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James A. Garfield

1831–1881 · 50 years Tier III

The congressman who published a proof of the Pythagorean theorem

Portrait of James A. Garfield — Unknown — part of Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. — 1881 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

His father died in 1833, when James was 18 months old, and left a widow, a mortgage and four children on a half-cleared patch of Ohio. Eliza Garfield sold off land to hold the rest, and her youngest worked it. He got away at 16, came home within weeks half dead of fever, and went to school instead, paying for Geauga Seminary and then the Eclectic Institute at Hiram with carpentry and a janitor's broom. Williams College took him as a third-year man. He finished salutatorian in 1856, having found in its president, Mark Hopkins, the teacher he would quote for the rest of his life. He preached, unordained, and was very good at it.

A win at Middle Creek in 1862 made him a brigadier at 30, and Chickamauga made him a major general and got him out of the army and into the House, where he stayed nine terms and ran Appropriations. In 1880 he went to Chicago to nominate somebody else and came home the nominee on the 36th ballot. Then 199 days, of which 79 were spent dying. BriefHistory has the shooting, the doctors and the reform that came out of it. What is left is the 49 years in front of the bullet.

Two things sit awkwardly against the log-cabin story. He accepted ten shares of Crédit Mobilier stock on credit in the late 1860s and told a congressional committee in 1873 that he had not — one biographer's summing-up was that he did not exactly lie and did not completely tell the truth. And in 1862, on a long absence from home, he began an affair with a journalist in New York. He confessed it to Lucretia, who told him to go back and end it to the woman's face, and then took him back. Their three-year-old daughter Eliza died in December 1863 while he was still in the field. The marriage that came out of all that was, by both their accounts, the strongest thing either of them had.

Cleveland buried him under a 180-foot sandstone tower on a hill at Lake View, dedicated in 1890 and paid for entirely by private donation, some of it in pennies mailed in by schoolchildren. His casket lies in the open in the crypt, where anyone can walk down and look at it. Cyrus Field ran a separate national subscription for Lucretia. She used part of it to build a fireproof wing onto the Ohio house for his books and papers, which is usually counted the first presidential library, and lived another 37 years. Historians decline to rank him, on the reasonable ground that 199 days is not a record. Mathematicians still teach the trapezoid.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

James A. Garfield's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Argument in Ex parte Milligan case
His first case before the Supreme Court, and it held that military tribunals could not try civilians where the courts were open 1866
Act creating a federal Department of Education law
He sponsored it — the first federal education office 1867
A proof of the Pythagorean theorem discovery
A trapezoid argument published in the New England Journal of Education while he sat in Congress 1876
Nominating speech for John Sherman speech
It turned the convention toward the speaker instead of the candidate 1880
Appointment of Frederick Douglass as Recorder of Deeds other
One of the few acts he had time to complete 1881

Life in brief

with age at each point

1833 aged ~2 His father dies and leaves the family on an unfinished Ohio farm James was 18 months old.
1856 aged ~25 Graduates salutatorian from Williams College He had paid his way with carpentry and janitor work.
November 11, 1858 aged 26 Marries Lucretia Rudolph after a long and doubtful courtship
1862 aged ~31 Wins at Middle Creek in eastern Kentucky and is made a brigadier general at 30
December 3, 1863 aged 32 His daughter Eliza dies at three while he is away from home
1876 aged ~45 Publishes an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem
June 8, 1880 aged 48 Nominated for president on the 36th ballot after coming to Chicago for someone else
July 2, 1881 aged 49 Shot at the Baltimore and Potomac depot in Washington
May 30, 1890 aged 58 A 180-foot memorial paid for by public subscription is dedicated over his grave Some of the money arrived as pennies from schoolchildren.