20th President Of The United States

Researching James A. Garfield: What Actually Works

Most people searching for information on the 20th President Of The United States end up confused about the numbering system itself. Garfield was the twentieth president, serving from March 1881 through September 1881. His vice president, Chester A. Arthur, succeeded him and was the twenty-first president. That distinction matters more than it should because half the sources online conflate their tenures or miscount because Grover Cleveland's two non-consecutive terms throw off the numbering if you're not careful. Garfield's term lasted roughly six and a half months, which means there's comparatively little executive action documented in the record. He was a sitting president when he was shot on July 2, 1881, and he lingered for 79 days before dying. That gap between the shooting and the death is where most amateur historians trip up. They'll cite events from late July and early September as if they happened during an active presidency, but Garfield was effectively incapacitated during much of that window. His cabinet meetings grew irregular, and Arthur was largely kept in the dark about policy decisions, which created a governance vacuum. I spent weeks trying to track which cabinet-level decisions actually had Garfield's direct involvement in August 1881 versus which ones were made by department heads acting on their own. The answer is messier than most secondary sources admit. The key workaround I found was cross-referencing the Public Papers of the Presidents with the actual departmental correspondence archived at the Library of Congress. Garfield's own letters from that period show he was still trying to read briefings but was physically unable to engage with them meaningfully after mid-July. Any claim that he personally directed policy in late August doesn't hold up under document-level scrutiny.

What most people miss about Garfield's actual record

Garfield was a competent administrator before the assassination, and his contributions to civil service reform are often overshadowed by the myth that Arthur inherited a broken system. The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act passed in 1883 under Arthur, but Garfield had pushed the legislation through Congress during his term. He was specifically motivated by the assassination attempt, which was carried out by a disgruntled office-seeker. That causal link gets buried in textbooks. The act itself had limits — it only covered about 10% of federal positions initially — but it established the precedent that hiring should be based on merit rather than patronage. Another detail that doesn't get enough attention: Garfield was the only sitting president to have been a general in the Union Army. He rose to brigadier general at age 22, which is young even by Civil War standards. His military background shaped how he approached appointments — he valued competence and loyalty over party machinery, which is precisely why the spoils system hunters targeted him. Understanding that connection between his military career and his reform agenda changes how you interpret his short presidency.

Pitfalls to watch for in the sources

The biggest issue you'll run into is the date problem. Garfield was inaugurated on March 4, 1881, because the 20th Amendment hadn't been ratified yet. That moved inauguration day to January 20 starting with FDR. If you're pulling dates from sources that normalize everything to the modern schedule, you'll get garbled timelines. Always check the original document dates, not the edited collections. Another problem is the medical literature. For decades, the official explanation was that Garfield died from infection caused by unsterilized medical probes. Modern pathologists have argued that he actually died from a cardiac event triggered by the bullet lodging near his aorta, and that the doctors' interference may have diverted him from life-saving surgery. Both accounts have merit, but the simpler narrative — that bad medicine killed him — is easier to repeat and harder to disprove without diving into the original autopsy records at the National Archives. If you want the most reliable single volume, Paul Simon's Victorious Auctioneer: A Life of James A. Garfield (2011) is thorough and avoids the hagiography that plagues older biographies. For primary documents, the Garfield Desk Diary and the James A. Garfield Papers at Case Western Reserve University are the gold standard, though accessing the manuscripts requires a research visit or a subscription to the digital archive.