The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield. E. E. Brown
its earnest and ready champion. During the campaign of 1856 he was constantly called upon for speeches and lectures. A pupil at Hiram at that time says:—
"He would attend to his duties at the Institute through the day, jump into a buggy at night, taking me or some other student to keep him company, put his arm around me, talk all the way to the place where the meeting was to be held, be it ten or twenty miles. It would not be conversation on politics, but on history, general literature, or some great principle. He was always welcomed upon the platform, and after speaking would return, taking up the theme we had dropped, getting home in the small hours in the morning.
"At nine o'clock the next day he would be in the school as fresh as ever. When Sunday came he would have a sermon as fresh and vigorous as if it had been the study of the week. All the while he was carrying on the study of law and attending to the duties incumbent on him as the president of the Institute, keeping up a course of general reading, and his acquaintance with the classics."
In 1859, only three years after his graduation, the faculty of Williams College honored Garfield with an invitation to deliver the master's oration at Commencement. The able, brilliant speaker was constantly in demand, and he won fresh laurels wherever he went.
Upon his return to Ohio, he found to his surprise that his name had been proposed in Portage county for the state senatorship. The unanimous support he received was very gratifying, yet his first thought was of the Institute.
"You will be away but a few weeks at a time," said the trustees; "your influence is greatly needed at the Capitol, and Hiram must be content to wait."
So, after much persuasion, Garfield accepted the nomination, and the Institute jealously kept his name, though deprived of his presence.
It was in January, 1860, that Garfield first took his seat in the state senate. Secession and a civil war seemed imminent, but the North continued strong and steadfast in its denunciations against slavery. Garfield, scarcely thirty years of age at this time, was the youngest member of the senate. Jacob D. Cox, another radical member, and Professor Monroe of Oberlin College, were his intimate friends, and zealous coadjutors. The 'radical triumvirate,' they were called by the opposite party, and when the constitutional amendment which would give the slave states the continuation of slavery, was submitted to the Ohio legislature, Garfield led the brave minority with marked ability and courage.
In less than ten years from the time he visited Columbus with his mother, he had become one of the most prominent members of the state senate!
The following extract from the Fourth of July oration he delivered that year at Ravenna gives us a passing glimpse of his patriotic eloquence—
"The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea. Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by-and-by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace. It is true that in our land there is no such outer quiet, no such deceitful repose. Here society is a restless and surging sea. The roar of the billows, the dash of the wave, is forever in our ears. Even the angry hoarseness of breakers is not unheard. But there is an understratum of deep, calm sea, which the breath of the wildest tempest can never reach. There is, deep down in the hearts of the American people, a strong and abiding love of our country and its liberty, which no surface-storms of passion can ever shake. That kind of instability which arises from a free movement and interchange of position among the members of society, which brings one drop up to glisten for a time in the crest of the highest wave, and then gives place to another while it goes down to mingle again with the millions below, such instability is the surest pledge of permanence. On such instability the eternal fixedness of the universe is based. Each planet, in its circling orbit, returns to the god of its departure, and on the balance of these wildly rolling spheres God has planted the base of His mighty works. So the hope of our national perpetuity rests upon that perfect individual freedom, which shall forever keep up the circuit of perpetual change. God forbid that the waters of our national life should ever settle to the dead level of a waveless calm. It would be the stagnation of death—the ocean grave of individual liberty."
Garfield was elected to a second term in the senate, and among the difficult questions he was obliged to discuss the following year that of "State Rights" was one of the most perplexing.
CHAPTER XII.
War declared between the North and South.—Garfield forms a regiment from the Western Reserve.—Is appointed Colonel.—General Buell's Order.—Garfield takes charge of the 18th Brigade.—Jordan's perilous journey.—Bradley Brown.—Plan of a Campaign.—March against Marshall.
The Ohio legislature was still in session when, upon that never-to-be-forgotten April day, in 1861, Fort Sumter received the first rebel shot. The news was quickly followed by a call from President Lincoln for seventy-five thousand men. This, proclamation was read in the Ohio senate, and amid deafening applause, Garfield immediately sprang to his feet, and moved that Ohio should contribute twenty thousand men and three million dollars as the quota of the state.
Although the preservation of the Union was the first thought that presented itself to the minds of the people, another and deeper impulse—the overthrow of slavery—filled their hearts and nerved their hands for the coming conflict.
To his old pupil, Mr. Hinsdale, Garfield writes—
"My heart and thought are full almost every moment with the terrible reality of our country's condition. We have learned so long to look upon the convulsions of European States as things wholly impossible here, that the people are slow in coming to the belief that there may be any breaking up of our institutions; but stern, awful certainty is fastening upon the hearts of men. I do not see any way, outside a miracle of God, which can avoid civil war with all its attendant horrors. Peaceable dissolution is utterly impossible. Indeed I cannot say that I would wish it possible. To make the concessions demanded by the South would be hypocritical and sinful; they would neither be obeyed nor respected. I am inclined to believe that the sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission."
Garfield, always as quick to act as to speak, immediately offered his services to Gov. Dennison, who at once sent him to Missouri to obtain five thousand stands of arms that General Lyon had placed there.
These having been safely shipped to Columbus, Gov. Dennison then sent Garfield to Cleveland to organize the seventh and eighth regiments of Ohio infantry. He would have appointed him colonel of one of them, but Garfield, with his usual modesty, declined because he had had no military experience. He agreed, however, to take a subordinate position if he could serve under a West Point graduate.
The governor then appointed him lieutenant-colonel, and commissioned him to raise a regiment from the Western Reserve. He hoped to have his old schoolmate, Captain Hazen, of the regular army, for colonel, but when the governor sent on for his transfer, General Scott refused to release him.
Meanwhile, the Hiram students had laid aside their books, and flocked with patriotic ardor to the standard of their old leader. The greater part of this forty-second regiment, indeed, was made up of Campbellites, whose noble self-sacrifice in the days that followed will never be forgotten.
When the regiment went into camp at Columbus it was still without a colonel. Again the governor begged Garfield to assume the command, and after repeated requests he finally consented.
After making the decision, he wrote thus to a friend:—
"One by one my old plans and aims, modes of thought and feeling, are found to be inconsistent with present duty, and are set aside to give place to the new structure of military life. It is not without a regret, almost tearful at times, that I look upon the ruins. But if, as the result of the broken plans and shattered individual lives of thousands of American citizens, we can see on the ruins of our