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

by Candice Millard

  When the carriage reached the White House, it became clear that the nation had changed not just suddenly, but fundamentally and irretrievably. Where once an old policeman and a young secretary had been the only barriers between a president and his people, there now stood armed sentinels, flanking the White House as if it were the palace of a king. A reporter mournfully described the sun rising on the capital and looking “down upon the Executive Mansion of a free country guarded by soldiers.” As frightening and un-American as this sight seemed, it did not keep people away. On the contrary, hundreds of people were sprawled out on the lawns just outside the White House gates, many with picnic baskets and blankets, some who had clearly been sleeping there for days, anxious for news.

  Bell’s carriage was quickly ushered through the gates, but his meeting with Bliss was brief. The two men discussed the basic theory behind the induction balance and then made arrangements for the doctor to visit the Volta Laboratory to see the invention for himself. Before leaving, Bell turned to Brown and handed him a small gift he had carried on his lap from Boston—a basket of grapes that Mabel had sent for Lucretia. Attached was a note that read, “To Mrs. Garfield, a slight token of sympathy from Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell.” Brown assured Bell that the first lady would receive the gift. Then he handed Bell something in return, something that he had given to only a very few people—a card that gave the bearer access to the White House at any time, day or night.

  As Bell climbed back into the carriage, eager to return to his laboratory and begin work, Garfield lay in his isolated room on the south side of the White House, where he had been confined to his bed for nearly two weeks, unable to walk or even sit up. Although his temperature had fallen slightly, he was still sweating profusely, his arms and legs were cold, and pus was freely flowing through the drainage tube that his surgeons had inserted that day. On Bliss’s orders, he had been given rum, wine, and an injection of morphine, which he had received at least once a day, every day, since the shooting.

  Although Garfield rarely mentioned it, his doctors knew that he was in excruciating pain. He suffered from what Bliss described as “severe lancinating,” or stabbing, pains in his “scrotum, feet and ankles.” Garfield admitted that the pain felt like “tiger’s claws” on his legs, but tried to reassure those around him. “They don’t usually stay long,” he told his friend Rockwell after waking from a fitful sleep one night. “Don’t be alarmed.”

  More difficult for Garfield to deny than the pain was the violent vomiting that often seized him. On the morning of the Fourth of July, as plans for celebrations were being hastily canceled, the president vomited every twenty minutes for two hours. Since then, the vomiting and nausea had slowed, but continued to come in unpredictable waves.

  Garfield had for years suffered from severe stomach ailments. He had endured chronic dysentery during the Civil War and later battled dyspepsia so extreme that at one point he was confined to bed for nearly two weeks. Finally, a doctor told him that he would have to have a section of his intestines removed. Garfield had avoided such drastic measures, but he carefully controlled his diet, even carrying with him to Congress a lunch that his doctors had prescribed—a sandwich of raw beef on stale bread.

  Under Bliss’s care, however, the president’s diet changed dramatically and, for the victim of a gunshot wound, inexplicably. He received a wide variety of rich foods, from bacon and lamb chops to steak and potatoes. Boynton, Garfield’s cousin and one of the doctors whom Bliss had demoted to nursing status, openly criticized the way the president was being fed. “He was nauseated … with heavy food,” Boynton told the New York Herald. “He was given a dose of brandy that capped the climax, and he threw up everything, and a severe fit of vomiting followed.”

  Although Garfield was dangerously ill, the idea of taking him to a hospital was never considered. Hospitals were only for people who had nowhere else to go. “No sick or injured person who could possibly be nursed at home or in a medical man’s private residence,” one doctor wrote, “would choose … to enter the squalid and crowded wards of the public institutions.” They were dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and vastly overpopulated. The stench was unbearable, and ubiquitous. “Patients, no matter how critical their need,” one reporter noted, “dread the very name of hospital.”

  Unfortunately for Garfield, the White House was not much better. The structure had been built into sloping ground, and water constantly trickled in, keeping three layers of floors, two of which were made of unmortared brick, perpetually damp. The servants’ living quarters were dark, cold, and dank. The kitchen, which was underneath the central hallway, was almost beyond repair, with whitewash peeling from the ceilings and sifting down into the cooking pots.

  Over the years, the moist rooms and rotting woodwork had proved irresistible to the rats that roamed the city and woods. By the time Garfield and his family had moved in, the entire house was, in the words of one reporter, “packed with vermin from cellar to garret.” At night, when the office seekers had finally abandoned their hopes for the day and the staff had retired to their rooms, the family could hear rats scampering under the floorboards and rustling in the pantries.

  Worse than the whitewash in the soup or even the rats in the flour bins, however, was the house’s antiquated plumbing system. An inspection found that it did not even meet the most basic “sanitary requirements of a safe dwelling.” Much of the plumbing, one inspector noted, was “defective—not a little of it radically so.” The plumbing system had been built nearly half a century earlier and could not hope to hold up under the daily demands of waste from seven bathrooms in the primary living quarters, as well as the servants’ chambers, the kitchen, and the pantries. Many of the pipes had long since disintegrated, leaving the soil under the basement saturated with “foul matters.”

  The decrepit condition of the White House was no secret to the outside world. One New York newspaper referred to it derisively as a “pest house” and argued that it should be torn down altogether. “The old White House is unfit for longer use as a Presidential residence,” the Washington Post declared. “Indeed, it has not, for many years, been suitable for such occupancy.”

  Even if the mansion itself had been in good repair, its location was among the worst in Washington. The south lawn ended at the edge of the Potomac’s infamous tidal marsh. Although no one then understood that malaria was carried by mosquitoes, they had made the link between the “bad air” for which the disease was named and the marsh. When the “notoriously unhealthy” house had been blamed for Lucretia’s illness, former president Hayes had rushed to its defense, insisting that it was a perfectly safe place to live. Even Hayes, however, had moved to the Soldiers’ Home in the higher, cooler northwest section of the city every summer, from early July until after the first frost in October, as had Presidents Lincoln and Buchanan before him.

  There was now deep concern that the president was being “greatly influenced by the miasma generated by the marshes.” Four servants in the White House had already fallen ill with malaria, and Garfield’s doctors felt certain that if he were to contract the disease, he would not survive it. In a desperate effort to ward off malaria, they gave him five to ten grains of quinine every day. Unfortunately, the dangers of the drug are many. Not only can quinine be toxic if taken in large doses, but it can also bring on severe intestinal cramping, thus causing further trauma to Garfield’s already ravaged digestive system.

  Even away from the marsh, the city itself seemed noxious and diseased. Raw sewage floated down the Potomac, coating the thick summer air with a hazy stench, and dust and dirt settled over everything, from buildings to people. “You can’t imagine anything so vile as Washington,” Harriet Blaine wrote in disgust. “It seems like a weed by the wayside, covered with dust, too ugly for notice.” The temperature hovered at 90 degrees. “Scarcely a breath of air was stirring,” one reporter moaned, “and the air was heavy and sultry.” The little breeze there was, moreover, came from the north, never r
eaching Garfield’s room on the White House’s southern side.

  The oppressive heat, and the misery they knew it must be causing the president, prompted many Americans to write to the first lady, suggesting ways in which she might help her husband. “Sitting to day on my piazza, suffering from the great heat, my mind turned to Mr. Garfield,” one man wrote from Georgia, “and it occurred to me that the air of his sick room might be cooled to any degree you wish by having sufficient ice in [the] room over his room, and let cold air down by pipes.” Others suggested hanging sheets that had been dipped in ice water in Garfield’s room, piling ice on the floor, and even placing large pieces of marble on the furniture.

  Finally, a corps of engineers from the navy and a small contingent of scientists, which included Garfield’s old friend, the famed explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, stepped in and designed what would become the country’s first air conditioner. To cool Garfield’s room, which was twenty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and eighteen feet high, the men determined that they would need at least three tons of ice. In the president’s office, they set up an elaborate system comprised of a thirty-six-inch electric fan that forced air through cheesecloth screens that had been soaked in ice water and placed in a six-foot-long iron box. The cooled air was then conducted into the president’s room through a series of tin pipes.

  Although the system worked, cooling the air to a miraculous 55 degrees as it entered the pipes, the first trials brought Garfield more misery than relief. The damp cheesecloth made the air not just cool but heavily humid. Worse, although the air conditioner was in the president’s office, its perpetual grinding and whirring filled his bedroom with an ear-splitting racket. So deafening was the sound that Garfield, summoning the little strength he had, finally called out for someone to turn the contraption off.

  Unbowed, the engineers set to work to fix the problems. First, they placed a 134-gallon icebox between the iron box and the pipes, which, one scientist happily reported, produced air that was “cool, dry, and ample in supply.” Then, realizing that the tin pipes amplified the noise, they quickly replaced them with ones made of canvas-covered wire, which absorbed the sounds, leaving Garfield, at long last, in relatively cool, quiet peace.

  No one appreciated all that was being done to ease his suffering and save his life more than Garfield himself. Despite the fact that his health, his work, and quite possibly his life had been suddenly and senselessly taken from him, he remained unfailingly cheerful and kind, day after day. His doctors marveled at him, calling him a “wonderfully patient sufferer.” Bliss would later recall that, throughout Garfield’s illness, he “never approached him without meeting an extended hand, and an expression of thankful recognition of the efforts being made for his comfort and recovery.” Each time, after the doctors had dressed his wounds, a long and painful daily process, Garfield would always say, in a hearty voice, “Thank you, gentlemen.”

  While Garfield’s body had begun to fail him, his courtesy never did, nor his sense of humor. He had always been “witty, and quick at repartee,” a former college classmate recalled, “but his jokes … were always harmless, and he would never willingly hurt another’s feelings.” Garfield now used humor to put those around him at ease. He gave his attendants affectionate nicknames, teasingly referring to one particularly fussy nurse as “the beneficent bore.” “The vein of his conversation was … calculated to cheer up his friends and attendants,” a reporter wrote, recalling how, when a messenger sent to buy a bottle of brandy returned with two, Garfield joked that he would now have to receive a “double allowance.”

  Garfield was painfully aware of the widespread fear and suffering on his behalf, and he wanted desperately to lighten the burden, even on those who had made themselves his enemies. Although they had done their best to destroy his presidency, Garfield made it clear that he did not for a moment believe the rumors linking Chester Arthur and Roscoe Conkling to Guiteau. Too weak to read the newspaper himself, he often listened as Lucretia read to him. One day, she stumbled upon a paragraph that directly blamed the vice president and former senator for the shooting. Hearing this, Garfield vehemently shook his head. “I do not believe that,” he said.

  Although Garfield rarely mentioned the man who had tried to assassinate him, he could not help but wonder why anyone would do something so strange and inexplicably cruel. Finally, turning to Blaine, he asked, “What motive do you think that man could have had?” His old friend replied quietly, “I do not know Mr. President. He says he had no motive. He must be insane.”

  • CHAPTER 17 •

  ONE NATION

  There is no horizontal Stratification of society in this country like the rocks in the earth, that hold one class down below forevermore, and let another come to the surface to stay there forever. Our Stratification is like the ocean, where every individual drop is free to move, and where from the sternest depths of the mighty deep any drop may come up to glitter on the highest wave that rolls.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD

  For the first time in their memory, certainly since the earliest beginnings of the Civil War, Americans facing the shared tragedy of Garfield’s ordeal felt a deep and surprising connection to one another. Divided by vast stretches of dangerous wilderness and stark differences in race, religion, and culture, there had been little beyond severely strained notions of common citizenship to unite them. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln sixteen years earlier had only deepened that divide. But the attempt on Garfield’s life aroused feelings of patriotism that many Americans had long since forgotten, or never knew they had.

  The waves of emotion that swept over the country, moreover, were fed not only by the fact that America’s president had been attacked in the train station that morning, but that that president had been Garfield. To his countrymen, a staggeringly diverse array of people, Garfield was at the same time familiar and extraordinary, a man who represented both what they were and what they hoped to be. Although he had been elevated to the highest seat of power, he was still, and would always be, one of their own.

  A nation of immigrants, the United States found in Garfield a president who knew well the brutal indignities of poverty, and the struggle to overcome them. Between 1850 and 1930, the country’s foreign-born population would rise from more than two million to more than fourteen million. This flood of people, known as the “new immigrants,” came from a broader range of countries and with a greater number of languages than ever before. In Garfield’s humble origins, remarkable rise, and soaring erudition, they found justification for their sacrifices, and hope for their children.

  In the West, those Americans who had endured the perils and hardship of the frontier to find a better life knew Garfield not only as a child of poverty but as the son of pioneers. Although it was still a long and difficult journey from any part of the West to Washington, Garfield himself was a powerful link to the world of covered wagons and dirt farms. Since he had taken office, settlers, living on land they had cleared themselves and which, every day, they fought to defend, had felt secure in one thing at least, that they would not be forgotten in their nation’s capital.

  For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.”

  Even in the South, where he had once been hated and feared as an abolitionist and Union general, there was a
surprising pride in Garfield’s presidency. Although he had made it clear from the moment he took office, even in his inaugural address, that he would not tolerate the discrimination he knew was taking place in the South, what he promised was not judgment and vengeance but help. The root of the problem, he believed, was ignorance, and it was the responsibility, indeed “the high privilege and sacred duty,” of the entire nation, North and South, to educate its people.

  Garfield’s plan was to “give the South, as rapidly as possible, the blessings of general education and business enterprise and trust to time and these forces.” The South had taken him at his word, and, for the first time in decades, had accepted the president of the North as its president as well. With Garfield in the White House, the New York Times wrote, Southerners “felt, as they had not felt before for years, that the Government … was their Government, and that the chief magistrate of the country had an equal claim upon the loyal affection of the whole people.”

  Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, a contemporary of Garfield’s wrote, the nation was “united, as if by magic.” Even Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy and a man whom Garfield had voted to indict as a war criminal, admitted that the assassination attempt had made “the whole Nation kin.”

  Together, Americans waited for news of the president’s condition, helpless to prevent what they feared most. Although Garfield had not died in the attack, neither had he yet been saved. He was in an agonizing place in between, and as he suffered, so did his countrymen. Unable to rejoice or mourn, they waited in silence, and prayed as if they were at the sickbed not of a president but a brother.

  What made the suffering even harder to bear was that, despite the fury directed at men like Conkling and Arthur, it was devastatingly clear that there was nothing and no one to blame. In no man’s mind save the assassin’s had the shooting achieved anything. It had not been carried out in the name of personal or political freedom, national unity, or even war. It had addressed no wrong, been the consequence of no injustice.