Lucretia Garfield
Lucretia Garfield was the second First Lady to see her husband murdered while in office, an event which took place while she was recovering from malaria. Her tenure as an active First Lady was relatively short as a result, but her activities were important for what she did both in the office and afterwards.
She actively advised Garfield regarding the appointments he made to his cabinet, using her considerable interest in history and political acumen to point out the potential impact of each appointee on the opposing party. She developed plans for a complete restoration of the White House, with a focus on the building’s history and its changes over the time it had been in place. Her plans were unfortunately overturned by her husband’s assassination.
They included the manner in which each president lived and worked in the house being preserved for posterity for study by future historians and visitors. She went to the Library of Congress to obtain records from each of the previous administrations housed there, where she learned that many presidential records were scattered and that there was little formal preservation of papers. Many weren’t even in the possession of the government.
Garfield lived for three months after being shot, in continual agony as the doctors strove to find a way to save the president’s life to no avail. When Lucretia learned that one of the doctors’ in attendance, a woman named Susan Edson, was being paid at a rate which was approximately half that being paid the male doctors in attendance, her outrage led her to demand the woman be paid at the same rate as the others. She won.
After her husband’s death Lucretia returned to what had been their Ohio home. She dedicated the remainder of her life to gathering, cataloging, and editing her husband’s personal, private, and professional papers, letters, notes, speeches, and other materials from his career in the military and politics. These were preserved and made available to scholars and historians.
In preserving and gathering her husband’s papers and supporting materials in one place, Lucretia in effect established the first presidential library. Because of her efforts the records of the Garfield Administration and the era in which it occurred are available today, at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio.