Destiny of the Republic (20 page)

As the tension rose, and everyone around him spoke in hushed, panicked voices, Garfield remained “the calmest man in the room,” Robert Todd Lincoln marveled. Lying on his left side, his coat and waistcoat removed so that the wound was exposed, Garfield turned to one of the doctors closest to him and asked what chance he had of surviving. “One chance in a hundred,” the doctor gravely replied. “We will take that chance, doctor,” Garfield said, “and make good use of it.”

Secretary Lincoln watched the events unfolding around him with an all-too-familiar horror. His memory of standing at his father’s deathbed sixteen years earlier was vivid in his mind, and he was shocked and sickened by the realization that he was now witnessing another presidential assassination. “My God,” he murmured, “how many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

Suddenly, Lincoln decided that he would not simply stand by and watch Garfield die. Remembering that his own carriage was waiting just outside the station, he rushed out of the room, down the stairs, and to the door. Calling for his driver, he instructed him to find Dr. D. Willard Bliss, one of the doctors who had tried without hope to save his father.

Lincoln chose Bliss in part because he knew he would be a familiar sight to Garfield. Bliss had lived near the president’s childhood home in Ohio, and had known him as “an earnest, industrious boy … whose ambitions were evidently far above his apparent advantages.” Years later, when he was a congressman, Garfield had supported and encouraged Bliss when the doctor was expelled from the powerful District of Columbia Medical Society after disagreeing with its policy to bar black doctors and showing an interest in the relatively new medical field of homeopathy. When the society repeatedly and openly attacked Bliss, accusing him of conferring with “quacks” and seriously damaging his reputation, Garfield had written to him, praising his actions. By their condemnation, the society had “decorated” Bliss, Garfield insisted. “I have no doubt it will do you good.”

In the end, Bliss could not hold up under the pressure. After six years he had buckled, apologizing to the society, returning to its fold, and turning his back on the men he had once championed. By doing so, he had regained his reputation and lucrative medical practice. By the time of Garfield’s shooting, Bliss had been a practicing surgeon for thirty years. He had had a thriving practice in Michigan, had served as a regimental surgeon during the Civil War, and had run the Armory Square Hospital across the street from the Smithsonian Institution. Over the years, he had won the respect and admiration of a wide segment of the population, including even Walt Whitman, who had been a steward at the Armory Square Hospital and had described him as a “very fine operating surgeon.”

Bliss’s record, however, was far from spotless. Although it seemed that his occupation had been determined at birth, when his parents named him Doctor Willard, giving him a medical title for his first name, Bliss’s desire for recognition and financial compensation was nearly as all-consuming as Guiteau’s. While at the Armory Square Hospital, he had been accused of accepting a $500 bribe and was held for several days in the Old Capitol Prison. Just ten years earlier, he had been heavily involved in a controversy surrounding a purported cure for cancer called cundurango, a plant native to the Andes Mountains. Believing that cundurango would be to cancer what quinine was to malaria, he had staked his professional reputation on it, selling it wherever he could and even posting hyperbolic advertisements: “Cundurango!” one ad read. “The wonderful remedy for Cancer, Syphilis, Scrofula, Ulcers, Salt Rebum, and All Other Chronic Blood Diseases.”

More ominous for Garfield was the fact that Bliss had very little respect for Joseph Lister’s theories on infection, and even less interest in following his complicated methods for antisepsis. Although he had once been open to working with not only black doctors but also homeopaths, physicians who believed in using very small doses of medicine, Bliss’s approach to medicine had changed dramatically after his battle with the Medical Society. Now, like most doctors at that time, he was a strict adherent to allopathy, which often involved administering large doses of harsh medicines that, they believed, would produce an effect opposite to the disease.

As soon as Bliss arrived at the station in Lincoln’s carriage, he assumed immediate and complete control of the president’s medical care. Striding into the room where Garfield lay, he briefly questioned Townsend and Purvis and then quickly began his own, much more invasive examination of the patient. Opening his bag, Bliss selected a long probe that had a white porcelain tip. Fourteen years before the invention of the X-ray, doctors used these probes to determine the location of bullets. If the tip came against bone, it would remain white, but a lead bullet would leave a dark mark.

With nothing to even ease the pain, Garfield lay silent as Bliss searched for the bullet inside him. Pressing the unsterilized probe downward and forward into the wound, Bliss did not stop until he had reached a cavity three inches deep in Garfield’s back. At this point, he decided to remove the probe, but found that he could not. “In attempting to withdraw the probe, it became engaged between the fractured fragments and the end of the rib,” he later wrote. He finally had to press down on Garfield’s fractured rib so that it would lift and release the probe.

Although the probe was finally out, Garfield had no respite. Bliss immediately began to explore the wound again, this time with the little finger of his left hand. He inserted his finger so deeply into the wound that he could feel the broken rib and “what appeared to be lacerated tissue or comparatively firm coagula, probably the latter.”

By this time, Purvis had seen enough. With a boldness that was then extraordinary in a black doctor addressing a white one, he asked Bliss to end his examination. Ignoring Purvis, Bliss removed his finger from the wound, turned once again to his bag, and calmly selected another probe, this one made of flexible silver. Bending the probe into a curve, he passed it into Garfield’s back “downward and forward, and downward and backward in several directions” while Purvis looked on, unable to stop him.

•
CHAPTER 13
•
“I
T’S
T
RUE
”

It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow that
it finds solace in unselfish thought.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

L
ucretia was packing her bags in her hotel room in Elberon, New Jersey, preparing to meet James for their trip to New England, when General David Swaim knocked on her door. At one point during the Civil War, when Garfield had been too sick to walk, Swaim had literally carried him home. Now, he held only a telegram in his hands, but his words made Lucretia’s heart miss a beat. There has been an accident, he said. Perhaps she should return to Washington.

Lucretia took the slip of paper and slowly read the message that her husband had dictated to Rockwell in the train station:

T
HE
P
RESIDENT WISHES ME TO SAY TO YOU FROM HIM THAT HE HAS BEEN SERIOUSLY HURT—HOW SERIOUSLY HE CANNOT YET SAY.
H
E IS HIMSELF AND HOPES YOU WILL COME TO HIM SOON.
H
E SENDS HIS LOVE TO YOU.

Looking up at Swaim, she said, “Tell me the truth.”

As Swaim attempted to tell Lucretia the little he knew, Ulysses S. Grant appeared at the door. He had been staying in his son’s cabin just across the street for the past two weeks, but, still nursing a grudge, had done nothing before now to acknowledge the president and first lady beyond a stiff bow and tip of his hat. “I do not think he can afford to show feeling in this way,” Garfield had written in his diary just the week before. “I am quite certain he injures himself more than he does me.”

As soon as Grant learned of the assassination attempt, however, the hard feelings and wounded pride of the past year were forgotten. Taking Lucretia’s hand in his, the former president and retired general was at first “so overcome with emotion,” one member of Grant’s party would recall, “he could scarcely speak.” Finally, he was able to tell Lucretia that he had brought with him something that he hoped would give her a measure of comfort. He had just received a telegram from a friend in Washington who was certain that the president’s wounds were not mortal. From what he knew of the injury, Grant agreed. He had known many soldiers to survive similar wounds.

Although he did not stay long, Grant’s words and, perhaps even more, his kindness were an emotional life raft for Lucretia, something to cling to until she could see James. Hurriedly finishing her packing, she left the hotel with Mollie to catch a special train, made up of just an engine and one Pullman car, that had been arranged to take them to Washington as quickly as possible. By the time they reached the station, a crowd had already gathered, many of the women crying as the men stood in silence, hats in hands.

As Lucretia’s train sped south toward Washington, another train, traveling west, carried her youngest sons to Mentor, Ohio, where they were to spend the summer. By telegraph and telephone, news of their father’s shooting had raced ahead of them, stirring fear and confusion throughout the country. “All along the route … crowds collected at the stations we passed, and begged for news,” one conductor would later say. “The country seemed to become more feverish as the day advanced.”

Thanks to an extraordinary, spontaneous act of sympathy that united passengers and rail workers all along their journey, however, ten-year-old Irvin and eight-year-old Abe remained completely unaware of what had happened to their father. Even as citizens throughout the country struggled with their own reactions to the news of Guiteau’s crime, the president’s children became a focus of national concern. No one could bear the thought of them alone on the train, learning that their father had been shot.

While the boys gazed out the railcar window, watching trees and towns flash by, stationmasters and railroad officials passed ahead instructions not to discuss the assassination attempt. Passengers and even newsboys showed astonishing restraint. “Conductors passed quietly through the train that carried the boys westward, requesting silence as they whispered the news,” Garfield’s granddaughter would write years later. “The children reached Mentor unaware of the dark cloud that was enveloping their family.”

When the boys finally arrived it was noon, more than an hour after news of the assassination attempt had reached the little town. They were quickly bundled into a carriage and brought to their family farm. While neighbors and friends slipped in and out of the farmhouse, hoping to be told that the rumors were untrue, a reporter spoke to Lucretia’s father. “We have not said a word to the [boys],” Zeb Rudolph admitted. “We hoped that it may not be true, and now that it is true we almost fear to tell them.” Struggling to keep his composure in the presence of a stranger, he watched as his grandsons played “in happy ignorance” on the wide, sun-soaked lawn.

In the second-story room above the Baltimore and Potomac station, Garfield asked only one thing of the more than a dozen men who hovered over him—that they take him home. After enduring Bliss’s excruciating examinations and listening to ten different doctors discuss his fate, Garfield finally convinced the shell-shocked members of his cabinet that, although the White House, with its rotting wood and leaking pipes, was no place for a sick man, anything was better than this room. As gently as they could, eight men lifted the president and carried him back down the steep stairs while he lay on the train car mattress, now stained with vomit and blood.

When they reached the waiting room, the men could hardly believe their eyes. In the brief time they had spent upstairs, trying to understand the extent of the president’s injuries, the once orderly station below them had transformed into a madhouse. “The crowd about the depot,” one man would recall, “had become a swaying multitude, with people running from every direction in frantic haste.” Within ten minutes of the shooting, a mob had gathered on Sixth and B Streets. An attempt to storm the building, in the hope of finding the assassin and lynching him, had been prevented only by a desperate telephone call to the police.

As soon as Garfield appeared, however, the character of the crowd immediately changed. Men and women who had been screaming with fear and fury just moments before suddenly recovered their reason, quietly urging each other to make room for the president as he was carried out of the station and carefully put into a makeshift ambulance. “I think I can see now,” one of Garfield’s doctors would write years later, “the sea of human faces that completely filled the space in and around the depot, as we carried him down the stairs, and through the depot, with the mingled expressions of pity and consternation that sat upon each of them.” Once settled on the mattress and a pile of hastily arranged cushions, Garfield, his right arm lifted over his head and his face “ashy white,” looked silently out the window.

Hoping to spare the president any additional pain, the ambulance driver guided his horse so slowly over the broken brick streets that hundreds of people were able to keep up with his wagon, somberly walking just behind it. Whenever they came to a pothole, policemen would carefully lift the ambulance, trying their best not to jar it. Garfield’s “sufferings must have been intense,” one reporter wrote, “but he gave no sign of it, and was as gentle and submissive as a child.”

Joseph Stanley Brown was working alone in his office, just as Garfield had left him, when one of the White House doormen suddenly appeared before his desk. There was something about the way the man walked in, “haltingly and timidly,” that made Brown uneasy. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “there is a rumor that the President has been shot.”

Years later, Brown would struggle to explain how he felt when he heard those words. It was as if he were “suddenly congealed,” he said, as if his hectic, bustling world had lurched to a stop. Desperately trying to dismiss the idea, and to sound more confident than he felt, he snapped at the doorman. “Nonsense!” he said. “The story cannot possibly be true.”

The man quickly shuffled away, but Brown could not shake the sickening feeling that had settled over him, nor would he have a chance to. Just moments after he had managed to return his attention to his work, his office door suddenly burst open, and a messenger staggered into the room. “Oh, Mr. Secretary,” he cried, “it’s true, they are bringing the President to the White House now.”

Although Brown would later admit that he was more shocked than he had ever been, or would ever again be, he instinctively sprang into action, reacting with the same intelligence and pragmatism that had convinced Garfield to trust him with such a critical job. “Even in moments of greatest misery,” he would later write, “homely tasks have to be performed, and perhaps they tide us over the worst.” If the president was injured, a bed must be made ready at once. There was a suitable room in the southeast corner of the house, and Brown ordered a steward to prepare it “with all speed.”

Then Brown personally took charge of the fortification of the White House and the protection of the president. With complete confidence and authority, he ordered the gates closed and sent a telegram to the chief of police, requesting a “temporary but adequate detail of officers.” Next he contacted the War Department and arranged for a military contingent for Garfield, a man who had never had so much as a single bodyguard.

Although Brown’s first priority was to secure the White House, he knew that he could not seal it off completely. The American people deserved “full and accurate information” about their president, and he was determined that they would get it. With astonishing speed and efficiency, he had passes issued to journalists and government officials so that they might have access to his office at any time, day or night.

As he raced through the halls of the White House, giving orders, inspecting rooms, and turning an entire wing into a “miniature hospital,” Brown paused for a moment to glance out the window. Below him, he saw a modest wagon trundling up Pennsylvania Avenue. It looked suitable for neither a president nor a wounded man, but as it slowed to enter the gates, he suddenly noticed the crowd gathered around it. Garfield, he knew, was inside.