He Was Nominated for President While Trying to Nominate Someone Else

He had come to nominate someone else.

James Garfield, an Ohio congressman who had spent 17 years in the House, stood on the floor of the Republican convention to make the case for Ohio Senator John Sherman, a leading candidate for the 1880 nomination. He finished with a simple question to the delegates. "And now, gentlemen of the convention, what do we want?"

From the crowd came an answer he did not want. "We want Garfield."

What followed was a man talked into the presidency while he was still talking. Garfield had made it a rule never to ask for a new post or a step up for himself. "I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements," Garfield once admitted. He had watched what he called presidential fever ruin the careers, character, and lives of friends in Congress, and he had written, "I am determined it shall not seize me."

Now the fever was seizing the hall around him. A friend pulled him aside to warn him. "General, they are talking about nominating you." Garfield replied, "My God, I know it, and they will ruin me." He insisted he would vote for Sherman and remain loyal to him, and that his name must not be used.

The delegates used it anyway. As vote after vote went to Garfield against his will, he protested from the floor that no man had a right to announce another man's name and vote for him without that person's consent. "Such consent I have not given," he said. It did not stop them. When the final state voted, he held 399 votes, 20 beyond the threshold for victory. He had not consented to run, and had fought the idea hard, yet the convention made him its choice.

A friend came up to congratulate him. "I am very sorry that this has become necessary," Garfield said, and he meant it. In his journal he wrote, "This honor comes to me unsought. I have never had the presidential fever, not even for a day." He then largely refused to campaign. When reporters visited his modest home, they found books filling every room.

To Garfield, victory felt like loss. He did not see winning as an achievement. The presidency was, in Garfield's words, "a bleak mountain that he was obliged to ascend," one that would take his hours at home with his family, his reading, and his farm work, and bring loneliness and sorrow. "There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph, which I can hardly explain," he wrote to a friend.

The night before his inauguration, alone at his desk, he put it more bluntly. "Tonight, I'm a private citizen. Tomorrow, I should be called to assume new responsibilities. And on the day after, the broad side of the world's wrath will strike."