Description:

Garfield James

James Garfield Biography Dedicated by Publisher and Presented to Widow Lucretia Garfield

 

1st edition hardcover copy of E.E. Brown's The Life and Public Services of James A. Garfield, Twentieth President of the United States (Boston: D. Lothrop Company, 1881), personally dedicated and presented to Lucretia Garfield ten years after her husband's death. The front flyleaf is inscribed and signed by publisher Daniel Lothrop (1831-1892) as: "Mrs. James A Garfield with Sincere regards of D. Lothrop, Boston March 30, 1891."

 

Black morocco leather boards, gilt-stamped covers and spine, blue and gilt floral cloth endpapers and pastedowns, and gilt-edged text block. The frontispiece illustration facing the title page depicts Garfield's Mentor, Ohio farmhouse, and has an original and intact tissue guard. In near fine condition. Overall toning and expected surface wear to covers. Minor wear to front cover hinge. Measures 12mo, or 4.875" x 6.875" x 1.5".

 

The 587pp book provides an exhaustive account of Garfield's personal life, military and political career, assassination, and memorialization. The book was published in 1881 sometime after Garfield's death in mid-September of that year. Divided into 48 chapters and 5 addenda, the book incorporates correspondence, recollections, poetry, and more.

 

Almost half of the book is devoted to Garfield's shooting, final illness, death, funeral, and commemoration. Included in an addendum is the post-mortem examination report completed by Garfield's doctors. It reveals how little the presidential physicians actually knew about his condition, including the exact location of the second bullet buried near Garfield's pancreas. Unusually, Brown has also included a short sketch of Garfield's assassin, Charles J. Guiteau (1841-1882), in this biography of his victim (Chapter 30). Typically, period biographies simply write off Guiteau as a lunatic and don't attempt any sort of balanced analysis.

 

James Garfield (1831-1881), a college-educated lawyer, served as an Ohio delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives between 1863 and 1880. The Civil War veteran did not wish to run as a Republican candidate for President in 1880, but he won anyway. On July 2, 1881, President Garfield was shot in a Washington train station lounge by disgruntled office seeker Charles J. Guiteau. The second bullet was irretrievable despite Alexander Graham Bell’s attempts to locate the bullet using the newly developing science of metal detection. After two and a half months of excruciating convalescence in the White House and along the New Jersey shore, Garfield died from complications of an infection at age forty-nine.

Lucretia Garfield, or “Crete” as she was lovingly called by her husband of twenty-three years, impressed many by her strength and stoicism in the months and years following her husband’s death. Lucretia became involved in preserving records related to her husband’s presidency in the thirty-six years before her death in the spring of 1918.

 

Emma Elizabeth Brown (born 1847), known by her pen name E.E. Brown, wrote biographies of nineteenth-century American notables. In addition to Garfield, she chronicled U.S. Grant and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

 

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