A strange, even bizarre, exhibit is currently underway at the National Museum of Health and Medicine, on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit commemorates the 125th anniversary of the assassination of our 20th President, James Abram Garfield. Among the items on view are three of the President’s vertebrae, with a red plastic probe running through them to mark the path of the assassin’s bullet.

Garfield was shot by a disappointed office-seeker named Charles Guiteau on July 2, 1881. The wound itself was not mortal, but the unsanitary medical practices then in use – which included surgeons probing wounds with unwashed fingers and unsterilized instruments – caused a severe infection. Garfield died on September 19.

Because Garfield was in office for only a few months, he is one of our lesser-known Presidents. This is unfortunate, because he is a very interesting character.

Born in 1831, he was the last President to be born in a log cabin. His father died when he was two, leaving him to support his widowed mother and to scrape an education as best he could. Young Garfield worked as a farm hand, carpenter and canal boatman, and later helped pay his way through college by preaching Sunday sermons. In fact, he has the distinction of being the only President of the United States to have served as an ordained minister.

Garfield became a classics professor and later president of what is today Hiram College in Ohio. Entering politics, he was elected to the Ohio state senate in 1859, and was admitted to the bar the following year. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Union Army and proved himself equally successful as a soldier, attaining the rank of brigadier general at the age of 31.

Because of his skills honed as a preacher and a lawyer, Garfield enjoyed a considerable reputation as an orator. A popular story tells how he was in New York City in April of 1865 when the news broke that President Lincoln had been murdered by John Wilkes Booth. An angry mob gathered in the vicinity of Wall Street, ready to wreak bloody vengeance on anyone so much as suspected of harboring pro-Southern sympathies.

But as the tension reached the flash point, Garfield appeared on a balcony, holding an American flag. “Fellow citizens!” he called out in a booming voice. “God reigns, and the government at Washington still lives!”

Incredibly, the sheer drama of the moment quieted the crowd. The people dispersed and the city was spared a riot. Small wonder that Garfield would later be called the “Preacher President.”

And it was as the Preacher President that he would be remembered. As late as 1929, a church was erected in McLean, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, named the Garfield Memorial Christian Church, in honor of our only President to have been a clergyman.

Internet resources on President James Garfield include: