Eyewitness 1862: Lincoln's war effort aided by future prez
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James A. Garfield in 1881
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As the country split in two, President Abraham Lincoln was determined to hold onto the border areas, including his native state of Kentucky.
"I hope to have God on my side, but I must have Kentucky," he is reported to have said during the early days of the conflict.
James A. Garfield, an Ohio schoolteacher turned lawyer turned soldier, helped him keep it.
"When so many incapables ... have succeeded in getting themselves pitchforked into Brigadier Generalships, it is an occasional luxury we enjoy to record that a Brigadier General can be made out of different material -- of better and sterner stuff," the Daily Pittsburgh Gazette reported on Feb. 21, 1862.
Garfield was a colonel when he led a successful campaign in December 1861 and January 1862 to force Confederate Gen. Humphrey Marshall "and his rebel hordes" out of eastern Kentucky. President Lincoln, backed by his new Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, nominated Garfield for a general's star on Feb. 19, and the Senate confirmed him the same day.
Garfield, commander of the 42nd Ohio Regiment, had served as de facto field chief of the Army of the Ohio's 18th Brigade, the newspaper said. His superior, Brig. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, had assigned him the task of securing a critical portion of Kentucky, and troops under Garfield's command threw back Confederate forces from the towns of Paintsville and Prestonburg. While they were not major victories, they came at a time when the North needed heroes.
"Gen. Garfield is an earnest man," an anonymous "respected contemporary" wrote in the Gazette. "His heart is in the work which he has undertaken, and in no way will he be retarded by a tenderness for the rebels. He is a man of brains, too.
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
