Destiny of the Republic (13 page)

The general consensus in the United States, moreover, was that if the president did happen to be at a slightly greater risk than the average citizen, there was simply nothing to be done about it. “We cannot protect our Presidents with body guards,” an editorial in the
New York Times
read. “There is no protection with which we can surround them that will ward off danger or disarm it more effectively than our present refusal to recognize its existence.” Garfield, unwilling to forfeit any more of his liberty than he had already lost to political enemies and office seekers, could not have agreed more. “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he wrote, “and it is best not to worry about either.”

Beyond a doorman and the occasional presence of an aging police officer who had worked in the White House for nearly two decades, the only buffer between the president and the public was Garfield’s twenty-three-year-old private secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown. Brown had met Garfield two years earlier, when he was doing secretarial work for the legendary explorer John Wesley Powell. Powell was anxious to get funding from Congress for his survey of the American West and was counting on Garfield’s help. Garfield was deeply interested in Powell’s work, but his secretary had been ill for quite some time, and he was buried under stacks of correspondence. Powell’s solution was to lend him his own secretary.

The next morning, on his way to work, Brown stopped by Garfield’s house in Washington, D.C. When Garfield was told that a young man was waiting for him, he crossed the hall and, entering the room, said in his characteristically cheerful and booming voice, “Good morning, what can I do for you?” His casual smile quickly turned to a look of surprise as Brown, then just twenty-one, replied boldly, “It is not what you can do for me, General Garfield. It is what I can do for you.”

Over the following weeks, as Garfield came to know Brown, one of the things he liked best about the young man was that he relied on his own intelligence and ingenuity. Like Garfield, Brown had come from humble origins but had risen through hard work and disciplined study. “Aspirations for the reflected glory of a long lineage of illustrious progenitors—the solace of ignoble minds,” he would later write, “furnishes no part of the ‘motif’ of my ancestral inquiries.” Brown’s grandfather Nathaniel Stanley had come to the United States from England in 1819 in order to avoid debtor’s prison, changing his name to Brown upon arrival in Baltimore. In America, Nathaniel’s son became a carpenter, and his grandson, Joseph, was expected to do the same. Although Joseph dutifully learned carpentry during the day, he studied Latin at night. When he was twelve, he also began to teach himself shorthand, recording the speeches of every public speaker he met, most of whom were ministers. He won his first job with Powell by offering to work for free.

Soon after Brown began working for Garfield, Powell won his funding from Congress, but lost his secretary to Garfield, who had come to rely on him. Brown, who was not much older than Garfield’s oldest sons, quickly became part of the family. He traveled to Mentor, joined family dinners and croquet tournaments, listened as Garfield tried out his speeches, and even gave him advice on relating to his teenagers. “The gracious, affectionate home life of the Garfield family was a revelation to one whose own home life was rather severe and austere,” Brown would later recall. “It was like having two homes.”

Garfield made it clear to Brown from the beginning that he not only liked him, but genuinely needed his help. When Garfield had returned to Washington for a few days after his nomination, Brown decided not to call on him, worried that his boss would think he was just another person asking for a favor. He realized how wrong he had been when he ran into Garfield on the street. “Where have you been,” Garfield asked him. “I need all my friends now.” Exhausted and worried, Garfield was in earnest, but he roared with laughter when Brown, who knew that he had had hardly a moment to himself since his nomination, replied, “General, I do not think you could have been very lonesome.”

As much as Garfield had come to rely on Brown, when it was time to fill the position of private secretary to the president, the young man who had served him so well was not even a candidate. The position, which was one of great influence and proximity to power, traditionally went to men of considerable political skill and experience. Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary had been Meriwether Lewis, whom he soon after entrusted with exploring and charting the Pacific Northwest. Garfield wanted for his private secretary John Hay, who had been Lincoln’s assistant private secretary twenty years earlier, and would, in another twenty years, be Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He felt strongly that Hay was the right man for the job, but Hay, who had greater ambitions, delicately declined. “He is very bright and able,” Garfield wrote in discouragement. “I more and more regret that I cannot have him for my private secretary.”

When Garfield finally offered the job to Brown, it came as a surprise to no one but Garfield. One night, as the family sat before a fire in the farmhouse in Mentor, he ruminated aloud on his options for private secretary after the disappointment of Hay’s refusal. Suddenly, he turned to Brown and said, “Well, my boy, I may have to give it to you.” The young man replied drily, “Well that
is
complimentary, to say the least, when all these other fellows have been first considered.” Everyone in the room burst into laughter.

As prestigious as it was to be the president’s private secretary, Brown had no illusions about what the job would entail. Immediately following Garfield’s nomination, more than five thousand letters had poured into Mentor from all parts of the country, and Brown had been forced to quickly devise a system to deal with them. On the morning of Garfield’s inauguration, when the president-elect had collapsed into bed after finally finishing his speech, Brown had stayed up to make a clean copy of it, leaving him too tired to attend any of the day’s events until the ball that night. Since then, he had been opening, sorting, and responding to as many as three hundred letters every day, and there was no one to help him. “There was no organized staff … with expert stenographers and typists,” he later recalled. “Only one pair of hands.”

Although Brown insisted that everyone who called on the president at the White House be treated with courtesy and respect, regardless of influence or station, he became very adept at shielding Garfield from office seekers. His first official act as private secretary was to issue an order that anyone who wished to see the president had to go through him first. This rule applied to even high-ranking politicians and old friends, many of whom exploded in rage when asked to wait in an anteroom filled from wall to wall with office seekers. “How the President and his Private Secretary stand the pressure of the many callers seems a mystery,” one reporter marveled. “They must have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and brains with more extent of cell and surface than fall to the lot of most mortals.”

In a small room across town, Garfield’s most persistent office seeker grew more determined and delusional with each passing day. The day after Garfield’s inauguration, Charles Guiteau had taken a train from New York to Washington, D.C. With only a few dollars in his pocket and no intention of looking for a job outside the White House, he quickly resumed his habit of moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse when the rent came due. While he was forced to flee some rooms after just a day or two, he was able to keep others for several weeks by assuring his landlady that he was about to be given an important political appointment.

Guiteau had begun laying the groundwork for his appointment as soon as Garfield was elected. In November, he had sent a note of congratulations that sounded as though he and Garfield were the oldest of friends. “We have cleaned them out just as I expected. Thank God!” A few days later he had written to then secretary of state William Evarts, asking if he was correct in assuming that President Hayes’s foreign ministers would step aside to make way for Garfield’s appointments. “Please answer me at the Fifth Ave. Hotel at your earliest convenience,” he instructed one of the highest-ranking men in the country. “I am solid for General Garfield and may get an appointment from him next spring.”

Assuming that Garfield would soon be handing out appointments, Guiteau wanted to be first in line. After deciding that the position to which he was best suited was minister to Austria, he again wrote to the president-elect. “Dear General, I, Charles Guiteau, hereby make application for the Austrian Mission.… On the principle of first come first served, I have faith that you will give this application favorable consideration.” Although Garfield received hundreds of letters every day from people asking for government appointments, this letter in particular impressed him as an “illustration of unparalleled audacity and impudence.”

Guiteau, however, believed not only that he was entitled to a position of importance, but that he had the necessary credentials for one. “I have practiced law in New York and Chicago,” he wrote, “and presume I am well qualified for [the position].” He also let it be known that he expected to come into some money. “Being about to marry a wealthy and accomplished heiress of this city,” he told Garfield, “we think that together we might represent this Nation with dignity and grace.” The heiress in question, however, knew Guiteau only as an annoying and potentially dangerous stalker. After spotting her in church and learning that she came from a wealthy family, he had begun sending her letters, following her on the street, and knocking on her front door. Despite his vigorous efforts, or perhaps because of them, she had never spoken a word to him.

While still in New York, Guiteau had done all he could to make himself known to anyone of importance in the Republican Party. Every day, he had gone to campaign headquarters or the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a regular meeting place for Republicans. He had been in the hotel when Garfield arrived from Mentor for the meeting that Conkling refused to attend, and he had stayed all day, eagerly greeting senators and cabinet members whenever they happened to pass through the lobby. “All those leading politicians … knew me,” Guiteau would proudly recall, “and were very glad to see me.”

Even Chester Arthur had met Guiteau, who had made it a point to seek out the vice president–elect wherever he happened to be—at campaign headquarters, on the street, even in his home. “I have seen him at least ten times,” Arthur would later recall, “possibly as often as twenty times altogether.” On several occasions, Arthur’s butler opened the door to find Guiteau standing before him, clutching his “Garfield against Hancock” speech. Although he never set foot in the door, Guiteau believed that he had developed a close relationship with Arthur and was “on free-and-easy terms” with him.

The most fail-proof way to secure an appointment, Guiteau had decided, was to convince Arthur to let him stump for Garfield. Finally, Arthur agreed, giving Guiteau an opportunity to deliver a single speech at a small gathering in New York. Guiteau had spoken for only a few minutes, explaining later that it was too hot, he didn’t like the torch lights, and there were plenty of other speakers waiting to talk. He was convinced, however, that the speech he gave that night had played a pivotal role in putting Garfield in the White House, and that it should certainly guarantee him a position of prominence in the administration.

Within days of his arrival in Washington, Guiteau was at the White House. As he entered the waiting room, he handed the doorman his calling card and quietly took his place among the dozens of other office seekers, perched on wooden tables and chairs before a large, unlit fireplace. The day Guiteau chose to make his first visit to the White House was, even by the standards of the time, an exceptionally busy one. “No day in 12 years has witnessed such a jam of callers at each Executive Dep’t,” Garfield would write in his diary that night, complaining that “the Spartan band of disciplined office hunters … drew paper on me as highway men draw pistols.”

After waiting for a few hours without seeing anyone, Guiteau put his hat back on and left, disappointed but not discouraged. Since November, he had had a change of heart about the Austrian Mission, and he wrote to Garfield that day to deliver the news. “I think I prefer Paris to Vienna, and, if agreeable to you, should be satisfied with the consulship at Paris,” he wrote from the lobby of a hotel where he was not staying but which had more impressive stationery than his own. “Senators Blaine, Logan, and Conkling are friendly to me, and I presume my appointment will be promptly confirmed. There is nothing against me. I claim to be a gentleman and Christian.”