James+A.+Garfield

=James A. Garfield=

Early Life
[|James A. Garfield] was born on November 21, 1831 in Moreland Hills, Ohio. He attended Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio and then Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which he graduated from in 1856. He had a number of jobs before he became the senator of Ohio in 1859. He served until 1861. Then the Civil War started and he enlisted in the Union army. Garfield was given control of the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In 1862 while he was fighting in the Civil War, the Republicans elected to the United States House of Representatives for Ohio. He continued fighting in the war until December 1863, when Congress finally met. Garfield took his seat in Congress and was re-elected every two years from 1864 to 1878.

Election of 1880
In the election of 1880, the Republicans nominated the halfbreed James A. Garfield and the stalwart Chester A. Arthur as his vice president. The Democrats nominated Winfield S. Hancock, who was a former general who was wounded in Gettysburg. Garfield won the election by 214 electoral votes to 155. The popular vote was really close, Garfield won by less than 2,000 popular votes. He was the first person ever to be elected from the House of Representatives to the Presidency.

Presidency
James A. Garfield was sworn into office on March 4, 1881. He became the 20th President of the United States. His presidency is most significant because of the many people seeking federal jobs. In the first few weeks of office, Republicans were demanding about 100,000 federal jobs. Garfield decided to fill most of the jobs with halfbreeds and this made Senator Roscoe Conkling, the leader of the Stalwarts, very mad. Garfield also strengthened the federal authority over the New York Customs House.

Assassination[[image:GarfieldPassing.jpg align="right"]]
On July 2, 1881, Garfield was getting ready to board a train in Washington, D.C. for a summer vacation, when he was shot. [|Charles J. Guiteau], a stalwart who was seeking a position in which he wasn't qualified for at all, shot Garfield in the back. [|Alexander Graham Bell] made a special metal detector to find the bullet but it did not work because the bed that Garfield was lying in was made of metal. Nobody knew that the metal bed frames were the cause of the malfunction of the metal detector. Garfield started to become very weak because of an infection to the wound. He died on September 19, 1881, 80 days after the shooting. Many believe that Garfield could have been saved if they had better doctors and died because of the infection. After his death, Chester A. Arthur took the office.