Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [51]
Lucretia, in stark contrast, was soft-spoken and very private. Her parents, although kind and deeply interested in her education, had never been demonstrative. Zeb Rudolph’s neighbors would remember him as being almost without emotion, “never elated and never greatly depressed.” Although Lucretia would at times complain that James let the “generous and gushing affection of your warm impulsive nature” affect his good judgment, she worried that she leaned too far in the opposite direction. “The world,” she feared, would judge her to be “cold,” even “heartless.”
Their courtship was long, awkward, and far more analytical than passionate. It began with a painfully polite letter from Garfield to Lucretia when he was on a trip to Niagara Falls in 1853. “Please pardon the liberty I take in pointing my pen towards your name this evening,” he began stiffly, “for I have taken in so much scenery today I cannot contain it all myself.” As the years passed and they slowly moved toward marriage, Garfield waited impatiently for Lucretia to express her love for him, but she remained distant. Finally, in frustration, he wrote to her, “It is my desire to ‘know and be known.’ I long to hear from you … to know your heart and open mine to you.… Let your heart take the pen and your hand hold it not back.” Lucretia, however, could only ask James to try to understand. “I do not think I was born for constant caresses, and surely no education of my childhood taught me to need them,” she would one day tell him. “I am only sorry that my own quiet and reserve should mean to you a lack of love.”
In 1855, when Garfield returned to Ohio from Massachusetts, where he was attending Williams College, Lucretia seemed to him as cold and remote as the first time he met her. “For the past year, I had fears before I went away, that she had not that natural warmth of heart which my nature calls so loudly for,” he wrote dejectedly in his diary. “It seems as though all my former fears were well founded and that she and I are not like each other in enough respects to make us happy together.… My wild passionate heart demands so much.” When he visited her again the following day, however, Lucretia bravely handed him her diary. To Garfield’s astonishment, it was filled with the love that she had always felt but had never been able to express. “Never before did I see such depths of suffering and such entire devotion of heart as was displayed in her private journal which she allowed me to read,” he wrote that night. “For months, when I was away in the midst of my toils, her heart was constantly pouring out its tribute of love.”
Although Garfield now believed that Lucretia loved him, when they finally married in 1858, they both knew that he was not yet in love with her. “I am not certain I feel just as I ought toward her,” he had admitted in his diary. “I have the most entire confidence in her purity of heart, conscientiousness and trustfulness and truly love her qualities of mind and heart. But there is no delirium of passion nor overwhelming power of feeling that draws me to her irresistibly.” Lucretia was painfully aware that Garfield’s feelings toward her had not deepened over the years, and she was tormented by the thought that he was marrying her because he felt he had to. The summer before their wedding, she wrote miserably to him, “There are hours when my heart almost breaks with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold stern word duty.”
If their courtship was difficult, the first years of their marriage were nearly unbearable. Between the Civil War and Garfield’s congressional duties in Washington, they spent only five months together during the first five years. The constant separation made it almost impossible for Lucretia to overcome her natural reserve, although she tried in earnest. “Before when you were away my heart missed you,” she wrote after they had been married for four years. “Now my whole self mourns with it and