felt himself to be, in reserve at least, a possible soldier. It was
necessary to raise, drill, and render effective in an incredibly short
time a large army; and it would have been impossible to do so had it
not been for the eager enthusiasm with which civilians of every sort
enlisted, and threw themselves into their military duties with almost
incredible devotion. Garfield felt that he must bear his own part in
the struggle by fighting it out, not in the Senate but on the field;
and his first move was to obtain a large quantity of arms from the
arsenal in the doubtfully loyal state of Missouri. In this mission he
was completely successful; and he was next employed to raise and
organize two new regiments of Ohio infantry. Garfield, of course, knew
absolutely nothing of military matters at that time; but it was not a
moment to stand upon questions of precedence or experience; the born
organizers came naturally to the front, and Garfield was one of them.
Indeed, the faculty for organization seems innate in the American
people, so that when it became necessary to raise and equip so large a
body of men at a few weeks' notice, the task was undertaken offhand by
lawyers, doctors, shopkeepers, and schoolmasters, without a minute's
hesitation, and was performed on the whole with distinguished success.
When Garfield had organized his regiments, the Governor asked him to
accept the post of colonel to one of them. But Garfield at first
mistrusted his own powers in this direction. How should he, who had
hitherto been poring chiefly over the odes of Horace (his favourite
poet), now take so suddenly to leading a thousand men into actual
battle? He would accept only a subordinate position, he said, if a
regular officer of the United States army, trained at the great
military academy at West Point, was placed in command. So the Governor
told him to go among his own farmer friends in his native district, and
recruit a third regiment, promising to find him a West Point man as
colonel, if one was available. Garfield accepted the post of
lieutenant-colonel, raised the 42nd Ohio regiment, chiefly among his
own old pupils at Hiram, and set off for the seat of operations. At the
last moment the Governor failed to find a regular officer to lead these
raw recruits, every available man being already occupied, and Garfield
found himself, against his will, compelled to undertake the responsible
task of commanding the regiment. He accepted the task thus thrust upon
him, and as if by magic transformed himself at once from a schoolmaster
into an able soldier.
In less than one month, Colonel Garfield took his raw troops into
action in the battle of Middle Creek, and drove the Confederate General
Marshall, with far larger numbers, out of his intrenchments, compelling
him to retreat into Virginia. This timely victory did much to secure
the northern advance along the line of the Mississippi. During the
whole of the succeeding campaign Garfield handled his regiment with
such native skill and marked success that the Government appointed him
Brigadier-General for his bravery and military talent. In spite of all
his early disadvantages, he had been the youngest member of the Ohio
Senate, and now he was the youngest general in the whole American army.
Shortly after, the important victory of Chickamauga was gained almost
entirely by the energy and sagacity of General Garfield. For this
service, he was raised one degree in dignity, receiving his commission
as Major-General. He served altogether only two years and three months
in the army.
But while Garfield was at the head of his victorious troops in
Kentucky, his friends in Ohio were arranging, without his consent or
knowledge, to call him away to a very different sphere of work. They
nominated Garfield as their candidate for the United States House of
Representatives at Washington. The General himself was unwilling to
accede to their request, when it reached him. He thought he could serve
the country better in the field than in Congress. Besides, he was still
a comparatively poor man. His salary as Major-General was double that
of a member of the House; and for his wife's and children's sake he
hesitated to accept the lesser position. Had he continued in the army
to the end of the war, he would doubtless have risen to the very
highest honours of that stirring epoch. But President Lincoln was very
anxious that Garfield should come into the Congress, where his presence
would greatly strengthen the President's hands; and with a generous
self-denial which well bespeaks his thorough loyalty, Garfield gave up
his military post and accepted a place in the House of Representatives.
He took his seat in December, 1863.
For seventeen years, General Garfield sat in the general legislature of
the United States as one of the members for Ohio. During all that time,
he distinguished himself most honourably as the fearless advocate of
honest government, and the pronounced enemy of those underhand dodges
and wire-pulling machinery which are too often the disgrace of American
politics. He was opposed to all corruption and chicanery, especially to
the bad system of rewarding political supporters with places under
Government, which has long been the chief blot upon American republican
institutions. As a person of stalwart honesty and singleness of
purpose, he made himself respected by both sides alike. Politically
speaking, different men will judge very differently of Garfield's acts
in the House of Representatives. Englishmen especially cannot fail to
remark that his attitude towards ourselves was almost always one of
latent hostility; but it is impossible for anybody to deny that his
conduct was uniformly guided by high principle, and a constant
deference to what he regarded as the right course of action.
In 1880, when General Garfield had already risen to be the acknowledged
leader of the House of Representatives, his Ohio supporters put him in
nomination for the upper chamber, the Senate. They wished Garfield to
come down to the state capital and canvas for support; but this the
General would not hear of. "I never asked for any place yet," he said,
"except the post of bell-ringer and general sweeper at the Hiram
Institute, and I won't ask for one now." But at least, his friends
urged, he would be on the spot to encourage and confer with his
partisans. No, Garfield answered; if they wished to elect him they must
elect him in his absence; he would avoid all appearance, even, of
angling for office. The result was that all the other candidates
withdrew, and Garfield was elected by acclamation.
After the election he went down to Ohio and delivered a speech to his
constituents, a part of which strikingly illustrates the courage and
independence of the backwoods schoolmaster. "During the twenty years
that I have been in public life," he said, "almost eighteen of it in
the Congress of the United States, I have tried to do one thing.
Whether I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been the plan of my life to
follow my conviction, at whatever personal cost to myself. I have
represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I
greatly desired; but though it may seem, perhaps, a little egotistical
to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of one person, and
his name was Garfield. He is the only man that I am compelled to sleep
with, and eat with, and live with, and die with; and if I could not
have his approbation I should have bad companionship."
Only one higher honour could now fall to the lot of a citizen of the
United States. The presidency was the single post to which Garfield's
ambition could still aspire. That honour came upon him, like all the
others, without his seeking; and it came, too, quite unexpectedly. Five
months later, in the summer of 1880, the National Republican Convention
met to select a candidate for their party at the forthcoming
presidential election. Every four years, before the election, each
party thus meets to decide upon the man to whom its votes will be given
at the final choice. After one or two ineffectual attempts to secure
unanimity in favour of other and more prominent politicians, the
Convention with one accord chose James Garfield for its candidate--a
nomination which was quite as great a surprise to Garfield himself as
to all the rest of the world. He was elected President of the United
States in November, 1880.
It was a marvellous rise for the poor canal boy, the struggling
student, the obscure schoolmaster, thus to find himself placed at the
head of one among the greatest nations of the earth. He was still less
than fifty, and he might reasonably have looked forward to many years
of a happy, useful, and honourable life. Nevertheless, it is impossible
to feel that Garfield's death was other than a noble and enviable one.
He was cut off suddenly in the very moment of his brightest success,
before the cares and disappointments of office had begun to dim the
pleasure of his first unexpected triumph. He died a martyr to a good
and honest cause, and his death-bed was cheered and alleviated by the
hushed sorrow and sympathy of an entire nation--one might almost
truthfully add, of the whole civilized world.
From the first, President Garfield set his face sternly against the bad
practice of rewarding political adherents by allowing them to nominate
officials in the public service--a species of covert corruption
sanctioned by long usage in the United States. This honest and
independent conduct raised up for him at once a host of enemies among
his own party. The talk which they indulged in against the President
produced a deep effect upon a half-crazy and wildly egotistic
French-Canadian of the name of Guiteau, who had emigrated to the States
and become an American citizen. General Garfield had arranged a trip to
New England in the summer of 1881, to attend the annual festival at his
old school, the Williams College, Massachusetts; and for that purpose
he left the White House (the President's official residence at
Washington) on July 2. As he stood in the station of the Baltimore and
Potomac Railway, arm in arm with Mr. Blaine, the Secretary of State,
Guiteau approached him casually, and, drawing out a pistol, fired two
shots in rapid succession, one of which took effect on the President
above the third rib. The assassin was at once secured, and the wounded
President was carried back carefully to the White House.
Almost everybody who reads this book will remember the long suspense,
while the President lay stretched upon his bed for weeks and weeks
together, with all Europe and America watching anxiously for any sign
of recovery, and sympathizing deeply with the wounded statesman and his
devoted wife. Every effort that was possible was made to save him, but
the wound was past all surgical skill. After lingering long with the
stored-up force of a good constitution, James Garfield passed away at
last of blood-poisoning, more deeply regretted perhaps than any other
man whom the present generation can remember.
It is only in America that precisely such a success as Garfield's is
possible for people who spring, as he did, from the midst of the
people. In old-settled and wealthy countries we must be content, at
best, with slower and less lofty promotion. But the lesson of
Garfield's life is not for America only, but for the whole world of
workers everywhere. The same qualities which procured his success there
will produce a different, but still a solid success, anywhere else. As
Garfield himself fittingly put it, with his usual keen American common
sense, "There is no more common thought among young people than the
foolish one, that by-and-by something will turn up by which they will
suddenly achieve fame or fortune. No, young gentlemen; things don't
turn up in this world unless somebody turns them up."
VII.
THOMAS EDWARD, SHOEMAKER.
It is the object of this volume to set forth the lives of working men
who through industry, perseverance, and high principle have raised
themselves by their own exertions from humble beginnings. Raised
themselves! Yes; but to what? Not merely, let us hope, to wealth and
position, not merely to worldly respect and high office, but to some
conspicuous field of real usefulness to their fellow men. Those whose
lives we have hitherto examined did so raise themselves by their own
strenuous energy and self-education. Either, like Garfield and
Franklin, they served the State zealously in peace or war; or else,
like Stephenson and Telford, they improved human life by their
inventions and engineering works; or, again, like Herschel and
Fraunhofer, they added to the wide field of scientific knowledge; or
finally, like Millet and Gibson, they beautified the world with their
noble and inspiring artistic productions. But in every one of these
cases, the men whose lives we have been here considering did actually
rise, sooner or later, from the class of labourers into some other
class socially and monetarily superior to it. Though they did great
good in other ways to others, they did still as a matter of fact
succeed themselves in quitting the rank in which they were born, and
rising to some other rank more or less completely above it.
Now, it will be clear to everybody that so long as our present social
arrangements exist, it must be impossible for the vast mass of
labouring men ever to do anything of the sort. It is to be desired,
indeed, that every labouring man should by industry and thrift secure
independence in the end for himself and his family; but however much
that may be the case, it will still rest certain that the vast mass of
men will necessarily remain workers to the last; and that no attempt to
raise individual working men above their own class into the
professional or mercantile classes can ever greatly benefit the working
masses as a whole. What is most of all desirable is that the condition,
the aims; and the tastes of working men, as working men, should be
raised and bettered; that without necessarily going outside their own
ranks, they should become more prudent, more thrifty, better educated,
and wider-minded than many of their predecessors have been in the past.
Under such circumstances, it is surely well to set before ourselves
some examples of working men who, while still remaining members of
their own class, have in the truest and best sense "raised themselves"
so as to attain the respect and admiration of others whether their
equals or superiors in the artificial scale. Dr. Smiles, who has done
much to illustrate the history of the picked men among the labouring
orders, has chosen two or three lives of such a sort for investigation,
and from them we may select a single one as an example of a working
man's career rendered conspicuous by qualities other than those that
usually secure external success.
Thomas Edward, associate of the Linnean Society, though a Scotchman all
his life long, was accidentally born (so to speak) at Gosport, near
Portsmouth, on Christmas Day, 1814. His father was in the Fifeshire
militia and in those warlike days, when almost all the regulars were on
the Continent, fighting Napoleon, militia regiments used to be ordered
about the country from one place to another, to watch the coast or
mount guard over the French prisoners, in the most unaccountable
fashion. So it happened, oddly enough, that Thomas Edward, a Scotchman
of the Scotch, was born close under the big forts of Portsmouth harbour.
After Waterloo, however, the Fifeshire regiment was sent home again;
and the militia being before long disbanded, John Edward, our hero's
father, went to live at Aberdeen, where he plied his poor trade of a
hand-loom linen weaver for many years. It was on the green at Aberdeen,
surrounded by small labourers' cottages, that Thomas Edward passed his
early days. From his babyhood, almost, the boy had a strong love for
all the beasties he saw everywhere around him; a fondness for birds and
animals, and a habit of taming them which can seldom be acquired, but
which seems with some people to come instinctively by nature. While Tam
was still quite a child, he loved to wander by himself out into the
country, along the green banks of the Dee, or among the tidal islands
at the mouth of the river, overgrown by waving seaweeds, and fringed
with great white bunches of blossoming scurvy-grass. He loved to hunt
for crabs and sea-anemones beside the ebbing channels, or to watch the
jelly-fish left high and dry upon the shore by the retreating water.
Already, in his simple way, the little ragged bare-footed Scotch laddie
was at heart a born naturalist.
Very soon, Tam was not content with looking at the "venomous beasts,"
as the neighbours called them, but he must needs begin to bring them
home, and set up a small aquarium and zoological garden on his own
account. All was fish that came to Tam's net: tadpoles, newts, and
stickleback from the ponds, beetles from the dung-heaps, green crabs
from the sea-shore--nay, even in time such larger prizes as hedgehogs,
moles, and nestfuls of birds. Nothing delighted him so much as to be
out in the fields, hunting for and taming these his natural pets.
Unfortunately, Tam's father and mother did not share the boy's passion
for nature, and instead of encouraging him in pursuing his inborn
taste, they scolded him and punished him bitterly for bringing home the
nasty creatures. But nothing could win away Tam from the love of the
beasties; and in the end, he had his own way, and lived all his life,
as he himself afterwards beautifully put it, "a fool to nature." Too
often, unhappily, fathers and mothers thus try to check the best
impulses in their children, under mistaken notions of right, and
especially is this the case in many instances as regards the love of
nature. Children are constantly chidden for taking an interest in the
beautiful works of creation, and so have their first intelligent
inquiries and aspirations chilled at once; when a little care and
sympathy would get rid of the unpleasantness of having white mice or
lizards crawling about the house, without putting a stop to the young
beginner's longing for more knowledge of the wonderful and beautiful
world in whose midst he lives.
When Tam was nearly five years old, he was sent to school, chiefly no
doubt to get him out of the way; but Scotch schools for the children of
the working classes were in those days very rough hard places, where
the taws or leather strap was still regarded as the chief instrument of
education. Little Edward was not a child to be restrained by that
particular form of discipline; and after he had had two or three
serious tussles with his instructors, he was at last so cruelly beaten
by one of his masters that he refused to return, and his parents, who
were themselves by no means lacking in old Scotch severity, upheld him
in his determination. He had picked up reading by this time, and now
for a while he was left alone to hunt about to his heart's content
among his favourite fields and meadows. But by the time he was six
years old, he felt he ought to be going to work, brave little mortal
that he was; and as his father and mother thought so too, the poor wee
mite was sent to join his elder brother in working at a tobacco factory
in the town, at the wages of fourteen-pence a week. So, for the next
two years, little Tam waited upon a spinner (as the workers are called)
and began life in earnest as a working man. At the end of two years,
however, the brothers heard that better wages were being given, a
couple of miles away, at Grandholm, up the river Don. So off the lads
tramped, one fast-day (a recognized Scotch institution), to ask the
manager of the Grandholm factory if he could give them employment. They
told nobody of their intention, but trudged away on their own account;
and when they came back and told their parents what they had done, the
father was not very well satisfied with the proposal, because he
thought it too far for so small a boy as Tam to walk every day to and
from his work. Tam, however, was very anxious to go, not only on
account of the increased wages, but also (though this was a secret)
because of the beautiful woods and crags round Grandholm, through which
he hoped to wander during the short dinner hour. In the end, John
Edward gave way, and the boys were allowed to follow their own fancy in
going to the new factory.
It was very hard work; the hours were from six in the morning till
eight at night, for there was no Factory Act then to guard the interest
of helpless children; so the boys had to be up at four in the morning,
and were seldom home again till nine at night. In winter, the snow lies
long and deep on those chilly Aberdeenshire roads, and the east winds
from the German Ocean blow cold and cutting up the narrow valley of the
Don; and it was dreary work toiling along them in the dark of morning
or of night in bleak and cheerless December weather. Still, Tam liked
it on the whole extremely well. His wages were now three shillings a
week; and then, twice a day in summer, there was the beautiful walk to
and fro along the leafy high-road. "People may say of factories what
they please," Edward wrote much later, "but I liked this factory. It
was a happy time for me whilst I remained there. The woods were easy of
access during our meal-hours. What lots of nests! What insects, wild
flowers, and plants, the like of which I had never seen before." The
boy revelled in the beauty of the birds and beasts he saw here, and he
retained a delightful recollection of them throughout his whole after
life.
This happy time, however, was not to last for ever. When young Edward
was eleven years old, his father took him away from Grandholm, and
apprenticed him to a working shoemaker. The apprenticeship was to go on
for six years; the wages to begin at eighteen-pence a week; and the
hours, too sadly long, to be from six in the morning till nine at
night. Tam's master, one Charles Begg, was a drunken London workman,
who had wandered gradually north; a good shoemaker, but a quarrelsome,
rowdy fellow, loving nothing on earth so much as a round with his fists
on the slightest provocation. From this unpromising teacher, Edward
took his first lessons in the useful art of shoemaking; and though he
learned fast--for he was not slothful in business--he would have
learned faster, no doubt, but for his employer's very drunken and
careless ways. When Begg came home from the public-house, much the
worse for whisky, he would first beat Tam, and then proceed upstairs to
beat his wife. For three years young Edward lived under this
intolerable tyranny, till he could stand it no longer. At last, Begg
beat and ill-treated him so terribly that Tam refused outright to
complete his apprenticeship. Begg was afraid to compel him to do
so--doubtless fearing to expose his ill-usage of the lad. So Tam went
to a new master, a kindly man, with whom he worked in future far more
happily.
The boy now began to make himself a little botanical garden in the back
yard of his mother's house--a piece of waste ground covered with
rubbish, such as one often sees behind the poorer class of cottages in
towns. Tam determined to alter all that, so he piled up all the stones
into a small rockery, dug up the plot, manured it, and filled it with
wild and garden flowers. The wild flowers, of course, he found in the
woods and hedgerows around him; but the cultivated kinds he got in a
very ingenious fashion, by visiting all the rubbish heaps of the
neighbourhood, on which garden refuse was usually piled. A good many
roots and plants can generally be found in such places, and by digging
them up, Tam was soon able to make himself a number of bright and
lively beds. Such self-help in natural history always lay very much in
Edward's way.