Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1882 — JAMES A, BARFIELD. [ARTICLE]

JAMES A. GARFIELD.

Elequent Memorial Address upon the Life and Character of the Late President, by James G. Blaine. [Delivered at the Memorial Service at Washington. Feb. 27,1882.] .¶ Mr. President : For the second time in this generation the great departments of the Government of the United States are assembled in the Hall of Representatives to do honor to the memory of a murdered President. Lincoln fell at the close of a mighty struggle in which the passions of men had been deeply stirred. The tragical termination of his great life added but another to the lengthened succession of horrors which had marked so many lintels with the blood of the first born. Garfield was slain in a day of peace, when brother had been reconciled to brother, and when anger and hate had been banished from the land. “Whoever shall hereafter draw the portrait of murder, if' he will show it as it has been exhibited, where such example was least to have been looked for, let him not give the grim visage of Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate. Let him draw rather a decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon, not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character.” From the landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth till tbe uprising against Charles 1., about 20,000 emigrants came from Old England to New England. As they came in pursuit of intellectual freedom and ecclesiastical independence rather than for worldly honor and profit, the emigration naturally ceased when the contest for religious liberty began in earnest at home. The man who struck his most effective blow for freedom of conscience by sailing for the colonies in 1620 would hr ve been accounted a deserter to leave after 1640. The opportunity had then come on the soil of England for that great contest which established the authority of Parliament, gave religious freedom to the people, sent Charles to the block and committed to the hands of Oliver Cromwell the supreme executive authority of England- The English emigration was never renewed, and from these 20,000 men, with & small emigration from Scotland and fi>m France, are descended the vast numbers who have New England blood hi tbeir veins. In 1685 the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. scattered to other countries 400,0U0 Protestants, who were among the most intelligent and enterprising of the French subjects—merchants of capital, skilled manufacturers and handicraftsmen superior at tbe time to ali others in Europe. A considerable uuinbor of these Huguenot French came to America. A few landed in New England and became prominent in its history. Their names have in arge part become anglicized, or have disappeared, but their blood is traceable in many of tho most reputable families, and their fame is perpetuated in honorable memorials and useful institutions. From these two sources, the English Puritan and the French Huguenot, came the late President, his father, Abram Garfield, being descended frojn the one, and his mother, Eliza Ballou, from tho other. It was good stock on both sides—none better, none braver, none truer. There was in it an inheritance of courage, of maulinesd, of imperishable love of liberty, of undying adherence io principle. Garfield was proud of his blood, and, with as much satisfaction as if ho were a British nobleman reading his stately ancestral record in Burke’s Peerage, he spoke of himself as ninth in descent from those who would not eudure the oppression of the Stuarts, and seventh in descent from the bravo French Protestants who refused to submit to tyianny even from the Grand Monarque. Gen. Gsrficl l delighted to dwell ou theso traits, and during his only visit to England ha busied himself in discovering every trace of his foiefuthtrs in parish registries and ou ancient army rolls. Bitting with a friend in the gallery of tho House of Comilions one night, aftor a long day’s labor in this eaily field of resuaren, he said with evident elation that m every war in which for three centuries patriots of English blood had struck stuidy blows for coustilut.onal government and human liberty his family had been represented. They were at Marston Moor, at Naseby and Preston ; they were at Bunker Hill, at Saratoga and at Monmouth, and his own person had battled in the same great cause in the war which preserved the Union of States. Losing his father before he was 2 years old, the early life of Garfield ivas one of privation, but its poverty has been made indelicately and unjustly prominent. Thousands of readers have imagined him as the ragged, starving child, whose reality too often greets the eye in the squalid sections of our large cities. Gen. Garfield’s infancy and youth had none of the pitiful fea;ures appealing to the tender heart ami to tho open hand of chanty. He was a poor boy in the same sense in which Henry Clay was a poor boy; in which Andrew Jackson was a poor boy ; in which Daniel Webster was a poor boy ; in the same sen-e in which a large inajoiily of the eminent men of America in all generations have been poor boys. Before a great multitude of men in a publio speech Mr. Webster bore this testimony: “It ’ did not happen to me to be born in a log-cabin, but my elder brothers and sisters were bom in a log-cabin, raised amid the snow-drifts of New Hampshire at a period so early that when the smoke rose first from its crude chimney and curled over the frozen hills there was no similar evidence of a white man’s habitation between it and the settlements on the rivers of Canada. It remains still. I make it an annual visit. I carry my children to it to teach tin m the hardships endured by tbe generations which have gone before them. I love to dwell on the tender recollections, the kindred ties, the early affections, and the touching narratives and incidents which mingle with all.” I know of this primitive family abode, with the requisite change of scene, the same words would aptly portray the early days of Garfield. The poverty of the frontier, where all are engaged in a common struggle, and where a common sympathy and hearty co-operation lighten the burdens of each, is a very different poverty—different in kind, different in influence and effect from that conscious and humiliating indigence whjch is every day forced to contrast itself with neighboring wealth, on which it feels a sense or grinding dependence. Tbe poverty of tho frontier is indeed no poverty. It is Lut tho beginning of wealth, and has tho boundless possibilities of the future always opening before it No man ever grew up in ihe agricultural regions'of the West, where a house-raising or even a corn-husking is matter of common interest or helpfulness, with another feeling than that of broad-minded, geuerons independence. This honorable independence marked the youth of Garfield, as it marks the youth of millions of the best blood and brain now training for the future citizenship and future government of the republic. Garfioid was born heir to land, to the title of freeholder, which has been the patent and passport of self-respect with the Atigio-Baxoa race ever since Hengist and Horsa landed on the shores or England. His adventure on the canal, an alternative between that and the deck of a Lake Erie schooner, was a farmer boy’s device for earning money, just as the New England lad begins a possibly great career by sailing before tho mist on a coasting vessel or on a merchantman bound to tho farther India or to the China seas. No manly man feels anything of shame m looking back to early struggles with adverse circutns auces, and no man feels a worthier pride than when he has conquered the obstacles to his progress. But no one of noble mold desires to be looked upon as having occupied a menial position, as hanug been repressed by a feeling of inferiority, or as having suffored the evils of poverty until relief was found at the hand of charity. Gen. Garfieli’s youth presented no hardships which family love and family energy did not overcome, subjected him to no privations which he did not cheerfully accept, and left no memories save those which were recalled with delight and transmitted with profit and with pride. G irfield’s early opportunities for securing an education were extremely limited, and yet were sufficient to develop in him an intense desire to learn. He could read at 3 years of age, and each winter he had the advantage of the district school. He read all the books he found within the circle of his acquaintance. Borne of thi-m ho got by heart. While yet in childhood he was a constant student of the Bible, and became familiar with its literature. The dignity and earnestness of his speech in his maturer life gave evidence of this early training. At 18 years of age he was able to teach school, and thenceforward his ambition was to obtain a college education. To this end he bent all his efforts, working in the harvest field, at tbe carpenter’s bench, and in the winter season teaching the common schools of the neighborhood. While thus laboriously occupied he found time to prosecute his studies, and was so successful that at 22 he was able to enter the Junior class at Williams College, then under the Presidency of the venerable and honored Mark Hopkins, who. in the fullness of his powers, survived the eminent pupil to whom he was of inestimable service,