Their courtship was long, awkward, and far more analytical than passionate. It began with a painfully polite letter from Garfield to Lucretia when he was on a trip to Niagara Falls in 1853. “Please pardon the liberty I take in pointing my pen towards your name this evening,” he began stiffly, “for I have taken in so much scenery today I cannot contain it all myself.” As the years passed and they slowly moved toward marriage, Garfield waited impatiently for Lucretia to express her love for him, but she remained distant. Finally, in frustration, he wrote to her, “It is my desire to ‘know and be known.’ I long to hear from you … to know your heart and open mine to you.… Let your heart take the pen and your hand hold it not back.” Lucretia, however, could only ask James to try to understand. “I do not think I was born for constant caresses, and surely no education of my childhood taught me to need them,” she would one day tell him. “I am only sorry that my own quiet and reserve should mean to you a lack of love.”
In 1855, when Garfield returned to Ohio from Massachusetts, where he was attending Williams College, Lucretia seemed to him as cold and remote as the first time he met her. “For the past year, I had fears before I went away, that she had not that natural warmth of heart which my nature calls so loudly for,” he wrote dejectedly in his diary. “It seems as though all my former fears were well founded and that she and I are not like each other in enough respects to make us happy together.… My wild passionate heart demands so much.” When he visited her again the following day, however, Lucretia bravely handed him her diary. To Garfield’s astonishment, it was filled with the love that she had always felt but had never been able to express. “Never before did I see such depths of suffering and such entire devotion of heart as was displayed in her private journal which she allowed me to read,” he wrote that night. “For months, when I was away in the midst of my toils, her heart was constantly pouring out its tribute of love.”
Although Garfield now believed that Lucretia loved him, when they finally married in 1858, they both knew that he was not yet in love with her. “I am not certain I feel just as I ought toward her,” he had admitted in his diary. “I have the most entire confidence in her purity of heart, conscientiousness and trustfulness and truly love her qualities of mind and heart. But there is no delirium of passion nor overwhelming power of feeling that draws me to her irresistibly.” Lucretia was painfully aware that Garfield’s feelings toward her had not deepened over the years, and she was tormented by the thought that he was marrying her because he felt he had to. The summer before their wedding, she wrote miserably to him, “There are hours when my heart almost breaks with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold stern word duty.”
If their courtship was difficult, the first years of their marriage were nearly unbearable. Between the Civil War and Garfield’s congressional duties in Washington, they spent only five months together during the first five years. The constant separation made it almost impossible for Lucretia to overcome her natural reserve, although she tried in earnest. “Before when you were away my heart missed you,” she wrote after they had been married for four years. “Now my whole self mourns with it and longs and pines for your presence, my lips for your kisses, my cheek for the warm pressure of yours. In short, I understand what you meant when you used to say, ‘I want to be touched!’ ”
Finally able to express herself in a letter, Lucretia still struggled to show physical affection, and Garfield’s frustration deepened until he confessed that he had grave doubts about their marriage. “It seemed a little hard to have you tell me … that you had for several months felt that it was probably a great mistake that we ever tried married life,” Lucretia wrote to James while he was in Columbus, working in the state senate, and she was home, expecting their first child. “I am glad you are coming home so soon, but you must come with a light face, or the shadow of those hours of terrible suffering, which are so surely and steadily coming upon me, will steal over me with its chill of death.”
Not even Trot, whose birth in 1860 brought James and Lucretia joy, and whose death, just three years later, knit them in a shared grief, could help them overcome their differences. The divide that had always separated them continued to widen until, in 1864, Garfield nearly destroyed any hope they had ever had of happiness together. In the spring of that year, he had an affair with a young widow named Lucia Gilbert Calhoun. He had met her in New York, where she was a reporter for the New York Tribune, and they had fallen in love, the kind of love he had for so long yearned to feel for Lucretia.
A month after meeting Lucia, James went home to Ohio and confessed the affair. Although angry and heartbroken, Lucretia forgave him, demanding only that he end the relationship immediately. Garfield agreed. He was certain he was walking away from his one chance at real love, but he was deeply ashamed of his infidelity. “I believe after all I had rather be respected than loved if I can’t be both,” he wrote sadly. He thanked Lucretia for her “brave words of good sense,” adding, “I hope when you … balance up the whole of my wayward self, you will still find, after the many proper and heavy deductions are made, a small balance left on which you can base some respect and affection.”
Garfield feared that, in the wake of his confession, Lucretia would lose all faith in him. Instead, his own feelings began to change. As he watched her bravely endure the pain and heartbreak that he had caused, Garfield suddenly saw Lucretia in a new light. She was not cold and unreachable but strong, steady, and resilient. Slowly, he began to fall in love with his wife.
As the years passed, Garfield’s love for Lucretia grew until it eclipsed any doubts he had ever had. His letters, which once alternated between terse, cold replies and painfully honest confessions, were now filled with passionate declarations of love. Lucretia was finally the object of James’s “gushing affection.” “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” he wrote to her one night from Washington. “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming, but he has come to stay.” A few months later, he again poured out his heart to her. “I here record the most deliberate conviction of my soul,” he wrote. “Were every tie that binds me to the men and women of the world severed, and I free to choose out of all the world the sharer of my heart and home and life, I would fly to you and ask you to be mine as you are.”
During the Republican convention, Garfield missed Lucretia desperately. “You can never know how much I need you during these days of storm,” he wrote to her just days before his nomination. “Every hour I want to go and state some case to your quick intuition. But I feel the presence of your spirit.” When he won the nomination, the first thing he did after making his escape from the convention hall was to send Lucretia a telegram. It said simply: “Dear wife, if the result meets your approval, I shall be content.”
By the time Garfield became president, Lucretia was completely confident of his love for her. For years, she had waited at home for him, asking when he would return, wondering if he missed her, questioning his devotion. Now she knew that her husband felt her absence as strongly as she did his. “It is almost painful for me to feel that so much of my life and happiness have come to depend upon another than myself,” he had written to her. “I want to hear from you so often, and I shall wait and watch with a hungry heart until your dear words reach me.”
For Garfield, Lucretia had become the “life of my life,” and as he now sat by her bed in the White House, watching as her temperature steadily climbed, he realized with a helpless desperation that he could do nothing to save her. She was “the continent, the solid land on which I build all my happiness,” he had once told her. “When you are sick, I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes. They lose all faith in the eternal order and fixedness of things.”
On the night of May 10, after Lucretia had been moved to a room on the north side of the house, “to get her further from the river air,” Garfield sat with her until 4:00 a.m. A few hours later, news of her illness appeared in t
he newspapers, stirring dark memories of President John Tyler’s wife, Letitia, who had died in the White House less than forty years earlier. “I am sorry to say that I have grave fears about Mrs. Garfield,” James Blaine’s wife, Harriet, wrote to her daughter. “She is very sick, and after hearing exactly how she is, I confess I am very uneasy.”
Garfield could think of nothing but Lucretia. “I refused to see people on business,” he wrote in his diary on May 11. “All my thoughts center in her, in comparison with whom all else fades into insignificance.” Having buried two children, he knew far too well the devastation of losing someone he loved. After Trot’s death, he had been so paralyzed with grief that he had nearly left Congress. “I try to be cheerful, and plunge into the whirlpool of work which opens before me,” he had confided to a friend, “but it seems to me I shall never cease to grieve.”
Every day, Garfield consulted with the group of doctors he had gathered around Lucretia. They had come to the conclusion that she was suffering from a combination of exhaustion and malaria. Sixteen years before malaria was finally traced to mosquitoes, Lucretia’s doctors did not know what caused the disease, but they did have ways to fight it. They gave her “fever powders,” presumably quinine, which had been used to treat malaria in the West since the early 1600s, and bathed her with alcohol and ice water. As Lucretia’s fever worsened, rising ominously to 104 degrees, Garfield hovered over her, helping however he could. “If I thought her return to perfect health could be insured by my resigning the Presidency,” he wrote to a friend, “I would not hesitate a moment about doing it.”
While the White House did what it could to protect Lucretia from the outside world, banning carriages from the grounds and occasionally even closing the front gates, Charles Guiteau inched closer. When he had first submitted his application for an appointment, he had been told, as was every office seeker, that it would be put on file and considered. “In the majority of cases there was not the slightest possibility of any position being granted,” a White House employee who helped shepherd callers through the president’s anteroom later explained. “It was just the usual human method of saving trouble and avoiding a scene.” Guiteau, however, believed that the president was carefully studying his application and that his appointment was only a matter of time. When, after handing the doorman a note for Garfield one day, he was told, “The President says it will be impossible to see you to-day,” he seized on the word “to-day.” This was Garfield’s way, he thought, of telling him that, “as soon as he got Walker [the current consul-general to France] out of the way gracefully then I would be given the office.”
While he waited for his appointment, Guiteau survived as he always had. As well as skipping out on board bills, he had a long history of convincing people to lend him money, and he was proud of his straightforward approach. “I will tell you how I do it,” he would later explain. “I come right out square with a friend. I do not lie and sneak and do that kind of business, or anything. I say, ‘I want to get $25; I want to use a little money’; and the probability is that if he has got the money about him he will pull the money right out and give it to me. That is the way I get my money. I take it and thank him, and go about my business.”
The technique had worked often enough that Guiteau was reluctant to abandon it, but he was quickly running out of lenders. In mid-March, he finally tracked down a man named George Maynard, whom he barely knew and had not seen for more than twenty years. He had met Maynard in 1859, when he was a student boarding at Maynard’s mother’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maynard had been living in Washington for the past seventeen years, working as an electrician, and knew nothing of Guiteau’s life since he had seen him last. He was the perfect person to ask for a loan.
When Guiteau suddenly appeared in Maynard’s office, he did not waste time with pleasantries but came quickly to the point. “Mr. Guiteau came into my office and said that he wanted to borrow $10 for a few days; that he was very hard up for money to pay his board bills,” Maynard would later recall. Guiteau told him that he was expecting a check for $150 and would pay him back as soon as he received it. Taking pity on the small, shabbily dressed man, Maynard gave him the money and in return accepted a card on which was written: “March 12th, $10 until the 15th.” He would not see Guiteau again until June.
In the meantime, Guiteau went about his solitary life. He had very little contact with people outside of his boardinghouse and the White House waiting room, and no social interaction at all. He had lived this way for most of his adult life, with the surprising exception of the four years he had been married.
Soon after leaving Oneida, Guiteau had met and married a young librarian named Annie Bunn, launching her into the most desperate and frightening period of her life. “I lived,” Annie would later say, “in continual anxiety and suspense of mind.” Not only was she forced to flee boardinghouse after boardinghouse, often leaving behind her clothing and belongings when her husband did not pay the rent, but she was constantly dunned by his creditors and a string of furious clients whom he had cheated.
Despite the constant humiliations, Annie likely would have stayed with Guiteau had he not treated her so cruelly. If she disagreed with him in the smallest way, he would literally kick her out the door and into the hallway, even if other boarders were walking by. On more occasions than she could count, he wrenched her out of bed in the middle of the night and locked her in a bitterly cold closet until morning. Although Annie was convinced that her husband was “possessed of an evil spirit,” it was not until he openly visited a prostitute that she finally filed for divorce.
Had Annie seen Guiteau now, almost ten years after she left him, she would hardly have recognized him. He had always been “very proud and nice and particular about his dress and general appearance,” she said. “He always dressed well, wore the best of everything.” While Annie begged the landlords her husband had deceived to let her have one of her dresses so that she might have a single change of clothes, Guiteau shopped as though he were a wealthy man. “He would not think that a suit of clothes was fit to wear that did not cost at least sixty or seventy-five dollars,” Annie remembered. He would obtain the clothes by paying part of the price up front and then never return to pay the balance.
After years of living as a traveling evangelist, however, Guiteau no longer had enough money even for a down payment. His clothes were frayed, torn, and too light for the early-spring weather. He pulled his sleeves down over his hands and, in an effort to conceal the fact that he did not have a collar, buttoned his coat to the very top. While everyone else was wearing boots or heavy shoes, he walked around in rubber sandals. Always a small, slight man, he had grown even thinner and was pale and drawn. To George Maynard, he looked “somewhat haggard and weak … as I have seen many a man look when they haven’t had a good square meal for two or three days.” When Guiteau did have an opportunity for a meal at a boardinghouse, the other guests recalled him eating with a savage determination and a distinct reluctance to pass the plates.
Despite his desperate circumstances, Guiteau did what he could to give the impression that he was a man of influence and means. When writing letters, he used the stationery either of the well-respected Riggs House, the hotel where Garfield had stayed on the night before his inauguration, or the White House. One day, when a White House staff member refused to give him more stationery, Guiteau slapped one of his enormous business cards down on a table and shouted, “Do you know who I am?… I am one of the men that made Garfield President.”
He also continued to try to associate himself with powerful men. He found out where John Logan, a Republican senator from Illinois, was staying and took a room in the same boardinghouse. One morning, hearing footsteps in the outer room of his suite, Logan stepped out from his bedroom to find Guiteau sitting in a chair near the door. When he saw the senator, Guiteau quickly stood up, greeted him by name, and handed him a copy of his “Garfield against Hancock” speech. Logan, who had no idea who this strange ma
n was, found himself listening helplessly as Guiteau told him that the speech he was holding had “elected the President of the United States, Mr. Garfield,” and that he was now waiting to be appointed consul-general to France. Secretary Blaine, Guiteau said, had promised him the appointment if Logan would give him a recommendation. He then pulled from his pocket a piece of paper on which he had written a three-line recommendation in large print and asked Logan to sign it. Logan declined. “He did not strike me as a person that I desired to recommend for an office of that character, or for any other office,” he would later say. “I treated him as kindly and as politely as I could; but I was very desirous of getting rid of him.”
A few days later, however, Guiteau was back. This time, he was more forceful in his request, insisting that, as he had once lived in Chicago, Logan was his senator and so was obliged to recommend him for the position. Again he thrust the handwritten recommendation at Logan. The senator ignored the piece of paper but assured Guiteau, “The first time that I see the Secretary of State I will mention your case to him.” While he did intend to mention Guiteau’s application to Blaine, Logan later explained, “I intended to mention it probably in a different way from what he supposed I would.… I must say that I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.”
As was his habit with the president at the White House, Guiteau followed up his frequent visits to the State Department with letters to the secretary of state. Late in March, he wrote to Blaine that it was his understanding that he was “to have a consulship” and that he hoped it was “the consulship at Paris, as that is the only one I care for.” After making the argument that he was entitled to the office and that it should be given to him “as a personal tribute,” he ended the letter by suggesting to Blaine that he too owed his position to Garfield’s generosity. “I am very glad, personally, that the President selected you for his premier,” Guiteau wrote. “It might have been someone else.”
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