Garfield: A Biography

This first full-scale biography of our twentieth president in over fifty years reflects not only a renewal of interest in Garfield the man as the centennial of his inauguration nears, but in the Gilded Age of American politics in which he played so influential a role. Moving from the battlefield to Congress before the end of the Civil War, Garfield had a hand in almost everything of national importance for two decades, the years of peace, Reconstruction, and industrialization. As a party leader he, along with his friend James G. Blaine, forged the modern Republican Party into the instrument which would lead the United States into the twentieth century, and though his presidency was cut short by an assassin’s bullet, he succeeded in rescuing the office from the shadows of Johnson and Grant, elevated it above the Congress, and began the accretion of presidential power that has lasted to our own day.