James A. Garfield

20th president of the United States, who was shot four months into his term in July 1881 and died that September. A Union general and nine-term Ohio congressman, he is the only sitting member of the House to be elected president.

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Biography

James Abram Garfield was born in 1831 in a log cabin in northeast Ohio and grew up poor. He studied at Geauga Seminary and the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, teaching and working as a janitor to pay his way, and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1856. Back at the Eclectic Institute he became its principal in 1857, preached in the Disciples of Christ movement and read law, and in 1859 he was elected to the Ohio Senate.

In the Civil War he commanded the 42nd Ohio Infantry, fought at Middle Creek, Shiloh and Chickamauga, served as chief of staff to William Rosecrans and rose to major general. Elected to Congress in 1862, he served nine terms, chaired the House Appropriations Committee and became a leading Republican voice for the gold standard. He argued Ex parte Milligan before the Supreme Court in 1866, sat on the Electoral Commission that settled the disputed 1876 election, and was damaged by his links to the Crédit Mobilier scandal.

In January 1880 the Ohio legislature elected him to the US Senate, but that June the Republican National Convention chose him as a compromise presidential nominee on the 36th ballot, and in November he narrowly beat Winfield Scott Hancock. As president he defied Senator Roscoe Conkling over patronage and pressed for civil service reform. On 2 July 1881 he was shot by Charles Guiteau, a deluded office seeker, and he died of infection on 19 September.