Lucretia Garfield, Loaves, & Libraries
"...much of the time that other women give to distributing visiting cards, in the frantic effort to make themselves ‘leaders of society,’ Mrs. Garfield spends in the alcove of the Congressional Library, searching for books to carry home to study while she nurses her children.“ Newspaper correspondent Mary Clemmer Ames wrote this about First Lady Lucretia Garfield in 1880 (yes, female newspaper correspondents existed in the nineteenth-century...).
This vision of First Lady Lucretia Garfield's hungry prowl through book stacks caught my attention when I read it in John Shaw's thoughtfully edited Crete & James: Personal Letters of James & Lucretia Garfield. What nerdy mother wouldn't love hunting through the stacks at the Library of Congress in between school runs and grocery stops?! Surely Lucretia (known to her friends as Crete) could be one of my besties today?
The Garfield family. Image courtesy of the Indiana Historical Society. Too often, James's seat was empty...
Having additional context for Lucretia's life can make that quote more meaningful still, though. Although James & Crete married in 1858, their letters make it clear that this step was not a doubt-free decision. These messy doubts persisted, but both the Civil War and the death of their beloved firstborn daughter less than five years after marriage kept the Garfields from working through their thorniest issues. In twenty-first century parlance, they both seemed to have attachment issues. He certainly had a wandering, ambitious heart. Lucretia's sacrifices, too often expected of women in nineteenth-century, were devastating; I kept thinking of the turmoil experienced by the heroines in George Eliot's Middlemarch, then felt vindicated when I read an 1873 letter where Crete wrote about the novel herself: "It touches upon the passions and struggles which have so invested & entered into our lives...it grew in places to seem almost personal, & I can scarcely judge the merit of it as a piece of literature, so absorbed did I become in the entanglements of its characters, & so in sympathy with all their trials." And that, Mrs. Garfield, is how I felt reading your letters. You came alive in them for me, as a woman of strength, struggle, and redemptive imagination.
James & Crete found peace together, but his assassination in 1881 shattered her world again. She spent much of the rest of her life organizing Garfield's papers. She created, in essence, one of the first Presidential libraries. That is how many define her life these days, but it is not how she would have defined the first half. As a mother, she read in snatches, always hungry for ideas, but also responsible for feeding & caring for the Garfield children...often alone. It would be so, so easy to slip into solitary bitterness. Lucretia chose a different path, though. In an 1871 letter, she described how one morning's reading revolutionized her work:
"I read something...the other day. There is no healthy thought without labor, & thought makes the laborer happy, & perhaps this is the way that I have been able to climb up higher. It came to me one morning while I was making bread. I said to myself, here I am by inevitable necessity compelled to make our own bread this summer, & why not consider it a pleasant occupation...by trying to see what perfect bread I can make...the very sunshine seemed flowing down through my spirit into the white loaves..." She continued with this triumphant note: "...this truth, old as creation, seems just now to have become fully mine that I need not be the shirking slave to toil but its regal master making whatever I do yield me its best fruits." This "regal" attitude is one reason (out of many) I came to love Crete Garfield through her letters. Lucretia's words here are their own sort of flowing sunshine. Mothers today do many things out of that same "inevitable necessity," but Crete's voice reminds us that instead of being feeling flattened by our lives, there is joy in owning the necessary work and making it more beautiful still.
A loaf of bread with sunshine on it, because now bread making reminds me of one of America's First Ladies...