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By Root 1633 0

’t even mention Washington and Jefferson. The true significance of the Revolution, he told them, was as the onset of a new era in the evolution of the human species, when for the first time a man’s success depended solely on his own brains and brawn as he “went forth to fight for himself the battle of life.” Then he began to speak of America’s history in geological, even cosmological, terms. Over the course of more than an hour, shock waves of revolution could be heard shattering the rocky strata of past millennia; the arctic ice of aristocratic privilege broke apart and clouds of discord were dispelled by the waxing light of truth and virtue. (Meanwhile the picnickers’ ice cream slowly melted in the July sun.) In this speech—one of the first addresses of his long political career—Garfield unveiled a mystical, radical vision that would obsess him for many years to come. America, he told his audience, was like a vast and restless sea, forever one and indivisible, yet composed of countless droplets of water, all in constant motion. A modern ear picks up echoes of Whitman as well as Darwin:

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 upon the crest of the highest wave, and then give place to another while it goes down again to mingle with the millions below—such instability is the surest pledge of permanence. On such instability the eternal fixedness of the universe is based.… So the hope of our national perpetuity rests upon that perfect individual freedom which shall forever keep up the circuit of perpetual change.6

Freedom and dynamism, liberty and union: all could be forever one.

His listeners—plain Midwestern farmers though they might be—found themselves strangely moved by his peculiar revelation. So much so, in fact, that the address was printed as a pamphlet, and Garfield received dozens of invitations to speak before Republican meetings and Wide Awake rallies in the months before the presidential election. He bought a horse and buggy so that he could take to the campaign trail for Lincoln throughout his own legislative district and beyond. He even delivered a version of the speech when the Republicans held an important statewide rally in October at their very own wigwam in Columbus.7

James A. Garfield was not yet famous, of course—much less the grave Victorian statesman he would become, one of the bewhiskered blur of Gilded Age presidents. Although his sisters and cousins predicted fondly that he would someday reach the White House, this was no more than was fondly predicted of ten thousand other rising young men in a republic that rewarded youthful ambition. He might well have remained a state legislator, regulating toll roads and proposing new ordinances to prevent steamboat accidents; or a small-time college teacher, sometimes inspiring, often eccentric, beloved on campus and unknown beyond it.

Yet he turned out to be a man whom the coming age would favor extravagantly; upon whom the renewed nation would, briefly, confer the highest gift in its power. His life and his early thoughts, when viewed in retrospect, take on almost the aura of prophecy; all the more so since from the age of seventeen, Garfield had been documenting that life and those thoughts almost obsessively, hardly ever throwing away even the most insignificant scrap of paper. He kept daily diaries, saved receipts for trifling purchases, and squirreled away the notes to almost every lecture he delivered at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later known as Hiram College), the tiny institution where he taught before the Civil War. (Decades later, a journalist would visit the president-elect’s house and describe rolls of documents stacked waist-high like cordwood throughout the house, even in the bathroom.) As with most men who ended up in the White House, every one of those surviving scraps would be hoarded for posterity. After a century and a half, the young professor’s mind is still an open book—more so than almost anyone else