“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 Voices: 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.

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