Destiny of the Republic (11 page)

Even to Bell’s father, a highly regarded elocutionist who for years had worked in his study until two in the morning, developing a universal alphabet, his work habits seemed not just extreme, but dangerous. “I have serious fears that you have not the stamina for the work your ambition has led you to undertake,” Alexander Melville Bell wrote his son. “Be wise. Stop in time.… I feel so strongly that you are endangering your future powers of work, and your life, by your present course, that I can write on no other subject.… Break your pens and ink bottles.… Wisdom points only in one direction. Stop work.”

As much as he loved his wife and his parents, Bell either would not stop or could not. He tried to explain to Mabel why he worked such long hours, refusing to stop to eat or rest. He had, he said, a “sort of telephonic undercurrent” in his brain that was constantly humming. “My mind concentrates itself on the subject that happens to occupy it,” he wrote, “and then all things else in the Universe—including father—mother—wife—children—
life itself
—become for the time being of secondary importance.”

By 1880, so frustrated had Bell become with the Bell Telephone Company—the time it stole from his laboratory work and the battles that he now realized it would always be fighting—that he simply quit. “I have been almost as much surprised as grieved at the course you have taken,” his father-in-law, who had become the company’s president, wrote him that summer. “My mortification and grief are only tempered by the hope that you do not realize what you have done.” Bell, however, understood exactly what he had done, and he would never regret it.

Renting a small house in Washington, D.C., where his parents had settled, Bell at first tried to write a history of the telephone, to at least acknowledge the singular role it had played in his life. To no one’s surprise, however, the temptation to return to his work quickly became too strong to resist. “However hard and faithfully Alec may work on his book,” Mabel wrote, “he cannot prevent ideas from entering and overflowing his brain.” Before long, Bell had opened a new laboratory.

In February of 1881, just a month before Garfield’s inauguration, Bell eagerly moved his equipment and notebooks into a small, two-story brick building that stood in the middle of a large, open stretch of land on Connecticut Avenue. He christened the building the Volta Laboratory, in honor of the science prize that Napoleon Bonaparte had created at the beginning of the century and that Bell had won that past summer. Along with the prize had come a substantial sum—50,000 francs, or $10,000. With the money, he was able not only to lease the building but to hire an impressive young inventor named Charles Sumner Tainter. Bell had found Tainter in Charles Williams’s electrical shop in Boston, the same shop where he had met Thomas Watson six years earlier. Watson had left the Bell Telephone Company about the same time Bell did, announcing his intention to travel and enjoy his modest wealth, and leaving Bell in great need of a man like Tainter.

Although by now even Bell admitted that he needed rest, he could not ignore the ideas erupting and colliding in his mind. “These are germs of important discoveries yet to come,” he wrote his parents early that year, “and I find it hard to rest here with the laboratory so close at hand.” One of these ideas was the photophone, a wireless telephone that relied on light waves to carry sound. So feverishly did he work on the invention that he finally had to seek medical care for an ailment that he described as “functional derangement of the heart brought on by too much Photophone.”

At the same time that Bell was fretting over his new invention, he was also settling an old score. He had not forgotten that Thomas Edison had made and patented improvements to the telephone, and he now realized with delight that he could return the favor. A few years earlier, Edison had invented the phonograph, but had set it aside before it was finished. Bell and Tainter were certain it could be made into something practical, and valuable. “Edison was completely absorbed in the work of perfecting the electrical light, and seemed to have lost all interest in the phonograph and had failed to appreciate its importance,” Tainter wrote. “But we had faith in its future.”

Since he had freed himself from the telephone, Bell had been desperately looking not just for a new project, but for work that would capture his heart and imagination, work that had meaning. When Mabel had complained that a school for the deaf he had founded in Scotland took too much of his time, Bell, frustrated that she could not understand what seemed so obvious to him, had snapped, “I trust you will … see that I am
needed
.” Nothing, not fame or wealth or even international recognition of his work, was as important to him as this. “I have been absolutely rusting from inaction,” he tried desperately to explain, “hoping and hoping that my services might be wanted somewhere.” The work he was now doing in the Volta Laboratory might not ease suffering or save a single life, but in this cramped and cluttered little building he knew that, if he were needed, he would be ready.

•
CHAPTER 7
•
R
EAL
B
RUTUSES AND
B
OLINGBROKES

Tonight, I am a private citizen. To-morrow I shall be called to assume new responsibilities, and on the day after, the broadside of the world’s wrath will strike. It will strike hard. I know it, and you will know it.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

A
t 2:30 in the morning on March 4, 1881, the day of his inauguration, Garfield sat at a small desk in his boardinghouse in Washington and wrote the final sentence of his inaugural address. Although he had been thinking about the speech since his election and had read the addresses of every president who had preceded him, he had not put pen to paper until late January. Over the past month, a friend recalled, he had written “no less than a half-dozen separate and distinct drafts of the address in whole or in part, each profusely adorned with notes, interlineations, and marginalia.” Then, three days before, Garfield had swept aside all these drafts, dismissing them as “the staggerings of my mind,” and had begun again. When he finally finished, just hours before his inaugural ceremony, he laid down his pen, pushed back his chair, and prepared to bid “good-by to the freedom of private life, and to a long series of happy years.”

Not long after Garfield climbed into bed that morning, tens of thousands of people left their homes and hotels and began walking toward the Capitol, determined to see the inauguration despite falling snow and bitter cold. With very few exceptions, presidential inaugurations had been held on the same day in March for nearly ninety years, since George Washington’s second inauguration in Philadelphia. The four-month delay between the election and the inauguration was then thought necessary to allow the president-elect sufficient time to travel to the capital. As transportation improved dramatically, however, and circumstances such as the Civil War made the delay not just difficult but dangerous, the date had not changed, and would not for another fifty-two years.

By the time a crowd had gathered on the National Mall for Garfield’s inauguration, the snow lay an inch and a half thick over the broad greensward and on the buildings that stood, in various stages of completion, along its edges. To the east lay the Capitol, which, waylaid by two wars, one fire—set by the British during the War of 1812—multiple architects, and bad reviews, had taken seventy-five years to complete. Farther west, on the Mall’s southern side, was a building of great interest to Garfield—the National Museum, now known as the Smithsonian’s Arts and Industries Building. Although the roof had only recently been finished and the museum would not be open to the public until October, its temporary pine floors had been laid and waxed months earlier, in anticipation of the inaugural ball it would host for Garfield that night.

Just beyond the Mall stood the painfully incomplete Washington Monument, which, in the words of Mark Twain, looked like “a factory chimney with the top broken off.” Although it had been proposed in 1783, construction had not begun until sixty-five years later. By 1854, when the monument had risen to just 152 feet, the project ran out of money, and before work could begin again, the country was plunged into civil war. Even now, sixteen years after the end of the war, the monument still sat abandoned, cowsheds erected in its shadow and sheep and pigs milling around its marble base.

When the sun emerged from the clouds at 8:00 a.m., however, glinting off the white marble and new snow, even the blunt, unfinished Washington Monument seemed dazzling and inspiring. Two hours later, Pennsylvania Avenue was finally “free from snow,” a journalist wryly noted, “if not from mud.” It was also overrun with people. “The sidewalks could not contain them,” one reporter wrote. “The crowd was so dense from the White House to the foot of Capitol Hill that they not only filled all the reserved seats, but all the windows, the sidewalks,… and much of the space of the roadway.” Those who could afford to spent anywhere from fifty cents to a dollar for a place in the roughly built tiered seating that, although “without cover and exposed to the full sweep of the keen west wind,” gave the best view of the parade route.

Determined to make up for the last inauguration, when there had been only a short procession and no inaugural ball because Hayes hadn’t been declared the winner until March 2, the city had begun planning Garfield’s procession immediately after his election. The fighting had started soon after. So bitter was the war between the various factions that President Hayes himself finally had to intervene. “The momentous question as to who shall ride the prancing steeds and wear broad silk sashes in the inauguration procession, and who shall distribute tickets of admission to the inauguration ball,” a reporter wrote mockingly, “is now in a fair way of peaceful if not happy solution.”

The moment General William Tecumseh Sherman appeared on Pennsylvania Avenue, leading the presidential procession, any lingering disappointment or wounded pride was instantly forgotten. Straight-backed, almost regal on his spirited gray horse, Sherman was, a reporter wrote, “the very picture of an old soldier in his slouch hat and great coat,” his orderlies “dash[ing] up to him on horseback from all directions.” Behind him marched twenty thousand militia, including thirteen companies of artillery, the red-lined capes of their coats carefully pinned over their shoulders and their bayonets glittering in the sun. Soon after, the first strains of music from the Marine Corps Band could be heard. The band, which had accompanied the inaugural procession since Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, was now led by the twenty-seven-year-old John Philip Sousa.

Suddenly, from within the crowd, a shout of joy rang out as the presidential carriage pulled into view. Garfield, with President Hayes at his side, rode in the back of an open carriage pulled by a team of four horses and driven by a legendary presidential coachman named Albert, who had trained under Ulysses S. Grant. As Garfield appeared, he was greeted with a cheer that rose “in a deafening chorus, and … was carried along the line without interruption.” A well-known and -loved minstrel named Billy Rice waited patiently in the crowd until the president-elect was within earshot and then, in a salute to his boyhood days on the canal, yelled out, “Low bridge!” Breaking into a broad grin, Garfield grabbed his silk hat and ducked.

At precisely noon, a pair of massive bronze doors opened onto the eastern portico of the Capitol, and the presidential party, which had disappeared inside an hour earlier, could be seen filing out. Although nearly a dozen people stepped onto the portico, all eyes were on only three: Frederick Douglass, who led the procession; the president-elect; and his mother, Eliza. It was an extraordinary scene, a testimony to the triumph of intelligence and industry over prejudice and poverty, and it was not lost on those who witnessed it. “James A. Garfield sprung from the people,” a reporter marveled. “James A. Garfield, who had known all the hardship of abject poverty, in the presence of a mother who had worked with her own hands to keep him from want—was about to assume the highest civil office this world knows. As the party so stood for a moment, cheer after cheer, loud huzzas which could not be controlled or checked, echoed and reechoed about the Capitol.”

After the crowd had finally quieted and he had been sworn into office, Garfield stepped forward to deliver the inaugural address he had finished just that morning. He felt deeply the importance of this speech, and he approached it with a seriousness of purpose that was almost didactic. He talked about education, which, he believed, was the foundation of freedom. He discussed the national debt, the challenges facing farmers, and the importance of civil service reform—at which point, a journalist noted, Roscoe Conkling, sitting directly behind Garfield, “smile[d] quietly at the hard task which Gen. Garfield had marked out for himself.”

It was when he spoke about the legacy of the Civil War, however, that Garfield was most passionate. With victory, he told the crowd standing before him, had come extraordinary opportunity. “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution,” he said. “It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.” Listening to Garfield speak, a reporter in the crowd of fifty thousand realized that, all around him, “black men who had been slaves, and who still bore upon their persons the evidence of cruel lashings,” were standing peacefully, even cheerfully, next to “Southern white men, who had grown poor during the war but who seemed, nevertheless, to harbor no ill-feelings.”

The painful past, however, had not been forgotten, nor did Garfield believe it should be. As he spoke, former slaves in the crowd openly wept. “The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress,” he said. “With unquestioning devotion to the Union, with a patience and gentleness not born of fear, they have ‘followed the light as God gave them to see the light.’ … They deserve the generous encouragement of all good men. So far as my authority can lawfully extend they shall enjoy the full and equal protection of the Constitution and the laws.”

When he finished his address, Garfield stood for a moment on the portico, his hands raised to the sky. “There was the utmost silence,” one reporter wrote, as the new president appealed “to God for aid in the trial before him.”

The trial, in fact, had already begun. The rivalry between the two factions within the Republican Party had only deepened since the convention in Chicago nine months earlier. Roscoe Conkling’s fury at Grant’s defeat had turned to outrage when it became clear that Garfield would not bow to his every demand. In August, in a desperate attempt at reconciliation, party bosses had arranged a meeting at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. Garfield had traveled all the way from Mentor for it, but Conkling, who lived in New York, had not even bothered to appear. “Mr. Garfield will doubtless leave New York thoroughly impressed with the magnanimity of our senior Senator,” a journalist sneered.

Conkling, it was later discovered, was in another room in the same hotel while the meeting was being held. He did not miss the opportunity, however, to let Garfield know what was expected of him. Through his minions, Conkling laid out his expectations, which, not surprisingly, revolved around patronage—its continuation and his control over it. Not hesitating to make the most audacious demands, he insisted that Garfield let him choose the next secretary of the treasury. Conkling would later claim that Garfield had agreed to everything, but Garfield said he offered nothing more than the assurance that he would try to include Stalwarts in his cabinet and, when appropriate, consult with Conkling. “No trades, no shackles,” Garfield had written in his diary after the meeting, “and as well fitted for defeat or victory as ever.”

Since Garfield’s election, Conkling had decided to take a more direct approach. If Garfield would not let him personally select the cabinet, he would dismantle it, one appointee at a time. In a letter he had written to Garfield just days before the inauguration, Conkling had warned the president-elect that he would be wise to keep in mind who was really in charge. “I need hardly add that your Administration cannot be more successful than I wish it to be,” he wrote. “Nor can it be more satisfactory to you, to the country, and to the party than I will labor to make it.”

Garfield saw the truth in this threat before his administration even began. On March 1, Levi Morton, a Stalwart who had accepted his nomination as secretary of the navy, was pulled from his sickbed in the middle of the night, forced to drink a bracing mixture of quinine and brandy, and driven to Conkling’s apartment—known widely as “the morgue”—to answer for his betrayal. At four the next morning, exhausted and defeated, Morton wrote a letter to Garfield asking him to withdraw his nomination.