issue, the troubles growing out of reconstruction in the South, the Crédit Mobilier and the “Salary Grab,” disgusted thousands of independent voters and sent a wave of Democracy over the country. Garfield himself was accused of corruption in connexion with the Crédit Mobilier scandal, but the charge was never proved. A Republican convention in his district demanded his resignation, and re-election seemed impossible; but he defended himself in two pamphlets, “Increase of Salaries” and “Review of the Transactions of the Crédit Mobilier Company,” made a village-to-village canvass, and was victorious. In 1876 Garfield for the eighth time was chosen to represent his district; and afterwards as one of the two representatives of the Republicans in the House, he was a member of the Electoral Commission which decided the dispute regarding the presidential election of 1876. When, in 1877, James G. Blaine was made a senator from Maine, the leadership of the House of Representatives passed to Garfield, and he became the Republican candidate for speaker. But the Democrats had a majority in the House, and he was defeated. Hayes, the new president, having chosen John Sherman to be his secretary of the treasury, an effort was made to send Garfield to the United States Senate in Sherman’s place. But the president needed his services in the House, and he was not elected to the Senate until 1880.
The time had now come (1880) when the Republican party must nominate a candidate for the presidency. General Grant had served two terms (1869–1877), and the unwritten law of custom condemned his being given another. But the “bosses” of the Republican party in three great States—New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois—were determined that he should be renominated. These men and their followers were known as the “stalwarts.” Opposed to them were two other factions, one supporting James G. Blaine, of Maine, and the other John Sherman, of Ohio. When the convention met and the balloting began, the contest along these factional lines started in earnest. For eight-and-twenty ballots no change of any consequence was noticeable. Though votes were often cast for ten names, there were but two real candidates before the convention, Grant and Blaine. That the partisans of neither would yield in favour of the other was certain. That the choice therefore rested with the supporters of the minor candidates was manifest, and with the cry “Anything to beat Grant!” an effort was made to find some man on whom the opposition could unite. Such a man was Garfield. His long term of service in the House, his leadership of his party on its floor, his candidacy for the speakership, and his recent election to the United States Senate, marked him out as the available man. Between the casting of the first and the thirty-third ballot, Garfield, who was the leader of Sherman’s adherents in the convention, had sometimes received one or two votes and at other times none. On the thirty-fourth he received seventeen, on the next fifty, and on the next almost the entire vote hitherto cast for Blaine and Sherman, and was declared nominated. During the campaign Garfield was subject to violent personal abuse; the fact that he was alleged to have received $329 from the Crédit Mobilier as a dividend on stock led his opponents to raise the campaign cry of “329,” and this number was placarded in the streets of the cities and printed in flaring type in partisan newspapers. The forged “Morey letter,” in which he was made to appear as opposed to the exclusion of the Chinese, was widely circulated and injured his candidacy in the West. That the charges against Garfield were not generally credited, however, is shown by the fact that he received 214 electoral votes to his opponent’s 155. He was inaugurated on the 4th of March 1881.
Unfortunately, the new president was unequal to the task of composing the differences in his party. For his secretary of state he chose James G. Blaine, the bitterest political enemy of Senator Roscoe Conkling (q.v.), the leader of the New York “stalwarts.” Without consulting the New York senators, Garfield appointed William H. Robertson, another political enemy of Conkling’s, to the desirable post of Collector of the Port of New York, and thereby destroyed all prospects of party harmony. On the 2nd of July, while on his way to attend the commencement exercises at Williams College, the new president was shot in a Washington railway station by a disappointed office-seeker named Charles J. Guiteau, whose mind had no doubt been somewhat influenced by the abuse lavished upon the president by his party opponents; and on the 19th of September 1881, he died at Elberon, New Jersey, whither he had been removed on the 6th. He was buried in Cleveland, Ohio, where in 1890 a monument was erected by popular subscription to his memory.
In 1858 Garfield had married Miss Lucretia Rudolph, by whom he had seven children. His son, Harry Augustus Garfield (b. 1863) graduated at Williams College in 1885, practised law in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1888–1903, was professor of politics at Princeton University in 1903–1908, and in 1908 became president of Williams College. Another son, James Rudolph Garfield (b. 1865), also graduated at Williams College in 1885 and practised law in Cleveland; he was a Republican member of the Ohio Senate in 1896–1899, was commissioner of corporations, Department of Commerce and Labour, in 1903–1907, attracting wide attention by his reports on certain large industrial organizations, and was secretary of the interior (1907–1909) in the cabinet of President Roosevelt.
President Garfield’s writings, edited by Burke A. Hinsdale, were published at Boston, in two volumes, in 1882. (J. B. McM.)
GAR-FISH, the name given to a genus of fishes (Belone) found
in nearly all the temperate and tropical seas, and readily recognized
by their long, slender, compressed and silvery body, and by
their jaws being produced into a long, pointed, bony and sharply-toothed
beak. About fifty species are known from different
parts of the globe, some attaining to a length of 4 or 5 ft. One
species is common on the British coasts, and is well known by the
names of “long-nose,” “green-bone,” &c. The last name is
given to those fishes on account of the peculiar green colour of
their bones, which deters many people from eating them, although
their flesh is well flavoured and perfectly wholesome. The
skipper (Scomberesox) and half-beak (Hemirhamphus), in which
the lower jaw only is prolonged, are fishes nearly akin to the
gar-pikes.
GARGANEY[1] (North-Italian, Garganello), or Summer-Teal,
the Anas querquedula and A. circia of Linnaeus (who made, as
did Willughby and Ray, two species out of one), and the type of
Stephens’s genus Querquedula. This bird is one of the smallest of
the Anatidae, and has gained its common English name from
being almost exclusively a summer-visitant to England where
nowadays it only regularly resorts to breed in some of the East-Norfolk
Broads, though possibly at one time it was found at the
same season throughout the great Fen-district. Slightly larger
than the common teal (A. crecca), the male is readily distinguished
therefrom by its peculiarly-coloured head, the sides of which are
nutmeg-brown, closely freckled with short whitish streaks, while
a conspicuous white curved line descends backwards from the
eyes. The upper wing-coverts are bluish grey, the scapulars
black with a white shaft-stripe, and the wing-spot (speculum)
greyish green bordered above and below by white. The female
closely resembles the hen teal, but possesses no wing-spot. In
Ireland or Scotland the garganey is very rare, and though it
is recorded from Iceland, more satisfactory evidence of its
occurrence there is needed. It has not a high northern range,
and its appearance in Norway and Sweden is casual. Though it
breeds in many parts of Europe, in none can it be said to be
common; but it ranges far to the eastward in Asia—even to
Formosa, according to Swinhoe—and yearly visits India in
winter in enormous numbers. Those that breed in Norfolk
arrive somewhat late in spring and make their nests in the vast
reed-beds which border the Broads—a situation rarely or never
chosen by the teal. The labyrinth or bony enlargement of the
trachea in the male garganey differs in form from that described
in any other drake, being more oval and placed nearly in the
- ↑ The word was introduced by Willughby from Gesner (Orn., lib. iii. p. 127), but, though generally adopted by authors, seems never to have become other than a book-name in English, the bird being invariably known in the parts of this island where it is indigenous as “summer-teal.”
