Garfield understood as well as any man what the Civil War had accomplished, and what it had left undone. When he was still a very young man, he had hidden a runaway slave. As commander of a small regiment from Ohio, he had driven a larger Confederate force out of eastern Kentucky, helping to save for the Union a critically strategic state. In Congress, he fought for equal rights for freed slaves. He argued for a resolution that ended the practice of requiring blacks to carry a pass in the nation’s capital, and he delivered a passionate speech for black suffrage. Is freedom “the bare privilege
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