Two of them, father and son, came over with Winthrop in 1630. Each of the six generations who dwelt in Massachusetts has left an honorable record still preserved. Five in succession bore an honorable military title. Some were fighters in the Indian wars. "It is not in Indian wars," Fisher Ames well says, "that heroes are celebrated, but it is there they are formed." At the breaking out of the Revolution the male representatives of the family were two young brothers. One, whose name descended to the President, was in arms at Concord bridge, at sunrise, on the 19th of April. The other, the President's great grandfather, dwelling thirty miles off, was on his way to the scene of action before noon. When the Constitution rejected by Massachusetts in 1778 was proposed, this same ancestor, with his fellow-citizens of the little town of Westminster, voted unanimously for the rejection, and put on record their reasons. "It is our opinion that no constitution whatever ought to be established till previously thereto a bill of rights be set forth, and the constitution be framed therefrom, so that the lowest capacity may be able to determine his natural rights, and judge of the equitableness of the constitution thereby." "And as to the Constitution itself, the following appears to us exceptionable, viz, the fifth article," [Excepting negroes, mulattoes and Indians from the right to vote], "which deprives a portion of the human race of their natural rights on account of their color, which, in our opinion, no power on earth has a just right to do. It therefore ought to be expunged the Constitution." No religious intolerance descended in the Garfield race. But the creed of this Westminster catechism they seem never to have forgotten. When the war was over, the same ancestor took his young family and penetrated the forest again. He established his home in Otsego county, in central New York, at the period and amid the scenes made familiar by Cooper, in his delightful tale, _The Pioneers_. Again the generations moved westward, in the march of civilization, keeping ever in the van, until in 1831, James Garfield was born, in a humble Ohio cabin where he was left fatherless in his infancy. In a new settlement the wealth of the family is in the right arm of the father. To say that the father, who had himself been left an orphan when he was an infant, left his son fatherless in infancy, is to say that the family was reduced to extreme poverty.