From Canal Boy to President Or the Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield

Horatio Alger Jr. wrote dozens of fictional rags to riches novels, but From Canal Boy to President is a slightly different project. Published in 1881, just months after the assassination of President James A. Garfield, the book is Alger’s biography of the late president, written for young readers in the same earnest, instructive tone he used for his fiction.

Garfield’s life was almost a perfect Alger plot in real form. Born in poverty in Ohio in 1831, he lost his father young, worked as a canal boat driver as a teenager, put himself through Williams College, became a professor and then a college president, served as a Union general in the Civil War, spent nearly two decades in Congress, and was elected the twentieth president of the United States in 1880. Less than a year into his term he was shot by a disappointed office seeker and died of his wounds. Alger walks through all of this in the brisk, chapter by chapter style his readers expected.

The book is more biography than hagiography, though the moral lessons are never far from the surface. Garfield’s commitment to learning, his willingness to do hard physical work, and his rise through public service are all held up as examples for young readers. Modern historians have pointed out that Alger took some liberties and skipped over the messier political compromises Garfield made, but as a popular biography written for nineteenth century young people it served its purpose well.

For readers interested in Gilded Age America, the Garfield assassination, or the cultural ideal of the self made man, this remains a useful primary source.