1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [223]
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In the late summer of 1861, James A. Garfield received his commission as colonel of the new Forty-second Regiment of Ohio Volunteers. In its ranks were many of his old pupils from Hiram College. The regiment would play a key role in securing Kentucky for the Union, and its early victories made Garfield a brigadier general, bringing him national acclaim. He later commanded troops at Shiloh and Chickamauga. Garfield resigned from the army in 1863, at Lincoln’s behest, to take a seat in the House of Representatives. In 1865, he was one of Congress’s most committed advocates of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery throughout the United States.7
Garfield fought staunchly not just for emancipation, but also for black civil rights. On Independence Day, 1865, he returned to the site of his Fourth of July oration five years earlier and gave a passionate speech rebutting those who believed that “the Negro” did not deserve the right to vote:
He was intelligent enough to understand from the beginning of the war that the destiny of his race was involved in it. He was intelligent enough to be true to that Union which his educated and traitorous master was endeavoring to destroy. He came to us in the hour of our sorest need, and by his aid, under God, the Republic was saved. Shall we now be guilty of the unutterable meanness, not only of thrusting him beyond the pale of its blessings, but of committing his destiny to the tender mercies of those pardoned rebels who have been so reluctantly compelled to take their feet from his neck and their hands from his throat? But some one says it is dangerous at this time to make new experiments. I answer, it is always safe to do justice. However, to grant suffrage to the black man in this country is not innovation, but restoration. It is a return to the ancient principles and practices of the fathers.
Garfield’s nomination and election to the presidency came about unexpectedly. After several candidates ended up in a deadlock at the 1880 Republican National Convention, delegates began stampeding toward the relatively obscure Ohioan. The party placed him at the head of its ticket (“I don’t know whether I am glad or not,” the somewhat dazed nominee said), and he went on to win by a slim plurality in November.
The new president’s inaugural address, almost wholly forgotten today, is a remarkable document, a clarion call for the nation to fulfill its promises to the former slaves. Indeed, over the course of more than two centuries, no other chief executive has begun his term with such a bold, firm, specific statement on the dangerous subject of civil rights, to which Garfield devoted more than half his speech. The emancipation of the Negro, he said, was the most important event in the nation’s history since the signing of the Constitution:
It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than five million people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.
Yet, Garfield continued, this epochal transformation would not be complete until blacks were granted their full privileges as Americans: voting rights, educational parity, and equal access to economic opportunities. All of these, his listeners knew, had been largely abrogated four years earlier when the previous Republican administration decreed the abrupt end of Reconstruction.
“There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States,” Garfield now warned. “Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen.”
In the end, he offered a hopeful vision, in words eerily foreshadowing others that