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

by Candice Millard

  Frantically, Bell tried everything he could think of to get rid of the sound. He sent Tainter back to the basement to check on the interrupter, and he carefully adjusted each of the four coils. No matter what he did, the sputtering remained. Pulling a lead bullet out of his pocket, he quickly ran a test and found, to his tremendous relief, that the invention appeared to work. The sound, however, was distracting, and Bell was concerned that the induction balance’s hearing distance might be affected as well.

  Before Tainter could even return from the basement, Bell turned to find Garfield’s doctors standing in the door that separated the two rooms, beckoning him to come in. Gripping the handle of the induction balance’s round, wooden detector in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, Bell stepped back into the president’s room, wires snaking behind him. Bliss had ordered the screen that surrounded the president’s bed to be removed. Garfield was now awake, his wound had been dressed, and he was looking directly at Bell.

  Taking in the long wires that stretched out the door and down the hallway, and were about to be draped over his body, Garfield asked Bell to explain to him how the instrument worked. After listening intently, the president allowed himself to be rolled over onto his left side so that the test could begin. He rested his head on an attendant’s shoulder, supporting the weight of his body by clasping his arms around the man’s neck. “His head was so buried on the gentleman’s shoulder,” Bell would later recall, “that he could not see any person in the room.”

  Garfield’s bed was surrounded by doctors, eager to see as much of the procedure as possible. The focus of their attention, however, was not just the president and Bell, but Bliss. After carefully pulling Garfield’s dressing gown to one side so that his back was exposed down to his thighs, the doctor turned expectantly to Bell, who handed him the induction balance’s exploring arm. Although it made more sense for Bell to search for the bullet himself while he listened through the telephone receiver, as he had done many times before, Bliss had made it understood that he would be the one to handle the exploring arm, and to decide which areas would be explored.

  As everyone in the room looked on in silence, Bliss took the wooden disk by its handle and slowly began to run the coils along the president’s spine, starting at the wound and traveling downward. Bell stood behind Garfield’s bed, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Although he waited to hear the distinctive buzzing sound that he knew would indicate the presence of a bullet, the only sound that reached him was the same faint, maddening sputter that had earlier appeared without warning.

  Turning Garfield over onto his back, they tried again, this time passing the coils over his abdomen. At one point, Bell thought he heard a “sharp and sudden reinforcement of sound,” but he was unable to find it again. “That horrid unbalanced spluttering kept coming & going,” Bell would later write in bitter frustration. Finally, with the President quickly tiring, he had no choice but to end the experiment.

  Although Bliss asked him to try again at another date, Bell felt the sharp sting of humiliation. “I feel woefully disappointed & disheartened,” he admitted to Mabel that night. The only consolation lay in knowing that he would “go right at the problem again tomorrow.”

  Returning to his laboratory early the next morning, Bell was sickened to find that the problem lay not in the induction balance at all, but simply in the way he had set it up. In his haste to improve the invention, Bell had added the condenser at the last minute. While setting up the induction balance at the White House, he had connected the condenser to only one side of the instrument. Had he connected it to both sides, the sputtering sound would have been banished immediately, and the instrument would have worked perfectly.

  More than ever, Bell was convinced of the necessity for secrecy. He had worked as hard as he possibly could, using every conceivable resource and idea, and still he had made a devastating mistake. Although, in his letter to Mabel, Bell described as faithfully as he could all that had happened at the White House that night, even drawing a sketch of the room, he sternly reminded her that the letter was intended for no one but her. “Private and confidential,” he wrote in a postscript. “Don’t tell any one the contents.”

  • CHAPTER 19 •

  ON A MOUNTAINTOP, ALONE

  Light itself is a great corrective. A thousand wrongs and abuses that are

  grown in darkness disappear like owls and bats before the light of day.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD

  On July 23, three days before Bell arrived at the White House with his induction balance, Conkling had woken early in his room at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York, already seething with anger. While most of the hotel’s occupants still slept, Conkling sat down to breakfast dressed in his customary black cutaway suit, yellow waistcoat, and brightly colored butterfly bow tie, an array of newspapers spread before him. As he did every day, his private secretary had carefully marked with blue pencil any article in which Conkling’s name appeared. On that day, the papers were awash in blue.

  Conkling, who had always worked in the shadows, demanding secrecy and anonymity, had rarely approved of anything that was written about him. Now, the mere sight of his name in print could be relied on to leave him trembling with rage. Picking up the New York Times, he saw, printed in bold letters across the front page, the words “ROSCOE CONKLING BEATEN.” It was a headline no New Yorker, least of all Conkling himself, had ever expected to see.

  Since his dramatic resignation in May, Conkling had called in every favor and used every opportunity for intimidation to win back his Senate seat. For more than two months, the citizens of New York had been forced to wait for the New York legislature to hold an election while Conkling and his men, including the vice president of the United States, had made promises, threats, and even alliances with Democrats. After the president’s shooting, Conkling was rarely seen in public, but had redoubled his efforts behind the scenes, forcing those Stalwarts who were still loyal to him to meet every morning at ten to “renew their pledges of firmness and adherence.”

  Despite the desperate efforts of what one New York newspaper mockingly referred to as “Conkling’s Servile Band,” an election had finally taken place on July 22. Not only had Conkling failed to regain his seat that day, but he had lost it to a rumpled, overweight, little-known congressman named Elbridge Lapham, a man to whom he scarcely would have deigned to speak in the past.

  The fact that Lapham was a professed Stalwart only further enraged Conkling. Simply by accepting the seat, he railed, Lapham showed himself to be a traitor, and he “must not reap the reward of his perfidy!” The contest, however, had been decided, and Conkling was astonished to find himself powerless to change it.

  Finishing his breakfast, Conkling stood up from the table and walked across the room to where his suitcase sat, already packed. Despite the early hour, a clutch of reporters waited in the hotel lobby for him, watching as he descended the stairs looking “moody and fretful.” He quickly paid his bill and then turned to leave, ignoring the men hovering nervously around him. In answer to their questions, he would say only that he was going away. “No one,” one reporter wrote, “dared to ask him his destination.”

  Conkling was going home to Utica, to the three-story gray stone mansion on the Mohawk River that he had bought with a single year’s salary when he was practicing law. His wife, a quiet, practical woman who recoiled from her husband’s political and social intrigues, lived there with their daughter in relative seclusion. Since taking his place in the Senate fourteen years earlier, Conkling had made only rare and brief appearances in Utica, and he did not plan to stay long now.

  Although, in the wake of his humiliating defeat, he vowed that he was “done with politics now and forever,” no one who knew him believed that he was about to bow out gracefully. Conkling would never again debase himself by asking for a single vote. Fortunately, votes were no longer necessary. He had, he believed, something much more valuable than a Senate seat. He had Chester Arthur.<
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  Like Conkling, Arthur had largely disappeared from view after Garfield’s shooting. It was widely assumed that he was in close and constant discussions with the man who had made him, planning for the day when he would be king, and Conkling his Cromwell. So little respect was there for the vice president, and so openly had he aligned himself with the president’s fiercest enemy, that to accuse him now of conspiring with Conkling was simply stating the obvious. “I presume that if Mr. Arthur should become President, in his ignorance and inexperience he would be compelled to rely on some one more capable than himself,” the political writer George William Curtis shrugged. “Obviously that person would be Mr. Conkling.”

  Hatred for Conkling and Arthur grew with each setback Garfield suffered. Newspapers only fueled the fire, assuring readers that, while they prayed for their president’s recovery, these two men plotted how best to take advantage of the tragedy. “Disguise it as they may seek to do,” one article read, “the men who have chosen to assume an attitude of hostility to the Administration are speculating hourly upon the chances of Garfield’s life or death.”

  Enraged by the very idea of Arthur taking over the presidency, Americans across the country readied themselves as if for battle. Some took a tactical approach, frantically trying to revive the rumor, started during the campaign, that the vice president had been born in Canada, and so was constitutionally prohibited from becoming president. Others were ready to take more drastic measures. Police departments prepared their men for riots as agitated crowds gathered in city streets. In Ohio, men angrily proclaimed that they would not hesitate to “shoulder their muskets and go to Washington to prevent the inauguration of Arthur.”

  As they oiled their guns, however, the object of their wrath, the once-preening politician whom they pictured waiting hungrily in the wings, sat alone in a borrowed house, terrified and distraught. To the few people who were able to see him in those first days after the shooting, Arthur seemed not just concerned or saddened, but shattered. His friends were reminded of the dazed, hollow man he had been little more than a year earlier, when he had lost his wife to pneumonia. “There is no doubt that he is suffering keenly,” one man confided to a reporter. “No one can look on him for a moment without being convinced of that fact. He cannot, if he would, control the evidences of his feelings.”

  The day after the shooting, Arthur had arrived in Washington at 8:00 a.m. and gone directly to the White House. Although Bliss had refused to let him see the president, Arthur had stayed for nearly two hours. A senator waiting in Joseph Stanley Brown’s office caught sight of him as he paced the halls and noted with astonishment that the vice president “seemed to be overcome.” Before Arthur left, Lucretia agreed to see him. Eager to express his sympathy to the first lady, he found to his embarrassment that he was “unable to conceal his emotion,” tears filling his eyes and his voice tightening as he tried to speak.

  After leaving the White House, Arthur returned to the house on Capitol Hill where he was staying, the enormous granite home of Senator John Jones, a Stalwart Republican from Nevada. For the next few days, he did not leave, turning away a stream of visitors and causing an undercurrent of alarm that ran just below the surface of the larger national crisis. This was the man who could be called upon at any moment to lead the nation, and he had effectively disappeared.

  Finally, a journalist from New York managed to gain entry into Senator Jones’s home. Jones and his family, who had fled the heat and filth of the summer, intending to return a few months later, had left the house in a state of complete disarray. The little light that slanted through cracks in the shuttered windows revealed furniture shoved into corners or piled in the middle of rooms. Arthur, who was as famously fastidious in his home decor as he was his dress, had done nothing to make sense of the confusion.

  Stepping into one of the home’s several parlors, the reporter finally found the vice president, sitting on a sofa, “his head bowed down and looking vacantly out through a low, open window.” At the sound of footsteps, Arthur looked up in surprise, and the reporter could see with startling clarity “the impression which the calamity … had left on his countenance.” Arthur’s eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with tears, and it was clear from the streaks on his face that he had been crying. “His whole manner,” the reporter would later write, “rather than the words he uttered, showed a depth of feeling … which would astonish even many of those who think they know the man well.”

  Although he soon returned to New York, anxious to allay fears that he was about to seize control of the White House, Arthur had already begun a transformation so complete that few would have believed it possible. He had, whether out of fear or force of habit, continued to help Conkling try to regain his Senate seat, but as soon as the election was over, he had begun to pull away. Conkling had “received no visit from the Vice-President since the news of the election of Mr. Lapham was received in this City,” the New York Times reported, “and this was remarked as very queer conduct for Gen. Arthur.”

  Not only had Arthur begun to pull away from Conkling, but he had started taking political advice from a very different and, even to him, completely unknown source. After Garfield’s shooting, he had received a letter from a woman named Julia Sand. Although he had never met Sand and knew nothing about her, Arthur read the letter, and was surprised to find in it a reflection of his own tortured thoughts. “The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” Sand had written. “The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce?”

  Sand, Arthur would later learn, was an unmarried, thirty-two-year-old invalid. For the past five years, she had felt “dead and buried,” but the attempt on Garfield’s life and Americans’ complete lack of faith in Arthur had inspired her to attempt to inspire him. She was as brutally honest in her assessment of the situation as she was galvanizing. “Your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him,’ ” she wrote. “But making a man President can change him! Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform!”

  Arthur not only read Sand’s letters, he kept them. Over the years, he would keep twenty-three of her letters, each one urging him to be a better man than he had once believed he could be. “It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong,” Sand assured him, “but it is a proof of it … to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it.” Arthur had been given an extraordinary opportunity, and he had found in Sand perhaps the one person in the nation who believed him capable of change. “Once in awhile there comes a crisis which renders miracles feasible,” she wrote. “The great tidal wave of sorrow which has rolled over the country, has swept you loose from your old moorings, & set you on a mountaintop, alone.”

  As long as Garfield’s survival lay in doubt, however, Arthur felt as though he were standing not on a mountaintop, but a precipice. So intense and apparent was his distress that it led to a rumor that the president had died and, prostrate with grief, Arthur had poisoned himself. Both men still lived, but for Arthur, the only relief from the despair that had settled over him was the occasional glimmer of hope from the White House.

  “As the President gets better,” he told Blaine, “I get better, too.”

  The president, however, was not getting better—a fact that his doctor, unable to change, was desperate to disguise. For nearly a month, Bliss had rarely left Garfield’s bedside, making every decision regarding his care, from what medicine he would receive, to what he could eat, to whom he could see. In a futile effort to have the decaying room “thoroughly aired and cleaned,” h
e insisted that all the carpets and upholstered furniture be removed, and he ordered the other doctors to take off their shoes so that the sound of their footsteps would not disturb the president’s rest.

  As he grew increasingly nervous, Bliss no longer trusted even the doctors he had handpicked to help him. Soon after taking charge of the case, he had given Robert Reyburn, a professor of surgery at Howard University and a close friend of his, the task of taking the president’s temperature several times a day. So many times had Reyburn walked into Garfield’s room holding a thermometer that the president had begun referring to him as “Old Temperature.” Now, Bliss took over even that menial duty, personally taking the president’s vital signs and writing the results in his daily medical bulletins. The other doctors were expected to take Bliss’s word for it that the bulletins were accurate, and sign them without having examined the president themselves.

  So tight was Bliss’s grip on the president’s case that it seemed as if he were fighting not for Garfield’s survival, but his own. In a confidential note to a friend, written on White House stationery, Bliss complained that he was “devoting all my professional skills—ability—time & thoughts to this case.” With little sleep and no relief from worry, his own health had begun to suffer, as had his medical practice, which he had completely neglected since the shooting. He had risked everything he had to treat the president, and, he wrote, underlining not just the sentence but each word with a heavy hand, “I can’t afford to have him die.”

  What Bliss needed now, as he watched Garfield’s temperature rise and fall like a churning sea, was some good news. On July 30, after instructing Hamilton to insert a drainage tube “farther into the cavity of the [President’s] wound,” Bliss wrote once again to Bell, asking him to return to the White House for a second test of the induction balance on the president.