The last speaker knew that some members of the faculty and board of trustees were anxious that he should accept the nomination.

To this last suggestion Garfield yielded, and the matter was laid before the faculty and trustees. To his surprise all of them urged him to consent to the use of his name. Teachers volunteered to do extra work in his absence, and all were willing to contribute service, so as to make it possible for him to go.

Garfield was pressed into this political service, and received the nomination. He was present, by request, at the nominating convention, and while the business was in progress a delegate, who saw the youthful candidate on that day for the first time, remarked to a leading Republican:

“Don’t you make a mistake in putting forward so young a man for senator?”

“Only young in years; he is not young in ability,” was the prompt reply.

“I don’t know, about that; unless his looks belie him, his experience in public life must be rather limited.”

“You wait and see. We shall hear from him when this business is through, and you will be satisfied that his head is old, though his body is young.”

After the nomination, according to the custom that prevailed, Garfield accepted it in a characteristic speech. The delegate who doubted the wisdom of the nomination immediately said to the Republican to whom his doubts were expressed:

“I am perfectly satisfied; he is a power.”

Garfield was elected by a very large majority, and took his seat in the State senate, January, 1860. It was a time of great excitement. The South was threatening secession and civil war, if a Republican should be elected president in the approaching campaign. The North was fully aroused to check the incursions of slavery, by a bold and victorious advance. Garfield was just the man to occupy a seat in the State senate at such a time, though he was the youngest member of the body. There was another able young man in the senate with him, as radical as himself, Jacob D. Cox, afterwards major-general, governor of Ohio, and Secretary of the Interior. The two roomed together, and were as intimate as brothers. Some of the members called them “Damon and Pythias.” There was still another young man, Professor Munroe of Oberlin College, an institution that was founded on anti-slavery principles, and whose teachers were as one with Garfield on the great national question that over-topped all others—liberty. Cox himself was the son-in-law of an Oberlin professor. These three senators stood shoulder to shoulder against slavery and were called the “radical triumvirate.”

Garfield took rank at once with the ablest speakers in that body. President Hinsdale says, “He was a valuable man on committees and in party counsels. No senator was more frequently called to his counsels by the president of the senate when knotty points of order were to be untied or cut.”

In a previous chapter we learned that Garfield visited Columbus with his mother, and saw the legislature in session. Little did he dream, or his mother, that in less than ten years he would be a leading member of that senate, his eloquence ringing through those halls, and his wise counsels and patriotic efforts preparing the state to oppose rebellion with great power; yet so it was. One of the most marvellous examples of success on record!

During his second term in the senate, 1861, he was confronted by the gravest questions that State or nation ever have to deal with. Lincoln had been elected president, the Southern States were preparing to secede, and civil war was imminent. “Shall Ohio prepare for war?” “Has a State the right to secede?” “Can a State be coerced?” “Shall we punish treason?” These were among the questions the young senator was compelled to discuss. Almost night and day he laboured to qualify himself to discuss them intelligently and ably. Night after night, until eleven, twelve, and even one o’clock, he spent in the state