First Words: James A. Garfield, March 4, 1881

First Words: James A. Garfield, March 4, 1881

In this ongoing series, the Miller Center’s First Year Project looks at key phrases from past inaugural addresses—the first words spoken by our new presidents. Today we look at James A. Garfield.

In one of the closest elections on record, Ohio’s James A. Garfield beat Democrat William Hancock by a mere 7,368 votes, less than one-tenth of one percent of the total votes cast. In his first words as the nation’s 20th president, Garfield reflected on the Civil War and addressed suffrage for African Americans, comparing the denial of voting rights to the assassination of a king. One hundred days later, Garfield himself was assassinated.

 [T]he Constitution and the laws made in pursuance there of are and shall continue to be the supreme law of the land, binding alike upon the States and the people. This decree does not disturb the autonomy of the States nor interfere with any of their necessary rights of local self-government, but it does fix and establish the permanent supremacy of the Union. 

There can be no permanent disfranchised peasantry in the United States. Freedom can never yield its fullness of blessings so long as the law or its administration places the smallest obstacle in the pathway of any virtuous citizen. 

The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. NO thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people. It has freed us from the perpetual danger of war and dissolution. It has added immensely to the moral and industrial forces of our people. It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both. It has surrendered to their own guardianship the manhood of more than 5,000,000 people, and has opened to each one of them a career of freedom and usefulness.

[T]o violate the freedom and sanctities of the suffrage is more than an evil. It is a crime which, if persisted in, will destroy the Government itself. Suicide is not a remedy. If in other lands it be high treason to compass the death of the king, it shall be counted no less a crime here to strangle our sovereign power and stifle its voice. 

Read Garfield's entire inaugural address.

Find out more about James A. Garfield.