In post–Civil War America, politics was a brutal sport played with blunt rules. Yet James Garfield's 1881 "dark horse" campaign after the longest-ever Republican nominating process (36 convention ballots), his victory in the closest-ever popular vote for president (by only 7,018 votes out of over 9 million cast), his struggle against feuding factions once elected, and the public's response to its culmination in violence, sets a revealing comparison with America approaching a new campaign year in 2004. Author and Capitol Hill veteran Kenneth D. Ackerman re-creates an American political landscape where fierce battles for power unfolded against a chivalrous code of honor in a nation struggling under the shadow of a recent war to confront its modernity.
