the disputed succession to the presidency, were among the problems successfully solved. Certainly, statesmen no where were ever called upon to grapple with questions of greater moment. It is enough to indicate the strength of Mr. Garfield that he was one of the military committee during the war, chairman of the committee on appropriations afterwards, a member of the electoral commission in 1876, and became the recognized leader of his party in the House. The Ohio Legislature, in 1880, elected him to the United States Senate, for the term beginning November 4th, 1881.
No party convention ever had it in its power to affect more seriously the institutions of the country than that which assembled in Chicago, in 1880, to nominate a candidate for the presidency. A few months earlier, the selection of ex-President Grant had seemed inevitable. For two years, a banker in Philadelphia,[1] with a taste for higher politics, had been urging the nomination of Mr. Garfield in the columns of the Penn Monthly and making combinations looking to that result. On the first ballot Mr, Garfield had but one vote, that of a friend of the Philadelphia banker. On the thirty-sixth ballot he was nominated. After a close struggle he was elected, and so it happened that he was a member of the House, a member elect of the Senate, and President elect of the United States at the same time; a distinction which never fell to man before. The policy of his administration had barely been defined, its strength had just been successfully tested, when an assassin crept up behind him and gave him a fatal wound.
Though his rule was brief, there are two things which will make it historic. His elevation marked the dissipa-
- ↑ Mr. Wharton Barker.
