Authors: Adam Goodheart
He could not have been more wrong. Beneath the bland exteriors of middle-class Ohioans beat idealistic—even poetic—hearts. They scribbled diaries and romantic verses; painted watercolors; relentlessly sought self-improvement by reading books and attending public lectures on every subject.
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The very barns that they built seemed almost Athenian
in their noble proportions, diminutive Parthenons among
the cow pastures. They schemed hard at making money, but they also schemed to remake the world—and turned to God for assistance.
The hard-living early settlers had spared little time for religion at first. Then, in the 1820s and 1830s, the Protestant revival sweeping much of the United States descended on Ohio with particular intensity. Such intensity, in fact, that one devout Methodist extolled the state as an “American Canaan” with “no red Sea in the way … & as for our Jordon (I mean the Ohio) it is easy to cross and (what’s better) when
once planted here our children are saved from the harmful practice of trading [in] their fellow creatures.”
The Garfields and many of their neighbors in the Western Reserve joined a religious group known variously as the Campbellites, the Brethren, or the Disciples. Its adherents professed a radical, almost primitive version of Christianity. Unlike their
New England Puritan ancestors, they turned away from the brutal majesty of the Old Testament toward what they esteemed the unadorned teachings of the Gospels: faith, repentance, and the
imitation of Christ’s virtues. Each member of the church was encouraged to study the
Bible for himself or herself with the “fullest liberty of discourse and investigation,” an extreme form of
sola scriptura.
Disciples renounced all hierarchies; church elders wore plain clothes and preached in simple wooden meetinghouses without steeple or pulpit; and followers addressed one another as Brother and Sister. Women played
important roles in congregations, and at least a few integrated and all-black churches sprang up. The sect’s founder,
Alexander Campbell, was equivocal on the slavery question: he disapproved personally of human bondage, yet also felt that Christians had no business interfering in the relationship between master and servant and that politics had no place in the church. He wanted his religious message to attract both Northerners and
Southerners. (Brother Campbell and other elders preached under a huge canvas canopy known as the Big Tent. Later, during the
Civil War, it was cut up into strips of cloth to make bandages for wounded Union soldiers.)
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So quickly did the movement spread across the Western Reserve that Brother Campbell and his fellow Disciples fully expected it just as quickly to convert the entire planet, sweeping aside old sects and heresies and bringing about the return of Christ in very short order. They were disappointed when the world continued going on, messiah-less, more or less as before. But they did not lose hope: Campbell began to prophesy that the year 1866 would usher in a new epoch in
human and divine affairs.
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After a time, these millenniarian dreams began
hardening into militancy among some Disciples. In 1832, a group of
Mormons—led by Prophet
Joseph Smith himself—settled in Hiram and began converting townsfolk. Local Disciples hastened forth into
battle. They seized the prophet from his bed in the middle of the night, stripped off his clothes, threatened to castrate him, and finally poured hot tar over his naked body, sending him fleeing into the darkness to seek a more hospitable haven farther west.
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James Garfield was born again into that austere faith at the age of eighteen, baptized one March morning in the bone-chilling waters of the Chagrin River.
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Like millions of other Americans, especially in the North, swept up in the nation’s
Second Great Awakening, he embraced a form of Protestantism focused not just
on the distant promise of Heaven but also on the obligations of the here and now. Conversion as a Disciple was not supposed to be an emotional or mystical experience but rather an intellectual one by which a man or woman became rationally convinced to accept Christ. (Perhaps Joseph Smith would have disputed this.) Brother Campbell and other elders held public debates on equal terms with prominent “nonbelievers,” including the famous British socialist
Robert Owen. Campbell also frequently preached a sermon called “The Progress of Revealed Thought,” in which he traced the ever-growing human understanding of religion from pre-Mosaic times up through the “Modern age” or “Sunlight age” ushered in by Christ.
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Such intellectualism—and faith in progress—appealed to the scholarly young Garfield, so much so that he soon took to the circuit himself as a preacher. In Disciple meetinghouses throughout the Western Reserve, he gave sermons on Christian ethics and morality and on the relationship of
science to religion. Reason and morality, he preached, “are alike the work of a perfect Creator who is himself the union of perfect
intelligence and infinite goodness.”
God’s hand was visible in the scientific laws that governed nature—and also throughout the affairs of mankind. “In every nation,” Garfield told his students in November 1860, “there is a political and a religious history.… Prophecy [is] the dim side of the tapestry—history the bright side.” The discovery of the New World and the birth of “Republicanism” in America fulfilled God’s promise to
Isaiah: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.”
This history seemed to Garfield to be drawing toward some sort of grand culmination, one that could be fully reached only by a mighty human effort. “He was a firm believer in the swift-coming millennium,” one of his students recalled. “He cited authorities to prove that
it was surely coming; proved its desirability, and quoted some very good poetry; but wound up with, ‘Let us, therefore, do all that we can to hasten the
millennium.’ ”
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The Disciples were just one of dozens, even hundreds, of new religious creeds in antebellum America. Doctrine and practices varied enormously from place to place and church to church, running the gamut from cool rationalism to ecstatic mysticism; antislavery moralizing to justification of bondage. What those movements taught in common, though—even to those who remained outside them—was that individual men and women had the power to choose their own
versions of Christian, or non-Christian, faith. Everyone was a free agent, and morally responsible for individual decisions. There was no obligation to blindly follow the beliefs of one’s parents: each new generation of Americans had the power to, quite literally, rewrite the universe in its own terms.
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As the new sects jockeyed for power and for new converts, they became more aggressive. Many, moreover, shared the Disciple vision of an impending, apocalyptic battle between good and evil to precede a new golden era of godliness: a battle that only true Christian warriors could win. Garfield became popular among the Disciples not just for his intellectual gifts but also for his combative prowess. Theological debates on the Reserve were knockdown, drag-out,
no-holds-barred brawls. In 1858, the young preacher went ten grueling rounds—two four-hour debates a day for five consecutive days—against a scientific theorist named
William Denton, who claimed that life on earth had developed by “spontaneous generation.” But rather than insisting on the literal truth of Genesis as his rebuttal, Garfield delved deep into the works of the greatest scientific thinkers of the
time—Humboldt, Agassiz, Lyell, Comte—to show that nature’s laws were themselves proof of God’s role as Creator. As many as a thousand people attended each debate, and at the end, they hailed Garfield as the victor and showered him with invitations to give lectures on “Geology and Religion.”
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Sometimes the combat was less rhetorical. Once, at a tent meeting, a “big two-fisted rowdy” tried to disrupt Garfield’s sermon about the patience of Job. The powerfully built professor—as local lore maintained—stepped toward the bully and, remarking that even Job’s patience would have worn thin under the circumstances, knocked off the man’s cap and then “grasping him by the hair, hoisted him at arm’s length
from the ground, as easily as if he had been an infant.” This was muscular Christianity at its best. The congregation loved it.
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At the same time that Garfield was being born again as a Christian
warrior, he was awakening to another no less potent, no less muscular, if secular, faith—one drawing as many millions of young Northerners to its banner as the Gospel: the creed of the self-made man.
Many years later, a famous author who was almost Garfield’s exact contemporary—they were born less than two months apart—would pen a highly embellished account of the late president’s rise from obscurity to the White House.
Horatio Alger titled his book
From Canal Boy to President,
and in it he turned Garfield into a version of one of his fictional heroes. (The biography’s title page reminded
readers, in capital letters, that Alger himself was already famous as the
AUTHOR OF RAGGED DICK; LUCK AND PLUCK; TATTERED TOM, ETC.
)
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Even without embellishment, though, Garfield’s swift rise in the world was indeed a novel-worthy tale of luck and pluck. Born into true poverty, he climbed up by dint of perseverance, intellectual
accomplishment, and hard manual labor. He worked his way through a local academy, then the Eclectic Institute, and then
Williams College, where he distinguished himself as a Greek and Latin scholar. On the strength of his Williams degree he was invited back to teach at the Eclectic, and ultimately to run the school. By the time he turned thirty, in November 1861, he could boast of having worked as a carpenter, canal boat driver, janitor,
schoolteacher, farm laborer, preacher, college professor, college president, lawyer, state senator, and U.S. Army colonel. He was truly the author of his own destiny. “The world talks about
self-made men,” Garfield wrote to a friend in 1857. “Every man that is made at all is self made.”
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The idea that every American was what he made of himself had already become a kind of civic religion in the antebellum North.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous lecture and essay, “Self-Reliance,” seemed to capture the spirit of the age. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string,” the sage proclaimed. And truly great men possessed a faith in themselves that transcended individuality:
“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,—that is genius.” Yet, Emerson said, men must also surrender themselves fully to the times in which they lived, and exist “not [as] cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.”
The Sage of Concord’s message was complex, even cryptic—and, as even he admitted, seemingly self-contradictory—but this scarcely mattered to the millions of young Americans who heard or read his words and took from them the idea that they were independent spirits
in a revolutionary age. To them, Emerson was as much performer as philosopher, more rhythmist than rhetorician; his public appearances were emotional events like the
rock concerts of a later generation. Garfield first saw him lecture in 1854 and confided afterward to his diary: “He is the most startlingly original thinker I ever heard. The bolt which he hurls against error, like Goethe’s cannonball goes ‘fearful and straight shattering that it may reach and shattering what it reaches.’ I could not sleep that night after hearing his thunderstorm of eloquent thoughts.” Emersonian ideas became an important part of
Garfield’s own thought. In September 1860, he lectured his students at the Eclectic Institute: “We build our own character & make our own world.” Each of us has innate “powers,” and “our use of them decides our lives and destinies.”
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This was an ideology particularly resonant in the fast-changing
Midwest, a place of projected dreams—imaginary canals and railroads, conjectural towns, utopian communes—that might vanish in a puff or, more remarkably, take shape out of nothing, just as the glorious statehouse arose on what had recently been a manure-covered pasture. Such a world required every person in it to be nimble, ambitious, adaptable, and free.
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The only thing lacking, it often seemed, was the “Almighty effort” that Emerson also hailed, the revolutionary mission that would enlist Americans as “guides, redeemers, and benefactors … advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” Where would it be found? For a while, almost nothing seemed too far-fetched. In 1852, the Hungarian revolutionary
Louis Kossuth, whose independence movement had been
routed by the forces of despotic
Russia, visited Columbus on a tour through the United States. “My heart has always heaved with interest at the name of Ohio,” he told the legislature at a special session. The governor vowed to lend him weapons and an army of young Buckeyes. Somehow, that local brigade never did end up marching off to liberate the distant Carpathians. But the heroic impulse remained.
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The idea of the brotherhood of man was more than an abstraction. Not only did Garfield and his friends address one another as “Brother” in the Disciple tradition, they also felt intense emotional—at times also physical—bonds with one another, clearly stronger than any James felt with his wife, Lucretia, to whom his letters were often brusque and businesslike. Young men in the mid–nineteenth century could be passionate in ways that some
readers today find disorienting, driving modern scholars into endless—and probably irresolvable—debates over exactly where comradeship ended and sexuality began. They
found nothing unorthodox in strolling arm in arm, addressing letters to “my dearest” or “lovely boy,” and sharing fond embraces in a common bed. In 1858, when his old college friend
Harry Rhodes was away from Hiram, Garfield
wrote to him: “Harry Dear, do you know how much I miss you? In the school—the church, at home, in labor or leisure—sleeping or waking, the want of your presence is felt. I knew I loved you, but you have left a larger void than I ever knew you filled.”