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This history seemed to Garfield to be drawing toward some sort of grand culmination, one that could be fully reached only by a mighty human effort. “He was a firm believer in the swift-coming millennium,” one of his students recalled. “He cited authorities to prove that it was surely coming; proved its desirability, and quoted some very good poetry; but wound up with, ‘Let us, therefore, do all that we can to hasten the millennium.’ ”39

The Disciples were just one of dozens, even hundreds, of new religious creeds in antebellum America. Doctrine and practices varied enormously from place to place and church to church, running the gamut from cool rationalism to ecstatic mysticism; antislavery moralizing to justification of bondage. What those movements taught in common, though—even to those who remained outside them—was that individual men and women had the power to choose their own versions of Christian, or non-Christian, faith. Everyone was a free agent, and morally responsible for individual decisions. There was no obligation to blindly follow the beliefs of one’s parents: each new generation of Americans had the power to, quite literally, rewrite the universe in its own terms.40

As the new sects jockeyed for power and for new converts, they became more aggressive. Many, moreover, shared the Disciple vision of an impending, apocalyptic battle between good and evil to precede a new golden era of godliness: a battle that only true Christian warriors could win. Garfield became popular among the Disciples not just for his intellectual gifts but also for his combative prowess. Theological debates on the Reserve were knockdown, drag-out, no-holds-barred brawls. In 1858, the young preacher went ten grueling rounds—two four-hour debates a day for five consecutive days—against a scientific theorist named William Denton, who claimed that life on earth had developed by “spontaneous generation.” But rather than insisting on the literal truth of Genesis as his rebuttal, Garfield delved deep into the works of the greatest scientific thinkers of the time—Humboldt, Agassiz, Lyell, Comte—to show that nature’s laws were themselves proof of God’s role as Creator. As many as a thousand people attended each debate, and at the end, they hailed Garfield as the victor and showered him with invitations to give lectures on “Geology and Religion.”41

Sometimes the combat was less rhetorical. Once, at a tent meeting, a “big two-fisted rowdy” tried to disrupt Garfield’s sermon about the patience of Job. The powerfully built professor—as local lore maintained—stepped toward the bully and, remarking that even Job’s patience would have worn thin under the circumstances, knocked off the man’s cap and then “grasping him by the hair, hoisted him at arm’s length from the ground, as easily as if he had been an infant.” This was muscular Christianity at its best. The congregation loved it.42

At the same time that Garfield was being born again as a Christian warrior, he was awakening to another no less potent, no less muscular, if secular, faith—one drawing as many millions of young Northerners to its banner as the Gospel: the creed of the self-made man.

Many years later, a famous author who was almost Garfield’s exact contemporary—they were born less than two months apart—would pen a highly embellished account of the late president’s rise from obscurity to the White House. Horatio Alger titled his book From Canal Boy to President, and in it he turned Garfield into a version of one of his fictional heroes. (The biography’s title page reminded readers, in capital letters, that Alger himself was already famous as the AUTHOR OF RAGGED DICK; LUCK AND PLUCK; TATTERED TOM, ETC.)43 Even without embellishment, though, Garfield’s swift rise in the world was indeed a novel-worthy tale of luck and pluck. Born into true poverty, he climbed up by dint of perseverance, intellectual accomplishment, and hard manual labor. He worked his way through a local academy, then the Eclectic Institute,