President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by CW Goodyear

So, why Garfield, you ask? Before read this I would have agreed with you. I did venture to his homestead once when I was in Ohio (which is the breeding ground of more Presidents than any other state than Virginia, and let's face it, they got a huge head start with the whole pre-and post Revolutionary War cabal, making a name for themselves with the Declaration of Independence and Constitution business). It’s not immediately evident why anyone should write an ambitious, thorough, supremely researched biography of James Garfield, the first such effort in nearly a half-century. The nation’s 20th president served just 200 days in office, 80 of which he spent dying after being shot by an assassin’s bullet, and seemingly the most interesting part of that abbreviated tenure — the assassination. Wrong! Garfield lived it all — starting work as a teenager on an Ohio canal towpath, traveling across a region whose canals his father helped build, teaching and ministering on the frontiers of the Western Reserve, then rising in local politics through the turbulent prewar years as the country was wrenched apart by slavery, ascending to fame in Civil War combat as one of the few Union officers who showed any ambition and aggression in the early years (bravery mixed with equal parts luck on the battlefield), and then catapulting himself into Congress at 31. From his first election as head of the debating society at Williams College to a then-long tenure of 17 years in the House and finally on to the White House, Garfield never lost an election. And, in advance of him becoming president himself, he presided over preventing Southern Dixiecrats from stealing the election from Rutherford Hayes from succeeding. He was the original Black Lives Matter guy. He saw the dangers for ex-slaves in the post-Civil War South, and while he lost many of these battles, he was unwaveringly anti-slavery before the war, and a supporter of full rights for black citizens. He lobbied for equal pay for equal work for black soldiers. Again, did not win many of these battles, but he fought them. It was his intellectual curiosity and thirst for education that would be one Garfield’s most lasting legacies: He fought for the creation of the federal Department of Education as one of the reforms necessary for a maturing country, which had extended the franchise to Blacks in early Reconstruction. The man who shot him wanted his VP, Chester Arthur to be President--which happened, but Arthur died of kidney disease at the end of Garfield's term, and it is possible he was born on the Canadian side of the border, no one knows for sure.