Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 March 1881 — The President’s Mother. [ARTICLE]

The President’s Mother.

General Garfield’s mother is the only woman who has seen “ her bey ” inaugurated president of*the Uriited States. It was a proud day for the old lady, now more than eighty, a mother in Israel. To take in the fall weight and breadth of the occasion, as it must have presented itself to the president’s mother, one must paint her in .his, mind as the daughter first hand then the wife of a poor New England farmer. Remember that her husband moved from Massachusetts to Northern NewYorkand cleared up a small farm in the wilderness; that he sold his land and ‘improvements and pushed still farther west, again encountering the “back woods” in hope of bettering his condition and giving his children a better chance in fe; that he was not able to educate his boys, except in a very rudimentary viy, and finally that he died before the family were sally grown,leaving her to finish the struggle of life unaided, except as she might pe aided by the children she had borne. '

This mother, on Friday, Saw her son, who began life on a porir farm, and who eked out money to bay for* his education by driving horse# on thetowpath of the old Erie and, Ohio canal and drudging at the carpenter’s bench, placed at the head of a Mation almost covering a continent and inhabited by a high spirited, intelligent and wealthy people numbering SI, 000,000 souls. J The mother was proud, and who shall say that she had not a night to be proud? Few women bearpboys capable of “paddling their own* canoes” through the broad corrldofaand ab ut the stately halls of the presidential mansion.

We have had about three self-faade presidents—Jackson, Lincoln,' land Garfield. The rest have been lucky accidents, negative figure heads, or happened to fill some’ special denUnd of the times. These three won [the right to the distinction—if not the! office itself—by force of ability frad power to manage men and cireiKistaftces. And now, consider what other great people on the globe has its affairs administered by a man who thirty-four years ago was a poor rough-clad strippling endeavoring to earn softie extra pence by the rudest and commonest labor. The old mother must be pardoned for her pride in that