Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [39]
Suddenly, from within the crowd, a shout of joy rang out as the presidential carriage pulled into view. Garfield, with President Hayes at his side, rode in the back of an open carriage pulled by a team of four horses and driven by a legendary presidential coachman named Albert, who had trained under Ulysses S. Grant. As Garfield appeared, he was greeted with a cheer that rose “in a deafening chorus, and … was carried along the line without interruption.” A well-known and -loved minstrel named Billy Rice waited patiently in the crowd until the president-elect was within earshot and then, in a salute to his boyhood days on the canal, yelled out, “Low bridge!” Breaking into a broad grin, Garfield grabbed his silk hat and ducked.
At precisely noon, a pair of massive bronze doors opened onto the eastern portico of the Capitol, and the presidential party, which had disappeared inside an hour earlier, could be seen filing out. Although nearly a dozen people stepped onto the portico, all eyes were on only three: Frederick Douglass, who led the procession; the president-elect; and his mother, Eliza. It was an extraordinary scene, a testimony to the triumph of intelligence and industry over prejudice and poverty, and it was not lost on those who witnessed it. “James A. Garfield sprung from the people,” a reporter marveled. “James A. Garfield, who had known all the hardship of abject poverty, in the presence of a mother who had worked with her own hands to keep him from want—was about to assume the highest civil office this world knows. As the party so stood for a moment, cheer after cheer, loud huzzas which could not be controlled or checked, echoed and reechoed about the Capitol.”
After the crowd had finally quieted and he had been sworn into office, Garfield stepped forward to deliver the inaugural address he had finished just that morning. He felt deeply the importance of this speech, and he approached it with a seriousness of purpose that was almost didactic. He talked about education, which, he believed, was the foundation of freedom. He discussed the national debt, the challenges facing farmers, and the importance of civil service reform—at which point, a journalist noted, Roscoe Conkling, sitting directly behind Garfield, “smile[d] quietly at the hard task which Gen. Garfield had marked out for himself.”
It was when he spoke about the legacy of the Civil War, however, that Garfield was most passionate. With victory, he told the crowd standing before him, had come extraordinary opportunity. “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution,” he said. “It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.” Listening to Garfield speak, a reporter in the crowd of fifty thousand realized that, all around him, “black men who had been slaves, and who still bore upon their persons the evidence of cruel lashings,” were standing peacefully, even cheerfully, next to “Southern white men, who had grown poor during the war but who seemed, nevertheless, to harbor no ill-feelings.”
The painful past, however, had not been forgotten, nor did Garfield believe it should be. As he spoke, former slaves in the crowd openly wept. “The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress,” he said. “With unquestioning devotion to