Gen. James A. Garfield
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Part 1 of a series
The battlefield decapitation of Union Gen. William Rosecrans’ chief of staff changed the political climate of the army occupying Murfreesboro and maybe that of the United States.
Col. Julius P. Garesché was more of a priest than a warrior, but he applied for a field command with his West Point friend, William Rosecrans. Garesché, despite being younger, was Rosecrans’ religious mentor and was largely responsible for his conversion to Catholicism.
Garesché took the battlefield commission despite his own premonitions of death and the prediction by his brother that he would die in his first battle.
Late in the first morning at the Battle of Stones River, Garesché accompanied Rosecrans as he dashed on horseback to the area of the Union army’s final stand near the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad line. A Confederate artilleryman seeing the band of Union officers aimed and fired. His cannonball narrowly missed Rosecrans and struck Garesché in the head, decapitating him.
The loss of his close friend unnerved Rosecrans, but he rallied his army to victory.
“The general later superstitiously expressed that Garesché had served as a Christlike sacrifice to win the day's battle,” wrote Larry Daniel in his book “Days of Glory.”
After the battle, Rosecran’s army occupied Murfreesboro, and Washington sent Rosecrans a replacement for Garesché.
While Garesché had been a career soldier/administrator, his replacement was a political general, James Abram Garfield, who would later become the last of the “log cabin” Presidents.
Garfield was born on Nov. 19, 1831 in rural Cuyahoga Country, Ohio. He was the youngest of the five children born to Abram and Eliza Ballou Garfield. The family's home was a plain log cabin, about 30 feet wide by 20 feet long. The area was so sparsely populated that their only neighbor lived seven miles away.
The family was poor but had distinguished American roots dating back 1630 and the Mayflower.
Abram Garfield was a farmer and canal worker. Following his death in 1833, Eliza Garfield kept the family together with the help of her oldest son, Thomas. She encouraged James to study, and he proved to be an excellent student. At age 18 he began to keep a journal, a habit he kept the rest of his life.
At about that same age, Garfield moved out on his own, first landing a job as a woodchopper and then leading a team of canal boat horses on the Ohio and Pennsylvania canals. He enjoyed the work and was soon promoted to serving as a bowman on a canal boat. A near drowning incident convinced the religious teen that God might have other plans for him. Within weeks, he caught malaria and returned home to recover.
He lived in the so-called Western Reserve, a 12-county area of Northeast Ohio that was once claimed by Connecticut.
He then decided to further his education. March 6, 1849 he left home for the Geauga Seminary in nearby Chester, Ohio. The Free-Will Baptists founded the seminary. About this same time, Garfield began to take an interest in politics even to the point of making pro-Republican speeches in the area. He left the seminary in 1850 to attend Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio. Now called Hiram College, the institution was founded by Amos Sutton Hayden of the Disciples of Christ Church.
Garfield was a student at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute from 1851-54 when he transferred to Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. where he graduated in 1856. He was called by the congregation of Franklin Circle Christian Church in New York where he preached a year before returning to education as instructor of classical languages at Eclectic Institute. Garfield was an instructor in classical languages for the 1856–1857 academic year, and was made principal of the Institute from 1857 to 1860.
Garfield was ambidextrous. It was said that one could ask him a question in English and he could simultaneously write the answer in Latin with one hand and Ancient Greek with the other.
Throughout this period of his life, he remained active in politics. He continued speechmaking and was elected an Ohio state senator in 1859, serving until 1861. Ohio’s Republican Gov. Salmon P. Chase was an important ally and mentor to Garfield. Chase would later be secretary of the treasury in the Lincoln administration.
He left the Eclectic Institute in 1861 to take up the Civil War command of Company A of the 42nd Regiment, Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment recruited from Hiram.
Army of Ohio Gen. Don Carlos Buell sent the untrained Col. Garfield to eastern Kentucky in November 1861, putting him in charge of the 18th Brigade composed of the 40th and 42nd Ohio and the 14th and 22nd Kentucky infantry regiments, as well as the 2nd (West) Virginia Cavalry and McLaughlin’s Squadron of Cavalry.
Garfield’s cavalry fought against Confederate Brig. Gen. Humphrey Marshall at Jenny’s Creek on Jan. 6, 1862 and again on Jan. 9 near Prestonsburg, Ky.
The Confederates withdrew, but Garfield did not pursue them. He did receive the rank of brigadier general on Jan. 11 in thanks for his victory.
Garfield continued as brigade commander under Buell and led troops at Battle of Shiloh and under Gen. Thomas J. Wood at the Siege of Corinth.
Garfield’s health deteriorated, and he remained inactive until the autumn of 1862, when he served on the commission investigating the conduct of Fits John Porter.
Lincoln’s handpicked Gen. John Pope blamed Porter for the Union defeat at Second Manassas. Pope charged Porter with disobedience. Porter was found guilty by court-martial on Jan. 10 and disgraced. In 1878 a second formal investigation concluded Porter was not at fault.
In the spring of 1863, Garfield returned to the field as chief of staff for Rosecrans, commander of the Army of the Cumberland. He was 32 years old.
Rosecrans, an Ohio resident himself, was suspicious of Garfield and believed he might be a spy for either the Lincoln administration or the Radical Republicans. He perceived him as nothing more than a preacher turned politician.
Rosecrans considered himself an abolitionist and was opposed to slavery. The much more radical Garfield saw his commanding general as rather pro-slavery.
When Garfield arrived in Murfreesboro, he took the home of Dr. Robert Wendel at the corner of Spring and East Main Streets as his headquarters. Wendel, a charter member of the Rutherford County Medical Society, was serving as a surgeon with the Confederate Army. When Garfield took his home, Wendel was serving at a Confederate hospital in Forsysthe, Ga. His wife, Emma and his children were given safe passage to Forsythe. The war pushed Emma Wendel and her 12 children on to Columbus, Miss., where here daughter, Roberta Lee Wendel, was born.
Novelist and correspondent James Robert Gilmore, who used the pen name, Edmund Kirke, wrote about meeting Garfield in Murfreesboro in his 1864 book, “Down in Tennessee and back by way of Richmond:”
“In a corner by the window, seated at a small pine desk – a sort of packing-box, perched on a long-legged stool, and divided into pigeon-holes, with a turn-down lid – was a tall, deep-chested, sinewy-built man, with regular, massive features, a full, clear blue eye, slightly tinged with gray, and high, broad forehead, rising into a ridge over the eyes, as if it had been thrown up by plow.
“There was something singularly engaging in his open, expressive face, and his whole appearance indicated, as the phrase goes, ‘great reserve power.’ His uniform, though cleanly bushed and sitting easily upon him, had a sort of democratic air, and everything about him seemed to denote that he was a ‘man of the people.’
“A rusty slouched hat, large enough to have fitted Daniel Webster, lay on the desk before him; but a glance at that was not needed to convince me that his head held more than the common share of brains. Though he is yet young – not thirty-three – the reader has heard of him, and if he lives he will make his name long remembered in our history.”
Murfreesboro was just a stepping-stone for James A. Garfield, who had some rather harsh things to say about the town.
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