James A. Garfield
President of the United States in 1881 · United States · Politicians · Lived 1831 to 1881 · aged 49
James A. Garfield is read about 5,326 times a day, in 129 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 15 October 2026
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Something wrong?Shot four months into his presidency by a man who wanted a government job, Garfield spent eleven weeks dying while doctors probed his wound with unsterilized hands. He's remembered less for what he did than for how infection - not the bullet - killed him.
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Photos 12
Replica of the log cabin in Moreland Hills, Ohio, where Garfield was born
Garfield at the age of 16
Lucretia Garfield in the 1870s
Garfield as a brigadier general during the Civil War
Middle Creek battlefield. Garfield commanded from the distant hill in the center of the photo.
General William S. Rosecrans
Salmon P. Chase was Garfield's ally until Andrew Johnson's impeachment trial.In their own words 10
, I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.
We do not even inquire whether a black man is a rebel in arms, or not, if he is black, be he friend or foe, he is thought best kept at a distance.
The world's history is a divine poem, of which the history of every nation is a canto, and every man a word.
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Born in an Ohio log cabin in 1831, Garfield worked his way from poverty through Williams College, became a preacher and lawyer, then a Union major general who fought at Shiloh and Chickamauga. Elected to Congress in 1862, he served nine terms - the only sitting House member ever chosen for the presidency - and published his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem in 1876. At the 1880 Republican convention, deadlocked delegates picked him as compromise nominee on the 36th ballot; he won the general election and took office in March 1881. He spent his brief tenure battling New York's Senator Roscoe Conkling over patronage appointments and purging Post Office corruption. On July 2, Charles Guiteau, a deranged office seeker, shot him in a Washington train station. Garfield lingered through the summer as physicians' unsanitary probing turned the wound septic, dying September 19 from infection.
Politicians from the United States 6
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