A Fickle Current

Fairport Harbor, Ohio 1858

“In the spring of 1848 I chopped 100 cords of wood upon a farm in Newburg, Cuyahoga county, within sight of the Lake and the passage of a ship made me almost insane with delight. The blue expanse seemed to me a region of enchantment…”

If you stand on a hilltop in northeast Ohio, even ten miles inland, and look to the northwest, you will see the almost limitless blue of Lake Erie stretching to the horizon. Imagine what that sight meant to a strapping sixteen year old farm boy in 1848. Young James Garfield yearned for independence, adventure, and escape. “I formed the determination to become a sailor,” Garfield said. “Nautical novels did it. I had read a large number of them, all I could get in the neighborhood.”

At the age of sixteen, he ran away to sea—or at least to Lake Erie. It did not go well. Only one vessel was in port at Cleveland, and the raw boy was immediately cursed at and laughed off its deck. Undaunted, James decided that he was probably “yet too green to become a real sailor. I thought there should be some apprenticeship served before coming upon a real vessel.” He decided to hire out on a canal boat, where the only available position was for a mule driver who guided the animals that pulled a canal boat. “As canaling was at the bottom of sailing, so driving was at the bottom of canaling. I took the job.”

His experience on the canal was brief and inglorious, though later his six weeks on the canal would make a politically powerful image in the 1880 presidential campaign. Garfield gave up on the idea of a career as a sailor, and the adventure it promised, and pursued education, public speaking, and politics instead. But romantic images of the sea appear again and again in his letters, speeches, journals and conversations. As he began his political career, planning his first campaign for a seat in the state legislature, he said in his diary, “I am aware that I launch out upon a fickle current . . .the most seductive and dangerous which a young man can follow.” More than twenty years later Garfield described the Republican convention that would nominate him as their presidential candidate this way: “This assemblage seemed to me a human ocean in tempest . . .but I remember that it is not the billows but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured.”

This month, A Fickle Current, a podcast about the political life of James A. Garfield will debut on our website. Listen for allusions to the water, Garfield’s favorite metaphor. You can find our new podcast on our website at www.nps.gov/jaga/a-fickle-current-podcast.htm, and on Apple podcasts streaming soon!