Destiny of the Republic (24 page)

Conkling’s attacks on the president, which had continued to make headlines as he fought for reelection to the Senate, now seemed not just petty and vicious, but darkly suspicious. Rumors linking the former senator and the vice president to Guiteau quickly spread. “There is a theory, which has many adherents,” a reporter noted, “that the attempted assassination was not the work of a lunatic, but the result of a plot much deeper and darker than has been suspected.”

Given the country’s tense political situation, this theory may have sprung up without any encouragement at all, but those looking for a conspiracy had been given all the evidence they needed in the words of Guiteau himself. It was already widely known that, as he was being hurried away from the train station, the would-be assassin had shouted, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president!” Although Guiteau insisted he had acted alone, and both Conkling and Arthur quickly denied any relationship with him, in the minds of the American people the connection had been made.

The rumors and accusations, moreover, were not whispered between friends but shouted from every street corner. Newspapers openly accused Conkling and Arthur of being directly to blame for the tragedy that had befallen the nation. “This crime is as logically and legitimately the result of doctrines of Conkling and his followers as the murder of Lincoln was the result of the teachings of Secessionists,” the
Cleveland Herald
charged. “It was not the hand of this miserable office-seeker that armed the deadly blow at the life of Garfield, but the embodied spirit of selfishness, of love of rule, of all that is implied by ‘the machine’ and the ‘one man power,’ in a word, of Conklingism and its teachings.”

Criticized for going too far and calling Conkling a murderer, the
New York Tribune
denied that it had ever used the word. That said, it wrote, “when a child, in its mad rage, kicks over a table, upsets a lamp, sets the house on fire, and burns people to death, nobody supposes that the child intended murder. Mr. Conkling has been acting like a child in a fit of passion.”

So rapidly did the rumors spread that it became dangerous simply to be known as a Stalwart, especially in Conkling’s own state. “Men go around with clenched teeth and white lips,” one newspaper reported. “If any Stalwart in New York should be seen rejoicing he would be immediately lynched.” In a New York prison, two inmates fought so savagely over the possibility of Arthur assuming the presidency that one man killed the other, bludgeoning him to death with an ax.

It did not take Conkling long to understand that neither he nor Arthur was safe from the nation’s fury. The lynching parties being formed, he realized, were not for Guiteau alone. “While there is no intimation that Conkling is blood-guilty in this calamity,” a reporter in Albany, where Conkling was seeking reelection, wrote, “the country will hold him in a degree blamable.”

Even the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Conkling had for years wielded his political power with the confidence of a king in his palace, no longer promised any refuge. After he had escaped to his rooms on the day of the shooting, Conkling rarely left them. Armed police detectives suddenly appeared, pacing the corridor outside his door. It was clear to everyone present, one reporter wrote, “that the ex-Senator had asked for protection.”

Downstairs in the lobby, the hotel’s proprietors received an anonymous note. Scrawled on a card, the handwritten message, which had been signed “The Committee,” read, “Gens: We will hang Conkling and Co. at nine p.m. sharpe.”

PART FOUR
TORTURED FOR
THE REPUBLIC

•
CHAPTER 16
•
N
EITHER
D
EATH NOR
L
IFE

I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost, that the characters
of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

J
ust two weeks after the attempt on the president’s life, Alexander Graham Bell was back in Washington. Although his wife, Mabel, was nearing the advanced stages of her pregnancy and he worried over her, admonishing her not to use the stairs more than necessary and to rest as often as possible, he had not hesitated to leave her. He had promised that they would spend the hottest part of the summer in Maine, but that trip, like everything else in his life, would now have to wait.

A few days earlier, he had contacted Dr. D. Willard Bliss to offer his help in locating the bullet inside the president. Although Bliss was not in the habit of consulting with inventors, Bell had two factors in his favor—his fame and Bliss’s fear. As he watched Garfield’s temperature ominously rise, Bliss had quietly agreed to meet with the young scientist.

As his train pulled into the station, Bell knew that the president’s private secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown, would be waiting for him. Brown quickly spotted Bell and his assistant Tainter in the rush of people pouring from the train and led them to a carriage that was waiting to take them directly to the White House. As they left the station, Bell could see that the hysteria he had witnessed on the day of the shooting had passed. Left in its wake was a palpable feeling of tension and nervousness. The usually noisy, chaotic city was somber and strangely quiet, as if every man were holding his breath. The only pockets of bustling activity were around telegraph stations and newspaper offices, where Bliss’s bulletins were posted on enormous wooden billboards. “Everywhere people go about with lengthened faces, anxiously inquiring as to the latest reported condition of the president and sadly speculating at the probable outcome of this terrible affair,” one newspaper reported.

The entire city was on a deathwatch, and everything, from day-to-day activities to special events, had been postponed, or, in many cases, canceled altogether. Even the Fourth of July celebrations had been called off, for the first time in the city’s history. That morning, the only outward recognition of Independence Day in the nation’s capital had been the raising of the flag on the White House grounds, and even that had been nothing more than a quiet message to a terrified people that their president still lived. “Men looked eagerly to the flag-pole this morning,” a reporter had written that day, “fearing to see the ensign at half mast, and breathed a sigh of relief when they found it floated from the top of the pole.”

When the carriage reached the White House, it became clear that the nation had changed not just suddenly, but fundamentally and irretrievably. Where once an old policeman and a young secretary had been the only barriers between a president and his people, there now stood armed sentinels, flanking the White House as if it were the palace of a king. A reporter mournfully described the sun rising on the capital and looking “down upon the Executive Mansion of a free country guarded by soldiers.” As frightening and un-American as this sight seemed, it did not keep people away. On the contrary, hundreds of people were sprawled out on the lawns just outside the White House gates, many with picnic baskets and blankets, some who had clearly been sleeping there for days, anxious for news.

Bell’s carriage was quickly ushered through the gates, but his meeting with Bliss was brief. The two men discussed the basic theory behind the induction balance and then made arrangements for the doctor to visit the Volta Laboratory to see the invention for himself. Before leaving, Bell turned to Brown and handed him a small gift he had carried on his lap from Boston—a basket of grapes that Mabel had sent for Lucretia. Attached was a note that read, “To Mrs. Garfield, a slight token of sympathy from Mr. & Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell.” Brown assured Bell that the first lady would receive the gift. Then he handed Bell something in return, something that he had given to only a very few people—a card that gave the bearer access to the White House at any time, day or night.

As Bell climbed back into the carriage, eager to return to his laboratory and begin work, Garfield lay in his isolated room on the south side of the White House, where he had been confined to his bed for nearly two weeks, unable to walk or even sit up. Although his temperature had fallen slightly, he was still sweating profusely, his arms and legs were cold, and pus was freely flowing through the drainage tube that his surgeons had inserted that day. On Bliss’s orders, he had been given rum, wine, and an injection of morphine, which he had received at least once a day, every day, since the shooting.

Although Garfield rarely mentioned it, his doctors knew that he was in excruciating pain. He suffered from what Bliss described as “severe lancinating,” or stabbing, pains in his “scrotum, feet and ankles.” Garfield admitted that the pain felt like “tiger’s claws” on his legs, but tried to reassure those around him. “They don’t usually stay long,” he told his friend Rockwell after waking from a fitful sleep one night. “Don’t be alarmed.”

More difficult for Garfield to deny than the pain was the violent vomiting that often seized him. On the morning of the Fourth of July, as plans for celebrations were being hastily canceled, the president vomited every twenty minutes for two hours. Since then, the vomiting and nausea had slowed, but continued to come in unpredictable waves.

Garfield had for years suffered from severe stomach ailments. He had endured chronic dysentery during the Civil War and later battled dyspepsia so extreme that at one point he was confined to bed for nearly two weeks. Finally, a doctor told him that he would have to have a section of his intestines removed. Garfield had avoided such drastic measures, but he carefully controlled his diet, even carrying with him to Congress a lunch that his doctors had prescribed—a sandwich of raw beef on stale bread.

Under Bliss’s care, however, the president’s diet changed dramatically and, for the victim of a gunshot wound, inexplicably. He received a wide variety of rich foods, from bacon and lamb chops to steak and potatoes. Boynton, Garfield’s cousin and one of the doctors whom Bliss had demoted to nursing status, openly criticized the way the president was being fed. “He was nauseated … with heavy food,” Boynton told the
New York Herald
. “He was given a dose of brandy that capped the climax, and he threw up everything, and a severe fit of vomiting followed.”

Although Garfield was dangerously ill, the idea of taking him to a hospital was never considered. Hospitals were only for people who had nowhere else to go. “No sick or injured person who could possibly be nursed at home or in a medical man’s private residence,” one doctor wrote, “would choose … to enter the squalid and crowded wards of the public institutions.” They were dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and vastly overpopulated. The stench was unbearable, and ubiquitous. “Patients, no matter how critical their need,” one reporter noted, “dread the very name of hospital.”

Unfortunately for Garfield, the White House was not much better. The structure had been built into sloping ground, and water constantly trickled in, keeping three layers of floors, two of which were made of unmortared brick, perpetually damp. The servants’ living quarters were dark, cold, and dank. The kitchen, which was underneath the central hallway, was almost beyond repair, with whitewash peeling from the ceilings and sifting down into the cooking pots.

Over the years, the moist rooms and rotting woodwork had proved irresistible to the rats that roamed the city and woods. By the time Garfield and his family had moved in, the entire house was, in the words of one reporter, “packed with vermin from cellar to garret.” At night, when the office seekers had finally abandoned their hopes for the day and the staff had retired to their rooms, the family could hear rats scampering under the floorboards and rustling in the pantries.

Worse than the whitewash in the soup or even the rats in the flour bins, however, was the house’s antiquated plumbing system. An inspection found that it did not even meet the most basic “sanitary requirements of a safe dwelling.” Much of the plumbing, one inspector noted, was “defective—not a little of it radically so.” The plumbing system had been built nearly half a century earlier and could not hope to hold up under the daily demands of waste from seven bathrooms in the primary living quarters, as well as the servants’ chambers, the kitchen, and the pantries. Many of the pipes had long since disintegrated, leaving the soil under the basement saturated with “foul matters.”

The decrepit condition of the White House was no secret to the outside world. One New York newspaper referred to it derisively as a “pest house” and argued that it should be torn down altogether. “The old White House is unfit for longer use as a Presidential residence,” the
Washington Post
declared. “Indeed, it has not, for many years, been suitable for such occupancy.”

Even if the mansion itself had been in good repair, its location was among the worst in Washington. The south lawn ended at the edge of the Potomac’s infamous tidal marsh. Although no one then understood that malaria was carried by mosquitoes, they had made the link between the “bad air” for which the disease was named and the marsh. When the “notoriously unhealthy” house had been blamed for Lucretia’s illness, former president Hayes had rushed to its defense, insisting that it was a perfectly safe place to live. Even Hayes, however, had moved to the Soldiers’ Home in the higher, cooler northwest section of the city every summer, from early July until after the first frost in October, as had Presidents Lincoln and Buchanan before him.

There was now deep concern that the president was being “greatly influenced by the miasma generated by the marshes.” Four servants in the White House had already fallen ill with malaria, and Garfield’s doctors felt certain that if he were to contract the disease, he would not survive it. In a desperate effort to ward off malaria, they gave him five to ten grains of quinine every day. Unfortunately, the dangers of the drug are many. Not only can quinine be toxic if taken in large doses, but it can also bring on severe intestinal cramping, thus causing further trauma to Garfield’s already ravaged digestive system.

Even away from the marsh, the city itself seemed noxious and diseased. Raw sewage floated down the Potomac, coating the thick summer air with a hazy stench, and dust and dirt settled over everything, from buildings to people. “You can’t imagine anything so vile as Washington,” Harriet Blaine wrote in disgust. “It seems like a weed by the wayside, covered with dust, too ugly for notice.” The temperature hovered at 90 degrees. “Scarcely a breath of air was stirring,” one reporter moaned, “and the air was heavy and sultry.” The little breeze there was, moreover, came from the north, never reaching Garfield’s room on the White House’s southern side.

The oppressive heat, and the misery they knew it must be causing the president, prompted many Americans to write to the first lady, suggesting ways in which she might help her husband. “Sitting to day on my piazza, suffering from the great heat, my mind turned to Mr. Garfield,” one man wrote from Georgia, “and it occurred to me that the air of his sick room might be cooled to any degree you wish by having sufficient ice in [the] room over his room, and let cold air down by pipes.” Others suggested hanging sheets that had been dipped in ice water in Garfield’s room, piling ice on the floor, and even placing large pieces of marble on the furniture.

Finally, a corps of engineers from the navy and a small contingent of scientists, which included Garfield’s old friend, the famed explorer and geologist John Wesley Powell, stepped in and designed what would become the country’s first air conditioner. To cool Garfield’s room, which was twenty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and eighteen feet high, the men determined that they would need at least three tons of ice. In the president’s office, they set up an elaborate system comprised of a thirty-six-inch electric fan that forced air through cheesecloth screens that had been soaked in ice water and placed in a six-foot-long iron box. The cooled air was then conducted into the president’s room through a series of tin pipes.