We’ve made it to the final day of Before They Were President week, and we’re closing out with one of history’s most fascinating — and tragic — what-ifs. James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States, served only 200 days in office before his assassination cut short a presidency that many believed had enormous promise. But before all of that, he lived one of the most genuinely remarkable pre-presidential lives of anyone to ever hold the office.
Born in a Log Cabin, Raised by Determination
Garfield was born into poverty in a log cabin in northeast Ohio — and not just any poverty, the kind where opportunity felt genuinely out of reach. He holds a small but meaningful distinction: he was the last American president to be born in a log cabin, the end of a frontier-era tradition that stretches back through Lincoln and Andrew Jackson. His early years were shaped by hardship, but also by an obvious restlessness and hunger for something more.
That restlessness sent him, at just 16 years old, out into the world to seek his fortune.
The Canal Boy
The adventure he found wasn’t exactly glamorous. Garfield left home and took work as a “canal boy” on the Ohio and Erie Canal, one of the great infrastructure projects of 19th-century America. His job wasn’t on the boats themselves but on the towpath alongside them, guiding the mules that pulled the vessels along the water with a rope. It was hard, unglamorous, outdoor labor — and by his own account, it nearly killed him repeatedly.
He fell into the canal approximately 16 times. He almost drowned. He contracted malaria. After six weeks of this, he returned home, where his mother, presumably having heard enough, convinced him to quit and use his savings to go to school instead. It is, all things considered, excellent motherly advice.
From Classroom to College President
What followed is where Garfield’s story starts to feel almost mythological. He enrolled at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College) and then transferred to Williams College in Massachusetts, where he excelled academically. After graduating in 1856, he returned to Hiram — this time as a classics professor. By age 26, he was president of the college.
He was also a preacher, making him the first — and still the only — president to have been a member of the clergy. And he was almost certainly the first left-handed president, though “left-handed” barely scratches the surface. Garfield was famously ambidextrous and allegedly could write in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other simultaneously. Whether you believe that party trick or not, it says something about the kind of person people believed him to be.
Soldier, Congressman, Compromise Candidate
When the Civil War came, Garfield served as a major general in the Union Army, seeing combat in several battles before Abraham Lincoln personally convinced him to hang up his uniform. Lincoln needed advocates in Congress, and Garfield was too valuable a voice for Ohio to keep on the battlefield. He obliged, joining the House of Representatives in 1863 and serving nine terms — and he remains, to this day, the only sitting member of the House ever to be elected president.
His path to the White House in 1880 was itself improbable. He had just been elected to the Senate when the Republican National Convention deadlocked. After 35 ballots failed to produce a nominee, delegates turned to Garfield on the 36th as a compromise candidate. He hadn’t campaigned for it. He simply became the answer to a problem no one else could solve. He conducted a quiet, low-key front porch campaign and narrowly won the presidency.
200 Days
What came next is where Garfield’s story turns from remarkable to heartbreaking.
On July 2, 1881, just months into his presidency, Garfield was shot at a Washington D.C. train station by Charles J. Guiteau, a deluded office-seeker who believed he was owed a diplomatic post. Among those present at the station that day was Robert Todd Lincoln — Abraham Lincoln’s son — who was serving as Secretary of War. He watched the scene unfold and, by his own account, couldn’t help but think back to the night his father was killed, 16 years earlier.
Garfield was tended to immediately by Dr. Charles Purvis, who became the first African-American physician to treat a sitting president. But what followed in the weeks and months after was, in many ways, as tragic as the shooting itself.
Joseph Lister’s work on antisepsis was known in American medical circles, but few physicians had real confidence in it, and none of Garfield’s treating doctors were among its advocates. They probed his wound repeatedly with unsterilized fingers and instruments, introducing massive infection into what had initially been a non-fatal bullet wound. X-ray imaging, which might have allowed doctors to precisely locate the bullet, wouldn’t be invented for another 14 years. Alexander Graham Bell attempted to find it with a primitive metal detector, but was unsuccessful.
Garfield lingered for months. He died on September 19, 1881 — giving him the second-shortest presidency in American history, behind only William Henry Harrison’s 32 days.
The Legacy of a What-If
Because of his brief tenure and the lack of major legislative accomplishments, historians tend to rank Garfield as a below-average president or leave him out of rankings entirely. But many look at his record — his anti-corruption stances, his genuine commitment to civil rights — and see someone whose potential was simply never realized. He’s one of history’s great what-ifs, a man of extraordinary ability who never got the chance to show what he could do with the office.
Interest in Garfield has seen a real revival recently, thanks in part to the 2025 Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning, which brought his story to a whole new audience.
And that’s a wrap on Before They Were President week. From canal boy to college president to compromise nominee to the second-shortest presidency in American history — James Garfield lived more before the White House than most people fit into a lifetime. Thanks for following along all week. What a ride it’s been.