Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [8]
• CHAPTER 2 •
PROVIDENCE
I never meet a ragged boy in the street without feeling that I may owe him a salute, for I know not what possibilities may be buttoned up under his coat.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
James Garfield’s father, Abram, had died on a spring day in 1833, just a few months after his thirty-third birthday. As he had peered out a window that day, surveying the farmland he had just saved from a raging wildfire, he had known that he would not survive the “violent cold” that had so suddenly seized him. The house he would die in was a log cabin he had built four years earlier. It consisted of one room, three small windows, and a rough, wooden plank floor. The windowpanes were made of oiled paper, and the gaps between the logs were filled with clay in a futile attempt to shut out the brutal Ohio winters. The house and the land were all his family had, and he had done everything he could to protect them from the fire.
Like his ancestors, who had sailed from Chester, England, to Massachusetts in 1630, just ten years after the Mayflower, Abram had left all he knew in search of a better life. His father had stayed in the East, on a small farm in New York, but as a very young man Abram had set his sights on the West. In 1819, he and his half brother Amos packed their bags and moved to Ohio. After several years of struggling to make a living, Abram took a job helping to build the Ohio and Erie Canal, as he had helped to build the Erie Canal when he was a teenager.
In the early 1800s, Ohio was the American frontier. Wild and largely unmapped, it had not joined the Union until 1803, becoming the country’s seventeenth state. Ohio was the first state to be created out of the Northwest Territory. Iroquois and Shawnee tribes were still scattered throughout the Ohio Valley, fiercely fighting for the little land they had left, but time was running out. They had lost their British allies after the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson would pass the Indian Removal Act less than twenty years later, forcing them all onto reservations.
Although land was available for two dollars an acre, ten years would pass before Abram and Amos had saved enough money for a farm. Soon after their arrival, they met and married a pair of sisters from New Hampshire named Eliza and Alpha Ballou. In 1829 the two couples, now with children of their own, bought a hundred acres of heavily wooded land in Cuyahoga County. They were just sixteen miles from Cleveland but two miles from the nearest road, surrounded by a vast, thick forest. It was the life they had hoped for, but it was far from easy.
When Abram had seen the wildfire racing toward his cabin, he had met it with equal ferocity. He worked all day, digging ditches, hacking away brush, and fighting back the roaring, choking flames. Somehow, miraculously, he had saved his farm, but his victory came at a high cost. Although he was young and strong, he was also poor and isolated. With no medical care beyond an unlicensed, itinerate doctor, he quickly succumbed to exhaustion and fever. Within days, he would die, keenly aware that he was leaving Eliza with four children to feed. Their youngest, James, not yet two years old.
There would come a time when the story of James Garfield’s early life would be widely admired. Throughout the nation and around the world, his extraordinary rise from fatherlessness and abject poverty would make him the embodiment of the American dream. Garfield himself, however, refused ever to romanticize his childhood. “Let us never praise poverty,” he would write to a friend, “for a child at least.”
Even by the standards of the hardscrabble rural region in which he lived, Garfield was raised in desperate circumstances. His mother, left with debts she could not hope to