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

by Candice Millard

  Finally, Blaine sent a cabinet member to New York to discuss the transition with the vice president. Arthur, however, made it clear that he would not even consider taking over the presidency while Garfield still lived. He refused even to return to Washington, concerned that it would appear as if he were preparing for his own inauguration. “Disappoint our fears,” his young invalid friend, Julia Sand, had urged him. “Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest of aims.”

  In the White House, Blaine found it impossibly painful to talk to the president about any of this. Garfield, however, had no illusions about his chances of survival. When asked if he knew that he might not live, he had replied simply, “Oh, yes, I have always been conscious of that.” What worried him now was not his own death, but the suffering it would bring to those he loved most. The last letter he would write was to his mother, in the hope that he could bolster her spirits, if only for a short time. Taking a pen, he began writing in a thin, shaky script that slipped down the page.

  Dear Mother,

  Don’t be disturbed by conflicting reports about my condition. It is true I am still weak, but I am gaining every day, and need only time and patience to bring me through.

  Give my love to all the relatives & friends, & especially to sisters Hetty and Mary.

  Your loving son,

  James A Garfield

  Only to his wife did Garfield admit his weariness. “I wonder,” he told her one night, “if all this fight against death is worth the little pinch of life I will get anyway.” Lucretia knew that what her husband wanted more than anything now was to escape, not just from this dreary, lonely room, but from Washington altogether. He dreamed of returning to his farm in Ohio, seeing his old friends, sitting in the shade of his neighbor’s maple trees, maybe even having a slice of his aunt’s homemade bread.

  If he could not go home, he hoped to go to the sea. He had never lost his childhood love of the ocean, which had seemed almost mythical to a boy from Ohio, and he wanted to see it one last time. “I have always felt that the ocean was my friend,” he had written in his diary just a few weeks before the assassination attempt. “The sight of it brings rest and peace.”

  Bliss, however, terrified that Garfield would not survive the trip, refused. “It would not now be prudent,” he told the president. He could leave Washington as soon as his stomach was stronger.

  “It’s all right now,” Garfield replied. “I want to get away.”

  Although Harriet seemed to speak for everyone in the White House when she admitted to her daughter that she had lost “heart and spirit,” there remained two people who refused to surrender. Lucretia had been so sick with worry for so long that her hair had begun to fall out, forcing her finally to cover her head with a scarf. Still, a reporter from the Evening Star marveled, she seemed to have “banished despair, and hopes even when to everyone else there was no hope.”

  The only person in the White House whose determination equaled Lucretia’s was Garfield’s young secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown. Although he would describe this time in his life as “one prolonged, hideous nightmare,” Brown would allow no one, not even the members of Garfield’s cabinet, to express anything but optimism in his presence. At a meeting of the cabinet members in late August, “despair,” a reporter noted, “was in their countenance, and in their speech. They said, ‘He must die.’ ” Brown, who had not yet turned twenty-four, stood and addressed the men, each one old enough to be his father. “Let nothing but words of cheer ever reach the President,” he reprimanded them. “He will not die.”

  Brown rarely left the White House, sleeping, when he slept at all, on the small sofa in his office. Garfield wanted Brown near him, so the young man divided his days and nights between the sadness of the sickroom and the madness of his own office, where he replied to thousands of letters and telegrams, fielded journalists’ questions, and greeted dignitaries. “During all this terror, hope, despair, and rush at the White House,” a reporter for the Evening Critic wrote, Brown has been “the ruling spirit of the Mansion, and his young hand, guided by his wise head and kind heart, has been upon all.”

  One night, as Brown was working, a member of the White House staff brought him a message that the first lady wished to see him. When he appeared before her, Lucretia did not at first speak, waiting “until control of her voice was assured.” Finally, she asked, “Will you tell me just what you think the chances are for the General’s recovery?”

  Brown took one look in Lucretia’s “anguished face,” he would later say, and “threw truthfulness to the winds, and lied and lied as convincingly and consolingly as I could.” Then, as quickly as possible—“as soon as decency permitted”—he excused himself and left the room. “Once beyond the door,” he admitted, “all restraint gave way.” He could not bear to tell Lucretia the truth, but he could no longer hide it from himself. He was, he would acknowledge years later, “utterly shattered and broken.”

  • CHAPTER 21 •

  AFTER ALL

  Despite the prayers and tears, and earnest pleading,

  And piteous protest o’er a hero’s fall,

  Despite the hopeful signs, our hearts misleading,

  Death cometh after all

  Over the brightest scenes are clouds descending;

  The flame soars highest ere its deepest fall;

  The glorious day has all too swift an ending;

  Night cometh after all

  O’er bloom or beauty now in our possession

  Is seen the shadow of the funeral pall;

  Though Love and Life make tearful intercession,

  Death cometh after all

  ANONYMOUS POEM, UPON THE DEATH OF

  PRESIDENT GARFIELD, SEPTEMBER 1881

  While Lucretia was forced to watch the slow, cruel approach of death, for Bell it came suddenly, blindsiding him while he was caught up in another man’s tragedy. Although he had returned to Boston to be with Mabel, he continued to work feverishly on the induction balance at his old work space in Charles Williams’s machine shop.

  Just a week after Bell returned from Washington, Mabel suddenly went into labor. That day she gave birth to a little boy, whom they named Edward. He was, Mabel would later write wistfully, a “strong and healthy little fellow.” As the baby struggled to breathe, however, it was immediately apparent that he had been born too soon. After Bell had seen his son for the first time, he sent his parents in Washington a telegram with the wrenching news.

  LITTLE BOY BORN PREMATURELY THIS AFTERNOON DIED IN THREE HOURS. MABEL DOING AS WELL AS CAN BE EXPECTED. NO NEED TO COME ON.

  A GRAHAM BELL

  Years later, Alec would admit to Mabel that he had yet to recover from the death of their son, and did not think he ever would. He was haunted by the belief that his selfishness had brought about their tragedy. “Nothing will ever comfort me for the loss,” he wrote, “for I feel at heart that I was the cause.”

  Engulfed in his own grief and mourning, Bell responded by plunging even more deeply into his quest for an answer to the president’s suffering. After his son’s funeral, he returned immediately to his work. He devised an attachment to the induction balance, and he wanted Tainter to re-create it in their laboratory in Washington so that he could take it to the White House.

  Just three days after Edward’s death, Tainter successfully tested the induction balance’s new attachment for one of Garfield’s surgeons, Frank Hamilton, in the Volta Laboratory in Washington. But with Garfield’s condition deteriorating gravely, and Bell stranded in Boston with his devastated family, unable to force the issue in person, his desperate, single-minded race to save the president came to an end. Bliss refused to let Tainter try the invention on Garfield. The president was too weak, he said. He would not risk the exhaustion that another test might cause.

  Unwilling to accept defeat, Bell redoubled his efforts from Boston, still believing that the president’s life could be saved or, failing that, that his inve
ntion would prove to have lasting value for others. Perfecting the induction balance was a personal and scientific obligation, and he was not about to abandon it now, whatever the cost. “Heartless science,” he would write years later, “seeks truth, and truth alone, quite apart from any consequences that may arise.”

  As a practical matter, however, Bell knew that whatever benefits the induction balance might have, they would come too late for President Garfield. The clock had run out, and there was simply nothing more that Bell could do.

  At the White House, the siegelike atmosphere surrounding the stricken president’s sickbed only seemed to worsen with each passing day. Strenuously resisting anything that might further weaken Garfield, Bliss was outraged when, upon entering the sickroom one day, he found a barber cutting the president’s hair. Bliss “stopped the proceedings immediately,” a reporter wrote, “much to the barber’s disgust.” Try as he might, however, Bliss could do nothing to banish the unbearable heat, which was sapping what little strength his patient had left. In the city, it was 90 degrees in the shade. Inside the president’s room, even with the help of the air conditioner the navy had built for him, the temperature was never below 80.

  Finally, Garfield had had enough. When Bliss walked into his room on the morning of September 5, the president made it clear that he would be going to the sea, with or without Bliss. “Well,” he said, “is this the last day in the White House?” Bliss tried to calm him, promising that he “might soon be so far recovered as to make the journey.” Garfield, however, was not going to be put off any longer. He was still the president, and he demanded to have some control over whatever was left of his own life. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t want any more delay.”

  At two o’clock the next morning, a specially equipped train pulled into the Baltimore and Ohio depot. It had been prepared weeks earlier so that it would be ready to take the president wherever he wished to go, whenever he was ready. Finally, the time had come. That day, Garfield was to be taken to Elberon, New Jersey, “in the hope,” a member of the White House staff wrote, “that the air and the sight of the sea might do for him what the doctors could not.”

  The train, which pulled four cars—three passenger and one baggage—had been thoroughly renovated for the sick president. One of the principal concerns was dust, both from the tracks and from the train itself. To protect Garfield, the train had been outfitted with an engine that used only clean-burning anthracite coal. Wire gauze had been wrapped around the outside of his car, and heavy curtains had been hung inside.

  The president’s car, number 33, bore almost no resemblance to a normal train car. The seats had been removed, and thick Brussels carpet laid on the floors. Taking up most of the space was a new bed with strong springs to try to soften the tracks’ jolts and bumps. In an attempt to keep Garfield cool, ice had been placed in the car, and a false ceiling had been installed a few inches from the actual ceiling to encourage air circulation.

  Before he would allow the president to be moved, Bliss insisted that everything be tested. The train was driven nearly twenty miles in a trial trip, to “determine,” Bliss explained, “the amount and nature of the motion of the bed.” The attendants who had been chosen to carry Garfield—among them, Swaim and Rockwell, his closest friends—were drilled over and over again, so “as to make a mistake almost impossible.” Bliss even considered having tracks laid from the White House door. He finally decided, however, that the “perfectly even surface of Pennsylvania Avenue really rendered such an expenditure needless.”

  Finally, at 6:00 a.m., Bliss walked into Garfield’s room and said, “Mr. President, we are ready to go.” Garfield replied, “I am ready.” Edson, who had spent that night watching over the president, vividly recalled the scene in his room that morning. It was, she would later write, “the saddest I have ever witnessed. The patient, while he spoke cheerfully, had a sad expression of countenance which was so unusual for him, but which I do not think indicated that he had given up hope, but rather that he had realized the danger of the situation.”

  Garfield was carried, Bliss wrote, “by no strange hands.” Standing on either side of his bed, Rockwell and Swaim grasped the sheet on which he lay, lifted it, and gently placed him on a stretcher, which they then carried down the stairs and out the door. Members of the White House staff filled the windows with tear-streaked faces, watching the solemn procession to the express wagon that waited on the gravel drive. As they looked down, Garfield looked up, caught sight of them, and lifted his hand in a feeble but warm wave. “A last token of amity,” one of the staff wrote, “from a man who loved the world and the people in it.”

  The train ride to Elberon had been planned as carefully as Garfield’s transfer from the White House to the station. Every conductor and engineer in the region stood ready, waiting for word that the president’s train had left the Baltimore and Ohio. As soon as they heard that Garfield was on his way, they switched off their engines and waited for him to pass so that their trains would not disturb him in any way. “No sound of bell or whistle was heard,” Bliss wrote. The doctor had also arranged to have private homes available for his patient all along the route, so that, if Garfield needed to stop, he would have a safe, clean place to stay. “I must now say,” Bliss would later write, “that this whole journey was a marvel even to myself.”

  The American people were acutely aware that their president was being moved from the White House. “At every station crowds of men and women appeared,” Bliss would later recall, “the former uncovered, with bowed heads, the latter often weeping.” Thousands of people stood in silence along the train tracks. “It was indeed a strange and affecting journey,” a doctor traveling with Garfield would write, “as we silently sped along.”

  When the train finally reached Elberon, it switched to a line of railroad track that had been laid just the night before. Two thousand people had worked until dawn to lay 3,200 feet of track so that the president’s train could take him to the door of Franklyn Cottage, the twenty-two-room summer home a wealthy New Yorker had offered for as long as it was needed. While determining where the track would have to go, a surveyor had realized that he would need to cut through a neighboring garden, and he apologized to the owner. “I am willing that you should ruin my house,” she replied, “all I have—if it would help to save him.”

  Before the train could reach its final destination, however, it stopped short. The cottage sat at the top of a hill, and the engine was not strong enough to breach it. No sooner had the problem become apparent than, out of the crowd of people who had waited all day in the tremendous heat for Garfield’s arrival, two hundred men ran forward to help. “Instantly hundreds of strong arms caught the cars,” Bliss wrote, “and silently … rolled the three heavy coaches” up the hill.

  When he was carried into his room, the first thing Garfield noticed was that the bed was turned away from the window. He asked to have it moved, so that he could look out at the sea. A few days later, when he was lifted into a chair so that he could better see the wide expanse of ocean just beyond the cottage walls, he was thrilled. “This is delightful,” he said. “It is such a change.”

  Despite the relentless suffering Garfield had endured for more than two months, he had maintained not only the strength of his mind, but the essence of his personality. “Throughout his long illness,” Rockwell would later recall, “I was most forcibly impressed with the manner in which those traits of his character which were most winning in health became intensified.” Even as he lay dying, Garfield was kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful.

  When Bliss told him that a fund was being raised for Lucretia, Garfield was overcome with gratitude. “What?” he said in surprise. Then, turning his face to his pillow to hide his emotion, he continued, “How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!” Garfield was then “silent and absorbed for a long time,” Bliss remembered, “as if overwhelmed with the thought.”

  Garfield was also deeply grateful to the people wh
o had cared for him for so long, and with such devotion. One day, he placed his hand on the head of one of his attendants and said, “You have been always faithful and forebearing.” For Bliss, who was visibly weakened by exhaustion and worry, he tried to provide a measure of comfort. “Doctor, you plainly show the effect of all this care and unrest,” he said. “Your anxious watching will soon be over.”

  Bliss still refused to admit that he could not save the president’s life. A few days after they arrived in Elberon, he issued a bulletin announcing that the last of the attending physicians had been dismissed, leaving him with only occasional assistance from the surgeons Agnew and Hamilton. Garfield was doing so well, Bliss explained in his bulletin, that he wished to relieve the doctors “from a labor and responsibility which in his improved condition he could no longer impose upon them.” To a reporter from the Washington Post, Bliss said that Garfield had a “clearer road to recovery now than he ever has had.” There was “no abscess, no pus cavity, no pyemia,” he insisted. “The trouble has now passed its crisis, and is going away.”

  Bliss’s assurances, however, no longer went unquestioned. “Despite the announcements that the condition of the President is hopeful and that he is making slight gains daily,” a reporter for the Medical Record wrote, “it is quite evident that his chances for ultimate recovery are very poor indeed.” Even Agnew admitted to a friend that he thought the president had very few days left to live. He “may live the day out,” he said, “and possibly tomorrow, but he cannot live a week.”

  Garfield was “perfectly calm, sentient,” Bliss wrote, content to live out his last days in this borrowed cottage, gazing at the sea. The president could not help but wonder, however, if, after such a brief presidency, he would leave behind any lasting legacy. “Do you think my name will have a place in human history?” he asked Rockwell one night. “Yes,” his friend replied, “a grand one, but a grander place in human hearts.”