A Boy With No Shoes Until Age Four Ran His Old School by 26

Each morning, James Garfield slipped out of his first class early to climb the tower and pull the rope for the big morning bell. As he later noted in his diary, his step felt steady and unburdened. He was the janitor.

Garfield, who later became the 20th U.S. president, grew up poor in an Ohio log cabin. He went barefoot until age four. What land the family had was farmed by his mother with the help of his 11-year-old brother, Thomas.

What happened next took him from a boy who did manual labor to pay for school to running his old school by age 26. It was driven by study, from 5 a.m. to just before midnight, and by a refusal to be ashamed of being poor.

At 16, Garfield left home to work as a canal man, driving boats on the canal. It was the lowliest job among rough and violent men. He fell into the cold water and almost drowned, then caught malaria and almost died. He made it back to the log cabin barely able to walk and spent two months in bed.

While he was away, his mother and brother had put aside $17 to send him to school. "I took the money, as well as the advice," Garfield wrote.

Unable to afford tuition, he persuaded a small academy, later Hiram College, to let him earn his lessons through cleaning and upkeep. He cleaned classrooms, carried firewood, and lit morning stoves, and he made no secret of being poor to fellow students. As a boy he had told his mother that if he got through a course of study, no one would ask what coat he wore, "and if they do, I shall not be ashamed to tell them it was a ragged one."

He studied with ferocity. "The ice is broken," he wrote. "I am resolved to make a mark in the world. There is some of the slumbering thunder in my soul, and it shall come out." If he tired, he wrote, he was spurred on by the thought that "some other fellow in the class will probably master it."

Within a year he went from janitor to assistant professor, teaching literature, mathematics, and ancient languages while still taking classes himself. In 1854 he entered Williams College in Massachusetts, where he found better prepared rivals and set out to beat them. Writing to someone he knew, he made his own boastful prediction that in a class of 42, 37 classmates would trail him within two months.

After finishing at Williams, he went back to the small academy as a teacher and then became its principal, running the school that had once paid him in lessons by age 26. Then, after the man holding an Ohio state senate seat died in 1859, Garfield was invited to stand for that seat, and he won by a wide margin, quietly starting the political career that would take him to the White House.