Gail Jarrow - Ambushed!: The Assassination Plot Against President Garfield

Garfields birthplace and childhood home (above). He was the last U.S. president to be born in a log cabin. James as a teen on the Evening Star canal boat, which transported products and supplies between Cleveland and Pittsburgh. These illustrations were included in an 1881 Garfield biography.

There is one country on the globe where a boy need not be born on the steps of the throne or in the seats of wealth to rise to distinguished place.

B. A. Hinsdale, Garfield friend and biographer

W HEN JAMES ABRAM GARFIELD RAN FOR POLITICAL OFFICE, HIS supporters told voters that he had been born in a log cabin and worked his way from poverty to admirable achievements. The campaigns strategy was to show that he was an honorable, talented man who understood the struggles of ordinary Americans. Other candidates had tried the log cabin tactic, too. In Garfields case, the story was true.

He was born on November 19, 1831, in his parents log house in northeastern Ohio. A big baby weighing ten pounds, James joined a brother and two sisters. His parents named him after another son who had died as a toddler two years before. Abram and Eliza Garfield farmed their land in sparsely populated Orange Township, not far from Lake Erie and Cleveland. They barely managed to support their young family.

When James was eighteen months old, a fast-burning fire spread in the nearby woods. For hours, his father desperately worked to save the farm, chopping away brush and digging ditches. Abram stopped the flames, though the exertion sapped his strength. He fell ill, likely from pneumonia, and never recovered. Soon after the fire, Abram died at age thirty-three.

Jamess uncle and aunt lived on the adjacent property, and they did what they could to help Eliza manage her land. The Garfield children pitched in. But life was difficult for a farm family without a father. Eliza was proud of the fact that, through hard work, they paid all their debts and received no charity.

At age three, James began attending the local schoolhouse with his siblings, often riding there on his brothers back. The little boy had an excellent memory and enjoyed school. Whenever James was able to get his hands on a bookand there werent many aroundhe read it over and over. Later in life, he described having a hunger and thirst for knowledge.

As he grew older, James helped with the farm work and took odd jobs to support the family. Hiring himself out to neighbors and relatives, he chopped wood, plowed fields, brought in hay, and built barns and cabins. His mother later said that James was never still a minute at a time in his whole life.

By fifteen, he had grown tall and strong and felt ready to make his way in the world. Enchanted by the boats on Lake Erie and novels about the sea, James decided to become a sailor.

During the summer of 1848, at the age of sixteen, James went to work on his older cousins boat on the canal that connected Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The canal wasnt the sea, but James considered his new job the first step toward reaching his goal.

At age sixteen James began a diary, which he continued throughout his life. In his entries for April 1848, he recorded the weather and the odd jobs he did each day to help support his mother: chopping, splitting, piling, and sawing wood (highlighted above).

At fourteen dollars a month, his duties included controlling the mules along the canals towpath as they pulled the boat, which was loaded with supplies such as lumber, coal, iron, or copper ore. James didnt know how to swim, and whenever he tumbled into the canalmore than a dozen times by his countsomeone had to pull him out.