Garfield, James A., as Twentieth President

Letter signed ("J. A. Garfield"), 1 page (8 x 5 3/8 in.; 225 x 137 mm), on Executive Mansion letterhead, written in a clerical hand, Washington, 9 June 1881, to Samuel Chapman Armstrong ("Dear General"), at Hampton, Virginia; integral blank torn away with two small chips at left margin.

Sotheby's, 19 May 1997, lot 65

Letter signed ("J. A. Garfield"), 1 page (8 x 5 3/8 in.; 225 x 137 mm), on Executive Mansion letterhead, written in a clerical hand, Washington, 9 June 1881, to Samuel Chapman Armstrong ("Dear General"), at Hampton, Virginia; integral blank torn away with two small chips at left margin.
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A rare presidential letter signed by Garfield, directed to a fellow abolitionist and fellow "Eph." Like Garfield, Samuel Armstrong matriculated at Williams College and served the Union during the Civil War as an officer of volunteers. In November 1863, Armstrong was commissioned the commanding colonel of the Ninth Regiment, United States Colored Infantry. He exhibited both admiration and sympathy for the position of his troops, and after the war he became an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, continuing his work with freed slaves. In 1868, with the financial assistance of the American Missionary Association and private benefactors, Armstrong opened the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute, which he led until his death in 1893. Hampton Institute became one of the great centers of African-American education, academic as well as vocational.

Garfield, too, had a strong record of promoting the civil rights of black Americans. At a massive campaign rally in New York City shortly before the 1880 election he reminded his fellow veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic that "in all that long, dreary war we never saw a traitor in a black skin," and he pledged to "stand by these black allies ... until the sun of liberty, fixed in the firmament of our Constitution, shall shine with equal ray upon every man, black or white, throughout the Union."

A member of Hampton's board of trustees as a congressman, on 5 June 1881, Garfield returned to the Institute's campus as president to deliver a brief address at Bethesda Chapel. Acknowledging Armstrong's efforts to bring about "a country without sections, a people without a stain," Garfield told the students the two great lessons he had learned about labor, which he termed "the great problem of the human race": "The basis of all civilization is that labor must be. The basis of everything great in civilization, the glory of our civilization, is that Labor must be free!" (Text from a report in The New York Times, 12 June 1881.)

Garfield evidently spoke extemporaneously, because four days later he sent this short inquiry to Armstrong, eager to secure a published record of his remarks: "If my little speech at your school is reported, I wish you would send me a copy. Somebody told me the other day that there was a short hand writer from one of the Boston papers at the meeting, but I have not yet seen the report."

Only five other letters signed by Garfield as President have been sold at auction since 1975.