In 1880, he was elected United States senator. After the election he said, "During the twenty years that I have been in public life, almost eighteen of it in the Congress of the United States, I have tried to do one thing. Whether I was mistaken or otherwise, it has been the plan of my life to follow my convictions, at whatever personal cost to myself. I have represented for many years a district in Congress whose approbation I greatly desired; but, though it may seem, perhaps, a little egotistical to say it, I yet desired still more the approbation of one person, and his name was Garfield. He is the only man that I am compelled to sleep with, and eat with, and live with, and die with; and if I could not have his approbation I should have had bad companionship." All these years the home life had been helpful and beautiful. Of his seven children, two were sleeping in the Hiram church-yard. Five, Harry, James, Mollie, Irvin, and Abram, made the Washington home a place of cheer in winter, and the summer home, at Mentor, Ohio, a few miles from Hiram, a place of rest and pleasure. Here Garfield, beloved by his neighbors, ploughed and sewed and reaped, as when a boy. His mother lived in his family, happy in his success. When the national Republican convention met in June, 1880, at Chicago, the names of several presidential candidates came before the people,--Grant, Blaine, and others. Garfield nominated John Sherman, of Ohio, in a chaste and eloquent speech. He said: "I have witnessed the extraordinary scenes of this convention with deep solicitude. No emotion touches my heart more quickly than a sentiment in honor of a great and noble character; but, as I sat on these seats and witnessed these demonstrations, it seemed to me you were a human ocean in a tempest. "I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows but the calm level of the sea from which all heights and depths are measured. When the storm has passed and the hour of calm settles on the ocean, when the sunlight bathes its smooth surface, then the astronomer and surveyor takes the level from which he measures all terrestrial heights and depths.