James A. Garfield"The Preacher President"

James Abram Garfield was born November 19, 1831, the last U.S. president to be born in a log cabin. He worked his way through college, eventually becoming a college president himself at Hiram College (then called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute) before the Civil War. He served as a Union Army general, then was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served nine terms and rose to become a leading Republican voice on financial policy. He won the presidency in 1880 as something of a compromise candidate, but his term was cut tragically short, just four months after taking office in 1881, he was shot by a disgruntled and mentally unstable office-seeker, Charles Guiteau, at a Washington train station. He lingered for 79 days before dying from complications (largely due to poor medical treatment at the time) in September 1881, making his one of the shortest presidencies in U.S. history.