Destiny of the Republic (19 page)

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
•
“T
HANK
G
OD
I
T
I
S
A
LL
O
VER
”

If there be one thing upon this earth that mankind love and
admire … it is a brave man.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

A
s 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.”

The men who had arrested Guiteau, on the other hand, had lost all professional bearing in the face of a presidential assassination. So excited and flustered were they that not one of them had thought to take the gun. They did not discover their extraordinary oversight until they emptied Guiteau’s pockets. Kearney found his papers first, then a couple of coins—which amounted to all the money he was carrying with him, and likely all he had—and then finally, reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out the weapon Guiteau had used to shoot the president, still loaded with three thick cartridges.

Just ten minutes after he had arrived at police headquarters, as word of the shooting spread and the streets began to fill with angry men searching for the assassin, Guiteau was moved to the District Jail. To his mind, he was going to jail only for his own protection, not because he was an accused murderer who would face trial. “I did not expect to go through the form of being committed,” he would later say. “I went to jail for my own personal protection. I had sense enough for that.”

By the time he stepped into a police department carriage, Guiteau had little thought for the crime he had just committed, or the man he assumed he had killed. His mind was too preoccupied with the celebrity that awaited him. Sherman, he was confident, would soon receive his letter and send out the troops to free him, and Vice President Arthur, overwhelmed with gratitude, would be eager to be of any assistance. Until they could reach him, however, he would need the help of someone less exalted to make his prison stay as comfortable as possible. Recalling what he knew about the District Jail from his trip there the week before, he turned to the detective seated next to him and attempted to strike a deal. “You stick to me and have me put in the third story, front, at the jail,” he said. “Gen. Sherman is coming down to take charge. Arthur and all those men are my friends, and I’ll have you made Chief of Police.”

Although he was in police custody, on his way to prison, Guiteau could not have been more pleased had he been bound for Paris, the consulship to France finally his. He complained that, for weeks, he had been “haunted and haunted and oppressed and oppressed, and could get no relief.” Now that he had finally carried out his divine mission, he could relax and enjoy what was to come. He believed he was about to shake off the poverty, misery, and obscurity of his former life, and step into the national spotlight. He felt happy for the first time in a long time. “Thank God it is all over,” he thought.

For Harry Garfield, who stood in the train station waiting room, desperately trying to fend off the crush of people pressing in upon his father, the nightmare into which Guiteau had plunged his family was only beginning. “Keep back! That my father may have air!” he cried, as his younger brother knelt beside Garfield, sobbing. “Keep them back!” Garfield’s eyes were open, but it was not clear if he was conscious. He “was very pale, and he did not say a word,” Jacob Smith, a janitor who had been the first person to reach the president, would later recall. Smith tried to help Garfield to his feet, but quickly realized that he could not stand and lowered him back to the floor. Garfield looked “very hard” into his eyes, as if trying to make sense of what was happening.

Watching Smith struggle to help Garfield, Sarah White, the ladies’ waiting room attendant, rushed over and placed the president’s head in her lap. Although he was able to ask her for water, and drink what she gave him, he immediately began vomiting again, turning his head so that he would stain his own suit rather than her dress. As tears streamed down White’s face, a station agent leaned over her to remove Garfield’s collar and tie.

Although it seemed to everyone in the station that the president was surely dying, the injury he had sustained from Guiteau’s gun was not fatal. The second bullet had entered his back four inches to the right of his spinal column. Continuing its trajectory, it had traveled ten inches and now rested behind his pancreas. It had broken two of Garfield’s ribs and grazed an artery, but it had missed his spinal cord and, more important, his vital organs.

Just five minutes after the shooting, Dr. Smith Townsend, the District of Columbia’s health officer, arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac. Although he was the first doctor to reach the station, within the hour he would be joined by a succession of nine more physicians, each of whom wanted to examine the president.

Townsend’s first concern was simply keeping Garfield conscious. After asking White to place his head back on the floor so that it would not be elevated, he gave the president half an ounce of brandy and aromatic spirits of ammonia. When Garfield was alert enough to speak, Townsend asked him where he felt the most pain, and Garfield indicated his legs and feet.

What Townsend did next was something that Joseph Lister, despite years spent traveling the world, proving the source of infection and pleading with physicians to sterilize their hands and instruments, had been unable to prevent. As the president lay on the train station floor, one of the most germ-infested environments imaginable, Townsend inserted an unsterilized finger into the wound in his back, causing a small hemorrhage and almost certainly introducing an infection that was far more lethal than Guiteau’s bullet.

After he made his initial examination, Townsend, finally realizing that he needed to get his patient away from the crowd, asked for help moving Garfield. A group of men who worked at the station disappeared into a nearby room and walked out a few minutes later carrying a mattress made of hay and horsehair. As they lifted the president onto the mattress, a groan of pain escaped from his lips, but he did not speak. The conductor of the train Garfield was supposed to be on had run to the scene of the shooting and now cleared the way as the men carried the president out of the waiting room and up a set of winding stairs that led to a large, empty room over the station.

As Garfield lay on the crude mattress, vomiting repeatedly and falling in and out of consciousness, he worried about Lucretia, who expected to see him that day. She was still recovering from an illness that had nearly killed her, and he was terrified that when she learned of the shooting the shock would be too much for her to bear. There was nothing he could do to protect her from the news. The best he could hope for was to somehow tell her himself. Motioning for his old friend Almon Rockwell to come close, he said, “I think you had better telegraph to Crete.” Rockwell listened intently to Garfield, determined to faithfully convey his words, and then left to send the most difficult telegram he had ever had to write.

On his way to the telegraph station, Rockwell passed the members of Garfield’s cabinet who had intended to travel with the president. They had been walking on the train station platform, waiting for Garfield to arrive, when Colonel John Jameson, an agent of the Postal Railway Service, came running up to them, shouting that the president had been shot. So unexpected and shocking was the news that at first they did not believe him. It was not until they heard the chaos and screaming in the station that they realized that Jameson was telling the truth, and quickly followed him to the somber room above the tracks.

As soon as the cabinet members appeared, Blaine pulled them aside and told them that he knew the assassin. “I recognized the man … before, I think, the police had even discovered his name,” Blaine would later say. He had not seen Guiteau pull the trigger, but he had caught sight of him as he fled toward the exit, and with a shock of recognition had realized that he was the same man who had sat in the State Department waiting room day after day, insisting that he be given a consulship.

While the cabinet members discussed Guiteau, a second doctor entered the room—Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital. Although he was only thirty-nine years old, Purvis had already made history several times over. He was one of the first black men in the country to receive his medical training at a university, had been one of only eight black surgeons in the Union Army during the Civil War, and was one of the first black men to serve on the faculty of an American medical school. Now, as he leaned over Garfield, recommending that blankets be wrapped around his body and hot water bottles placed on his feet and legs, he became the first black doctor to treat a president of the United States.