Destiny of the Republic (18 page)

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CHAPTER 11
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“A D
ESPERATE
D
EED
”

There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand
so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from
eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their
breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

O
n 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.”