Destiny of the Republic (23 page)

The idea had worked, and Bell had patented it in England that same year but had given it little thought since. Now, as he considered the president’s wound, he recalled that his tests in 1877 had shown him that his method of balancing induction could not only achieve a quiet line, it could detect metal. “When a position of silence was established,” he wrote, “a piece of metal brought within the field of induction caused the telephone to sound.”

After “brooding over the problem,” Bell realized that he could turn his system for reducing interference into an instrument for finding metal—the induction balance. He would loop two wires into coils, connecting one coil to a telephone receiver and the other to a battery and a circuit interrupter, thus providing the changing current necessary for induction. Then he would arrange the coils so that they overlapped each other just the right amount. He would know he had them perfectly adjusted when the buzzing sound in the receiver disappeared. If he then passed the coils over Garfield’s body, the metal bullet would upset the balance, and Bell would literally be able to hear it through the receiver. In this manner, the telephone, his most famous and frustrating invention, would “announce the presence of the bullet.”

Bell’s instincts told him that the induction balance would work, but he could not be certain until he tested it. Feeling frustrated and helpless in Boston, without his laboratory, his equipment, or his assistant, he once again turned to Charles Williams’s electrical shop, where he had met both Watson and Tainter, and where, just seven years earlier, he had built the first telephone. At “great personal inconvenience,” Williams did everything he could to help Bell, giving him laboratory space, equipment, and his best men.

Bell, however, still wanted his own man. Tainter, who had continued to work in the Volta Laboratory since the shooting, “received an urgent request from A. G. Bell … to join him.” The next day, he was on a train bound for Boston. Both men knew that, if they were to have any hope of helping the president, they had to work quickly. Although still little more than an idea in Bell’s mind, their invention would be Garfield’s only hope of avoiding death at his doctor’s hands.

•
CHAPTER 15
•
B
LOOD
-G
UILTY

We should do nothing for revenge.… Nothing for the past.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

F
rom his cell deep in the District Jail, Guiteau was gratified to learn that, as he had predicted, General William Tecumseh Sherman had sent out his troops. The heavily armed company of artillery that flanked the somber stone building, however, was there not to free the president’s would-be assassin, but to make sure he wasn’t dragged outside and lynched. So great was the fear that a mob would overwhelm the prison that its guards had at first denied that Guiteau was even there. “Information had reached them,” the
New York Times
reported, “that, should the fact be made known that he was there, the building would be attacked.”

After the initial shock of the president’s shooting, the prevailing feeling throughout the country was one of unfettered rage. The fact that Guiteau had been captured and was in jail, awaiting trial, did little to satisfy most Americans’ desire for immediate revenge. “There were many who felt intensely dissatisfied that the indignant crowd in Washington was not permitted to wreak summary vengeance on the assassin of the President,” one reporter wrote. “Many declared that the proper disposition of him would have been to have held him under the grinding wheels of the railroad train which was to have carried President Garfield away.”

Although Guiteau was widely assumed to be insane, the thought that he was alive while the president lay dying was unbearable. “While it seems incredible that a sane man could have done so desperate and utterly inexcusable a deed,” a newspaper reported, “the feeling is quite general that it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.” In Brooklyn, as a “roar of indignation went up that echoed from end to end of the town,” the mayor declared that “the wretch ought to be hanged whether he was insane or not.” Rumors spread that a group of six hundred black men had already formed a lynching party, determined to settle the matter themselves.

Aside from occasional interviews with reporters in the warden’s office, Guiteau rarely left his cell, which was even more difficult to reach than Garfield’s sickroom in the White House. On the top floor of the prison’s south wing, Cell Two belonged to a grim block of seventeen cells known as Murderers’ Row. Guiteau’s door was sunk three feet into a brick wall and barred with an L-shaped bar, a steel catch, and a lock that held five tumblers. In fact, so famously escape-proof was Guiteau’s cell that fifteen years later the renowned magician Harry Houdini would thrill onlookers by escaping from it after allowing himself to be stripped, searched, and locked in.

Although prison officials went to elaborate lengths to make sure their most famous prisoner could not escape, their efforts were unneeded. Guiteau was not going anywhere. He was perfectly content to be in the prison—safe, comfortable, and well fed—while he waited for his friends to free him. In an interview on July 4 with the district attorney and his own lawyer, Guiteau said that Chester Arthur was “a particular friend of mine.” At the very least, the vice president would make certain that he would not be punished for his crime. Soon after settling into his cell, Guiteau wrote Arthur a lighthearted letter, giving some advice on the selection of his cabinet and offering a friendly reminder that, without his help, Arthur would not be about to assume the presidency.

While Guiteau planned Arthur’s first term, Arthur, unaware of what had happened, was concerned about the political career of only one man—Roscoe Conkling. Since the New York legislature had refused to reinstate Conkling after his dramatic resignation from the Senate, he had embarked on a desperate campaign to regain his seat. Although Conkling was widely known to be the president’s fiercest detractor, Arthur had made no effort to conceal his support. On the contrary, so intimately had he been involved in Conkling’s reelection bid that he was jeered in the press for “lobbying like any political henchman.”
Harper’s Weekly
had run a front-page cartoon of Arthur wearing an apron while he shined Conkling’s shoes.

Even in the moment when he learned that the president had been shot, Arthur was with Conkling. The two men had just stepped off an overnight steamer from Albany to Manhattan, where they had planned to take a brief break from their lobbying, when Arthur was handed a telegram. As he scanned the message, a reporter waiting anxiously on the dock for his reaction watched as his face blanched with shock.

The thought of Garfield dying terrified Arthur. The vice presidency was a prominent but undemanding job that had suited him well. Now, however, with the president near death, Arthur’s position had been suddenly elevated to one of far greater importance than he, or anyone else, had ever believed possible.

Clutching the telegram in his hand, Arthur reacted instinctively, turning, as he always had, to Conkling for direction. Far from frightened by this sudden turn of events, Conkling tucked Arthur even more tightly under his wing. Flagging down a taxi, he quickly steered Arthur into the carriage and climbed in next to him. Rather than seeing the vice president to the train station so that Arthur might take the first express into Washington, or even taking him home, Conkling ordered the driver to take them directly to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and not spare the whip.

As soon as they arrived at the hotel, however, Conkling could tell that even this bastion of Republican stalwartism had already changed. Across the street, the sidewalk was choked with people struggling to see the front windows of a telegraph office that had posted the most recent bulletins about the president’s condition. As Conkling and Arthur entered the hotel and walked through its ornate, marbled lobby, they were greeted not by warm, collegial smiles but by faces fixed in fear and anger. The library, sitting rooms, and bar were overflowing with more than a hundred anxious men, all fighting for a position near a small telegraph office and a beleaguered stock indicator, both of which produced bulletins at excruciatingly long intervals.

A reporter who had spent the morning at the hotel, interviewing powerful political men and listening in on their heated conversations, noticed that the general thinking had already begun to shift. The idea had taken root that something other than insanity may have been behind the president’s shooting. “More than one excited man declared his belief,” the reporter wrote, “that the murder was a political one.” If politics was involved, even tangentially, it followed that only one man could be to blame. “This is the result of placating bosses,” a man standing in the hotel bar growled. “If Conkling had not been placated at Chicago, President Garfield would not now be lying on his deathbed.”

So suffocatingly crowded was the main lobby that it took Arthur and Conkling ten minutes just to reach the reception desk. By the time Conkling had his hands on the hotel register, he and Arthur were encircled by reporters shouting questions. Quickly signing his name, Conkling, his jaw set and teeth clenched, dropped the pen and strode toward the stairs, a knot of reporters at his heels.

Conkling no doubt assumed that Arthur would be right behind him, but, for the first time since he had taken office, the vice president did not follow his mentor. Making a visible effort to calm himself, Arthur turned to the reporters gathered around him and, his voice shaking, asked what news they had of the president. After hearing the most recent bulletin, Arthur expressed his “great grief and sympathy,” and then hurried up the stairs toward Conkling’s suite.

As the vice president hunkered down in New York, and Garfield fought for his life in Washington, the nation began to realize that, at any moment, its fate might be suddenly thrust into the hands of Chester Arthur. Across the country, among men and women of both parties, the prospect of Arthur in the White House elicited reactions of horror. Even a prominent Republican groaned, “Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!”

Arthur had never been seen as anything more than Conkling’s puppet, with no mind or ambition of his own. A large man with a long, fleshy face, carefully groomed sideburns that swept to his chin, and a heavy mustache that drooped dramatically, Arthur put nearly as much thought into his appearance as did the famously preening Conkling. He had even changed his birth date, quietly moving it forward a year out of what a biographer would term “simple vanity.”

Arthur was also widely known as a man of leisure, someone who liked fine clothes, old wine, and dinner parties that lasted late into the night. As collector of the New York Customs House, he had rarely arrived at work before noon. In stark contrast to Garfield, he had been a lackluster student, and even now seemed to have little interest in the life of the mind. “I do not think he knows anything,” Harriet Blaine wrote disdainfully of Arthur. “He can quote a verse of poetry or a page from Dickens or Thackery, but these are only leaves springing from a root out of dry ground. His vital forces are not fed, and very soon he has given out his all.”

During the campaign, there had been some discussion about the fact that, were Garfield elected, Arthur would be next in line to the presidency, but the possibility of something happening to Garfield had seemed so remote as to be hardly worth considering. He was in the prime of his life, the picture of health and strength, and would be president during a time of peace. Arthur would be constrained by the limits of his office, where he could do little harm. “There is no place in which the powers of mischief will be so small as in the Vice Presidency,” E. L. Godkin, the famously acerbic editor of the
Nation
, had then written. “It is true General Garfield … may die during his term of office, but this is too unlikely a contingency to be worth making extraordinary provisions for.”

Now the unthinkable had happened, and Arthur could become president at any moment. The very idea caused hearts to sink and shoulders to shudder. After giving his readers a cursory review of Arthur’s political career, Godkin now wrote with disgust, “It is out of this mess of filth that Mr. Arthur will go to the Presidential chair in case of the President’s death.”

The unavoidable comparison to Garfield, moreover, did not help Arthur’s case. Garfield was “a statesman and a thorough-bred gentleman … a man whose mind was filled with great ideas for the good of all,” a man at the Fifth Avenue Hotel told a reporter. “Gen. Arthur appears as a politician of the most ordinary character, a man whose sole thought is of political patronage, and a man who has for his bosom friends and intimate companions those with whom no gentleman should associate.”

It was Arthur’s friends, and, in particular, his close ties to Conkling, that worried Americans even more than his own questionable character. “Republicans and Democrats alike are profoundly disturbed at the probable accession to the Presidency of Vice-President Arthur, with the consequence that Conkling shall be the President de facto,” one newspaper reported. In his diary, former president Hayes, whose one term in the White House had been made miserable by Conkling, choked with rage at the thought of his nemesis in such proximity to power. “Arthur for President!” he scrawled in horror in his diary. “Conkling the power behind the throne, superior to the throne!”