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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  James Abram Garfield (1831–81)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 718
AUTHOR: James Abram Garfield (1831–81)
QUOTATION: Fellow-citizens! Clouds and darkness are round about Him! His pavilion is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies! Justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne! Mercy and truth shall go before his face! Fellow-citizens! God reigns and the government at Washington still lives.
ATTRIBUTION: Representative JAMES A. GARFIELD, address to calm a crowd in New York City, April 17, 1865, two days after the death of President Lincoln.—Theodore Clarke Smith, The Life and Letters of James Abram Garfield, vol. 1, p. 383 (1925).

Smith notes that while the tradition of this speech was so well established during Garfield’s own lifetime as to become “a familiar commonplace,” no clipping of it exists among Garfield’s papers, nor did Garfield himself, so far as known, refer to it in later times.
SUBJECTS: Government