned, the more ambitious he became. “The ice is broken,” he wrote as he began his academic life. “I am resolved to make a mark in the world.… There is some of the slumbering thunder in my soul and it shall come out.” His day began at 5:00 a.m., as he immersed himself in Virgil before breakfast, and it continued, unabated, with studying, classes, work, and more studying until just before midnight. No one worked harder, and if they came close, Garfield took it as a personal challenge. “If at any time I began to flag in my effort to master a subject,” he wrote, “I was stimulated to further effort by the thought, ‘Some other fellow in the class will probably master it.’ ” As determined as Garfield was to outpace his fellow students, his fiercest competition was with himself. “He had a great desire and settled purpose to conquer,” a classmate and student of his wrote. “To master all lessons, to prove superior to every difficulty, to excel all competitors, to conquer and surpass himself.”

So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more—one on penmanship and the other on Virgil.

In 1854, Garfield was accepted to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the competition was greater than he had ever experienced, stirring in him an even fiercer ambition. “There is a high standard of scholarship here and very many excellent scholars, those that have had far better advantages and more thorough training than I have,” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving in Williamstown. “I have been endeavoring to calculate their dimensions and power and, between you and me, I have determined that out of the forty-two members of my class thirty-seven shall stand behind me within two months.”

After graduating with honors from Williams two years later, Garfield returned to the Eclectic Institute to teach. By the time he was twenty-six, he was the school’s president.

Two things ended Garfield’s academic career: politics and war. When an Ohio state senator died unexpectedly in the summer of 1859, Garfield was asked to take his place in an upcoming election. He accepted the nomination, but not without concern. “I am aware that I launch out upon a fickle current and am about a work as precarious as men follow,” he wrote in his diary the night of the nomination. Two months later he won the election by a wide margin, quietly beginning a career that, in the end, would lead him to the White House.

Little more than a year after Garfield entered politics, the country was plunged into civil war. Garfield, anxious to leave the legislature for the battlefield, wrote to a friend that he had “no heart to think of anything but the country.” Four months after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, he was