While the boys gazed out the railcar window, watching trees and towns flash by, stationmasters and railroad officials passed ahead instructions not to discuss the assassination attempt. Passengers and even newsboys showed astonishing restraint. “Conductors passed quietly through the train that carried the boys westward, requesting silence as they whispered the news,” Garfield’s granddaughter would write years later. “The children reached Mentor unaware of the dark cloud that was enveloping their family.”
When the boys finally arrived it was noon, more than an hour after news of the assassination attempt had reached the little town. They were quickly bundled into a carriage and brought to their family farm. While neighbors and friends slipped in and out of the farmhouse, hoping to be told that the rumors were untrue, a reporter spoke to Lucretia’s father. “We have not said a word to the [boys],” Zeb Rudolph admitted. “We hoped that it may not be true, and now that it is true we almost fear to tell them.” Struggling to keep his composure in the presence of a stranger, he watched as his grandsons played “in happy ignorance” on the wide, sun-soaked lawn.
In the second-story room above the Baltimore and Potomac station, Garfield asked only one thing of the more than a dozen men who hovered over him—that they take him home. After enduring Bliss’s excruciating examinations and listening to ten different doctors discuss his fate, Garfield finally convinced the shell-shocked members of his cabinet that, although the White House, with its rotting wood and leaking pipes, was no place for a sick man, anything was better than this room. As gently as they could, eight men lifted the president and carried him back down the steep stairs while he lay on the train car mattress, now stained with vomit and blood.
When they reached the waiting room, the men could hardly believe their eyes. In the brief time they had spent upstairs, trying to understand the extent of the president’s injuries, the once orderly station below them had transformed into a madhouse. “The crowd about the depot,” one man would recall, “had become a swaying multitude, with people running from every direction in frantic haste.” Within ten minutes of the shooting, a mob had gathered on Sixth and B Streets. An attempt to storm the building, in the hope of finding the assassin and lynching him, had been prevented only by a desperate telephone call to the police.
As soon as Garfield appeared, however, the character of the crowd immediately changed. Men and women who had been screaming with fear and fury just moments before suddenly recovered their reason, quietly urging each other to make room for the president as he was carried out of the station and carefully put into a makeshift ambulance. “I think I can see now,” one of Garfield’s doctors would write years later, “the sea of human faces that completely filled the space in and around the depot, as we carried him down the stairs, and through the depot, with the mingled expressions of pity and consternation that sat upon each of them.” Once settled on the mattress and a pile of hastily arranged cushions, Garfield, his right arm lifted over his head and his face “ashy white,” looked silently out the window.
Hoping to spare the president any additional pain, the ambulance driver guided his horse so slowly over the broken brick streets that hundreds of people were able to keep up with his wagon, somberly walking just behind it. Whenever they came to a pothole, policemen would carefully lift the ambulance, trying their best not to jar it. Garfield’s “sufferings must have been intense,” one reporter wrote, “but he gave no sign of it, and was as gentle and submissive as a child.”
Joseph Stanley Brown was working alone in his office, just as Garfield had left him, when one of the White House doormen suddenly appeared before his desk. There was something about the way the man walked in, “haltingly and timidly,” that made Brown uneasy. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “there is a rumor that the President has been shot.”
Years later, Brown would struggle to explain how he felt when he heard those words. It was as if he were “suddenly congealed,” he said, as if his hectic, bustling world had lurched to a stop. Desperately trying to dismiss the idea, and to sound more confident than he felt, he snapped at the doorman. “Nonsense!” he said. “The story cannot possibly be true.”
The man quickly shuffled away, but Brown could not shake the sickening feeling that had settled over him, nor would he have a chance to. Just moments after he had managed to return his attention to his work, his office door suddenly burst open, and a messenger staggered into the room. “Oh, Mr. Secretary,” he cried, “it’s true, they are bringing the President to the White House now.”
Although Brown would later admit that he was more shocked than he had ever been, or would ever again be, he instinctively sprang into action, reacting with the same intelligence and pragmatism that had convinced Garfield to trust him with such a critical job. “Even in moments of greatest misery,” he would later write, “homely tasks have to be performed, and perhaps they tide us over the worst.” If the president was injured, a bed must be made ready at once. There was a suitable room in the southeast corner of the house, and Brown ordered a steward to prepare it “with all speed.”
Then Brown personally took charge of the fortification of the White House and the protection of the president. With complete confidence and authority, he ordered the gates closed and sent a telegram to the chief of police, requesting a “temporary but adequate detail of officers.” Next he contacted the War Department and arranged for a military contingent for Garfield, a man who had never had so much as a single bodyguard.
Although Brown’s first priority was to secure the White House, he knew that he could not seal it off completely. The American people deserved “full and accurate information” about their president, and he was determined that they would get it. With astonishing speed and efficiency, he had passes issued to journalists and government officials so that they might have access to his office at any time, day or night.
As he raced through the halls of the White House, giving orders, inspecting rooms, and turning an entire wing into a “miniature hospital,” Brown paused for a moment to glance out the window. Below him, he saw a modest wagon trundling up Pennsylvania Avenue. It looked suitable for neither a president nor a wounded man, but as it slowed to enter the gates, he suddenly noticed the crowd gathered around it. Garfield, he knew, was inside.
With his staff watching from the windows, Brown raced down the stairs and out the door to where the wagon had rolled to a stop. As he stood there, still trying to understand what was happening, a group of men reached into the wagon and carefully carried the president out. When he saw his young secretary, Garfield waved weakly and tried to smile. Looking at the president, drained of color, his handsome gray suit torn and soaked with blood, Brown could not believe this was the same man who, just an hour before, had left the White House “abounding in health and the joy of living.”
A dozen men lifted above their heads the mattress on which the president lay, carrying him into the White House, through the Blue Room, up the broad, central staircase, and to the room that Brown had had prepared for him. As his son Jim, no longer able to contain his fear and grief, began to cry, Garfield grasped his hand tightly. “The upper story is alright,” he promised. “It is only the hull that was damaged.”
Just eighteen miles outside of Washington, Lucretia, terrified that she was already too late, suddenly heard a deafening, high-pitched squeal and saw sparks flying outside her window. The twelve-foot-long parallel bar connecting the wheels of the special train that had been arranged for her, thundering along at 250 revolutions per minute, had suddenly snapped. Unable to stop, the engine dragged the broken rod for two miles, ripping up railroad ties and gouging the side of the train. The railroad men who would later arrive on the scene pronounced it a miracle that the engine had not jumped the tracks. Had that happened, “the Pullman car would have been splintered into kindling-wood,” the New York Times reported, “and all on board would have been killed.”
More frustrated than frightened, Lucretia was forced to wait until a second engi
ne could arrive to take her the rest of the way into Washington. By the time she finally reached the White House, it was nearly 7:00 p.m. Garfield had waited for her for hours without complaint, but he knew the moment she arrived. Hearing the crunch of her carriage wheels over the gravel driveway, he broke into a broad smile and, turning to his doctors, said, “That’s my wife!”
Lucretia’s face was streaked with tears when she stepped out of the carriage, but she quickly wiped them away, determined to show only strength and confidence to James. “Mrs. Garfield came, frail, fatigued, desperate,” Harriet Blaine wrote to her daughter the next day. “But firm and quiet and full of purpose to save.” Until that moment, Secretary Blaine, although very pale and “evidently … making a strong effort to keep up his strength,” had managed to stave off grief, allowing himself to think only of what could be done to save his friend. When he saw Lucretia and Mollie, however, he “broke completely,” a reporter who had been waiting outside the White House gates wrote, and “wept for several minutes.”
Lucretia went straight to Garfield’s room, escorted up the stairs by her son Jim, his arm wrapped protectively around her as he whispered in her ear, trying to reassure her as his father had reassured him. Although she was surrounded by people desperate to protect her, to soften the blow, few of them believed her husband would live. Colonel Abel Corbin, President Grant’s brother-in-law, had seen Garfield lying on the train station floor and told a reporter that he had watched “too many men die on the battlefield not to know death’s mark.” “In my opinion,” Corbin said, Garfield was “virtually a dead man from the moment he was shot.” Even the man who had assumed control of the president’s medical care admitted that he held out little if any hope. Garfield “will not probably live three hours,” Bliss said, “and may die in half an hour.”
Lucretia, as she had done throughout her life, insisted on the truth, no matter how painful, but she was not about to abandon hope. Resolutely opening the door to the room where her husband lay, she left her children and friends behind and stepped inside with dry eyes and a warm smile. She would admit fear, but not despair. When Garfield, the memory of his own fatherless childhood weighing heavily on his mind, tried to talk to her about plans for their children if he were to die, she stopped him.
“I am here to nurse you back to life,” she said firmly. “Please do not speak again of death.”
• CHAPTER 14 •
ALL EVIL CONSEQUENCES
Great ideas travel slowly, and for a time noiselessly,
as the gods whose feet were shod with wool.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
While most of the country heard newsboys crying “Extra!” in the streets or overheard the frantic whispers of friends, news of the president’s shooting reached the Volta Laboratory by telephone call. Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant, Charles Sumner Tainter, was in the laboratory in Washington, working on a row of wax impressions for the phonograph, when his telephone suddenly sprang to life, its sharp ring shattering the silence and wrenching him away from his work. Although by now the invention had been installed in thousands of homes, for most Americans, it was not yet part of the everyday world. Even Bell did not often hear it ring.
If Tainter was surprised to receive a telephone call, he was astonished by the news it brought. “President Garfield,” the caller said, had “just been shot while in the Baltimore and Potomac.” When they learned what had happened, the members of Bell’s family were struck by the cruelty and senselessness of the act, and reminded of the losses they had suffered in their own lives. As his mother would write in the following days, there was a sense of shock and grief, as heavy as if the president “belonged to us.”
The Volta Laboratory was on Connecticut Avenue, a main thoroughfare in the heart of Washington, and Tainter and Bell’s cousin Dr. Chicester Bell watched as the city seemed to descend into madness. People flooded the streets, dodging carriage wheels and horses’ hooves as they raced toward the train station in disbelief, or away from it in terror. “Everybody ran hither and thither without method,” one contemporary writer would remember of that day. “Men forgot hat and coat, and ran into the streets and wandered about, apparently anxious only to be near somebody else, but shocked and bewildered.” Determined to find out for himself what had happened, Tainter began to make his way toward the Baltimore and Potomac. So crowded and chaotic were the streets, however, that by the time he reached the train station, Garfield was already gone.
In Boston, Bell had been in frequent contact with Tainter, as they worked long distance. His wife, pregnant with their third child, and his daughters needed him, but his thoughts had never been far from his work. As soon as he heard the news of the president’s shooting, however, Bell’s mind immediately shifted away from Edison’s phonograph, and even his own invention, the photophone, to the president. Although he was not a doctor, Bell knew that, in the case of a gunshot wound, “no one could venture to predict the end so long as the position of the bullet remained unknown.” It sickened him to think of Garfield’s doctors blindly “search[ing] with knife and probe” for Guiteau’s bullet. “Science,” he reasoned, “should be able to discover some less barbarous method.”
Science would soon exceed even Bell’s expectations. Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.
Even had Garfield simply been left alone, he almost certainly would have survived. Lodged as it was in the fatty tissue below and behind his pancreas, the bullet itself was no continuing danger to the president. “Nature did all she could to restore him to health,” a surgeon would write just a few years later. “She caused a capsule of thick, strong, fibrous tissue to be formed around the bullet, completely walling it off from the rest of the body, and rendering it entirely harmless.”
Garfield’s doctors did not know where the bullet was, but they did know that it was not necessarily fatal. Just sixteen years after the end of the Civil War, hundreds of men, Union veterans and Confederate, were walking around with lead balls inside them. Many of the soldiers, moreover, had sustained wounds that seemed almost impossible to survive. For the better part of his life, the man who delivered Guiteau to the District Jail, Detective McElfresh, had had a bullet in his brain, a wound also sustained during the Civil War. He appeared to be, one reporter mentioned offhandedly, “none the worse for it.”
The critical difference between these anonymous men and Garfield was that they had received little if any medical care. If Garfield “had been a ‘tough,’ and had received his wound in a Bowery dive,” a contemporary medical critic wrote, “he would have been brought to Bellevue Hospital … without any fuss or feathers, and would have gotten well.” Instead, Garfield was the object of intense medical interest from a menagerie of physicians, each with his own theories and ambitions, and each acutely aware that he was treating the president of the United States.
For one doctor in particular, this national crisis was a rare and heady intersection of medicine and political power—an opportunity for recognition he would never see again. Although ten different doctors had examined Garfield at the train station, as soon as the medical entourage reached the White House, Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss made it perfectly clear that he was in charge. Striding into the room where Garfield was to stay, Bliss immediately began issuing orders. In the chaos and confusion that marked the first hours after the president was shot, Bliss’s complete confidence in his position convinced even his most determined competitors that he had been given full authority over Garfield’s case.
Taking on the role of chief physician, Bliss’s first orders were to isolate the president. In this he had the help of armed military sentinels. The policemen whom Joseph Stanley Brown had requested to secure the White House had been forced to fan out in
to the city, where, according to one journalist, “the crowds were rapidly increasing in angry excitement.” In their place stood a company of soldiers, refusing entry to even Garfield’s closest friends and advisers and discouraging the most determined visitors. “The glance of their bayonets flashing in the sunlight as they walked with measured tread the several paths to which they were assigned,” one reporter wrote, “recalled the last hours of President Lincoln, when the same astonishment and horror were reflected on the faces of the crowds about the Executive Mansion.”
Inside the White House, Garfield was confined not to just one wing, or even one room, but to a small space within that room. At Bliss’s direction, his bed was pushed to the center of the room and encircled by screens. Even if a visitor were able to make it past the locked gates and armed guards, through the house, up the stairs, and into Garfield’s room, he would still be separated from the president.
To anyone standing beyond the White House gates, it seemed that the president had simply disappeared. So completely removed was he from sight, and so impossible was it to get any information about him, that rumors quickly began to circulate that he had already died. The rumors were so convincing, in fact, that the Washington Post published an extra edition, claiming that “President Garfield was shot and killed this morning.” New Yorkers sorrowfully lowered their flags, only to raise them again a few hours later when they learned that the president was still living.
Having strictly limited Garfield’s visitors to just a handful of family members and friends, Bliss turned his attention to what he considered to be the greatest threat to his newly won position—the other doctors. At the top of his list of potential competitors was Dr. Jedediah Hyde Baxter, the chief medical purveyor of the army and Garfield’s personal physician for the past five years. When Garfield was shot, Baxter had been in Pennsylvania visiting a friend, but he had taken the first express train into Washington as soon as he heard the news. Bliss had been expecting him.
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