THE CANAL-BOY BECOMES A COLLEGE PRESIDENT.
During his second winter vacation a great temptation assailed James. It
was not a temptation to do wrong. That he could easily have resisted.
I must explain.
At Prestenkill, a country village six miles from Troy, N.Y., the young
student organized a writing school, to help defray his expenses. Having
occasion to visit Troy, his interest in education led him to form an
acquaintance with some of the teachers and directors of the public
schools.
One of these gentlemen, while walking with him over the sloping sides of
a hill overlooking the city, said: "Mr. Garfield, I have a proposition
to make to you."
The student listened with interest.
"There is a vacancy in one of our public schools. We want an experienced
teacher, and I am sure you will suit us. I offer you the place, with a
salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. What do you say?"
The young man's heart beat for a moment with repressible excitement. It
was a strong temptation. He was offered, deducting vacations, about one
hundred and twenty-five dollars a month, while heretofore his highest
wages had been but eighteen dollars per month and board. Moreover, he
could marry at once the young lady to whom he had been for years
engaged.
He considered the offer a moment, and this was his answer:
"You are not Satan and I am not Jesus, but we are upon the mountain, and
you have tempted me powerfully. I think I must say, 'Get thee behind
me!' I am poor, and the salary would soon pay my debts and place me in a
position of independence; but there are two objections. I could not
accomplish my resolution to complete a college course, and should be
crippled intellectually for life. Then, my roots are all fixed in Ohio,
where people know me and I know them, and this transplanting might not
succeed as well in the long run as to go back home and work for smaller
pay."
So the young man decided adversely, and it looks as if his decision was
a wise one. It is interesting to conjecture what would have been his
future position had he left college and accepted the school then offered
him. He might still have been a teacher, well known and of high repute,
but of fame merely local, and without a thought of the brilliant destiny
he had foregone.
So he went back to college, and in the summer of 1856 he graduated,
carrying off the highest honor--the metaphysical oration. His class was
a brilliant one. Three became general officers during the
rebellion--Garfield, Daviess, and Thompson. Rockwell's name is well
known in official circles; Gilfillan is Treasurer of the United States.
There are others who fill prominent positions. In the class above him
was the late Hon. Phineas W. Hitchcock, who for six years represented
Nebraska in the United States Senate--like Garfield, the architect of
his own fortunes.
"What are your plans, Garfield?" asked a classmate but a short time
before graduation.
"I am going back to Ohio, to teach in the school where I prepared for
college."
"What is the name of the school?"
"Hiram Institute."
"I never heard of it."
"It has only a local reputation."
"Will you get a high salary?"
"No; the institute is poor, and can pay me but little."
"I think you are making a mistake."
"Why so?"
"You are our best scholar, and no one can rival you in speaking in the
societies. You should study law, and then go to one of our large cities
and build up a reputation, instead of burying yourself in an
out-of-the-way Ohio town, where you may live and die without the world
hearing of you."
"Thank you for your good opinion of me. I am not sure whether I deserve
it, but if I do, I shall come to the surface some day. Meanwhile, to
this humble school (it was not yet a college) I owe a large debt of
gratitude. I am under a promise to go back and do what I can to pay that
debt."
"In doing so you may sacrifice your own prospects."
"I hope not. At any rate, my mind is made up."
"Oh, well, in that case I will say no more. I know that if your mind is
made up, you are bound to go. Only, years hence you will think of my
warning."
"At any rate," said Garfield, cordially, "I shall bear in mind the
interest you have shown in me. You may be right--I admit that--but I
feel that it is my duty to go."
I doubt whether any man of great powers can permanently bury himself, no
matter how obscure the position which he chooses. Sooner or later the
world will find him out, and he will be lifted to his rightful place.
When General Grant occupied a desk in the office of a lawyer in St.
Louis, and made a precarious living by collecting bills, it didn't look
as if Fame had a niche for him; but occasion came, and lifted him to
distinction. So I must confess that the young graduate seemed to be
making a mistake when, turning his back upon Williams College, he sought
the humble institution where he had taught, as a pupil-teacher, two
years before, and occupied a place as instructor, with an humble salary.
But even here there was promotion for him. A year later, at the age of
twenty-six, he was made president of the institution. It was not,
perhaps, a lofty position, for though Hiram Institute now became Hiram
College, it was not a college in the New England sense, but rather a
superior academy.
Let us pause a minute and see what changes have taken place in ten
years.
At the age of sixteen Jimmy Garfield was glad to get a chance to drive a
couple of mules on the tow-path of the Ohio and Pennsylvania Canal. The
ragged, homespun boy had disappeared. In his place we find James A.
Garfield, A.B., president of a Western college--a man of education and
culture. And how has this change been brought about! By energy,
perseverance, and a resolute purpose--a soul that poverty could not
daunt, an ambition which shrank from no hardship, and no amount of
labor. They have been years of toil, for it takes time to transform a
raw and ignorant country lad into a college president; but the toil has
not harmed him--the poverty has not cramped him, nor crippled his
energies. "Poverty is very inconvenient," he said on one occasion, in
speaking of those early years, "but it is a fine spur to activity, and
may be made a rich blessing."
The young man now had an assured income; not a large one, but Hiram was
but an humble village. No fashionable people lived there. The people
were plain in their tastes, and he could live as well as the best
without difficulty. He was employed in a way that interested and pleased
him, and but one thing seemed wanting. His heart had never swerved from
the young lady with whom he first became acquainted at Geauga, to whom
he was more closely drawn at Hiram, and to whom now for some years he
had been betrothed. He felt that he could now afford to be married; and
so Lucretia Rudolph became Mrs. Garfield--a name loved and honored, for
her sake as well as his, throughout the length and breadth of our land.
She, too, had been busily and usefully employed in these intervening
years. As Mr. Philo Chamberlain, of Cleveland, has told us elsewhere,
she has been a useful and efficient teacher in one of the public schools
of that city. She has not been content with instructing others, but in
her hours of leisure has pursued a private course of study, by which her
mind has been broadened and deepened. If some prophetic instinct had
acquainted her with the high position which the future had in store for
her, she could have taken no fitter course to prepare herself to fulfil
with credit the duties which, twenty years after, were to devolve upon
her as the wife of the Chief Magistrate of the Union.
This was the wife that Garfield selected, and he found her indeed a
helper and a sympathizer in all his sorrows and joys. She has proved
equal to any position to which the rising fame of her husband lifted
her. Less than a year ago her husband said of her: "I have been
wonderfully blessed in the discretion of my wife. She is one of the
coolest and best-balanced women I ever saw. She is unstampedable. There
has not been one solitary instance in my public career when I suffered
in the smallest degree for any remark she ever made. It would have been
perfectly natural for a woman often to say something that could be
misinterpreted; but, without any design, and with the intelligence and
coolness of her character, she has never made the slightest mistake that
I ever heard of. With the competition that has been against me, such
discretion has been a real blessing."
Public men who have risen from humble beginnings often suffer from the
mistakes of wives who have remained stationary, and are unfitted to
sympathize with them in the larger life of their husbands. But as James
A. Garfield grew in the public esteem, and honors crowded upon him, step
by step his wife kept pace with him, and was at all times a fitting and
sympathetic companion and helpmeet.
They commenced housekeeping in a neat little cottage fronting the
college campus; and so their wedded life began. It was a modest home,
but a happy one, and doubtless both enjoyed more happy hours than in the
White House, even had the last sorrowful tragedy never been enacted. As
President, James A. Garfield belonged to the nation; as the head of
Hiram College, to his family. Greatness has its penalties, and a low
estate its compensations.