Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

by Candice Millard

  In the end, Blaine was the only man to give Guiteau an honest answer. He had received his letters and seen him on dozens of occasions at the State Department, brushing off his persistent questions about the consulship with a terse “We have not got to that yet.” So frequent were Guiteau’s visits to the State Department that the chief clerk had instructed the messengers not to forward his notes and to do what they could to shield the secretary of state.

  Finally, after nearly two months of being chased by Guiteau, Blaine had had enough. When Guiteau cornered him one day, the secretary of state abruptly turned and addressed him directly. He told Guiteau that “he had, in my opinion, no prospect whatever of receiving” the appointment. Determined to end the matter once and for all, he snapped, “Never speak to me about the Paris consulship again.” Guiteau watched in shock as Blaine walked away, and then he returned to his boardinghouse, determined to warn Garfield that his secretary of state was a “wicked man” and that there would be “no peace till you get rid of him.”

  Blaine forgot Guiteau as soon as he turned his back on him. The war that Conkling had been waging against Garfield’s administration had taken a sudden and unexpected turn, and the secretary of state could smell blood. Before Lucretia had fallen ill, Garfield, still trying to find common ground with the Stalwarts, had appointed five of Conkling’s men to New York posts. He believed, however, that Grant had made a fatal mistake in surrendering New York to Conkling, and he was not about to put himself in the same position. The day after his appointments of Conkling’s men, he announced another appointment. This one was only a single recommendation, but it was for the post that Conkling prized above all others, the one he had bestowed upon Chester Arthur—the collectorship of the New York Customs House.

  Shocked and enraged, Conkling spluttered that the nomination was “perfidy without peril.” Not only had Garfield not consulted him, but the man he had chosen, Judge William Robertson, was high on Conkling’s long list of enemies. At the Republican convention, Robertson had been the first delegate to abandon Grant, thus, Conkling believed, causing the hemorrhaging of votes that had ultimately resulted in Grant’s defeat. Robertson had, Conkling raged, “treacherously betray[ed] a sacred trust,” and he demanded that Garfield withdraw the nomination.

  By nominating Robertson, Garfield knew, he had given Conkling his “casus belli,” his justification for war, but the president was prepared for battle, and confident of victory. “Let who will, fight me,” Garfield wrote in his diary after making the nomination. This battle was about more than Robertson or even Conkling. It was about the power of the presidency. “I owe something to the dignity of my office,” he wrote. This post was critical to the nation’s financial strength, and he was not about to let someone else fill it. “Shall the principal port of entry in which more than 90% of all our customs duties are collected be under the direct control of the Administration or under the local control of a factional Senator,” he asked. “I think I win in this contest.”

  The American people agreed. Garfield’s refusal to back down was widely hailed as a courageous and necessary stand against a dangerous man. Even Conkling’s own state turned against him. Of the more than one hundred newspapers in the state of New York, fewer than twenty supported their senior senator, the rest lining up behind the president. Garfield, the New York Herald argued, “has recognized Republicans as members of a great party and not of mean factions. He has chosen men for office because of their fitness and ability, and not because they have stuck to the political fortunes of loved leaders.” Conkling, in stark contrast, “would be Caesar or nothing.” He “makes the mistake of supposing that he, and not Gen. Garfield, was elected President,” the newspaper chided. “He declares war, and the President accepts the situation.”

  Conkling, however, was much more experienced at political warfare than Garfield. Every time he had gone into battle, no matter how bruising, he had emerged even stronger than before. He seemed unaffected even by highly public humiliations, shrugging off scandals that would have ruined another man. Just two years earlier, he had been caught in a brazen affair with Kate Chase Sprague, the wife of William Sprague, a U.S. senator and former governor of Rhode Island, and daughter of Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury under Lincoln and the chief justice of the United States. Newspapers had gleefully reported that Senator Sprague had chased Conkling from his home with a pistol. In the end, however, the only reputation that had been damaged by the scandal was Kate’s.

  It was not until early May, as Lucretia lay near death, that Conkling finally overreached. Fearing that public sympathy for her would derail his campaign against Garfield, Conkling decided that it was time to call in some favors. He had long before solicited the support of James Gordon Bennett, the founder, editor, and publisher of the New York Herald. As Bennett was then out of the country, his managing editor, Thomas Connery, would have to do. Conkling sent word to Connery that he wished to meet with him in Washington. Connery realized that he was about to step into a snake pit, but he had little choice but to do as Conkling asked.

  When Connery arrived at Conkling’s house on the corner of Fourteenth and F Streets, he was received not by the senator but by the vice president of the United States. Although Chester Arthur was now part of Garfield’s administration, his allegiance to Conkling was stronger, and more obvious, than it had ever been. He continued to share a home with him, frequently joined him on long fishing trips, and did not hesitate to criticize Garfield at every opportunity. “Garfield has not been square, nor honorable, nor truthful with Conkling,” Arthur told a reporter. “It’s a hard thing to say of a president of the United States, but it is, unfortunately, only the truth.” After Robertson’s appointment, Arthur had even signed a petition of protest against the president.

  Connery, unsure why he was there and extremely ill at ease, quickly asked Arthur what Conkling wanted. The vice president, he would later recall, “smiled and looked at me as if doubting the innocence of my question.” Soon after, Conkling arrived and launched into a “lengthy and impassioned harangue” against Garfield, at the end of which he asked Connery to pledge the support of the Herald in his war against the president. Connery agreed, although he knew there was not much he could do to save Conkling from himself.

  While Conkling and Arthur carefully plotted their next move, Garfield, well aware that he was under attack, gave his enemies little thought. Lucretia had slowly begun to recover, and he was overwhelmed with gratitude. On May 15, he finally allowed himself to believe that “God will be merciful to us and let her stay.” Her fever had fallen to just over 100 degrees, and Garfield’s “hope almost reached triumph.” Over breakfast that morning, the normally happy, boisterous family laughed for the first time since Lucretia had fallen ill. “The little ones have been very brave but very still,” Garfield wrote. “The house has been very still.”

  The Capitol, on the other hand, had been roiling. The day after Lucretia began to rally, Conkling made a last, desperate attempt to regain the upper hand from a president who had dared to defy him. The idea came to him from Senator Tom Platt, a Stalwart who had, months earlier, promised to confirm any appointment Garfield made in exchange for help in winning a Senate seat. Now, expected to vote for Robertson, Platt feared Conkling’s wrath. The only honorable response to Garfield’s outrageous nomination, he told Conkling, was to “rebuke the President by immediately turning in our resignations.” The New York legislature would quickly reinstate them, and they would return to the Senate triumphant.

  It was a bold, dramatic move, and Conkling, who valued showmanship nearly as much as he did power, seized on it. On the morning of May 16, after the chaplain finished the morning prayer, Arthur, who had entered the Senate chamber late and visibly nervous, handed the clerk a note. Few people in the hall even noticed the exchange, and those who did assumed it was an ordinary, uninteresting communication. As the clerk began to read, however, those who were only half listening, idly sifting through their mail, sudd
enly sat straight up in their seats, a look of pure astonishment on their faces. The letter was addressed to Arthur, and it read, “Sir, Will you please announce to the Senate that my resignation as Senator of the United States from the State of New-York has been forwarded to the Governor of the State. I have the honor to be, with great respect, your obedient servant, Roscoe Conkling.”

  The brief note, one reporter wrote, “seemed to stupefy” everyone in the chamber, and it quickly caused a “sensation.” The reaction that followed, however, was not at all what Conkling had envisioned. After recovering from their initial shock, Stalwarts in the Senate merely mumbled their support, while delighted Half-Breeds, hardly believing their luck, immediately went on the attack. This was nothing more than a stunt, they jeered, and an impotent one at that. Conkling, scoffed one congressman, was just “a great big baby boohooing because he can’t have all the cake.”

  When he was told of Conkling’s resignation, Garfield simply shrugged. It was, he wrote in his diary, “a very weak attempt at the heroic.… I go on without disturbance.” His first concern was for Lucretia. Any time and energy he had left were put toward creating a balanced administration and freeing himself from office seekers so he would have time to do his job. A few days later, he announced that he was limiting his calling hours to one hour a day, from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. Conkling, he knew, was still capable of doing tremendous damage, but Garfield was no longer interested in compromise. “Having done all I fairly could to avoid a fight,” he wrote, “I now fight to the end.”

  As the final, fatal blow had been self-inflicted, Conkling’s long political career came to a shockingly swift end. Immediately following their dramatic resignations, Conkling and Platt left for New York. After years of controlling every aspect of New York politics, and every man involved in it, Conkling was confident that the legislature at Albany would reelect them both. However, on the last day of May, the same day that Lucretia’s doctors finally pronounced her well—telling Garfield, “with emphasis, it is ended”—both men were soundly defeated. Conkling received just a third of the Republican votes, and Platt six fewer than Conkling. “Stung with mortification at his inability to control the President, and believing that the people of this State shared his disappointment,” wrote the New York Times, Conkling “has thrown away his power, destroyed his own influence.”

  For the first time since his nomination nearly a year earlier, Garfield was hopeful. Lucretia, who, just days earlier, had been so close to death, was every day gaining in health and strength. No longer forced to surrender half his day to the demands of office seekers, he suddenly had time to think and plan. And, in a turn of events that no one could have predicted, the legendary senator who had declared himself Garfield’s enemy, and whose iron grip on his administration had threatened to destroy it before it had even begun, was alone and powerless in Albany. Three months after his inauguration, Garfield was finally free to begin his presidency.

  “A deep strong current of happy peace,” he wrote that night, “flows through every heart in the household.”

  • CHAPTER 10 •

  THE DARK DREAMS OF PRESIDENTS

  History is but the unrolled scroll of Prophecy.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD

  The idea came to Guiteau suddenly, “like a flash,” he would later say. On May 18, two days after Conkling’s dramatic resignation, Guiteau, “depressed and perplexed … wearied in mind and body,” had climbed into bed at 8:00 p.m., much earlier than usual. He had been lying on his cot in his small, rented room for an hour, unable to sleep, his mind churning, when he was struck by a single, pulsing thought: “If the President was out of the way every thing would go better.”

  Guiteau was certain the idea had not come from his own, feverish mind. It was a divine inspiration, a message from God. He was, he believed, in a unique position to recognize divine inspiration when it occurred because it had happened to him before. Even before the wreck of the steamship Stonington, he had been inspired, he said, to join the Oneida Community, to leave so that he might start a religious newspaper, and to become a traveling evangelist. Each time God had called him, he had answered.

  This time, for the first time, he hesitated. Despite his certainty that the message had come directly from God, he did not want to listen. The next morning, when the thought returned “with renewed force,” he recoiled from it. “I was kept horrified,” he said, “kept throwing it off.” Wherever he went and whatever he did, however, the idea stayed with him. “It kept growing upon me, pressing me, goading me.”

  Guiteau had “no ill-will to the President,” he insisted. In fact, he believed that he had given Garfield every opportunity to save his own life. He was certain that God wanted Garfield out of the way because he was a danger to the Republican Party and, ultimately, the American people. As Conkling’s war with Garfield had escalated, Guiteau wrote to the president repeatedly, advising him that the best way to respond to the senator’s demands was to give in to them. “It seems to me that the only way out of this difficulty is to withdraw Mr. R.,” he wrote, referring to Garfield’s appointment of Judge Robertson to run the New York Customs House. “I am on friendly terms with Senator Conkling and the rest of our Senators, but I write this on my own account and in the spirit of a peacemaker.”

  Guiteau also felt that he had done all he could to warn Garfield about Blaine. After the secretary of state had snapped at him outside of the State Department, he bitterly recounted the exchange in a letter to Garfield. “Until Saturday I supposed Mr. Blaine was my friend in the matter of the Paris consulship,” he wrote, still wounded by the memory. “ ‘Never speak to me again,’ said Mr. Blaine, Saturday, ‘on the Paris consulship as long as you live.’ Heretofore he has been my friend.”

  Even after his divine inspiration, Guiteau continued to appeal to Garfield. On May 23, he again wrote to the president, advising him to demand Blaine’s “immediate resignation.” “I have been trying to be your friend,” he wrote darkly. “I do not know whether you appreciate it or not.” Garfield would be wise to listen to him, he warned, “otherwise you and the Republican party will come to grief. I will see you in the morning if I can and talk with you.”

  Guiteau did not see Garfield the next morning, or any day after that. Unknown to him, he had been barred from the president’s office. Even among the strange and strikingly persistent office seekers that filled Garfield’s anteroom every day, Guiteau had stood out. Brown, Garfield’s private secretary, had long before relegated Guiteau’s letters to what was known as “the eccentric file,” but he continued to welcome him to the White House with the same courtesy he extended to every other caller. That did not change until Guiteau’s eccentricity and doggedness turned into belligerence. Finally, after a heated argument with one of the president’s ushers that ended with Guiteau sitting in a corner of the waiting room, glowering, Brown issued orders that “he should be quietly kept away.”

  Soon after, Guiteau stopped going to the White House altogether. He gave up trying to secure an appointment, and he no longer fought the press of divine inspiration. For two weeks, he had prayed to God to show him that he had misunderstood the message he had received that night. “That is the way I test the Deity,” he would later explain. “When I feel the pressure upon me to do a certain thing and I have any doubt about it I keep praying that the Deity may stay it in some way if I am wrong.” Despite his prayers and constant vigilance, he had received no such sign.

  By the end of May, Guiteau had given himself up entirely to his new obsession. Alone in his room, with nowhere to go and no one to talk to, he pored over newspaper accounts of the battle between Conkling and the White House, fixating on any criticism of Garfield, real or implied. “I kept reading the papers and kept being impressed,” he remembered, “and the idea kept bearing and bearing and bearing down upon me.” Finally, on June 1, thoroughly convinced of “the divinity of the inspiration,” he made up his mind. He would kill the president.

  The next day, Guiteau
began to prepare. Although he believed he was doing God’s work, he had been driven for so long by a desire for fame and prestige that his first thought was not how he would assassinate the president, but the attention he would receive after he did. “I thought just what people would talk and thought what a tremendous excitement it would create,” he wrote, “and I kept thinking about it all week.”

  With his forthcoming celebrity in mind, Guiteau decided that his first task should be to edit a religious book he had written several years ago called The Truth: A Companion to the Bible. The publicity it would bring the book, he believed, was one of the principal reasons God wanted him to assassinate the president. “Two points will be accomplished,” he wrote. “It will save the Republic, and create a demand for my book, The Truth.… This book was not written for money. It was written to save souls. In order to attract public attention the book needs the notice the President’s removal will give it.” There would be a great demand for the book following Garfield’s death, he reasoned, so it should be “in proper shape.”

  As was true of most things in Guiteau’s life, The Truth was largely stolen. In a single-sentence preface, he insisted that “a new line of thought runs through this book, and the Author asks for it a careful attention.” There was, however, nothing new about The Truth. The ideas, most of them copied verbatim, came from a book called The Berean, which John Humphrey Noyes, the founder of Oneida, had written in 1847, and which Guiteau’s father had treasured, believing that it was “better than the Bible.”