Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [14]
When it came to the presidency, Garfield simply looked the other way. He spent seventeen years in Congress, and every day he saw men whose desperate desire for the White House ruined their careers, their character, and their lives. “I have so long and so often seen the evil effects of the presidential fever upon my associates and friends that I am determined it shall not seize me,” he wrote in his journal in February 1879. “In almost ever[y] case it impairs if it does not destroy the usefulness of its victim.” Aware that there was talk of making him a candidate in the presidential election of 1880, Garfield hoped to avoid the grasp of other men’s ambitions, and to be given a chance to “wait for the future.” However, he had already lived a long life for a young man, and he knew that change came without invitation, too often bringing loss and sorrow in its wake. “This world,” he had learned long before, “does not seem to be the place to carry out one’s wishes.”
• CHAPTER 3 •
“A BEAM IN DARKNESS”
Quiet is no certain pledge of permanence and safety. Trees may flourish and flowers may bloom upon the quiet mountain side, while silently the trickling rain-drops are filling the deep cavern behind its rocky barriers, which, by and by, in a single moment, shall hurl to wild ruin its treacherous peace.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
When Garfield made his way through the crowded streets of Chicago to the Republican National Convention on the evening of June 6, 1880, he felt not excitement, but a heavy sense of dread. The convention was about to begin the second session of its fourth day, and he had no illusions about what it would hold. Each day had been more bruising than the last, as the crowd had grown louder, the tensions higher, and the delegates angrier. The viciousness of the convention dismayed Garfield, but it did not surprise him. His first night in Chicago, he had written home asking for help in the days ahead. “Don’t fail to write me every day,” he wrote to his wife. “Each word from you will be a light in this wilderness.”
In 1880, the Republican Party was sharply divided into two warring factions. At the convention, delegates had little choice but to choose a side—either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation with the South; or the men whose values Garfield shared, a determined group of reformers who would become known as the Half-Breeds. The Stalwarts had nothing but contempt for their rivals within the party, particularly Rutherford B. Hayes, who was about to complete his first term in the White House. President Hayes’s attempts to replace government patronage with a merit system had been met with such fury from the Stalwarts, and had led to such bitter contention and open rebellion, that he had made it clear to anyone who would listen that he did not want to be nominated for a second term. “The first half of my term was so full of trouble and embarrassments as to be a continual struggle,” Hayes wrote, “and I do not propose to invite a new season of embarrassment.”
Hayes’s abdication and the escalating battle for control of the party had aroused such intense interest in the nomination that, for the first time in Republican history, every state had sent a representative to the convention. The Half-Breeds had two top candidates: John Sherman, General William Tecumseh Sherman’s younger brother and secretary of the