Mike Huckabee’s triumph in the Iowa caucuses forces Americans to contemplate the possibility that he will be the second ordained minister to occupy the White House.

The first was James A. Garfield, who was president for just a few months in 1881 before he was assassinated by a disappointed office seeker.

Because Garfield’s tenure in office was so brief, 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.

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.”

Ironically, in light of the fact that Mormon Mitt Romney was Huckabee’s chief rival in Iowa, Garfield’s inaugural address included two paragraphs warning his countrymen about the dangers posed by the Mormon church.

At the time, the Mormons still practiced polygamy in what was then the territory of Utah, despite the passage of a federal anti-bigamy act in 1862. The Republican Party equated polygamy with slavery, and Garfield strongly condemned the practice in his address. He declared:

The Territories of the United States are subject to the direct legislative authority of Congress, and hence the General Government is responsible for any violation of the Constitution in any of them. It is therefore a reproach to the Government that in the most populous of the Territories the constitutional guaranty is not enjoyed by the people and the authority of Congress is set at naught. The Mormon Church not only offends the moral sense of manhood by sanctioning polygamy, but prevents the administration of justice through ordinary instrumentalities of law.

In my judgment it is the duty of Congress, while respecting to the uttermost the conscientious convictions and religious scruples of every citizen, to prohibit within its jurisdiction all criminal practices, especially of that class which destroy the family relations and endanger social order. Nor can any ecclesiastical organization be safely permitted to usurp in the smallest degree the functions and powers of the National Government.

Mormon leaders officially abolished polygamy some years later, to pave the way for the admission of Utah as a state in 1896. But in the eyes of at least some of Huckabee’s evangelical supporters, Mormonism is still a heretical cult. It will be interesting to see how the man who wants to be our next preacher president handles –- or avoids -– this issue in the months ahead.