Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [11]
In 1854, Garfield was accepted to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the competition was greater than he had ever experienced, stirring in him an even fiercer ambition. “There is a high standard of scholarship here and very many excellent scholars, those that have had far better advantages and more thorough training than I have,” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving in Williamstown. “I have been endeavoring to calculate their dimensions and power and, between you and me, I have determined that out of the forty-two members of my class thirty-seven shall stand behind me within two months.”
After graduating with honors from Williams two years later, Garfield returned to the Eclectic Institute to teach. By the time he was twenty-six, he was the school’s president.
Two things ended Garfield’s academic career: politics and war. When an Ohio state senator died unexpectedly in the summer of 1859, Garfield was asked to take his place in an upcoming election. He accepted the nomination, but not without concern. “I am aware that I launch out upon a fickle current and am about a work as precarious as men follow,” he wrote in his diary the night of the nomination. Two months later he won the election by a wide margin, quietly beginning a career that, in the end, would lead him to the White House.
Little more than a year after Garfield entered politics, the country was plunged into civil war. Garfield, anxious to leave the legislature for the battlefield, wrote to a friend that he had “no heart to think of anything but the country.” Four months after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, he was made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. Soon after, at thirty years of age, he was promoted to colonel and enthusiastically began recruiting men from Ohio to join the ranks of his regiment—the 42nd.
As he looked into the eager faces of his recruits, many of them students of the Eclectic Institute, Garfield shared their excitement, too young himself to understand that, before the war had ended, he would be filled with “pride and grief commingled.” The 42nd’s first commission was to fight back the growing rebel incursion into Kentucky. Every soldier, Union or Confederate, understood the critical role Kentucky would play in the outcome of the Civil War. As a border state, and Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, it was the constant target of military and ideological attacks from the North and the South. “I hope to have God on my side,” Lincoln reportedly said, “but I must have Kentucky.”
Garfield’s regiment did not have a hope of succeeding. The Confederate force it faced was two thousand men strong, fortified with a battery of four cannons and several wagonloads of ammunition, and led by Humphrey Marshall, a well-known, well-seasoned brigadier general who had graduated from West Point the year after Garfield was born. In sharp contrast, the 42nd had five hundred fewer soldiers and no artillery. Worse, its commander was a young academic who had spent the past decade thinking about Latin and higher math and had absolutely no military experience, in war or peace.
Although he was hopelessly inexperienced, outmanned, and outgunned, Garfield accepted the assignment. After he received his orders, he worked through the night, hunched over a map of eastern Kentucky. By the light of a lantern, he traced the ragged mountains and deep valleys that marked the six thousand square miles of territory he and his men had been asked to defend. By morning, he was ready to set out.
In the end, the struggle for Kentucky’s allegiance came down to a single, seminal battle—the Battle of Middle Creek—and a military strategy that some would call brilliant, others audacious. In January of 1862, after weeks of marching