Who is James Garfield?
James Garfield was a professor, a school president, studied law, was ordained as a minister, and became our country’s 20th president. In an election in which the popular vote was very clearly split between North and South, he won by less than 10,000 votes. President Garfield was shot less than four months after taking office, and served for less time than anyone except William Henry Harrison. James Garfield was born in a log cabin, the last president to be able to make that claim. The cabin was in Ohio, and it was 1831, two years before his father was to die, leaving his mother to try to run the family farm. The family was poor, but he graduated from Williams College and became a professor of ancient languages at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, where he had taken classes. In 1857, James Garfield became the school’s president, and supported its name change to Hiram College. Garfield became interested in the recently formed Republican Party, and was elected to the state legislature i
