was threatening to
secede if a President hostile to the slave-owning interest was elected,
the contest was fought out almost entirely along those particular
lines. Garfield was returned as senator by a large majority, and took
his seat in the Ohio Senate in January, 1860. There, his voice was
always raised against slavery, and he was recognized at once as one of
the ablest speakers in the whole legislature.

In 1861, the great storm burst over the States. In the preceding
November, Abraham Lincoln had been elected President. Lincoln was
himself, like Garfield, a self-made man, who had risen from the very
same pioneer labourer class;--a wood-cutter and rail-splitter in the
backwoods of Illinois, he had become a common boatman on the
Mississippi, and had there improved his mind by reading eagerly in all
his spare moments. With one of those rapid rises so commonly made by
self-taught lads in America, he had pushed his way into the Illinois
legislature by the time he was twenty-five, and qualified himself to
practise as a barrister at Springfield. His shrewd original talents
had raised him with wonderful quickness into the front ranks of his own
party; and when the question between the North and South rose into the
region of practical politics, Lincoln was selected by the republicans
(the antislavery group) as their candidate for the Presidency of the
United States. This selection was a very significant one in several
ways; Lincoln was a very strong opponent of slavery, and his
candidature showed the southern slave-owners that if the Republicans
were successful in the contest, a vigorous move against the
slave-holding oligarchy would at once be made. But it was also
significant in the fact that Lincoln was a western man; it was a sign
that the farmers and grangers of the agricultural west were beginning
to wake up politically and throw themselves into the full current of
American State affairs. On both these grounds, Lincoln's nomination
must have been deeply interesting to Garfield, whose own life had been
so closely similar, and who was destined, twenty years later, to follow
him to the same goal.

Lincoln was duly elected, and the southern states began to secede. The
firing upon Fort Sumter by the South Carolina secessionists was the
first blow struck in that terrible war. Every man who was privileged
to live in America at that time (like the present writer) cannot recall
without a glow of recollection the m