Description:

Garfield James



James Garfield, Eulogy by His Former Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Presented to Widow Lucretia Garfield

 

1st edition authorized version of James G. Blaine's Eulogy on James Abram Garfield, Delivered before the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, February 27, 1882 (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882), later presented to the widowed First Lady. Inscribed on the front fly leaf as "Lucretia A. Garfield from The Publishers, 1882."

 

Brown morocco leather boards and spine, the latter gilt embossed "Blaine's Eulogy on Garfield." Red marbled endpapers and gilt-edged pages. With a handsome frontispiece of Garfield located to the left of the title page, with original and intact tissue guard. Overall light toning and some isolated foxing to the first few pages. Expected light scuffs and edge wear to the spine and corners. Some wear to front cover hinge and inner binding, else near fine. Measures 12mo, or 4.75" x 7" x .625".

 

The 60pp book reproduces the speech Blaine delivered before Congress six months after Garfield's death. James G. Blaine (1830-1893) was a seasoned politician from Maine who had competed against Garfield for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 1880. But he had become Garfield's friend and loyal colleague when he served as his Secretary of State. Blaine was with Garfield when he was shot at the Washington, D.C. train station.

 

Blaine, whose spare but stirring oratorical style was compared at the time to Daniel Webster's, characterized Garfield as a bright, honest, hardworking person whose good will extended to everyone. The speech ended by emphasizing Garfield's final display of courage. For, after the shooting, Garfield lingered for two and a half months before expiring of wide-spread septic blood poisoning. In the most memorable part of the eulogy, Blaine stated: "Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death…he was thrust…into the visible presence of death -- and he did not quail. Not alone for one short moment, in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life, hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony…with clear sight and calm courage, he looked into his open grave." (57)

 

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 (1841-1882). The second bullet lodged near Garfield’s pancreas but was irretrievable despite Alexander Graham Bell’s attempts to locate the bullet using the newly developing science of metal detection. After weeks of excruciating convalescence in the White House and along the New Jersey shore--where he was probed by many doctors unfamiliar with basic germ theory--Garfield died 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.

 


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