Lightning & Legacy: The Memoirs of James A. Garfield

by R.A. Ernst

“The bullet slowed my body, not my mind—so before the final hush, let me reckon with the lightning that lit my life.”

Hear the twentieth President of the United States tell his story—log-cabin farmhand, scholar-soldier, reform crusader, and reluctant commander-in-chief cut down after just 200 days in office. In Lightning & Legacy James Abram Garfield reflects from his seaside sickroom in Elberon, reliving a quintessentially American rise and the ideals that refused to die with him.

Feel Ohio’s frontier mud between your fingers, taste the gun-smoke at Shiloh and Chickamauga, and navigate the smoky backrooms of Gilded-Age Washington where patronage and corruption clash with a new call for civil-service reform. Share the quiet devotion of his marriage to Lucretia, the exhilaration of intellectual debate, and the biting irony of a statesman who never sought the presidency yet fought like lightning to ennoble it.

Part of the In Their Own Unfiltered Histories series, this deeply human political memoir fuses voluminous diaries and letters with vivid historical imagination, capturing the heartbeat of Reconstruction-era America. Essential for readers of presidential biography, Civil-War history, and stories of moral courage.

“Garfield lives again in these pages—erudite, compassionate, and heartbreakingly hopeful.” – Early Reader Review

Brilliant. Honest. Undaunted. Discover Lightning & Legacy and meet the president who still speaks to America’s better angels.

130 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 2, 2025

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 1 out of 5]

My advice is to go to actual scholarly sources for information about Garfield if you don’t want to feel talked down to. This book presents information about its subject in the first person and is annoying. Garfield was a very impressive man both intellectually and for the most part in his actions. This book romanticizes that person in the brief parts of his life it uses. It is also very strange to read the viewpoint of the dead man talking about how he felt about situations going on while dying as well as after he died.

The best book I have read on Garfield is Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic. The book I am reviewing here, especially in the lead up to and assassination of James A. Garfield, takes liberties in the presentation by having him come to the similar conclusions as Millard in her book. That was my take anyway.