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James A. Garfield: Presidents
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James Abram Garfield (November 19, 1831–September 19, 1881) was the twentieth President of the United States. He had ... served as a major general in the United States Army, and as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Garfield was the second U.S. President to be assassinated — Abraham Lincoln was the first. Garfield had the second shortest presidency in U.S. history, after William Henry Harrison's. In office for six months and fifteen days, President Garfield, a Republican, served for less than four months before being shot and fatally wounded on July 2, 1881. He is the only Congressman to have been in office when elected President.
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After 36 convention votes, Republican Speaker of the House James Garfield was finally nominated over former president Ulysses S. Grant. Garfield went on to win the presidency over his democratic contender by only 10,000 votes. He was the last president to be born in a log cabin and the only preacher ever to become president of the United States. Just six and a half months after he became president, Garfield was shot by a mentally disturbed, disaffected office seeker. Eleven weeks later, Garfield died.
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Needless to say, Garfield sent Jordan on the mission. Later, after defeating a superior Confederate force, he was promoted to Brigadier General, then to Major General. While still serving in the Military, Garfield was elected to Congress, taking the position at the wishes of President Lincoln. On April 14, 1863 Lincoln was assassinated, and the next day Garfield happened to be in New York City giving a speech. A crowd gathered in the city, and soon turned into a mob when news reached the city of not only Lincoln's death, but ... the attempt of the life of Secretary of State Seward. Armed and ready to avenge Lincoln's death, the mob turned ugly.
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Interesting Fact: James Garfield was the second president shot in office. Doctors tried to find the bullet with a metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell. But the device failed because Garfield was placed on a bed with metal springs, and no one thought to move him. He died on September 19, 1881.
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On July 2, 1881, a few hours after Garfield was shot, there was a premature announcement of his death. This news took seven hours to travel from Washington, D. C. to Seattle. By September 19 the nation’s telegraph operators had apparently prepared to quickly inform the nation of the President’s fate. It took exactly 16 minutes for those three words “The President dead” to be transmitted from the President’s bedside on the New Jersey coast to Seattle. This was likely the quickest transmission to date of news from the East Coast to Seattle.
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Garfield held his House office for eighteen years, for the most part easily winning the nomination of his party and the vote of the electorate as each term concluded. Only once during his time in the House was his reelection in question. In the early 1870s, the Republican party was discredited by allegations of scandal in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant—including the Cr|Aaedit Mobilier scandal. Crédit Mobilier of America was a construction company established to build the Union Pacific Railroad. It became known that Garfield was among a group of congressmen who had accepted stock in Crédit Mobilier, in exchange for legislative consideration. Garfield ultimately refused the stock, but it took him two years to do so. His critics maintained that he decided not to take the stock only because the issue had placed him in political hot water.
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