{"id":3056,"date":"2010-07-24T14:26:19","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T19:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/?p=3056"},"modified":"2010-07-24T14:37:12","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T19:37:12","slug":"the-courtship-of-james-garfield","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/2010\/07\/24\/the-courtship-of-james-garfield\/","title":{"rendered":"The Courtship of James Garfield"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In 1847, Zeb and Arabella Rudolph decided that their daughter Lucretia needed more of an academic challenge than the local Garrettsville, Ohio, schools could offer.\u00a0 The fifteen-year old was sent twenty miles away to board at the Geauga Seminary, where she would have the benefit of a classical curriculum.\u00a0 The Geauga Seminary was coeducational, and one of Lucretia\u2019s fellow pupils there was an awkward and earnest sixteen-year old boy named James Garfield.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA prodigy,\u201d Lucretia called him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1850, Lucretia left the Geauga Seminary and enrolled in the new Hiram Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio.\u00a0 The following year, Garfield also enrolled at Hiram, and Lucretia experienced the unexpected thrill of meeting \u201ca pair of eyes…as once I looked up from a hard sentence somewhere in the fore part of the Greek grammar.\u201d\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t exactly love at first conjugation\u2014both she and James were recovering from painful break-ups\u2014but in 1853 James surprised Lucretia with a letter written during an excursion to Niagara Falls, and soon the two were engaged in a full-fledged correspondence.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At first, they addressed each other as Brother and Sister.\u00a0 They wrote about the books they were reading, and about their shared enthusiasm for teaching.\u00a0 James was teaching Latin and Greek at Hiram, and Lucretia was teaching at a public school in Chagrin Falls, and attempting to keep pace with James\u2019s Latin class in reading Virgil.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like to know how many hundred lines the Virgil class are ahead of me,\u201d she wrote to James in November 1853.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, the Virgil class finished the third book and are going about 50 lines per day,\u201d Jame wrote back on December 8.\u00a0 \u201cAre you ahead? I presume so.\u00a0 Won\u2019t you come in to both Greek and Latin in the spring? We miss you very much in these two classes.\u00a0 What are your views with regard to studying the classics?\u00a0 Have you reconciled yourself to devoting a few more years to them? I would like to hear your reasonings on the subject.\u201d<\/p>\n

Replying six days later, Lucretia confessed that she had laid aside Virgil for the winter.\u00a0 As to the study of classics in general, she wrote: \u201cCandidly, I will confess that thus far I have prosecuted the study of them without any argument in their favor which appeared to me conclusive.\u201d\u00a0 She admitted that the study of Greek and Latin provided \u201crigid mental discipline,\u201d but she wondered if there might be other means of acquiring that discipline.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI wish you would convince me of their superior merit if they really<\/em> possess it<\/em>,\u201d she wrote; \u201cfor I do not like to give them up\u2014neither do I like to continue in them feeling that precious moments are being wasted…\u201d<\/p>\n

This discussion continued in several letters over the following months.\u00a0 Meanwhile, James quietly dropped the pretense of calling her Sister, and soon Lucretia was sending James her \u201cwarmest love.\u201d \u00a0In March 1854, the subject of marriage was raised.<\/p>\n

James A. Garfield\u2014veteran of Shiloh and Chickamauga, Union general, and twentieth President of the United States\u2014courted his wife with a debate over the value of a classical education.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The correspondence of James and Lucretia Garfield can be found in John Shaw, ed. Crete and James: Personal Letters of Lucretia and James Garfield<\/a><\/em> (Michigan State University Press 1994).\u00a0 For a biography of Lucretia Garfield, see John Shaw, Lucretia<\/a><\/em> (Nova History Publications, 2001). \u00a0On James Garfield’s study of the classics, see Susan Ford Wiltshire’s essay, “The Classicist President<\/a>” (.pdf).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1847, Zeb and Arabella Rudolph decided that their daughter Lucretia needed more of an academic challenge than the local Garrettsville, Ohio, schools could offer.\u00a0 The fifteen-year old was sent twenty miles away to board at the Geauga Seminary, where she would have the benefit of a classical curriculum.\u00a0 The Geauga Seminary was coeducational, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,172],"tags":[167,160],"class_list":["post-3056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-letters-diaries","tag-education-culture","tag-women-families"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3056"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3061,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3056\/revisions\/3061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}