Deep in conversation with Secretary of State James Blaine, the president was oblivious to his killer’s presence. Guiteau rushed up behind him and, from just a yard away, raised a pistol and fired at Garfield’s back. “My God! What is this?” the stunned president exclaimed, staggering from the shot. As Garfield crumpled to the ground, the assassin took two steps forward and shot him again. “I am a Stalwart,” he screamed, “and [Vice President Chester] Arthur is president now.” A police officer on the scene pounced on Guiteau, who was struggling to escape, while agitated onlookers demanded that he be lynched on the spot.
Garfield, meanwhile, lay on the station floor. One bullet had grazed his arm, but the other had penetrated deeply. At the time, rigorous sterilization was not yet commonplace, and a physician, seeking the bullet, probed the wound with his fingers. Believing that the president was hemorrhaging internally, the doctor nevertheless reassured him, saying, “I don’t believe the wound is serious.” But Garfield, pale and quickly losing strength, knew otherwise. “Thank you, doctor,” he said with a weak smile, “but I am a dead man.”
The president was taken to the White House, where he lingered near death as a shocked nation kept vigil. Medical advice poured in from all over the country. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, made several appearances at Garfield’s bedside with a primitive metal detector he had rigged to locate the bullet in the absence of X-rays, which would not be discovered until the 1890s. Though the bullet was never found, the president rallied enough to be taken to a seaside cottage in Elberon, New Jersey. Infection overtook him, however, and he died on September 19, 1881, two and a half months after being shot.
As Americans mourned the fallen president they never really knew, Garfield’s murderer was put on trial in Washington. It was a spectacle from the beginning. Guiteau, who had pleaded not guilty by reason of temporary insanity brought about by “divine power,” constantly disrupted the proceedings with his ranting. He called the prosecutor a “low-livered whelp” and prosecution witnesses “dirty liars.” At one point he jumped up and told the judge, “I had a very happy holiday,” and at the conclusion of the lengthy trial, he insisted on making his own summation before the jury. “God told me to kill,” he shrieked. “Let your verdict be that it was the Deity’s act, not mine.”
Guiteau was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging at the Washington Asylum and Jail. He went to the gallows, thrilled to be the center of attention, reciting an epic poem he had written for the occasion. It was called, “I Am Going to the Lordy.”
Twenty years after Garfield’s assassination, William McKinley met the same fate. Like Garfield, McKinley was from Ohio, served in the Civil War, and represented Ohio in Congress. Unlike his predecessor, however, McKinley served a full term and more in the White House before being murdered. During that time, the United States was emerging as a world leader, winning the Spanish-American War in 1898 and taking possession of Guam, Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and part of Samoa. American confidence was growing, big business was booming, and new technology was changing the nation. “We have prosperity at home and prestige abroad,” McKinley said as he was elected to a second term in 1900.
Although he had once favored growth of big business, McKinley modified that position at the beginning of his new term, fearing monopolies and the resulting high prices. He also changed his views on protective tariffs designed to help U.S. businesses against foreign competition. McKinley now favored reciprocal trade agreements with other countries and introduced the new policy in a speech at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 5, 1901. “By sensible trade relations which will not interrupt our home production, we shall extend the outlets for our increasing surplus,” he said. “The period of exclusiveness is past,” he concluded. It would be his last speech.
The next day, the president appeared at the exposition’s Temple of Music for a mass reception. Always affable and outgoing, McKinley was eager to shake as many hands as possible. A dense crowd had assembled, erupting into great applause when the president arrived. Among the thousands was a twenty-nine-year-old anarchist by the name of Leon Czolgosz. He had come to kill.
A disaffected youth who had grown up in poverty in Michigan, Czolgosz became obsessed with anarchist literature of the day. He hated the American system of government and believed that killing anyone branded an “enemy of the people” by anarchist leaders was just. He was thrilled to learn that King Humbert I of Italy had been assassinated by an anarchist in 1900, and he soon set out to make his own mark. Reading that McKinley would be in Buffalo for the trade exposition, Czolgosz staked out the grounds there, including the Temple of Music, where he knew the president would be appearing. He purchased a small revolver and bided his time.
On the morning of September 6, Czolgosz arrived at the temple and joined the milling thousands waiting for the president. He had wrapped the revolver in a handkerchief, knowing he would have to pull it out unseen when the president greeted him. “Let them come,” McKinley said with a smile as he arrived at the temple amid a fanfare of music. Crowds immediately poured in, and the president began shaking hands in earnest. In the line moving forward, his face expressionless, was the assassin.
Agents guarding the president didn’t notice anything unusual as Czolgosz repeatedly took out the handkerchief wrapped around the gun and pretended to wipe his forehead. When the killer reached the president, McKinley graciously extended his hand to greet him. In a flash, Czolgosz slapped it away and fired two shots into McKinley’s midsection from inches away. As the president clutched his abdomen in shock, six agents rushed the the assassin and knocked him to the floor. Seeing this, McKinley weakly told an aide: “Don’t let them hurt him. Be easy with him, boys.” Looking up at his secretary, George Cortelyou, McKinley whispered, “My wife, be careful, Cortelyou, how you tell her—oh, be careful!”
The president was taken to a small hospital on the exposition grounds, where it was decided that an immediate operation was necessary. With no electricity in the makeshift hospital, physicians used a mirror to reflect the sun’s dying rays as they worked. One bullet had grazed the president, possibly deflected by a button, but the other had pierced his stomach front and back. The doctors cleaned the peritoneal cavity and sutured the stomach. The wound was closed and covered with an antiseptic bandage, and McKinley was taken to a friend’s home to recuperate.
Initially, it seemed that the fifty-seven-year-old president might recover. But gangrene set in, and doctors argued among themselves about whether McKinley was strong enough to withstand another operation. He grew progressively weaker and lapsed into a coma a week after being shot. McKinley revived briefly to say to those around him: “It is useless, gentlemen. I think we ought to have a prayer.” The Lord’s Prayer was recited, with the dying president silently moving his lips to the words. He then said, “Goodbye, good-bye, all,” adding, “It is God’s way. His will, not ours, be done.” With death very near, the president drew his wife closer and whispered the words of his favorite hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee, Nearer to Thee.” After Ida McKinley was led away weeping, the president groped for a hand to hold. A doctor took it as McKinley drew his last breath on September 14, 1901.
“I killed President McKinley because I believed it was my duty,” Czolgosz told reporters from his jail cell. He was tried for the crime and never denied his guilt, maintaining that he followed the teachings of American anarchist leader Emma Goldman. Czolgosz was sentenced to death. Asked if he had any last words as he was being strapped in the electric chair, he responded, “I am not sorry for my crime.”
Although Americans grieved for the murdered president, crowding the funeral route and erecting memorials across the country, McKinley’s death soon was overshadowed by the dynamic vice president who succeeded him, Theodore Roosevelt. It would be another six decades before a presidential assassin would successfully strike again. When he did, Americans thought back almost a century and remembered Lincoln.
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br /> Part VIII
Remains to Be Seen
For deceased Americans of renown, R.I.P. has always been more of a plea than a promise. Take Zachary Taylor, who lay peacefully buried for nearly a century and a half before someone got the idea that maybe it wasn’t a surfeit of cherries on a hot day that killed the twelfth president, as has been commonly accepted, but a nefarious plot to assassinate him with arsenic. Armed with this theory, and little to back it up, an amateur historian succeeded in having President Taylor’s corpse dug up and tested for poison. Although no arsenic was found, putting the kibosh on the conspiracy theory, it was noted that Old Rough ’n’ Ready was still recognizable by his “protruding eyebrows.” The indignity of this exhumation was just one instance in a long, grisly tradition of discommoding the dead. Indeed, old Zach fared better than most, at least being treated to the formality of a flag-draped coffin. Disinterment has not always been so decorous.
1
Boiling “Mad”
“Mad” Anthony Wayne was not your run-of-the-mill Revolutionary War hero. He had an extra streak of boldness—sometimes bordering on recklessness—that earned him his “Mad” appellation, as well as the almost universal affection of his troops. Wayne’s willingness to defy the odds helped him achieve one of the greatest American victories in the War of Independence when he attacked the nearly impregnable fort at Stony Point on the Hudson River and subdued the entire 700-man enemy garrison there. It was a devastating blow to British operations in the North, and gave sagging American morale a much needed boost. That Mad Anthony succeeded in this enterprise despite being wounded in the head by a musket ball only added to his luster. Because he was such a great man, his brethren in the Society of the Cincinnati naturally wanted to honor him with a memorial after his death in 1796. Yet if the general had had any notion of what this would entail, he no doubt would have preferred to be forgotten.
It was decided that the churchyard at St. David’s parish in Radnor, Pennsylvania, would be the most appropriate place for the memorial, as generations of Waynes were buried there. The only problem was, Mad Anthony himself was buried all the way across the state in Presque Isle (now Erie), where he had died. So, in 1809, his son Isaac set out in a small carriage to bring his father’s remains back to Radnor. When he arrived in Presque Isle, though, Isaac discovered that taking his dad’s body away with him would not be so easy. Accounts differ as to what the problem was. Some say the locals, proud to have such a great American hero buried in their midst, were loath to have him removed; others maintain that Isaac Wayne discovered that his father’s well-preserved corpse would not fit into the small, one-horse carriage he had driven across the state. Whatever the problem may have been, the solution was ghastly. Mad Anthony Wayne was removed from his burial place and his remains were boiled. After his flesh and bones were separated, the spoils were divvied up. Presque Isle kept the corpse soup, while Isaac Wayne took the lighter load of bones away with him for reburial in the family plot.
2
Tom Paine’s Farewell Tour
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” Thomas Paine wrote during what he later called “a passion of patriotism” at the onset of the American Revolution in 1776. Sadly for the British-bred Founding Father who wrote so eloquently against tyranny and for basic human dignity, the years after his death in 1809 were the times that tried his body.
Despite having been one of the leading voices of both the American and French Revolutions, author of such works as Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Paine died reviled and nearly friendless. The radical views on religion he expressed later in his life certainly contributed to his unpopularity, and an attack on his former friend George Washington didn’t exactly enhance his standing with the public either. Only six people came to his funeral.
One of Paine’s harshest critics was the English pamphleteer William Cobbett, a staunch conservative who despised Paine’s revolutionary ideas and repeatedly savaged him in print. Cobbett, alas, did not remain an enemy for long. Exposed to the ravages of the Industrial Revolution on Britain’s rural poor, he was stunned by what he witnessed and as a result transformed himself into a radical reformer. Paine’s worst critic was now his greatest disciple, preaching the new gospel against monied interests and monarchical privileges. Of course, this did not go over very well with Britain’s ruling elite, and Cobbett, after serving two years in prison for sedition, was forced to flee to the United States in 1817. It was here that Paine’s most loyal adherent started acting a little loony.
Cobbett was outraged at how poorly his hero’s grave in New Rochelle, New York, was being maintained. “Paine lies in a little hole under the grass and weeds of an obscure farm in America,” he wrote. “There, however, he should not lie, unnoticed, much longer. He belongs to England. His fame is the property of England; and if no other people will show that they value that fame, the people of England will.” Cobbett could not have been more mistaken about his countrymen, as he would soon discover.
His plan to glorify Thomas Paine in perpetuity was twofold: He would remove his corpse from the ungrateful United States and take it to Britain, where he would build a magnificent monument for it, a rallying place for the poor and downtrodden. Obtaining the body was no problem. Cobbett simply stole Paine’s remains under cover of night. “I have done myself the honor to disinter his bones,” he reported. “I have removed them from New Rochelle . . . they are now on their way to England. When I myself return, I shall cause them to speak to the common sense of the great man; I shall gather together the people of Liverpool and Manchester in one assembly with those of London, and those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.”
Cobbett was bubbling with enthusiasm, but money was another matter. He didn’t have any. This cast a bit of a pall on his plans to honor Paine with a lavish funeral featuring “twenty wagon loads of flowers . . . to strew before the hearse,” not to mention the monument he wanted to build. To raise funds, he decided to take his revered relic, Paine’s body, on a tour of Britain. It was a flop. No one came to his “bone rallies”; instead, he was laughed at. Lord Byron even penned a mocking poem for the occasion:
In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will Cobbett has done well;
You visit him on earth again,
He’ll visit you in hell.
Eventually Cobbett was reduced to selling locks of Paine’s hair, but the demand was minimal. He was soon forced to realize that nobody cared, and he reluctantly shelved his plans. The bones he had removed from New Rochelle were shoved under his bed, where they stayed until his death in 1835. After that, Cobbett’s son inherited them. But the younger Cobbett was arrested for debt and the remains were seized for auction, along with his other possessions. There was a reprieve, however, when a court ruled that Thomas Paine’s skeleton was not a marketable asset, and it was returned to Cobbett’s son. After that, the bone trail grows cold. And though history has rehabilitated Thomas Paine’s reputation, his final resting place remains a mystery.
3
Abe Lincoln’s Indecent Exposure
Most accounts of the life of Lincoln end with the solemn funeral procession that carried the martyred president by train from Washington back home to Springfield, Illinois. There is an epilogue, but it is not often included—perhaps because it is so unseemly. The Great Emancipator died in 1865, but he wasn’t left alone until almost a half century later. In the intervening years, his corpse was subjected to a succession of abuses, including an abortive body-snatching scheme that came off more like a Keystone Kops caper.
Lincoln was laid to rest, the first time, in a temporary vault at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. And though his body would never leave the precincts of the graveyard, it would be disinterred no fewer than a dozen times. The first exhumation came just six months after Lincoln arrived at Oak Ridge, when his corpse was moved to another temporary vault pending completion of a permanent monument. His coffin was opened, ostensibly to identify
the six-month-old corpse for the record. Then, in 1871, he was moved again—after being reidentified and reboxed in an iron coffin—to another temporary resting spot inside the partially completed monument. When a stone sarcophagus intended to be the president’s permanent grave was completed three years later, officials were stunned to discover that Lincoln’s iron coffin would not fit into it. They had to remove the body from the casket and place it in a smaller one made of wood. Of course, a formal identification of the remains was included in the process. Finally, on October 15, 1874, President Ulysses Grant dedicated the now completed National Lincoln Monument at Oak Ridge. Abraham Lincoln, safely ensconced in stone, was now at peace—or so it seemed.
A year after the monument’s completion, Benjamin Boyd, a master engraver in the employ of counterfeiter “Big Jim” Kinelly, entered the state prison at Joliet, Illinois. This was a blow to Kinelly’s criminal operations, depending as they did on Boyd’s skill in making quality engravings of U.S. currency. Kinelly wanted his man back and settled upon a plan to make it happen. He would steal Lincoln’s body and hold it for ransom in exchange for Boyd’s release, plus $200,000 in cash. It seemed simple enough, but word of the plot leaked out to the U.S. Secret Service. Patrick Tyrell, the agent in charge of the service’s Chicago branch, ordered one of his paid informers, a petty crook named Lewis Swegles, to infiltrate Kinelly’s gang and find out how and when they planned to make their move against Lincoln’s remains. Tyrell wanted to catch them in the act.
On the night of November 7, 1876, a group of Secret Service agents and detectives borrowed from Pinkerton’s and other detective agencies waited in the darkness of the National Lincoln Monument for the invasion of the body snatchers. Swegles, who was accompanying the robbers, was supposed to give the waiting lawmen a signal as soon as the crypt was entered, but he couldn’t slip away in time. It was only after the thieves had entered the tomb, pried open the sarcophagus, and began dragging away the coffin that Swegles was able to get outside, under the pretext of fetching the wagon, and give the signal that the crime was in progress. All at once, the agents charged the tomb, but to their dismay they found no thieves. Rushing back outside, they started shooting at each other in the darkness and confusion. Miraculously, no one was killed, but the grave robbers, who had decided to wait for Swegles and the wagon outside, escaped into the night when they heard the gunshots.
A Treasury of Great American Scandals Page 25