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

by Candice Millard

  Twenty thousand people had requested tickets to the execution. Two hundred and fifty had been issued. More than a thousand people stood outside, waiting for the announcement of Guiteau’s death, while those who had seats inside watched in silence as he made his way toward the scaffold, his footsteps echoing on the brick floor. As he ascended the steps of the scaffold, struggling a little because his arms were tied tightly behind his back, Guiteau tripped on the first step. Smiling, he turned to Hicks and said, “I stubbed my toe going to the gallows.”

  When they had all assembled on the scaffold, Hicks, who was visibly shaken, spoke first, giving a brief supplication. Then he held a Bible before Guiteau, who proceeded to read fourteen verses from Matthew 10, beginning with the words “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” After he had finished, Guiteau looked out at the silent, stone-faced crowd and announced that he would now read a prayer of his own composition.

  He began by paraphrasing Matthew 18:3. “Except ye become as a little child,” he said, “ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Then, in a falsetto meant to evoke the pleadings of a child, he began to read “Simplicity.”

  I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.

  I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.

  I am going to the Lordy,

  Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!

  I am going to the Lordy!

  The poem continued for four more stanzas. Guiteau’s voice, although high, remained strong until the final line. “Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!” he said, his voice finally breaking. “I am with the Lord.”

  When Guiteau had finished, Hicks stepped forward once again to give the benediction. “God the Father be with thee,” he said, “and give thee peace evermore.” Nothing more was said as Guiteau’s legs were bound together, a noose looped around his neck and carefully adjusted, and a heavy black hood placed over his head. He stood with his shoulders pulled back, his head held high.

  “Glory, glory, glory,” he called out, and then, opening his hand, he let the prayer fall.

  • EPILOGUE •

  FOREVER AND FOREVER MORE

  There is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the Dead.

  They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no

  glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us,

  but forever and forever more we need them.

  JAMES A. GARFIELD, AUGUST 1880

  The death of Charles Guiteau, which was greeted by a triumphant shout that echoed through the courtyard and was picked up and carried by the crowd pressed against the prison walls, accomplished nothing. It did not prevent future assassinations, brought no solace to a heartbroken nation, no comfort to Lucretia or her children, nor even lasting satisfaction to those who had screamed for vengeance.

  After the doors were opened and the throng was allowed to parade past Guiteau’s body, while his brother silently fanned flies from his face, he was buried in the prison courtyard. As the casket was being covered with dirt, John Guiteau did not say a word or shed a tear. Before he left, however, he bent over the grave and placed a small clutch of white flowers at its head.

  A few days later, Guiteau’s body was quietly exhumed and taken to the Army Medical Museum, where Dr. Lamb, the same man who had performed Garfield’s autopsy, studied it for signs of insanity. Guiteau’s brain was removed, divided into small sections, and sent to psychiatrists across the country. Besides a malaria-infected spleen that was twice the normal size, however, the scientists found nothing notable in the remains of Charles Guiteau.

  Today, two sections of Guiteau’s spleen, parts of his skeleton—including his ribs, left hand, and left foot—and a glass jar containing the pieces of his brain, which were eventually returned to Washington, remain in the Army Medical Museum, now known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine. These specimens are kept in a large metal cabinet with long, deep drawers. The drawer just below Guiteau’s holds the vertebrae of another presidential assassin—John Wilkes Booth—as well as a six-inch section of Garfield’s spine, which had served as an exhibit at Guiteau’s trial. A red, plastic rod rests in a hole in the knobby, yellowed bone, indicating the path of the bullet.

  Even as they mourned the death of their president, Americans understood that, as time passed, Garfield would begin to fade from memory. “His ultimate place in history will be far less exalted than that which he now holds in popular estimation,” the New York Times warned its readers. More painful even than the realization that his brief presidency would be forgotten was the thought that future generations would never know the man he had been. A few years after Garfield’s death, a reporter, gazing at a formal portrait of him that hung in the White House, wrote, “I fear coming generations of visitors who pass through this grand corridor will see nothing in the stern, sad face of Garfield to remind them that here was a man who loved to play croquet and romp with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”

  What has survived of Garfield, however, is far more powerful than a portrait, a statue, or even the fragment of his spine that tells the tragic story of his assassination. The horror and senselessness of his death, and the wasted promise of his life, brought tremendous change to the country he loved—change that, had it come earlier, almost certainly would have spared his life.

  Garfield’s long illness and painful death brought the country together in a way that, even the day before the assassination attempt, had seemed to most Americans impossible. “Garfield does not belong to the North alone,” read a letter that was written by a southerner to Lucretia soon after the shooting, and printed in papers across the country. “From this common vigil and prayer and sympathy in the travail of this hour there shall be a new birth of the Nation.” That prediction was realized the day Garfield’s death was announced, when his countrymen mourned not as northerners or southerners, but as Americans. “This morning from the depth of their grief-stricken hearts all Americans can and will thank God that there is no North, no South, no East, no West,” a minister said from his pulpit. “Bound together in one common sorrow, binding in its vastness, we are one and indissoluble.”

  Out of this common sorrow grew a fierce resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Americans did not believe, however, that Garfield had been assassinated because he had walked into the train station, just as he had traveled everywhere since the day of his election, wholly unprotected. Even after losing two presidents to assassins, the idea of surrounding them with guards, and so distancing them from the people they served, still seemed too imperial, too un-American. In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. The day McKinley was shot—he would die from his wounds eight days later—Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation’s four presidential assassinations.

  To Americans in 1881, the principal danger their presidents faced was not physical attack but political corruption. With a determination that shocked even the most senior politicians, they turned their wrath on the spoils system, the political practice that had made Garfield the target of the delusional ambitions of a man like Guiteau. “We do not think we have taken up a newspaper during the last ten days which has not in some manner made the crime the product of ‘the spoils system,’ ” an article in the Nation had read soon after the shooting. “There has hardly been an allusion to it in the pulpit which has not pointed to the spoils system as the fons et origo mali. In fact, the crime seems to have acted on public opinion very like a spark on a powder-magazine. It has fallen on a mass of
popular indignation all ready to explode.” With Garfield’s death, the cries of indignation reached such a fevered pitch that they could no longer be ignored.

  Finally, civil service reform would find its most powerful advocate in the most unlikely of men—Chester Arthur. No man in the country owed more to the spoils system—or to its most powerful advocate, Roscoe Conkling—than Arthur. Since Garfield’s death, however, it had become strikingly apparent that Arthur was no longer the man Conkling had made. “He isn’t ‘Chet Arthur’ any more,” one of Conkling’s men mournfully said after he had taken office. “He’s the President.”

  In his first official address as president, Arthur called for civil service reform. Just one year later, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. This act, named for the Ohio Senator who sponsored it, transformed government appointments from what men like Conkling and Guiteau believed them to be—gifts given at the pleasure of powerful officials to those who had been most useful to them—into positions won on the basis of merit. Pendleton had introduced the bill two years earlier, but Congress had ignored it. It took Garfield’s assassination, the resounding defeat in 1882 of several congressmen who had publicly opposed reform, and President Arthur’s support to finally make it law.

  Conkling learned this too, when he visited Arthur in the White House soon after his inauguration. Now that Arthur was president, Conkling expected his protégé to redeem his reputation, and avenge his humiliating defeat at Garfield’s hands. He demanded that Arthur strip William Robertson of the collectorship of the New York Customs House, the appointment that had led to his disastrous decision to resign his Senate seat, and he expected to be made secretary of state. Blaine had resigned in December, writing to a friend that Garfield’s death was still a “fresh grief to me,” and Conkling relished the idea of taking up the powerful position from which his old enemy had limped away.

  Arthur, however, to Conkling’s amazement, not only refused to do his bidding, but was offended by the assumption that he would. Conkling’s demands, he said angrily, were “outrageous.” Conkling, realizing that he was suddenly powerless to control a man who had for years been his most loyal minion, stormed out of the room, sick with rage and “swearing that all of his friends have turned traitor.” Even more than the loss of his Senate seat, this betrayal was, for Conkling, a staggering blow. “When I saw him afterwards,” his mistress, Kate Sprague, would later write to Arthur, “& saw how he was suffering, I urged his quitting Washington without delay. Friends who have seen him within a day or two, report him as very ill.”

  Arthur had, in part, found the strength to free himself from Conkling’s grasp in the bold letters of his mysterious friend, Julia Sand. So much did he admire her strong, intelligent advice that he finally decided that he must meet her. After dinner on August 20, 1882, a highly polished carriage pulled up to the front door of number 46 East Seventy-Fourth Street, the house where Sand lived with her brother. Sand was inside, stretched out on the sofa, having “disdained roast beef and scorned peach-pie,” when she suddenly heard a man talking to her brother in the front parlor. She was just “wondering who that gentle-voiced Episcopal minister … might be” when President Arthur walked into the room. Arthur would stay for nearly an hour, pleased to finally have a face-to-face discussion with one of his most trusted advisers.

  Although Arthur would go on to become a respected leader, his presidency marked by earnest effort and honest, if modest, achievement, his political career would end with his first term. In 1884, the Republican Party chose for its presidential candidate not the man who had inherited the White House, but the one who had fought longest and hardest to occupy it—James G. Blaine. Blaine, although he had promised Garfield he would never again seek the presidency, could not resist a final chance to hold the office he had hungered for most of his life. So desperately did he want to be president that, after he won the nomination, he even had his men approach Conkling, in the hope that the former senator might set aside his hatred for him to help secure the election for his party. “Gentlemen, you have been misinformed,” Conkling coolly replied. “I have given up criminal law.” Soon after, Blaine lost the election to Grover Cleveland, who became the first Democratic president to be elected since the Civil War.

  When Arthur left the White House, after having meticulously and beautifully renovated it, he was almost unrecognizable as the man who had been Garfield’s running mate and vice president. “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted,” the well-known journalist Alexander McClure wrote, “and no one ever retired … more generally respected.” It was not until after Arthur had moved back to New York City that it became widely known that he was suffering from Bright’s disease, an excruciatingly painful and, at that time, fatal kidney disease. He died two years later, at the age of fifty-six.

  Although he attended Arthur’s funeral, Conkling never forgave him. For years after their falling-out, he nursed a bitter grudge, jeeringly referring to Arthur as “His Accidency” and taking pleasure in refusing an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court after Arthur had risked his reputation nominating him. After Garfield’s death and Arthur’s betrayal, Conkling bitterly turned his back on public life. “How can I speak into a grave?” he railed. “How can I do battle with a shroud? Silence is a duty and a doom!”

  Like his life, Conkling’s death, which came just two years after Arthur’s, was a pitched battle for control. Early in the spring of 1888, over a period of little more than two days, New York City was buried under twenty-two inches of snow, more than twice as much snow as it had seen all winter. The wind howled at forty-five miles per hour, with gusts nearly twice as fast, and the city was littered with towering snow drifts, some as high as fifty feet. Before it was over, four hundred people along the northeastern coast would die—two hundred in New York City alone.

  On March 11, while most New Yorkers stayed home, or huddled in bars or train stations—three hundred people slept in Grand Central Terminal—Conkling insisted on going to work. Then, as the storm steadily worsened, he refused a hack driver’s offer to drive him for fifty dollars, and insisted on walking home. It took even Conkling, who was a famously vigorous walker, three hours to walk the three miles from his office to the New York Club at Broadway and Twenty-first Street. Moments after he walked in the door, he fell facedown onto the entryway floor. “He didn’t crumble, he didn’t collapse,” his biographer would write. “He fell full length. For he was that kind of man.”

  Conkling survived that night, even returned to work, but on April 4 he fell ill again. For nearly two weeks, he fought to gain the upper hand, falling in and out of a feverish delirium. Twelve years earlier, while suffering from a severe case of malaria, Conkling had told a friend through clenched teeth, “I am not going to die.” Now, he paced the floor of his room, fighting off those who tried to help him as his temperature soared. The battle lasted until two o’clock on the morning of April 17, when, more than a month after he had walked through one of the deadliest snowstorms in New York history, Conkling died from pulmonary edema.

  Although there were many deaths in the late nineteenth century that even the most skilled physicians had no ability to prevent, Garfield’s was not one of them. In fact, following his autopsy, it became immediately and painfully apparent that, far from preventing or even delaying the president’s death, his doctors very likely caused it.

  Bliss had a few loyal defenders, but as a whole, the international medical community forcefully condemned the decisions he had made and the actions he had taken, particularly the repeated, unsterilized probing of the president’s wound. Just six months after Garfield’s death, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal printed a lecture by the renowned German surgeon Friedrich Esmarch. “It seems that the attending physicians were under the pressure of the public opinion that they were doing far too little,” Esmarch had said. “But according to my opinion they have not done too little but too much.”

  American physicians were less gen
tle in their assessment. Bliss had done “more to cast distrust upon American surgery than any time heretofore known to our medical history,” one doctor wrote. Young surgeons, especially, were scornfully critical of Bliss’s care. “None of the injuries inflicted by the assassin’s bullet were necessarily fatal,” wrote Arpad Gerster, a thirty-three-year-old New York surgeon who had recently been in Europe, studying the “Listerian method of wound treatment,” and would write the first American surgical textbook based on that method. To the physicians of his generation, Gerster continued, Garfield’s death proved with certainty that, as the poet Thomas Gray had written more than a century earlier, “ignorance is Bliss.”

  Bliss, however, refused to be cowed. Garfield, he said, had died not from a massive blood infection, but as the result of a broken backbone. He insisted, moreover, that the care he had given the president had been not only adequate, but exemplary. In a document titled “Statement of the Services Rendered,” Bliss and the few surgeons he had allowed to work with him argued that “he should receive, as he merits, the sympathy and goodwill (as well as the lasting confidence) of every patriotic citizen for the great skill, unequalled devotion and labor performed in this notable case, which … secured to the distinguished patient the perfection of surgical management.”

  To the astonishment of the members of Congress, Bliss confidently presented them with a bill for $25,000—more than half a million dollars in today’s currency. While caring for the president, Bliss said, he had lost twenty-three pounds, and his health was “so greatly impaired as to render him entirely unable to recover or attend to his professional duties.” Congress agreed to pay Bliss $6,500, and not a penny more. Bliss, outraged, refused to accept it, bitterly complaining that it was “notoriously inadequate as a just compensation.” Seven years later, Bliss would die quietly at his home following a stroke, having never recovered his health, his practice, or his reputation.