James A. Garfield

James A. Garfield steps onto the national stage with the air of someone who has already worn half a dozen lives and is suspicious of fame because it looks too much like a costume. He is born in a one-room cabin in Orange Township, Ohio, the last child of a widowed mother who has nothing to offer but work and the belief that work is convertible into dignity. The boy is small, eager, and afflicted with a restlessness that in a harsher age might have been called fate: he runs away to the canal, becomes a mule driver, learns the night-rhythm of towpaths and the profanity of men who live by weather. He nearly dies of fever, returns to the cabin chastened and taller, and confronts the unglamorous truth at the heart of the American promise: books are ladders and ladders do not climb themselves. At the Western Reserve Eclectic Ins ...