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

by Candice Millard

  Bell, however, still wanted his own man. Tainter, who had continued to work in the Volta Laboratory since the shooting, “received an urgent request from A. G. Bell … to join him.” The next day, he was on a train bound for Boston. Both men knew that, if they were to have any hope of helping the president, they had to work quickly. Although still little more than an idea in Bell’s mind, their invention would be Garfield’s only hope of avoiding death at his doctor’s hands.

  • CHAPTER 15 •

  BLOOD-GUILTY

  We should do nothing for revenge.… Nothing for the past.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD

  From his cell deep in the District Jail, Guiteau was gratified to learn that, as he had predicted, General William Tecumseh Sherman had sent out his troops. The heavily armed company of artillery that flanked the somber stone building, however, was there not to free the president’s would-be assassin, but to make sure he wasn’t dragged outside and lynched. So great was the fear that a mob would overwhelm the prison that its guards had at first denied that Guiteau was even there. “Information had reached them,” the New York Times reported, “that, should the fact be made known that he was there, the building would be attacked.”

  After the initial shock of the president’s shooting, the prevailing feeling throughout the country was one of unfettered rage. The fact that Guiteau had been captured and was in jail, awaiting trial, did little to satisfy most Americans’ desire for immediate revenge. “There were many who felt intensely dissatisfied that the indignant crowd in Washington was not permitted to wreak summary vengeance on the assassin of the President,” one reporter wrote. “Many declared that the proper disposition of him would have been to have held him under the grinding wheels of the railroad train which was to have carried President Garfield away.”

  Although Guiteau was widely assumed to be insane, the thought that he was alive while the president lay dying was unbearable. “While it seems incredible that a sane man could have done so desperate and utterly inexcusable a deed,” a newspaper reported, “the feeling is quite general that it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.” In Brooklyn, as a “roar of indignation went up that echoed from end to end of the town,” the mayor declared that “the wretch ought to be hanged whether he was insane or not.” Rumors spread that a group of six hundred black men had already formed a lynching party, determined to settle the matter themselves.

  Aside from occasional interviews with reporters in the warden’s office, Guiteau rarely left his cell, which was even more difficult to reach than Garfield’s sickroom in the White House. On the top floor of the prison’s south wing, Cell Two belonged to a grim block of seventeen cells known as Murderers’ Row. Guiteau’s door was sunk three feet into a brick wall and barred with an L-shaped bar, a steel catch, and a lock that held five tumblers. In fact, so famously escape-proof was Guiteau’s cell that fifteen years later the renowned magician Harry Houdini would thrill onlookers by escaping from it after allowing himself to be stripped, searched, and locked in.

  Although prison officials went to elaborate lengths to make sure their most famous prisoner could not escape, their efforts were unneeded. Guiteau was not going anywhere. He was perfectly content to be in the prison—safe, comfortable, and well fed—while he waited for his friends to free him. In an interview on July 4 with the district attorney and his own lawyer, Guiteau said that Chester Arthur was “a particular friend of mine.” At the very least, the vice president would make certain that he would not be punished for his crime. Soon after settling into his cell, Guiteau wrote Arthur a lighthearted letter, giving some advice on the selection of his cabinet and offering a friendly reminder that, without his help, Arthur would not be about to assume the presidency.

  While Guiteau planned Arthur’s first term, Arthur, unaware of what had happened, was concerned about the political career of only one man—Roscoe Conkling. Since the New York legislature had refused to reinstate Conkling after his dramatic resignation from the Senate, he had embarked on a desperate campaign to regain his seat. Although Conkling was widely known to be the president’s fiercest detractor, Arthur had made no effort to conceal his support. On the contrary, so intimately had he been involved in Conkling’s reelection bid that he was jeered in the press for “lobbying like any political henchman.” Harper’s Weekly had run a front-page cartoon of Arthur wearing an apron while he shined Conkling’s shoes.

  Even in the moment when he learned that the president had been shot, Arthur was with Conkling. The two men had just stepped off an overnight steamer from Albany to Manhattan, where they had planned to take a brief break from their lobbying, when Arthur was handed a telegram. As he scanned the message, a reporter waiting anxiously on the dock for his reaction watched as his face blanched with shock.

  The thought of Garfield dying terrified Arthur. The vice presidency was a prominent but undemanding job that had suited him well. Now, however, with the president near death, Arthur’s position had been suddenly elevated to one of far greater importance than he, or anyone else, had ever believed possible.

  Clutching the telegram in his hand, Arthur reacted instinctively, turning, as he always had, to Conkling for direction. Far from frightened by this sudden turn of events, Conkling tucked Arthur even more tightly under his wing. Flagging down a taxi, he quickly steered Arthur into the carriage and climbed in next to him. Rather than seeing the vice president to the train station so that Arthur might take the first express into Washington, or even taking him home, Conkling ordered the driver to take them directly to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and not spare the whip.

  As soon as they arrived at the hotel, however, Conkling could tell that even this bastion of Republican stalwartism had already changed. Across the street, the sidewalk was choked with people struggling to see the front windows of a telegraph office that had posted the most recent bulletins about the president’s condition. As Conkling and Arthur entered the hotel and walked through its ornate, marbled lobby, they were greeted not by warm, collegial smiles but by faces fixed in fear and anger. The library, sitting rooms, and bar were overflowing with more than a hundred anxious men, all fighting for a position near a small telegraph office and a beleaguered stock indicator, both of which produced bulletins at excruciatingly long intervals.

  A reporter who had spent the morning at the hotel, interviewing powerful political men and listening in on their heated conversations, noticed that the general thinking had already begun to shift. The idea had taken root that something other than insanity may have been behind the president’s shooting. “More than one excited man declared his belief,” the reporter wrote, “that the murder was a political one.” If politics was involved, even tangentially, it followed that only one man could be to blame. “This is the result of placating bosses,” a man standing in the hotel bar growled. “If Conkling had not been placated at Chicago, President Garfield would not now be lying on his deathbed.”

  So suffocatingly crowded was the main lobby that it took Arthur and Conkling ten minutes just to reach the reception desk. By the time Conkling had his hands on the hotel register, he and Arthur were encircled by reporters shouting questions. Quickly signing his name, Conkling, his jaw set and teeth clenched, dropped the pen and strode toward the stairs, a knot of reporters at his heels.

  Conkling no doubt assumed that Arthur would be right behind him, but, for the first time since he had taken office, the vice president did not follow his mentor. Making a visible effort to calm himself, Arthur turned to the reporters gathered around him and, his voice shaking, asked what news they had of the president. After hearing the most recent bulletin, Arthur expressed his “great grief and sympathy,” and then hurried up the stairs toward Conkling’s suite.

  As the vice president hunkered down in New York, and Garfield fought for his life in Washington, the nation began to realize that, at any moment, its fate might be suddenly thrust into the hands of Chester Arthur. Across the country, among men and
women of both parties, the prospect of Arthur in the White House elicited reactions of horror. Even a prominent Republican groaned, “Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!”

  Arthur had never been seen as anything more than Conkling’s puppet, with no mind or ambition of his own. A large man with a long, fleshy face, carefully groomed sideburns that swept to his chin, and a heavy mustache that drooped dramatically, Arthur put nearly as much thought into his appearance as did the famously preening Conkling. He had even changed his birth date, quietly moving it forward a year out of what a biographer would term “simple vanity.”

  Arthur was also widely known as a man of leisure, someone who liked fine clothes, old wine, and dinner parties that lasted late into the night. As collector of the New York Customs House, he had rarely arrived at work before noon. In stark contrast to Garfield, he had been a lackluster student, and even now seemed to have little interest in the life of the mind. “I do not think he knows anything,” Harriet Blaine wrote disdainfully of Arthur. “He can quote a verse of poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackery, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed, and very soon he has given out his all.”

  During the campaign, there had been some discussion about the fact that, were Garfield elected, Arthur would be next in line to the presidency, but the possibility of something happening to Garfield had seemed so remote as to be hardly worth considering. He was in the prime of his life, the picture of health and strength, and would be president during a time of peace. Arthur would be constrained by the limits of his office, where he could do little harm. “There is no place in which the powers of mischief will be so small as in the Vice Presidency,” E. L. Godkin, the famously acerbic editor of the Nation, had then written. “It is true General Garfield … may die during his term of office, but this is too unlikely a contingency to be worth making extraordinary provisions for.”

  Now the unthinkable had happened, and Arthur could become president at any moment. The very idea caused hearts to sink and shoulders to shudder. After giving his readers a cursory review of Arthur’s political career, Godkin now wrote with disgust, “It is out of this mess of filth that Mr. Arthur will go to the Presidential chair in case of the President’s death.”

  The unavoidable comparison to Garfield, moreover, did not help Arthur’s case. Garfield was “a statesman and a thorough-bred gentleman … a man whose mind was filled with great ideas for the good of all,” a man at the Fifth Avenue Hotel told a reporter. “Gen. Arthur appears as a politician of the most ordinary character, a man whose sole thought is of political patronage, and a man who has for his bosom friends and intimate companions those with whom no gentleman should associate.”

  It was Arthur’s friends, and, in particular, his close ties to Conkling, that worried Americans even more than his own questionable character. “Republicans and Democrats alike are profoundly disturbed at the probable accession to the Presidency of Vice-President Arthur, with the consequence that Conkling shall be the President de facto,” one newspaper reported. In his diary, former president Hayes, whose one term in the White House had been made miserable by Conkling, choked with rage at the thought of his nemesis in such proximity to power. “Arthur for President!” he scrawled in horror in his diary. “Conkling the power behind the throne, superior to the throne!”

  Conkling’s attacks on the president, which had continued to make headlines as he fought for reelection to the Senate, now seemed not just petty and vicious, but darkly suspicious. Rumors linking the former senator and the vice president to Guiteau quickly spread. “There is a theory, which has many adherents,” a reporter noted, “that the attempted assassination was not the work of a lunatic, but the result of a plot much deeper and darker than has been suspected.”

  Given the country’s tense political situation, this theory may have sprung up without any encouragement at all, but those looking for a conspiracy had been given all the evidence they needed in the words of Guiteau himself. It was already widely known that, as he was being hurried away from the train station, the would-be assassin had shouted, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president!” Although Guiteau insisted he had acted alone, and both Conkling and Arthur quickly denied any relationship with him, in the minds of the American people the connection had been made.

  The rumors and accusations, moreover, were not whispered between friends but shouted from every street corner. Newspapers openly accused Conkling and Arthur of being directly to blame for the tragedy that had befallen the nation. “This crime is as logically and legitimately the result of doctrines of Conkling and his followers as the murder of Lincoln was the result of the teachings of Secessionists,” the Cleveland Herald charged. “It was not the hand of this miserable office-seeker that armed the deadly blow at the life of Garfield, but the embodied spirit of selfishness, of love of rule, of all that is implied by ‘the machine’ and the ‘one man power,’ in a word, of Conklingism and its teachings.”

  Criticized for going too far and calling Conkling a murderer, the New York Tribune denied that it had ever used the word. That said, it wrote, “when a child, in its mad rage, kicks over a table, upsets a lamp, sets the house on fire, and burns people to death, nobody supposes that the child intended murder. Mr. Conkling has been acting like a child in a fit of passion.”

  So rapidly did the rumors spread that it became dangerous simply to be known as a Stalwart, especially in Conkling’s own state. “Men go around with clenched teeth and white lips,” one newspaper reported. “If any Stalwart in New York should be seen rejoicing he would be immediately lynched.” In a New York prison, two inmates fought so savagely over the possibility of Arthur assuming the presidency that one man killed the other, bludgeoning him to death with an ax.

  It did not take Conkling long to understand that neither he nor Arthur was safe from the nation’s fury. The lynching parties being formed, he realized, were not for Guiteau alone. “While there is no intimation that Conkling is blood-guilty in this calamity,” a reporter in Albany, where Conkling was seeking reelection, wrote, “the country will hold him in a degree blamable.”

  Even the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Conkling had for years wielded his political power with the confidence of a king in his palace, no longer promised any refuge. After he had escaped to his rooms on the day of the shooting, Conkling rarely left them. Armed police detectives suddenly appeared, pacing the corridor outside his door. It was clear to everyone present, one reporter wrote, “that the ex-Senator had asked for protection.”

  Downstairs in the lobby, the hotel’s proprietors received an anonymous note. Scrawled on a card, the handwritten message, which had been signed “The Committee,” read, “Gens: We will hang Conkling and Co. at nine p.m. sharpe.”

  PART FOUR

  TORTURED FOR

  THE REPUBLIC

  • CHAPTER 16 •

  NEITHER DEATH NOR LIFE

  I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters

  of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD

  Just two weeks after the attempt on the president’s life, Alexander Graham Bell was back in Washington. Although his wife, Mabel, was nearing the advanced stages of her pregnancy and he worried over her, admonishing her not to use the stairs more than necessary and to rest as often as possible, he had not hesitated to leave her. He had promised that they would spend the hottest part of the summer in Maine, but that trip, like everything else in his life, would now have to wait.

  A few days earlier, he had contacted Dr. D. Willard Bliss to offer his help in locating the bullet inside the president. Although Bliss was not in the habit of consulting with inventors, Bell had two factors in his favor—his fame and Bliss’s fear. As he watched Garfield’s temperature ominously rise, Bliss had quietly agreed to meet with the young scientist.

  As his train pulled into the station, Bell knew that the presiden
t’s private secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown, would be waiting for him. Brown quickly spotted Bell and his assistant Tainter in the rush of people pouring from the train and led them to a carriage that was waiting to take them directly to the White House. As they left the station, Bell could see that the hysteria he had witnessed on the day of the shooting had passed. Left in its wake was a palpable feeling of tension and nervousness. The usually noisy, chaotic city was somber and strangely quiet, as if every man were holding his breath. The only pockets of bustling activity were around telegraph stations and newspaper offices, where Bliss’s bulletins were posted on enormous wooden billboards. “Everywhere people go about with lengthened faces, anxiously inquiring as to the latest reported condition of the president and sadly speculating at the probable outcome of this terrible affair,” one newspaper reported.

  The entire city was on a deathwatch, and everything, from day-to-day activities to special events, had been postponed, or, in many cases, canceled altogether. Even the Fourth of July celebrations had been called off, for the first time in the city’s history. That morning, the only outward recognition of Independence Day in the nation’s capital had been the raising of the flag on the White House grounds, and even that had been nothing more than a quiet message to a terrified people that their president still lived. “Men looked eagerly to the flag-pole this morning,” a reporter had written that day, “fearing to see the ensign at half mast, and breathed a sigh of relief when they found it floated from the top of the pole.”