A Confederate force of 2,000 men plus cannons, invaded eastern Kentucky.

Garfield was made a lieutenant colonel in Ohio’s 42nd Regiment, to which many of his former students belonged. Then came the civil war, when Confederate soldiers fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. When an Ohio state senator died unexpectedly in 1859, Garfield was asked to take his place for the upcoming election, and won by a large majority. Returning to Eclectic to teach, he was the school’s president by age twenty-six. He went on to Williams College in Massachusetts, graduating in two years with honors. His grades were so outstanding that the following year he was promoted to “assistant professor”, teaching classes in literature, mathematics and ancient languages, along with classes he was taking as a student. At age 20 he was accepted at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute had no money but worked as janitor to pay for his tuition. Her main goal for James was that he get an education, and he proved to be an excellent student. She had to sell part of the farmland to pay off debts, but she and her oldest son, Thomas age 11, kept the family together. His father died at age 32, when James was two, leaving James’s mother in poverty to raise four children. He was born in 1831 on a hardscrabble Ohio farm, the frontier of the westward-expanding United States. James Garfield was President of the USA for less than seven months, but may have done more to unite the nation than any other president before or since.

Book review destiny of the republic