On the morning of July 2, Harry and Jim Garfield were still in bed when their father bounded into their room, a broad smile on his handsome face. Singing “I Mixed Those Babies Up,” from his favorite song in the new Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore, he plucked his teenage sons out of bed, tucked one under each arm, and swung them around “as if we were in fact two babies,” Jim would later recall. Wriggling free, Jim turned a flip over the end of his bed and said triumphantly to his father, “You are President of the United States but you can’t do that.” To his sons’ astonishment and delight, Garfield, six feet tall and just a few months shy of his fiftieth birthday, not only did the flip but then hopped across the room balanced only on his fingers and toes.
Despite the strain of the past year, Garfield still looked strong, vigorous, and, on this day, thoroughly happy. Each blow—from his unexpected and unwanted nomination to the battle with Conkling to Lucretia’s illness—had taken its toll, but he remained the man he had always been. “There are a few additional lines about the eyes, perhaps,” a reporter for the New York Tribune noted, “but he wears his old robust hearty frank look, stands straight as a soldier, and greets his friends with the same cordial, strong, magnetic grip of the hand.”
After rousing his sons, Garfield had breakfast with his private secretary, who had just returned from a trip to London that Garfield had arranged. “The work of the campaign and the pressure of the first three months at the White House had made pretty severe inroads on my vitality,” Brown admitted. When Garfield needed someone to shepherd $6 million in U.S. bonds to London, therefore, he had sent his young friend.
The president had been delighted to give the opportunity to Brown, who had come from a family of modest means and had traveled very little, but he was happy to have him back. Brown had become essential not just to Garfield but to everyone who came into contact with him. Despite the fact that he was the youngest man ever to hold the office of private secretary to the president, he had, in the words of one journalist, “the tact and ability of age and experience.” As well as organizing Garfield’s voluminous correspondence and personal papers, he made arrangements for presidential receptions and dinners, attended to the countless problems that occurred each day in the White House, and oversaw the entire staff. He had even impressed a hard-bitten political reporter for the Washington Post, who wrote that Brown was “perfectly master of the situation and handles his office … with ease and dexterity.”
As the president’s right-hand man, Brown was the last person in the White House to see him before he left for the train station that morning. He was working quietly in his office when, just before 9:00 a.m., he heard the door open and looked up to see Garfield walking into the room. Over the years, he had come to know the president well, and he could tell that he was looking forward to this trip “with an almost pathetic longing.” Clapping a hand on his secretary’s shoulder, Garfield said, “Goodbye, my boy, you have had your holiday, now I am going to have mine. Keep a watchful eye on things.”
After warmly shaking Brown’s hand, Garfield stepped outside the White House and climbed into a waiting carriage. It was the State Department carriage, a small coupe with just one seat for the president and the secretary of state, whom Garfield had asked to ride with him to the station. There were no guards, not even an assistant. Just two old friends riding in a modest, one-horse carriage. Behind them, Garfield’s army buddy Captain Almon Rockwell drove Harry and Jim in the president’s carriage, which Garfield had borrowed from Rutherford Hayes because he could not afford his own.
The small caravan was in no hurry to reach its destination. Garfield, although looking forward to seeing Lucretia and visiting his alma mater, wanted to discuss with Blaine his plans for the end of the summer. He had scheduled a tour of the South and planned to give an important, and very likely controversial, speech on reconstruction and race while in Atlanta, Georgia. As they talked, Blaine kept his horse clopping along at a leisurely pace, “in conscious enjoyment of the beautiful morning.”
Like Garfield, Guiteau woke early that morning, excited and restless. When he opened his eyes at 5:00 a.m., he saw not the small, shabby interior of Mrs. Grant’s boardinghouse, where he had been staying for the past six weeks, but a much more elegant room. After reading about the president’s trip in the newspaper two days earlier and deciding that this was the opportunity he had been looking for, Guiteau had moved to the Riggs House, the hotel where Garfield had stayed on the night before his inauguration. For months, Guiteau had spent entire afternoons in the Riggs House lobby, reading the newspapers, using the hotel stationery, and keeping an eye out for the many politicians and prominent men who met there. Now he finally had a room of his own at the prestigious hotel, and need not concern himself about the bill.
As Guiteau dressed for the day in his new, well-appointed room, Mrs. Grant, the owner of his previous boardinghouse, was desperately trying to track him down. For weeks, Guiteau had met her requests for payment with excuses and promises. “I can’t do anything for you to-day, but I certainly will in a day or two,” he had written to her two days earlier. “Please do not mention this to any one, as it will do me harm, as I will settle in a day or two. You can depend on this.” The next day, Mrs. Grant had found his room empty and his bag gone. She refused, however, to admit defeat. In fact, she had placed an advertisement in the Daily Post that was to appear that day: “WANTED: Charles Guiteau, of Illinois, who gives the President and Secretary Blaine as reference, to call at 924 14th St., and pay his board bill.”
Unaware and unconcerned about Mrs. Grant’s advertisement, and filled with a satisfying sense of his own importance that day, Guiteau allowed himself a leisurely morning. It was too early for breakfast, so he walked to Lafayette Park as he had done nearly every day for the past four months. He rested, read the paper, and “enjoyed the beautiful morning air.” At eight, he returned to the Riggs House and had a large meal. “I ate well,” he would later say, “and felt well in body and mind.”
After breakfast, Guiteau returned to his room to retrieve a few items. Over the past few weeks, as he prepared to assassinate the president, he had written a series of letters that he took great satisfaction in knowing would be published to wide readership. One of those letters, however, he had addressed to just one man—General William Tecumseh Sherman. Scrawled on the back of a telegraph sheet, it read:
To General Sherman:
I have just shot the President.
I shot him several times, as I wished him to go as easily as possible.
His death was a political necessity.
I am a lawyer, theologian, and politician.
I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts.
I was with Gen Grant, and the rest of our men in New York during the canvas.
I am going to the jail.
Please order out your troops, and take possession of the jail at once.
Charles Guiteau
Folding the letters into an envelope, Guiteau put them with his edited copy of The Truth. To the cover of his book, he attached a note to the New York Herald. “You can print this entire book, if you wish to,” it read. “I would suggest that it be printed in sections, i.e., one or two sections a day.… I intend to have it handsomely printed by some first-class New York publisher, but the Herald can have the first chance at it.”
There was one last letter, which Guiteau had written just that morning and now tucked safely into his shirt pocket. Addressed to the White House, it attempted to explain what he was about to do. “The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican party and save the Republic. Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little when one goes,” he wrote. “I presume the President was a Christian and that he will be happier in Paradise than here.”
His affairs in order, Guiteau was finally ready to leave. He was wearing a dark suit with a “nice, clean shirt,” and he looked, he was confident, “like a gentleman.” Before stepping out the door, he picked up his
revolver, carefully wrapped it in paper, and slid it into his hip pocket.
Although he had taken his time that morning, Guiteau arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac station at Sixth and B Streets half an hour before Garfield. He decided to use the time to complete a few last tasks. Aware that he would soon be the focus of great attention, and concerned that his shoes looked a little dusty, he had them brushed and blacked. Then he approached a line of hack drivers outside the station. Thinking it best to arrange for a ride to the jail ahead of time, in case there was any danger to him personally, he asked one driver what he would charge to take him to the Congressional Cemetery, which was near the prison. “Well, I will take you out there for $2,” the driver answered. Guiteau, who did not have two dollars but did not plan to pay for the ride anyway, told the driver he would let him know in a few minutes if he “wanted his services.”
Once inside the station, Guiteau turned his attention to the items he had carried with him from the Riggs House. Approaching a newsstand, he asked the young man behind the counter, James Denny, if he could leave some packages with him for a few minutes. “Certainly,” Denny replied, and, taking the packages from Guiteau, placed them on top of a pile of papers stacked against a wall. Satisfied that his letters and book were in good hands and would be found by the authorities when the time came, Guiteau walked to the bathroom to examine his revolver one last time. He unwrapped it from the paper he had used to protect the powder from his perspiration, tested the trigger, and looked it over carefully “to see that it was alright.” Five minutes after he stepped back into the waiting room, Garfield and Blaine arrived.
When the State Department carriage rounded the corner onto B Street, Garfield was seated nearest the sidewalk and so had an unimpeded view of the station. Although eager to begin his trip, the president did not relish the sight of the three-story redbrick building with its imposing Gothic design, nor had he ever.
So strongly did Garfield object to the station that, while in Congress, he had argued that it should be torn down. Nine years earlier, the government had given the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad fourteen acres of the National Mall, and the company had quickly built the station and laid tracks across the broad greensward. To the Mall, which Pierre-Charles L’Enfant had designed as a place for quiet contemplation, the station brought soot, smoke, noise, and even danger. Trains frequently killed and maimed people as they walked or rode in carriages along the Mall. People “will wonder,” one senator railed, “why an American Congress should permit so foul a blotch to besmirch the face of so grand a picture.”
Garfield, who referred to the Baltimore and Potomac as a “nuisance which ought long since to have been abated,” also had personal reasons for disliking the station. In his mind, it would always be inextricably linked with one of the most painful experiences of his life—the death of his youngest son, Neddie. Just five years earlier, Garfield and Crete had watched as their little boy’s body was carried through the station so that he might be buried in Mentor, next to his sister Trot, whom they had lost thirteen years earlier. “I did not know, since that great sorrow,” Garfield had written in his diary after burying Neddie, “that my heart could be so wrung again by a similar loss.”
As the carriage carrying Garfield came to a stop in front of the station entrance, Patrick Kearney, an officer with the Metropolitan Police, quickly walked in front of it to see if he could be of assistance. The president and his secretary of state, however, remained seated while they finished their conversation, Garfield’s hand resting on Blaine’s shoulder. Finally, Garfield called out the window to Kearney, asking him how much time he had before his train departed. Kearney, who had been leaning against a lamppost while he waited for the president, walked over to Garfield and showed him his watch: ten minutes.
Before stepping out of the carriage, Garfield turned to say goodbye to Blaine, who would not be traveling with him. The secretary of state, however, insisted on escorting him to the train. “I did not think it was proper for a president to go entirely unattended,” he would later explain. As the two men ascended the steps into the station, arm in arm, Garfield suddenly stopped and turned back to Kearney, who had lifted his hat and saluted. Responding with a warm smile and tip of his hat, the president disappeared inside the door.
As Garfield entered the station, Sarah White, the matron for the ladies’ waiting room, looked up from her position next to the room’s heater. She watched as the president and secretary of state strode by, Blaine slightly ahead of Garfield, Harry and Jim trailing behind them. Garfield walked with an easy, natural confidence—“absolutely free from any affectation whatever.”
He must have made a striking contrast to Guiteau, whom White had also been watching that morning. Not only was Guiteau nearly half a foot shorter than the president and seventy-five pounds lighter, but he seemed as uncomfortable and nervous as Garfield was at ease. As he shuffled soundlessly between the gentlemen’s and ladies’ waiting rooms, his shoulders bent, his head tilted at an odd angle, and his dark slouch hat sitting low over his eyes, Guiteau had seemed suspicious to White. “He would look in one door and pass on to the next door and look in again,” she remembered. “He walked in the room once, took off his hat, wiped his face, and went out again.”
When Garfield walked in, Guiteau was standing right behind him. This, Guiteau realized, was his chance to kill the president, and this time he was not about to let it slip away. Without a moment’s hesitation, he raised the revolver he had been carrying with him for nearly a month and pointed it at Garfield’s back. So complete was his composure that he might have been standing at the edge of the Potomac aiming at a sapling, instead of in a crowded train station about to shoot the president of the United States.
The Venezuelan chargé d’affaires, Simón Camacho, happened to be standing next to Guiteau at that moment, and he could clearly see the assassin’s face as he stood looking at Garfield, arm outstretched and unwavering. “His teeth were clenched and his mouth closed firmly,” Camacho would later recall. “His eye was steady, and his face presented the appearance of a brave man, who is determined upon a desperate deed, and meant to do it calmly and well.”
Garfield had walked only a few steps into the room, and was just three feet away when Guiteau pulled the trigger. The bullet sliced through the president’s right arm, passing through his jacket and piercing the side of a tool box that a terrified worker was carrying through the station. The sudden impact made Garfield throw up his arms in surprise and cry out, “My God! What is this?”
As Garfield turned to see who had shot him, Guiteau fired again. By now, however, his courage had abandoned him, as his thoughts seemed to have suddenly shifted from the president’s fate to his own. “The expression on [his] face had now changed,” Camacho said. “His calmness had disappeared.… He fired wildly this time and with a hurried movement.”
Despite the wave of fear that had washed over Guiteau, the lead bullet hit its mark, ripping into the president’s back. The force thrust Garfield forward, his long legs buckling underneath him and his hands reaching out to break his fall. As he sank heavily to the carpeted floor, vomiting violently and barely conscious, a bright red stain blossomed on the back of his gray summer suit. There was a moment of stunned silence, and then the station erupted in screams.
PART THREE
FEAR
• CHAPTER 12 •
“THANK GOD IT IS ALL OVER”
If there be one thing upon this earth that mankind love and
admire … it is a brave man.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
As cries of “Catch him!” echoed through the train station, Guiteau’s face “blanched like that of a corpse,” the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires, Camacho, would remember. Literally trembling with fear, his eyes rolling “from side to side as if he was a hunted man,” Guiteau sprang for the door that led to B Street and his waiting carriage. Before he could reach it, however, Camacho, who was closer to the exit and had suddenly realized what
was happening, lunged forward, blocking the door and desperately waving his arms in the air for help. Guiteau spun around and darted for the Sixth Street exit just as Blaine, who had instinctively raced after him, shouted for the doors to be barred.
The first man to catch Guiteau was a ticket agent named Robert Parke. As the assassin raced past him, Parke grabbed him by the back of his neck and his left wrist, calling out, “This is the man.” Officer Kearney, who had exchanged a smile and a tip of the hat with Garfield just minutes earlier, ran to Parke’s side, seizing Guiteau powerfully and shaking him.
At first Guiteau twisted and turned, trying to free himself, but as the crowd surged around him, pulsing with shock and fury, he realized that, on his own, he would not survive. Across the station, a group of enraged black men, joined by a growing chorus, began shouting “Lynch him!” and the lethal momentum of the mob became all but unstoppable. “I truly believe that if they hadn’t been so many officers present,” a porter would later say, “the man would have been strung up then and there.” Guiteau, fear “in his eyes, in his color, in his every movement,” turned to Kearney and said, “I want to go to jail.”
Guiteau gladly acquiesced as Kearney dragged him outside the station and onto the street, but he had something he wanted to say, and he repeated it over and over, in a desperate refrain. Taking the letter he had written to General Sherman out of his breast pocket and waving it frantically in the air, he said, “I have a letter that I want to see carried to General Sherman. I want Sherman to have this letter.” As they hurried along, Kearney assured Guiteau that his letter would be delivered. By the time they reached police headquarters, Guiteau, surrounded by policemen and safely away from the raging mob, had recovered the calm, determined expression he had had before firing the first shot. “He had a rather fierce look out of his eyes,” one of the officers would later recall, “but he did not appear to me to be excited at all.”
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