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

by Candice Millard

  The day after her husband’s funeral, Lucretia Garfield returned home to Mentor. At first, even surrounded by family and friends—her children, her mother-in-law, Rockwell and his family, and Swaim and his wife had all gone with her—the house felt achingly empty. “Now that Papa has gone,” James, her second son, wrote that night, “our home will be desolate.” For Lucretia, the farmhouse had always been filled with her husband’s great, booming laughter, or with the happy anticipation of his return. “Had it not been that her children needed her more than at any time in their lives,” Mollie would write of her mother years later, “life would have meant very little to her.”

  Lucretia, however, would not surrender to grief. One of the few outward concessions she would make to a life of mourning was her stationery, which, from the day of James’s death until her own, would be trimmed in black. The letters she wrote, however, were strong and fearless—most often in the protection either of her children’s future, or her husband’s memory. She had become, in the words of Garfield’s mother, James’s “armed defender.”

  Although it was a role that Lucretia did not enjoy, she was determined to do it well. She spent countless hours correcting articles about James, keeping private letters out of books and newspapers, and trying to discourage eager but talentless portraitists. She informed one painter that his portrait of Garfield was “not very good” and that she hoped he would not let anyone else see “such an imperfect representation.”

  Lucretia’s first concern, however, was for her husband’s papers. She asked Joseph Stanley Brown for his help in organizing them, and she used some of the money from the fund that had been established for her to build an addition to the farmhouse. The second floor of this wing was made into a library, which would become the nation’s first presidential library.

  Within the library, Lucretia installed a fireproof vault. Today, that vault still holds the wreath that Queen Victoria sent upon Garfield’s death. Among the first items Lucretia placed in it, however, were the letters that she and James had written to each other over twenty-two years of marriage. She included all that she had, even the most painful. To one small bundle of letters, she attached a note. “These are the last letters and telegrams received from My Darling,” she wrote, “during the five days I remained at Elberon previous to the fearful tragedy of July 2nd, 1881.”

  The most precious product of her marriage to James, their children, would, under her firm guidance, grow up to live full and useful lives, lives that would have made their father exceedingly proud. Their oldest son, Harry, would become a lawyer, a professor of government at Princeton, and, like his father, a university president—of Williams College, Garfield’s alma mater. James, also a lawyer, would become Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior in 1907. Of James, Roosevelt would write, “He has such poise and sanity—he is so fearless, and yet possesses such common sense, that he is a real support to me.” Irvin would become a lawyer as well, and Abe, the youngest, an architect. All of Garfield’s sons, no matter where they settled, remained close to their mother, often visiting her and the family farm that had shaped their boyhoods.

  Perhaps more than her brothers, Mollie would struggle to accept the loss of their father. “Sometimes I feel that God couldn’t have known how we all loved & needed him, here with us,” she wrote in her diary two months after his death. “I don’t believe I shall ever learn to say ‘Thy will be done’ about that.” The holidays were particularly painful, when she kept expecting to hear the little song, “Ring out wild bells,” that her father used to sing, “to a tune he made himself.” “Oh! me!” she wrote, “How I miss my darling father.”

  In the end, Mollie would find comfort and strength in an emotion even more powerful than grief—love. Little more than a year after her father’s death, Mollie, now sixteen, wrote in her diary not a lament, but a confession. She had fallen in love with the young man who had been like a son to her father—Joseph Stanley Brown. “I believe I am in love,” she wrote. “I don’t believe I will ever in my life love any man as I do Mr. Brown—and it can’t be merely like. For I like Bentley, Don, and Gaillard Hunt. And it isn’t infatuation, for when I first knew Mr. Brown I didn’t like him at all. No, I’m sure it is nothing but honest & true love.”

  Brown had turned down Arthur’s request to stay on in the White House as the president’s private secretary. He wished, he said, to complete the work he had begun. When he had finished that work—organizing Garfield’s papers and preparing them for binding—he left Mentor for New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

  Little more than two years later, Brown returned to Ohio, a college-educated man. When Mollie arrived home after a trip to England with her mother, he was waiting for her at the dock, with a ring in his pocket. The diamond was, Mollie would later tell her daughter, “a small stone, but a very good one.” Three months later, Mollie and Joseph were married, in a double wedding with Harry Garfield and his fiancée, Belle Hartford Mason. The wedding took place before the large bay window of the library that Lucretia had built for James.

  After Garfield’s death, Alexander Graham Bell stayed on in Washington, still convinced that his induction balance would save lives. The reason for its failure remained a frustrating and demoralizing mystery to Bell until the day Garfield’s autopsy results were announced. “It is now rendered quite certain why it was that the result of the experiment with the Induction Balance was ‘not satisfactory,’ as I stated in my report,” he wrote soon after to Mabel, in a letter filled with as much anger as sorrow. “For the bullet was not in any part of the area explored.”

  The realization that, while he had carefully searched Garfield’s right side for the bullet, it had been lying on the left, was sickening to Bell. “This is most mortifying to me and I can hardly bear to think of it,” he confessed to Mabel. “I feel that now the finger of scorn will be pointed at the Induction Balance and at me—and all the hard work I have gone through—seems thrown away.” More painful to him than the damage to his reputation was the thought that his invention would be dismissed as useless, or even dangerous. “I feel that I have really accomplished a great work—and have devised an apparatus that will be of inestimable use in surgery,” he wrote, “but this mistake will re-act against its introduction. The patients I am anxious to benefit would hardly be willing to risk an operation … after what has occurred.”

  As dejected as Bell was, however, he could not give up on his invention. On October 7, less than a month after Garfield’s death, he again tested the induction balance, this time on several patients of Dr. Hamilton, who had been one of Garfield’s surgeons. The tests were an unqualified success—the first time the invention had found a bullet “the position of which was previously unknown”—and they left Bell even more convinced that, had he been permitted to search both sides of Garfield’s body, he would have found Guiteau’s bullet.

  Bell made no further entries in his laboratory notebook about the induction balance until October 25. On that day, however, his notes covered four pages. “An old idea not previously noted came back to me with considerable significance,” he wrote from a hotel room in Paris. A few days later, he returned once again to the invention, with the same determination and enthusiasm he had had from the moment of its inception.

  Bell knew that the induction balance was important. His mistake was in believing that, because it had not worked on the president, no one would be willing to use it. In the years to come, the induction balance would lessen the suffering and save the lives not just of Americans but of soldiers in the Sino-Japanese War and the Boer War. Even during World War I, doctors would often turn to the induction balance when they could not find an X-ray machine, or did not trust its accuracy.

  The induction balance, however, was not the only medical invention that would come out of this difficult time in Bell’s life. The death of his son also inspired him to build a machine that would essentially breathe for those who, like Edward, coul
d not breathe for themselves. The invention, which he called a vacuum jacket, consisted primarily of an airtight iron cylinder that encircled the patient’s torso, and a suction pump that forced air into his lungs. The vacuum jacket was a precursor to the iron lung, which would help thousands of people breathe during the polio epidemic of the 1940s and early 1950s.

  Bell, still a young man, had an astonishingly busy and productive life yet ahead of him. Soon after Garfield’s death, he would become a United States citizen. In 1888, he and a small group of like-minded men would found the National Geographic Society, whose ambition it was to create “a society for the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge.” About the same time, Bell also founded the Volta Bureau, “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf.” In 1893, he moved the bureau into a yellow-brick and sandstone building, now a National Historic Landmark, on Thirty-fifth Street in Washington, D.C., directly across the street from where he had earlier moved his Volta Laboratory.

  Although he would continue to work on a wide range of inventions, most strikingly with various forms of flight, for Bell, the desire to help and teach the deaf would be the overarching passion of his life. In 1886, Captain Arthur Keller traveled to Washington from Alabama to see Bell. He brought with him his six-year-old daughter, Helen, who had been left blind, deaf, and mute after contracting what may have been scarlet fever when she was nineteen months old. Years later, Helen Keller would remember that meeting with Bell as the “door through which I should pass from darkness into light.” So grateful was she to Bell that sixteen years later, she would dedicate her autobiography to him.

  Keller wrote her memoirs when she was just twenty-two years old, but Bell, even near the end of his life, refused to write his own. When repeatedly asked to put down on paper the extraordinary events of his life, his reply was always the same: He was “still more interested in the future than in the past.”

  Bell would live to be seventy-five years old, dying at his home in Nova Scotia on August 2, 1922. Alone with him in his room was his wife, Mabel. She had been by his side when he was an unknown, penniless teacher, and she was with him now, forty-five years later, as he left the world one of its most famous men. Moments before his death, Mabel, who would survive her husband by only six months, whispered to Alec, “Don’t leave me.” Unable to speak, he answered her by pressing her fingers with two of his own—sign language, their language, for “no.”

  Like Bell, Joseph Lister would live a long life, long enough to see his ideas not only vindicated, but venerated. Over the years, he would be given his country’s most distinguished honors—from being knighted by Queen Victoria in 1882, to being made a baron by William Gladstone a year later, to being named one of the twelve original members of the Order of Merit, established in 1902 by Edward VII, Victoria’s son, to recognize extraordinary achievement. What Lister valued above all else, however, was the knowledge that doctors around the world now practiced antiseptic surgery, and that their patients had a far greater hope of keeping their limbs, and their lives. “I must confess that, highly, and very highly, as I esteem the honors that have been conferred upon me,” he would say later in life, “I regard all worldly distinctions as nothing in comparison with the hope that I may have been the means of reducing in some degree the sum of human misery.”

  Long before his death at the age of eighty-four, Lister would be recognized as “the greatest conqueror of disease the world has ever seen.” Nowhere, however, was his contribution to science, and to the welfare of all humankind, appreciated more than in the United States, a country that had once dismissed his theory at tremendous cost. In 1902, more than twenty years after Garfield’s death, the American ambassador to England would give a speech at the Royal Society in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Lister’s doctorate.

  “My lord,” the ambassador said, addressing Lister as he sat in an opulent hall, surrounded by powerful men and celebrated scientists, “it is not a profession, it is not a nation, it is humanity itself which, with uncovered head, salutes you.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It does not take much exposure to the vast and rich collection of Garfield’s papers and artifacts to understand that our twentieth president was not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man. The story of his remarkable life and brutal murder is told in heartbreaking detail in hundreds of diary entries, letters, and personal artifacts—a historical treasure trove that would have been lost long ago were it not for the exceptional skill and devotion of the men and women who are the keepers of our nation’s great archives.

  While researching this book, every time I visited one of these archives I found largely forgotten items that, more than a century after Garfield’s death, brought him suddenly and vividly to life. At the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., I was shown the lead bullet, smooth and flattened by the impact with Garfield’s body, that Guiteau shot from his .44 caliber gun on the morning of July 2, 1881. At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, I held in my gloved hands the section of Garfield’s spine which that bullet had pierced. At the National Museum of American History, I had the great honor of being able to closely examine the many versions of Alexander Graham Bell’s induction balance—in various shapes and sizes, with hanging wires and unfinished edges—that Bell had designed and built in the Volta Laboratory in a desperate attempt to save the president’s life.

  In the Library of Congress’s Manuscript Division, I would like to thank Lia Apodaca, Fred Augustyn, Jennifer Brathodue, Patrick Kerwin, Bruce Kirby, and Joseph Jackson, with special thanks to Jeff Flannery, who patiently and kindly answered my many questions. At the National Museum of Health and Medicine, I am grateful to Kathleen Stocker, assistant archivist; Brian Spatola, anatomical collections; and, especially, the museum’s chief archivist, Michael Rhode. Michael made all my research there possible, helped me find items I never would have found without his guidance, and introduced me to one of my most valued scientific advisers.

  I was very fortunate to spend much of my research time at the National Museum of American History. David Haberstitch, the incredibly knowledgeable curator of photographs in the Archives Center, helped me track down the unpublished memoirs of Charles Sumner Tainter, Bell’s assistant, who played a critical role in helping to build the induction balance. Judy Chelnick, associate curator in the museum’s Division of Medicine and Science, first told me about the various versions of the induction balance, which Bell donated to the museum in 1898, and then made arrangements for me to see them for myself. Judy also introduced me to Roger Sherman, also an associate curator in the Division of Medicine and Science, who patiently explained to me how the induction balance, in all its many manifestations, worked. Roger has a genius not only for understanding even the most complicated and arcane historical scientific instruments, but for explaining them in a way that others too might understand. I will be forever grateful for his help.

  I also had the pleasure of doing a great deal of research in Ohio, my home state, and was extremely impressed with the libraries and archives I visited there. At Hiram College—known as the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute when Garfield was one of its students and teachers, and, later, its president—Jennifer Morrow, the college archivist, was unfailingly helpful, both while I was in the library, doing general research, and later, when I asked for her help in finding specific items long-distance. She always worked with astonishing speed, and found exactly what I was looking for. The Western Reserve Historical Society also has a large collection of Garfield papers, and I would like to thank reference supervisor Ann Sindelar for her generous help. Many thanks also go to the very knowledgeable guides at Lawnfield, Garfield’s beloved farmhouse, which is now a National Historic Site. I would strongly encourage anyone visiting the area to stop and see it. It is fascinating and beautifully preserved.

  Thanks also go to Richard Tuske, director of the library for the New York City Bar; Anne Thacher, library director of the Stonington Historical Society; Dale Saut
er, manuscript curator of the special collections department at East Carolina University; William Bushong at the White House Historical Association; Kathie Pohl, director of marketing and community relations for the City of Mentor; Mary Kramer at Lakeview Cemetery; Kathryn Murphy at the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf; and the staff of the Chicago Historical Society.

  For help in understanding Garfield’s physical condition after the shooting and his autopsy report, I am very grateful to Dr. Paul Uhlig, who generously shared his time and exceptional knowledge. For advice on the science behind the induction balance, I would like to thank David Deatherage, an electrical engineer at Pearson Kent McKinley Raaf Engineers. For sending me a copy of his fine article about the medical aspects related to Garfield’s shooting, thanks go to Dr. Ibrahim Eltorai. I am also, and especially, deeply grateful to Dr. Dave Edmond Lounsbury, a brilliant internist who spent months answering my countless questions and pointing out details relating to Garfield’s condition and care that I had overlooked. Dave also read and reviewed every chapter in this book.

  I would also like to thank those scholars who devoted many years of their lives to studying and writing about Garfield. I am grateful to Kenneth Ackerman for his compelling book Dark Horse, to Ira Rutkow for James A. Garfield in the American Presidents Series, and to John Shaw, both for his insightful biography of Lucretia Garfield and for his careful reading and editing of James and Lucretia’s letters to each other, which he compiled into a moving and illuminating book. I am indebted to Harry Garfield’s daughter, Lucretia Garfield Comer, who wrote Harry Garfield’s First Forty Years, and to Ruth Feis, Mollie Garfield’s daughter, author of Mollie Garfield in the White House, for their beautifully written books, which give the kind of insight into Garfield’s life that could come only from the members of his family. Finally, I am especially grateful to Alan Peskin, who, with his book Garfield, wrote what is, in my opinion, the definitive Garfield biography. I had the great pleasure to meet Alan in Cleveland, and he generously shared with me his own impressions of Garfield, after having spent a quarter of a century studying him.