JAMES A. GARFIELD

I have never been satisfied with the explanation for the assassination of President James M. Garfield in 1881. Popular wags say that a mad man of deranged mind, of unknown political orientation, had shot him, out of the blue, without rationale. But reading in the BETRAYAL OF THE NEGRO FROM RUTHERFORD B. HAYES TO WOODROW WILSON (1965, 1997) by Rayford W. Logan, my unsupported suspicions begin to find a familiar footing in racism. Logan writes: "Although President Garfield was shot just four months after he took office and died in September, 1881, his brief administration is notable for a definition of the status of the Negro that has been almost entirely overlooked. On many previous occasions he had asserted that Negroes should enjoy full equality after they had been freed. He had been closely allied with Thaddeus Stevens and other 'Radicals ' who advanced a strong policy in behalf of the freedmen. In 1866, he had declared: 'I say here before this House, that I will never so long as I have any voice in political affairs rest satisfied until the way is opened by which those colored people, as soon as they are worthy, shall be lifted up to the full rights of citizenship.' As previously indicated, he was one of the few Congressmen who seemed to have remembered the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. "It is a neglected passage in his inaugural address, however, that deserves to be rescued from oblivion. In two pungent sentences he declared: 'Under our institutions there was no middle ground for the negro between slavery and equal citizenship. There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States.'... "Little attention was paid at the time or later to the two sentences which, one would think today, would have called for considerable comment.... "Garfield's death on September 19, 1881, deprived him of an opportunity of showing what he could do to help time give shape to the experiment in American democracy. The San Francisco 'Examiner ' of February 23, 1881, reported that more Negroes than whites has brought tickets for his inaugural ball. Colored men , in accordance with established custom, had marched in the inaugural parade. He had appointed Negroes to 'Negro' jobs--John M. Langston as minister to Haiti and counsel general to the Dominican Republic; Henry Highland Garnet as minister to Haiti; ex-Senator Blanche K. Bruce as register of the treasury; and Frederick Douglass as recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. Perhaps Garfield's most significant policy was his alliance with the ex-Confederate General William Mahone of Virginia, leader of the Readjusters in that state." P. 38-39, 43