Lucretia Garfield

First Lady

• Born: April 19, 1832
• Birthplace: Hiram, Ohio
• Died: March 14, 1918
• Place of death: Pasadena, California

President:James A. Garfield 1881

Overview

Like her husband, who rose so spectacularly from poverty to be a United States president, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield began life on a farm in Ohio’s Western Reserve. She managed to educate herself widely and deeply through constant reading. Though her days as First Lady were brief and her thirty-nine years as a widow were determinedly private, she enjoyed the same national respect and admiration accorded her husband. Her influence upon James A. Garfield and his political endeavors was considerable and often acknowledged by him.

Early Life

Lucretia was the eldest of the four children born to Zeb and Arabella Rudolph. Her father, of German stock, had been born in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in 1803. Zeb’s father, John, and his Welsh mother had bought a farm in 1806 between the tiny village of Garrettsville and the even smaller community of Hiram, in what was known as the Western Reserve in northeastern Ohio. In addition to helping his father farm their land, Zeb became a fine carpenter. In 1830, he married Arabella Mason, who lived on a nearby farm.

Arabella, born in 1810 in Hartford, Connecticut, was the daughter of Elijah Mason and Lucretia Green. Her family had moved out to Portage County in the Western Reserve in 1816. On April 19, 1832, Lucretia, named for her grandmother, was born to Zeb and Arabella Rudolph.

Lucretia’s childhood was a happy one. She was close to her two brothers, John and Joe, and her sister, Nellie; from her mother she learned the requirements of a well-organized and smoothly run household. The Rudolphs believed strongly in education. Lucretia was unusually intelligent, with refreshing common sense. People respected her for her practical insights. James Garfield, who came to know her at her first school, wrote that she had “good, practical, sound common sense,” and “a well balanced mind . . . logical and precise.”

In 1850, Lucretia became a student at the school newly founded by the Disciples of Christ in Hiram, the Eclectic Institute. James Garfield also entered the institute in 1850. He and Lucretia studied Greek and Latin, music, art, and religion. It was not long before James saw in Lucretia the kind of woman he might like to marry. Their courtship began in 1853.

Marriage and Family

In the winter of 1854, the two became engaged. That summer, James departed for Williams College in Massachusetts, where he studied for the next two years, earning his bachelor’s degree. He and Lucretia exchanged letters regularly over those months, building their dreams and hopes of a future together as well as comparing books and ideas and experiences.

When Garfield returned to Hiram to teach and later to head the Eclectic Institute, his love for Lucretia seemed to have cooled; nevertheless, after much soul-searching, he finally decided he ought to marry her. She accepted, but she knew he was marrying her out of a sense of duty. They married in 1858. James was twenty-seven, and Lucretia was twenty-six.

The marriage got off to a rocky start. Unhappy with his domestic and professional life at Hiram, James cast about for something more fitting his extraordinary talents than teaching. He won a seat in the Ohio senate in 1859, then volunteered for the Union Army in 1861. Lucretia remained at her home in Hiram, nursing her first baby, and suffering from loneliness and neglect. The domestic scene improved after James came home ill from Tennessee. The two, with their child, spent an idyllic month isolated from friends and admirers at a retreat near Warren, Ohio.

In 1863, after James had been elected to the United States House of Representatives, Lucretia once again settled down to her life in Ohio, managing a household of college boarders as well as James’s mother. Two more children were born, and James and Lucretia and their family grew closer together. In 1869, James built a home in Washington, D.C., so that the family could be united there.

During these years of the Ohio senate, the Civil War, and then the House of Representatives, Lucretia never hesitated to advise James. Her first letter to him as he left for Columbus, Ohio, as a public servant in January, 1860, made it clear that she intended to be an influence on him: “I want you to be so great and good. So worthy of the highest respect and love of all. So unimpeachable in every relation that your bitterest enemy can find no just cause for accusation . . . ” Often James spoke of her influence on him and their growing family. “You have gained such an ascendancy over us all,” he told her.

Presidency and First Ladyship

In 1880, James Garfield was nominated and then elected to the presidency of the United States. Lucretia, now forty-eight years old with five surviving children—they had lost two—moved her family into the White House in the beginning of March, 1881, after Garfield’s inauguration. Her tenure as First Lady was even briefer than James’s as president—less than three months. Early in May of that year she contracted malaria. For the last two weeks of May, she lay ill in the White House and then was taken to the New Jersey shore to fully recover her strength. James was shot on July 2, just as Lucretia was on her way back to rejoin him. He died on September 19. Thus, Lucretia served for only ten weeks as First Lady, but she was a forceful one, nevertheless.

She had not wanted James to be president. “I begin to be afraid that the convention will give you the nomination,” she wrote him on June 4, 1880. She added with prophetic insight: “and the place would be most unenviable with so many disappointed candidates.” Once he was president, however, Lucretia aided and abetted James in many ways as he struggled with the angry machinations of those Republicans who lost out to him at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York. “You will never have anything from those men but their assured contempt until you fight them dead,” she said to him. “You can put every one of them in his political grave if you are a mind to, and that is the only place where they can be kept peaceable.” Lucretia’s diary recorded Conkling’s and Garfield’s political maneuvers, suggesting that James had discussed his strategy with her before making his decisions.

Not only did Lucretia support James with her tough-minded insights, she also provided him with a White House he could rely on to be similar to the farm in Ohio in its domesticity. The children, so necessary to James’s happiness and her own, were there—rambunctious, perhaps, but lovingly and competently managed by Lucretia. Soon after arriving in Washington, she began a serious study of the White House. She expected James to request a grant from Congress to restore the old building during their first summer there. She was among the earliest of all those First Ladies who wished to restore the old building along lines faithful to its character and history.

Lucretia was never one to care about social convention. What she hoped to bring about was a kind of “social family” at the White House, inviting not just good old friends, but artists and writers of national renown.

Legacy

Upon James Garfield’s death in September of 1881, Lucretia took her family back to the farm in Mentor, Ohio, as unobtrusively as she had brought them to the White House. Now her determination was twofold: first, to honor and protect the memory of James, and second, to live the quiet, private life of a devoted mother and grandmother for her and James’s beloved family. For the first of these goals, to protect James’s memory, she insisted that, whenever possible, she review all books and articles published about him. At Lawnfield, the Mentor farm, she built the first “presidential library,” gathering all of James’s papers and books there, keeping the most valuable letters and papers in a fireproof vault. She spent months going through her husband’s papers, private and public, as well as more than twelve hundred personal letters she had exchanged with him. She dated and ordered these documents. Not until 1912 did she allow Theodore Clarke Smith, a historian from Williams College, to begin, with her help, the first “official” biography of President Garfield.

As for the second of these decisions, she saw to it that her family lived its life modestly and out of the public eye. When various editors wished to write about, or interview, her or her children, she typically said no. As the extraordinary worldwide grief died down during the autumn of 1881, the Garfields as a family simply faded into ordinariness. Lucretia traveled, visiting friends and relatives. The two older boys grew to be substantial public figures, and the younger children married and also led productive lives.

After 1900, Lucretia, while spending her summers at the farm in Mentor, began to winter in South Pasadena, California. She continued her wide range of reading, often wrote essays for a book club, and kept up with the political scene, even to the extent of voting once for Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who was a friend of her son Harry. She died peacefully in Pasadena on March 14, 1918, and was buried next to her largely forgotten husband in Cleveland, Ohio.

Bibliography

Anthony, Carl Sferrazza. First Ladies: The Saga of the Presidents’ Wives and Their Power. Vol. 1. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Contains an excellent account of Lucretia Rudolph Garfield.

Comer, Lucretia Garfield. Strands from the Weaving. New York: Vantage Press, 1959. Family reminiscences from Lucretia and James Garfield’s granddaughter.

Garfield, James A. The Diary of James A. Garfield. 4 vols. Edited by Harry J. Brown and Frederick D. Williams. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967-1981. A useful source.

Leech, Margaret, and Harry J. Brown. The Garfield Orbit: The Life of President James A. Garfield. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. A highly readable biography with special insights into the Garfield marriage.

Shaw, John. Lucretia. Huntington, N.Y.: Nova History, 2001. A thorough biography of Mrs. Garfield.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. The story of the Garfield marriage, as told by James and Lucretia’s correspondence written between 1853 and 1881.