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By Root 1111 0

Republican Party. From a very young age, Garfield had realized that he had one skill above all others—the ability to capture a crowd. When he was just twenty-one, he had humiliated a well-known traveling philosopher named Treat who made his living by going from town to town attacking Christianity and those who would defend it. After Treat had addressed one of the professors at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, with taunting disrespect, Garfield had stood up and, to the surprise of no one but Treat, quietly and calmly eviscerated him. “It is impossible,” a man who attended the debate would later recall, “for me to give any idea of his speech or of its effect upon his audience.… The applause was constant and deafening. He spoke with readiness and power and eloquence which were perfectly overwhelming. I do not think that Mr. Treat ever attempted another speech at Hiram.”

By the time Garfield entered Congress, he was a highly skilled rhetorician. The only problem was that, as good as he was at speaking, he enjoyed it even more, perhaps too much. It was not unheard of for him to speak on the floor of Congress more than forty times in a single day, and when he gave a speech, it was rarely a short one. Over the years, he had tested his colleagues’ patience on more than one occasion, prompting some of them to complain that he was “too fond of talking.” Even Garfield himself admitted that, when it came to words, he had a “fatal facility.”

However, when the fate of a bill lay in the balance or there was a moment of grave national importance, Garfield’s colleagues often turned to him to speak for the Party. On the first anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, he had been asked to give an impromptu eulogy, even though he was then one of the most junior members of Congress. Garfield had resisted, arguing that someone with substantially more seniority should give the address, but his colleagues would not relent. With only a few minutes to prepare, he delivered a speech that would be remembered not only for its eloquence but also for the powerful emotion it conveyed. At one point, he recited from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, which he had not read in many years. “We have but faith: we cannot know; / For knowledge is of things we see / And yet we trust it comes from thee, / A beam in darkness: let it grow.”

Yet despite his ability, Garfield dreaded the speech he was about to give. He was obliged to support Sherman, a fellow Ohioan, but he did not believe Sherman was the best candidate for the nomination. So reluctant was Garfield to deliver the speech that he had hardly given any thought to what he would say. “I have arisen at 7 this morning to tell you the peril I am in,” he had written home in desperation just a few days earlier. “I have not made the first step in preparation for my speech nominating Sherman and I see no chance to get to prepare. It was a frightful mistake that I did not write [it] before I came. It now seems inevitable that I shall fall far below what I ought to do.”

Garfield’s agonizing situation was made far worse by the fact that he would be competing for the attention and sympathies of the rabidly partisan crowd with Roscoe Conkling, a senior senator from New York and the undisputed leader of the Stalwarts. Conkling was not only a famously charismatic speaker, but arguably the most powerful person in the country. Ten years earlier, then President Grant had given Conkling, his most fiercely loyal supporter, control of the New York Customs House, which was the largest federal office in the United States and collected 70 percent of the country’s customs revenue. Since then, Conkling had personally made each appointment to the customs house. Any man fortunate enough to receive one of the high-paying jobs had been expected to make generous contributions to the Republican Party of New York, and to show unwavering loyalty to Conkling. So powerful had Conkling become that he had cavalierly turned down Grant’s offer to nominate him to the U.S. Supreme Court six years