Destiny of the Republic (26 page)

While Guiteau sank deeper into delusion and the country staggered under the weight of shock and grief, a thin ray of hope shone late into the night, every night, in a small laboratory on Connecticut Avenue. From the moment he had left the White House, Alexander Graham Bell had begun work in earnest, thrilled to be back in his own laboratory, where there was little danger of interruption or distraction. He had often worked under intense pressure, under the threat of humiliation, even professional and financial ruin, but he had never before felt the weight of another man’s life in his hands.

Bent over a long, rectangular work bench made of unpainted wood, Bell stared at the latest incarnation of his induction balance, modified to find a bullet in a man’s back. He had been wrestling with the design for weeks and had solicited advice from some of the world’s most respected scientists. He was in contact with everyone from the British inventor David Hughes to the renowned mathematician and astronomer Simon Newcomb to inventors at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the
Scientific American
. “Alec says he telegraphed all leading physicists here and in London and all here at least have answered with suggestions and expressions of interest and desire to help,” Mabel wrote to her mother. “No one thinks they can do enough to help the President.”

At this point in his experiments, Bell had made some significant changes to his original design, most of which revolved around the coils. He had tried winding the primary coil into a conical shape. He had adjusted the coils’ size, making them “enormous” at one point, and as small as a bullet at another. Most important, he had decided to borrow an idea from Hughes and use four coils—two exploring and two balancing—rather than two. He was concerned that if he used his original instrument to search for a bullet, especially over a broad area such as the president’s back, the movement might upset the coils’ delicate balance. By using Hughes’s four-coil design, he could rigidly attach the two exploring coils to each other. Any necessary adjustments could be made to the balancing coils, which would sit on a nearby table, undisturbed.

The result of Bell’s experiments was the instrument that sat before him now. The exploring arm of the invention consisted of a handle, rounded at the top and narrower at its base, attached to a disk carved from walnut. On the other side of the disk were the exploring coils, which he had stacked on top of each other—the larger, primary coil against the disk and the smaller, secondary coil against the primary. Four wires from the coils had been threaded up through a hole Bell had hollowed into the handle. The wires stretched out like tentacles, connecting one coil to the telephone receiver and a balancing coil, and the other to a battery, the second balancing coil, and an automatic circuit interrupter.

Bell and Tainter had already begun testing the design. Before each test, they would fire a bullet against a board, to ensure that it was flattened like the bullet inside Garfield, and then conceal it in their subject. Bell had never hesitated to use unorthodox test subjects. Seven years earlier, while working on a phonautograph, a distant cousin of the phonograph, he had used a dead man’s ear, soaking it in glycerin and water to make it pliable. Now, for Garfield, he used everything from a bag stuffed with wet bran to mimic the electrical resistance of a human body to a massive joint of meat that he had bought from a butcher in an effort to “more nearly approximate the dreadful reality.”

On July 20, as promised, Bliss visited the Volta Laboratory, as had Joseph Stanley Brown the day before. Bliss, who had brought for the inventor two lead bullets exactly like the one lodged in Garfield, watched in silence as Bell repeated a number of his tests. Gripping the induction balance’s handle in one hand, Bell carefully ran the instrument over his subjects. Every time, it found its mark, emitting its now-familiar buzzing through the telephone receiver.

Just days after Garfield’s shooting, Bell had begun carefully detailing his work on the induction balance in a laboratory notebook. He used a modest, bound book with a pebbled cover and a white label that, in handwriting that shook and swerved with each bump in the leather, read “Volta Lab Notes.” On July 9, before he had even returned to Washington, he had expressed his confidence in his invention, scrawled over half an unlined page. “Ball can certainly be located by Induction Balance,” he had written. “See it clearly.”

There was no question that the invention worked. The problem was that it did not yet work well enough. Not only did the induction balance have to detect metal, it had to detect lead, which, among the metals, is one of the poorest conductors of electricity. What Bell yearned for was, quite literally, a silver bullet. “If people would only make their bullets of silver or iron,” he complained, “there would be no difficulty in finding them in any part of the body!”

In its earliest form, the induction balance could detect lead buried only slightly more than an inch deep. After weeks of struggle, Bell had been able to increase that range to just over two inches. His fear was that the bullet in Garfield lay deeper than that.

Convinced that he could stretch the range even farther, Bell rarely left his laboratory, and the strain was apparent. He had dragged his fingers through his black hair and beard so many times, they stood out at sharp, odd angles, like untrimmed trees. Always a serious young man, he had never managed to look youthful. Even when he had fallen in love with Mabel, her family had assumed that he was nearly ten years older than he was. Six years later, as he hunched over the induction balance, his face seemed to be set in a permanent scowl of concentration. No one would have guessed that the dour scientist had only recently celebrated his thirty-fourth birthday.

The Volta Laboratory, moreover, was far from an ideal work environment. Despite Bell’s renovations, the building seemed less like a laboratory than a horse stable, which is what it had been. Bell used the saddle posts that still hung from the walls as coat hooks, but there was little he could do about the smell. No amount of scrubbing could free the small building from the stubborn odor of manure, which seemed to cling to the walls, attracting clouds of flies that drove Bell and Tainter to distraction with their soft, buzzing hum. So unhealthy was the laboratory, in fact, that just a few weeks earlier it had been reported to the board of health.

Bell hardly noticed the clutter or even the smell, but he could not ignore the heat. For a man who suffered blinding headaches brought on by heat, spending the hottest days of summer in Washington, D.C., was excruciating. The summer before, he had complained that his “headache has taken root in my left eye and is flourishing!” Even when he could not bear the sound of a slamming door or ringing telephone, however, he had refused to stop working. “Alec says he would rather die than leave work,” his exasperated wife had written to his mother.

So engrossed had Bell become in his work that he had little time to think about anything else, even his wife, who was pregnant and miserable in sweltering Boston. After not writing to her for more than a week, he apologized for his “epistolary silence,” but then quickly lapsed back into it. Mabel, on the other hand, wrote frequently—both to Bell and about him. “Alec says he is well and bearing the heat well,” she wrote to her mother. “Still I shall be glad to have him home again and his work accomplished. I fear he won’t have the rest he so much needs after all.”

Mabel understood the importance of her husband’s work, but she also knew that he would literally work himself to death before he would give up. She had seen him sick with worry and determination too many times before, and it frightened her to know that this invention, and the good it could accomplish, meant as much to him as anything he had ever done. “I want to know how you are personally,” she wrote to Alec a few days after he had left for Washington. “I fancy you are so eager and excited that you don’t feel the heat as you otherwise would. Only for my sake do take care and don’t wear yourself all out. I … would think the President’s life a poor exchange for yours.”

•
CHAPTER 18
•
“K
EEP
H
EART
”

If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written
upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

W
hile Mabel’s anxiety for her husband grew, Lucretia’s fears for James slowly began to ease. As the weeks passed and the president, whom few had believed would survive the first night, lived on, clear-eyed and cheerful if too weak even to sit up, the sharp terror that had seized her began to loosen its grip. “I hope the dangers are nearly passed,” she wrote to a friend on July 14. “My heart is full of gratitude … so full that I have no words wherewith to express it.” By late July, she had settled into a nervous but steady vigilance. Although she continued to spend the greater part of her days and evenings at James’s bedside, he had convinced her to sleep in a room in another corner of the house, apart from the shuffling and whispering attendants who always surrounded him, and even to venture out on occasion, taking quiet rides through the city.

When she was not with her family, Lucretia had always preferred to be alone. Since becoming first lady, she had dreaded public functions, painfully aware that she paled in comparison to her immediate predecessors, Julia Grant and Lucy Hayes, who were effortless and enthusiastic hostesses. “I hope I shall not disappoint you,” Lucretia had told a group of women who had called on her after James’s inauguration. She also found the rules of etiquette that accompanied her position confusing and almost impossible to follow. In her last diary entry before James was shot, she had lamented a small misstep in protocol that had been quickly reported in the newspapers. “Blundered!” she wrote. “I wonder if I shall ever learn that I have a position to guard!”

After the assassination attempt, Lucretia endured a far more intense and prolonged public scrutiny than any first lady before her. In the midst of it, she won not only the approval of the American people, but their hearts as well. Throughout the country, families who had lost fathers, sons, and brothers to the Civil War, or had watched them suffer and survive, took pride in Lucretia’s courage, knowing far too well how difficult it was to sustain, day after day. “In these few weeks of trial and anxiety,” the
New York Times
wrote, “Mrs. Garfield has achieved a distinction grander and more lasting than ever before fell to the lot of a President’s wife.” Although worry had taken its toll, and Lucretia was even thinner and paler than before, she seemed to those around her to have an almost supernatural strength. “She must be a pretty brave woman,” Mabel wrote admiringly to Bell. “The whole nation leans upon her courage.”

Lucretia’s courage was buoyed by genuine hope. She refused to be lied to or shielded in any way, and she had never been one to pretend that things were better than they were. She now felt, however, that she had real reason for optimism. Not only had her husband survived the initial trauma of the shooting, but his natural vitality and strength had made it possible for him to fight off the early infection introduced by the bullet, and his doctors’ fingers, in the train station. Since July 6, Garfield had been making slow but undeniable progress. His pulse and temperature had been steady. He had been eating and sleeping well, and the pain in his feet and legs had eased. “His gradual progress towards recovery is manifest,” Bliss’s morning bulletin announced on July 13, “and thus far without complications.”

Hope filled the White House, and, as the nation eagerly read Bliss’s bulletins, which were posted several times a day, every day, it radiated throughout the country. Every day, newspapers ran headlines proclaiming that the president was “On the Road to Recovery” and announcing that his condition was “More and More Hopeful.” So confident of Garfield’s survival was the governor of Ohio that he wrote to his fellow governors suggesting that all thirty-eight states designate a “day of thanksgiving for the recovery of the President.”

Garfield himself made every effort to assure those around him that he was not only well but content. “You keep heart,” he told Lucretia. “I have not lost mine.” He endured without complaint excruciating pain and daily humiliations. “Every passage of his bowels and urine required the same attendance bestowed upon a young infant,” one of his doctors would recall. He could not bend his spine, so, in an effort to avoid bed sores, his large body was rolled from one side to another as often as a hundred times a day, a ritual that required at least three people and the strongest linen sheets the White House could find. Garfield, however, “rarely spoke of his condition,” an attendant wrote, “seldom expressed a want.”

The president’s only complaint was loneliness. Although Garfield appeared to have improved dramatically, Bliss continued to deny him any visitors. For a man who cherished his friends and delighted in long, rambling conversations, this isolation was more painful than anything else he had had to endure. His only link to the outside world was through the one window not obscured by the screens Bliss had placed around his bed. It was the same view he had had from his office—a stretch of trees on the White House grounds, the unfinished Washington Monument, and a silver thread of the Potomac. Now, however, as he lay on his back, unable to sit up, his bamboo bed frame lifting him just high enough to see out the window, the scene must have seemed lonely and remote, almost unfamiliar.

Turning to his friend Rockwell, Garfield asked for something with which to write. After handing him a clipboard and a pencil, Rockwell watched as the president wrote his name in a loose, drifting hand that was almost unrecognizable as his signature. Then, underneath his name, he scrawled the words “
Strangulatus pro Republica
”—Tortured for the Republic. “There was never a moment that the dear General was left alone,” Rockwell would later write, “and yet, when one thinks of the loneliness in which his great spirit lived, the heart is almost ready to break.”

Bliss permitted no one to see the president but the handful of friends and family members who had become his nurses. His children, whom he ached to see, were allowed only rare visits. Even Blaine had not seen Garfield since the day he had knelt over him in the train station. Finally, nearly a month after the shooting, Garfield insisted that he see his secretary of state. On a Friday morning in late July, Blaine was ushered into the president’s darkened sickroom. He was relieved to see that Garfield looked better than he had feared, but he had time to do little more than reassure himself that his friend was still alive. Just six minutes after Blaine had entered the room, Garfield’s doctors politely showed him back out.

In part, Bliss defended his decision to keep the president isolated by insisting that it was dangerous for Garfield to talk. By talking, he said, Garfield moved his diaphragm, which in turn moved the liver, the region where Bliss believed the bullet had lodged. “But I move the diaphragm every time I breathe,” Garfield had pointed out. Yes, he was told, but breathing was a gentle movement, while talking was violent.

Garfield did his best to follow his doctors’ instructions, but as his old friend Swaim sat by his bed one night, trying to conjure a small breeze with a fan, he could not resist talking to him. Terrified that Garfield would somehow further injure himself, Swaim asked him several times to stay silent. Finally, when the president tried to strike up yet another conversation, Swaim snapped at him, “I won’t talk to you and won’t listen to you.” Garfield laughed, laid his hand on his friend’s arm, and said, “I will make a treaty with you. If you keep my mouth filled with ice I will keep quiet.”

By late July, Garfield had seemed so strong and steady, so much like himself for so long, that it seemed impossible that he would not recover. Friends and family members in Ohio who had been packing their bags, expecting to go to Washington to be of support and help to Lucretia in her mourning, began canceling their travel plans. “Everywhere,” one reporter wrote, “hope and confidence have taken the place of alarm and doubt.” On July 21, Lucretia told Harriet Blaine that she considered her husband to be “out of danger.”

The very next day, in a descent that seemed as sudden and mysterious as it was terrifying, Garfield began to lose all the ground he had gained. When his wound was dressed that morning, a “large quantity” of pus escaped, carrying with it fragments of cloth that the bullet had dragged into his back and a piece of bone that was about an eighth of an inch long. By evening, he was uncharacteristically restless and so tired he did not even try to speak.

Bliss was not concerned about the pus. On the contrary, he considered it to be a good sign, as did many like-minded surgeons at that time. Just two years earlier, William Savory, a well-regarded British surgeon and prominent critic of Joseph Lister, had proclaimed in a speech to the British Medical Association that he was “neither ashamed nor afraid to see well formed pus.” A wound, he declared, was “satisfactory under a layer of laudable pus.” Bliss could not have agreed more heartily. Garfield’s wound, the medical bulletin announced that night, “was looking very well,” having “discharged several ounces of healthy pus.”

By the next morning, however, even Bliss’s confidence had begun to fade. At 7:00 a.m., the president’s temperature was 101 degrees. By 10:00 a.m., it had risen to 104. “He is feverish and quite restless,” one of Bliss’s attending physicians noted, “and has vomited three times this morning a fluid tinged with bile.”

Quietly, Bliss sent for his surgeons, David Hayes Agnew and Frank Hamilton, who arrived in Washington by a quarter past eight that evening. As Garfield lay in his bed, “drenched with a profuse perspiration,” the two surgeons examined his back and found a small pus sac about three inches below the wound. Using only a sulphuric ether, sprayed directly onto the site, to lessen the pain, Agnew made a deep incision into Garfield’s back and inserted a large drainage tube.

Bliss’s bulletin that day announced that “the President bore the operation well,” and was “much relieved.” Garfield’s condition, however, continued to deteriorate. He vomited repeatedly and was constantly bathed in sweat. Two days after the first surgery, Agnew again operated on the president, enlarging the opening he had earlier made over his rib and pulling out fragments of muscle, connective tissue, and bone, one piece of which was an inch long.

Bliss, Agnew, and Hamilton would later insist that, as they examined and operated on the president, they used an adequate degree of antisepsis. Occasionally, they sprayed Garfield’s back with carbolic acid or rinsed the wound with a “weak solution of car bolic [
sic
] acid (one-fourth of 1 per cent).” Like the surgeons who sterilized their knives and then held them in their teeth, however, the doctors’ efforts did little more than give the appearance of antisepsis. Each time they inserted an unsterilized finger or instrument into Garfield’s back, something that happened several times every day, they introduced bacteria, which not only caused infection at the site of the wound, but entered Garfield’s bloodstream.

Unbeknownst to his doctors, cavities of pus had begun to ravage the president’s body. One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile.

Nearly a month had passed since the shooting, but Bliss and his team of doctors were still probing Garfield’s wound in the hope of answering one question: Where was the bullet? Eager to help solve the mystery, Americans flooded the White House with letters not just of concern and sympathy but medical advice. “We received every morning literally bushels of letters,” one doctor in the White House would later recall. “Every crank … in the country seemed to think himself called upon to offer to cure the president.” One man sent the doctors plans for a suction device that he assured them would suck the bullet right out of Garfield. Another suggested that they simply hang the president upside down until the bullet fell out. A man in Maryland wrote to Bliss saying that there was no reason for concern. The bullet was not in Garfield at all, but with him in Annapolis.