Lucretia garfield biography of abraham
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Lucretia Rudolph Garfield
Five-Month First Lady
By Anne Adams
When an American president is assassinated, historians often speculate on what might have been if the man had survived. Would American history have been different if Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy had not been murdered? Sometimes this speculation can even extend to the wives of these presidents and what influence they might have had on their husbands administration. In the case of Mrs. James A Garfield, if her husband had not been gunned down within months of his inauguration, historians most likely would have become aware of how an important an influence on the assassinated president was a proper Victorian wife named Lucretia.
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Wife of Union General James A. Garfield
Lucretia Rudolph was born on April 19, , in Hiram, Ohio, the eldest of fyra children of Zebediah Rudolph, a prosperous carpenter-farmer, and Arabella Mason Rudolph. Her family were devout members of a religious sect called the Disciples of Christ. Lucretia&#;s father was a leader in both the business and religious communities. Her parents firmly believed in the importance of education, and insisted that their daughter attend school. Although Lucretia was a sickly child, she received a thorough education. She liked school and was a very good student, and at a young age she developed a love of literature that would last throughout her life.
Education
Lucretia attended Garrettsville Public Grammar School in Garrettsville, Ohio, from to , and Geauga Seminary in Chester, Ohio – a private academy – from to There she was a boarding lärjunge and took a course of study that focused on Greek and Latin, and also included history, algebra, science, g
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In the April issue of Century magazine, journalist E.V. Smalley offered this wistful portrait of James Garfield:
“I fear coming generations … will see nothing … to remind
them that here was a man who loved to play croquet and romp
with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, [Ohio] who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”1
It is a fitting tribute to a man whose outward circumstances at birth did not suggest the warmth of heart or the intellect of brain for which James Abram Garfield would be remembered.