JAMES A.
GARFIELD
(March 4, 1881 – September 19, 1881)
BIOGRAFY:
James Abram Garfield, (born November 19, 1831, near Orange [in Cuyahoga
county], Ohio, U.S.—died September 19, 1881, Elberon [now in Long
Branch], New Jersey), 20th president of the United States (March 4–
September 19, 1881), who had the second shortest tenure in U.S.
presidential history. When he was shot and incapacitated, serious
constitutional questions arose concerning who should properly perform the
functions of the presidency.
POLITICAL CAREER:
He was elected as a senator from the state of Ohio in 1859, and served until
1861. He remained in the Republican Party throughout his political life.
He was chosen as a candidate for the Republican Party in 1880 at a
convention held in Chicago, and was elected President of the United States
and inaugurated on March 4, 1881.
PRESIDENCY OF JAMES A. GARFIELD:
By the time of his election, Garfield had begun to see education rather than
the ballot box as the best hope for improving the lives of African Americans.
In his inaugural speech he said, “The elevation of the Negro race from
slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change
we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No
thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our
institutions and people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from
a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.”
ASSASSINATION:
On July 2, 1881, after only four months in office, while on his way to a family
vacation in New England, Garfield was shot twice in the railroad station in
Washington, D.C., by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker with
messianic visions. The first shot only grazed Garfield’s arm, but the second
bullet pierced his back and lodged behind his pancreas.
Wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for 70 days. The doctors, under
the pretext of finding one of the bullets that they could not find,
transformed a wound of a few millimeters into a serious wound.
Alexander Graham Bell tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with a metal
detector that Thomas Edison had invented, but the bed he was lying on was
made of metal and that made it impossible to find the bullet. On September
6, Garfield was washed ashore in New Jersey. For a few days he seemed to
have recovered, but on the 19th of the same month he died due to the
infection and internal bleeding caused by the doctors.
Name: Kristin Laz López
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