Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [9]
Although Garfield understood clearly, and at times painfully, that he was poor, he had inherited from his mother an innate dignity that never failed to inspire respect. His mother was fiercely proud that she and her children had “received no aid, worked and won their living and could look any man in the face.” Even as a child, Garfield walked with his shoulders squared and his head thrown back. “If I ever get through a course of study I don’t expect any one will ask me what kind of a coat I wore when studying,” he wrote to his mother while attending a nearby school, “and if they do I shall not be ashamed to tell them it was a ragged one.”
Eliza Garfield’s greatest ambition for her second son was a good education. She came from a long line of New England intellectuals, including a president of Tufts College and the founder and editor of a Boston newspaper. She donated some of her land for a small schoolhouse so that her children, as well as her neighbors’ children, could have a place to learn. Even when James turned eleven years old, the age at which his brother had begun helping the family by working on neighboring farms, she insisted that he stay home and concentrate on his education—and Thomas wholeheartedly agreed. “Whatever else happens,” they said, “James must go to school.”
James, unfortunately, had different dreams. Although he could not swim, and admitted that he “knew almost nothing about the water except what I had read,” he longed for a life at sea. As he was hundreds of miles from any ocean, the best he could do was the Erie and Ohio Canal, the canal his father had helped to build. At sixteen years of age, he left home to become a canal man, breaking his mother’s heart and, she feared, putting an end to her hopes for him.
Garfield’s first job on the canal was as a driver, the lowliest position among a group of rough, and occasionally violent, men. As the months passed, he became increasingly comfortable with the life he had fashioned for himself. He knew that the work he was doing, and the men he met along the way, likely made him “ripe for ruin,” but he was willing to take that chance.
Before he could “drink in every species of vice,” however, the course of his young life took a sudden turn. As he stood alone at the bow one night, struggling with a coiled rope, he lost his balance and, before he could right himself, fell into the canal. He had fallen in before, more than a dozen times, but each time it had been daylight, and there had been men on the deck to pull him out.
Now it was midnight, and Garfield was certain that he would drown. He cried out for help although he knew it was useless. Everyone on the boat was fast asleep. As he searched frantically and blindly for something to save his life, his hands suddenly struck the rope that had been the cause of his fall. Gripping it tightly, he found that, with a “great struggle,” he could use it to slowly pull himself up until, finally, he fell heavily onto the boat.
As he sat, dripping and scared, on the deck of the canal boat, Garfield wondered why he was still alive. The rope was not secured to anything on the boat. When he had pulled on it, it should have fallen off the deck, slipping to the bottom of the canal and leaving him to drown. “Carefully examining it, I found that just where it came over the edge of the boat it had been drawn into a crack and there knotted itself,” he would later write. “I sat down in the cold of the night and in my wet clothes and contemplated the matter.… I did not believe that God had paid any attention to me on my own account but I thought He had saved me for my