Remarks of a Personal Friend.--Reminiscences of the
President's Cousin Henry Boynton.--Garfield as a Freemason.
Said a personal friend,--
"No one who saw President Garfield after his installation in the White
House can fail to have observed the great change which his accession to
power had occasioned in him. Only at intervals did his bright joyousness
shine out again, as at the pleasant home at Mentor. The very day after
he became President, the struggle for the spoils of office began with a
fierceness hitherto unparalleled in all the strife of that kind which
has been seen at Washington. He was half-maddened by his desire to do
justice to all the contending factions. It was this feeling which made
him slow to give irrevocable decisions. I was at the White House one
morning, and he referred to his anxiety not to take a step in haste
which he might repent at leisure. The humor of his own cautious slowness
brought back the twinkle in his eye, the smile on the rosy lip. 'I don't
know when I shall get around to that,' he said. 'You know, there's no
telling when the Mississippi River will reach a given point.' The
sluggish movement of the great Father of Waters was hit off to the life
by this impromptu epigram."
Hardly had Garfield been nominated for the presidency, when his
neighbors, those who had known him from boyhood, together with his
kinsmen, gathered, and raised upon his old home, near the spot where he
was born, a pole, and placed thereon the candidate's name. The pole was
erected where the house stood which Garfield with his brother erected
for their mother and sisters with their own hands, after the log hut, a
little farther out in the field nearer the wood, had become unfit for
habitation. Thomas Garfield, an old man eighty years of age, the one who
was killed in a railroad accident soon after Gen. Garfield had been
inaugurated President, directed the manual labor of rearing the shaft,
and was proud of his work. Soon after it was erected Garfield himself
came from Mentor to look over the old place again, and with proud
satisfaction looked upon this expression of friendship of his old
neighbors. There is nothing except this pole left to mark his
birthplace, and the old well, not two rods off, which he and his brother
dug to furnish water for the family. On the day of the funeral services,
the torn and tattered banner which those who knew him from childhood to
manhood had erected in his honor, was lazily floating in the breeze
half-way down the pole, showing in its plain way the sorrow of those who
so gladly erected it less than twelve months ago. In the little maple
grove to the left, children played about the country school-house, which
has replaced the log one where the dead President first gathered the
rudiments upon which he built to such purpose. The old orchard in its
sere and yellow leaf, the dying grass, and the turning maple-leaves,
seemed to join in the general mourning.
Adjoining the field where the flag floats is an unpretentious farm
almost as much identified with General Garfield's early history as the
one he helped to clear of the forest timber while he was a child, but it
is now free of buildings. Near by is the home of Henry B. Boynton,
cousin of the dead President, and a brother of Dr. Boynton, who has been
so conspicuously connected with the Garfield family since Mrs.
Garfield's illness last spring. "General Garfield and I were like
brothers," said he to a visitor, as he turned from giving some
directions to his farm hands, now sowing the fall grain upon ground
which the dead President first helped to break. He looked off tearfully,
as he spoke, toward the flag at half-mast, marking the birthplace of his
life-long friend. "His father died yonder, within a stone's throw of us,
when the son was but one and a half years old and I was but three and a
half. He knew no other father than mine, who watched over the family as
if it had been his own. I bore a peculiar relation to the general. His
father and my father were half-brothers, and his mother and my mother
were sisters. This very house in which I live was as much his home as it
was mine." They walked toward the house as he spoke, and had here
reached the plain mansion which was the house of the speaker's
ancestors, as well as General Garfield's, and passed inside, to find his
good housewife silent and tearful, and whose swollen eyes told plainer
than words the terrible sorrow they all felt.
"Over there," said he, pointing to the brick schoolhouse in the grove of
maples, around which the happy children were playing, "is where he and I
first went to school. I have read a statement that he could not read or
write until he was nineteen. He could do both before he was nine; and
before he was twelve, so familiar was he with the Indian history of the
country, that he had named every tree in the orchard, which his father
planted before he was born, with the name of some Indian chief. One
favorite tree of his he named 'Tecumseh,' and the branches of many of
those old trees have been cut since his promotion to the presidency by
relic hunters and carried away. General Garfield was a remarkable boy,
sir, as well as man. It is not possible to tell you the fight he made
amid poverty for a place in life, and how gradually he obtained it. When
he was a boy he would rather read than work. But he became a great
student. He had to work after he was twelve years of age. In those days
we were all poor, and it took hard knocks to get on. He worked clearing
the fields yonder with his brother, and then cut cordwood and did other
farm labor to get the necessaries of life for his mother and sisters.
"His experience upon the canal was a severe one, but perhaps useful. I
can remember the winter when he came home after the summer's service
there. He had the chills all that fall and winter, yet he would shake,
and get his lessons at home; go over to the school and recite, and thus
keep up with his class. The next spring found him weak from constant
ague. Yet he intended to return to the canal. Here came the turning
point in his life. Mr. Bates, who taught the school, pleaded with him
not to do so, and said that, if he would continue in school until the
next fall, he could get a certificate. I received my certificate about
the same time. The next year we went to the seminary at Chester, only
twelve miles distant. Here our books were furnished us, and we cooked
our own victuals. We lived upon a dollar a week each. Our diet was
strong, but very plain; mush and molasses, pork and potatoes. Saturdays
we took our axes and went into the woods and cut cordwood; during
vacations we labored in the harvest field, or taught a district school,
as we could. Yonder," said he, pointing off toward a beautiful valley,
"about two miles distant stands the school-house where Garfield first
taught school. He got twelve dollars a month and boarded around. I also
taught school in a neighboring town. You see," continued the farmer,
"that the general and myself were very close to one another from the
time either of us could lisp until he became President. He visited me
here just before election, and looked with gratification upon that pole
yonder and its flag, erected by his neighbors and kinsmen. He wandered
over the fields he himself had helped clear, and pointed out to me
trees, from the limbs of which he had shot squirrel after squirrel, and
beneath the branches of which he had played and worked in the years of
his infancy and boyhood.
"I forgot to say that one of General Garfield's striking characteristics
while he was growing up was that, when he saw a boy in the class excel
him in anything, he never gave up until he reached the same standard,
and even went beyond it. It got to be known that no scholar could be
ahead of him. Our association as men has been almost as close as that of
boys, although not as constant. The general never forgot his neighbors
or less fortunate kinsmen, and often visited us, as we did him.
"Just before he was inaugurated I had a conversation with him, which
impressed me more than any other talk of our lives. He said: 'Henry, I
approach the duties of the Presidency with much reluctance. I had
thought that at some future time it might be possible for me to aspire
to that position, but I had been elected to the Senate, and should have
preferred to serve the six years in that body to which my own State
people had elected me. It would have been six years of comparative rest,
for service in the Senate is much easier than in the House. I hope I may
discharge the duties of the Presidency with satisfaction. There is one
thing, however, that distresses me more than all else. All my life I
have been making friends, and I have a great many sincere ones. But from
the hour I assume the Presidency I must necessarily begin making
enemies. Any man who wants an office and does not get it, will feel
himself aggrieved.' Our conversation at this time was long and earnest,
and seemed like returning to the days when we were schoolboys together."
Garfield was made a Mason in Magnolia Lodge, No. 20, at Columbus, Nov.
22, 1861, while he was commander at Camp Chase. His affiliation at the
time of his death was with Pentalpha Lodge, No. 23, and Columbia
Commandery, No. 2, Knights Templars, at Washington, D. C. Suitar says
that he was the eighth Mason, but the first Knight Templar, who was
ever honored with the Presidency. He was a true and courteous knight,
and was not only an earnest supporter, but a charter member of Pentalpha
Lodge. After his election to the Presidency, his commandery sought to
express their esteem for him by attending the inauguration, and,
although the Masonic law forbids any interference with or participation
in politics, the occasion was regarded by the right eminent grand
commander as sufficiently important and devoid of partisan coloring to
grant the desired permission for five platoons of sixteen knights each
to attend President Garfield. On the 19th of July, 1881, he was elected
an honorary member of Hanselmann Commandery, No. 16, at Cincinnati, and
they sent him handsomely engraved resolutions of sympathy, which were
brought to his personal notice during his sickness, to which he
appropriately replied through his private secretary.