A wealthy man in one way, but poor in all others

JAMES Garfield didn't want to be President of the USA.

- Phil Wisdom

At the Republican convention of 1880 he nominated James Blaine, but with such dignity and eloquence that, when the voting became deadlocked between Blaine and Ulysses S Grant, the delegates made a reluctant Garfield their candidate. Born in poverty in Ohio, the youngest of five children, he was raised by his widowed mother and at 16 began work as a canal muleteer, then paid his way through school by working as a carpenter's assistant and itinerant teacher. In 1851 he attended college, the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, initially working as the janitor to fund his studies; by 1854 he was a full-time teacher there. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts in only a year he returned to the institute to teach, and in 1857 its former janitor became its principal. Garfield was a state senator, a general during the Civil War and then served nine terms in the House of Representatives. Inaugurated as President on March 4, 1881, on July 2 he was shot in the back by a derang