Destiny of the Republic (31 page)

When he was carried into his room, the first thing Garfield noticed was that the bed was turned away from the window. He asked to have it moved, so that he could look out at the sea. A few days later, when he was lifted into a chair so that he could better see the wide expanse of ocean just beyond the cottage walls, he was thrilled. “This is delightful,” he said. “It is such a change.”

Despite the relentless suffering Garfield had endured for more than two months, he had maintained not only the strength of his mind, but the essence of his personality. “Throughout his long illness,” Rockwell would later recall, “I was most forcibly impressed with the manner in which those traits of his character which were most winning in health became intensified.” Even as he lay dying, Garfield was kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful.

When Bliss told him that a fund was being raised for Lucretia, Garfield was overcome with gratitude. “What?” he said in surprise. Then, turning his face to his pillow to hide his emotion, he continued, “How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!” Garfield was then “silent and absorbed for a long time,” Bliss remembered, “as if overwhelmed with the thought.”

Garfield was also deeply grateful to the people who had cared for him for so long, and with such devotion. One day, he placed his hand on the head of one of his attendants and said, “You have been always faithful and forebearing.” For Bliss, who was visibly weakened by exhaustion and worry, he tried to provide a measure of comfort. “Doctor, you plainly show the effect of all this care and unrest,” he said. “Your anxious watching will soon be over.”

Bliss still refused to admit that he could not save the president’s life. A few days after they arrived in Elberon, he issued a bulletin announcing that the last of the attending physicians had been dismissed, leaving him with only occasional assistance from the surgeons Agnew and Hamilton. Garfield was doing so well, Bliss explained in his bulletin, that he wished to relieve the doctors “from a labor and responsibility which in his improved condition he could no longer impose upon them.” To a reporter from the
Washington Post
, Bliss said that Garfield had a “clearer road to recovery now than he ever has had.” There was “no abscess, no pus cavity, no pyemia,” he insisted. “The trouble has now passed its crisis, and is going away.”

Bliss’s assurances, however, no longer went unquestioned. “Despite the announcements that the condition of the President is hopeful and that he is making slight gains daily,” a reporter for the
Medical Record
wrote, “it is quite evident that his chances for ultimate recovery are very poor indeed.” Even Agnew admitted to a friend that he thought the president had very few days left to live. He “may live the day out,” he said, “and possibly tomorrow, but he cannot live a week.”

Garfield was “perfectly calm, sentient,” Bliss wrote, content to live out his last days in this borrowed cottage, gazing at the sea. The president could not help but wonder, however, if, after such a brief presidency, he would leave behind any lasting legacy. “Do you think my name will have a place in human history?” he asked Rockwell one night. “Yes,” his friend replied, “a grand one, but a grander place in human hearts.”

Rockwell was again with Garfield on the evening of September 19. The president had been suffering from chills, fever, and a persistent cough, but still he longed for companionship. Looking over at his old friend, with whom he had passed many happy evenings, he lifted his hands slightly above the bedcovers and wistfully pantomimed dealing a deck of cards. Soon after, Swaim arrived to relieve Rockwell for the night, and Garfield fell asleep.

At 10:00 p.m., as Swaim sat in silence in the president’s room, he suddenly heard Garfield make a gasping sound, as if he were struggling to speak. Rushing to his bedside, he saw, by the light of a single candle, Garfield open his eyes and look at him for a moment. “Well, Swaim,” he said, and then, suddenly pressing his hand to his heart, he cried out, “Oh my! Swaim, what a pain I have right here.”

Bliss was in his room, reading through the day’s multitude of letters offering sympathy and medical advice—“wonderful productions of the human imagination”—when one of Garfield’s attendants appeared at the door. “General Swaim wants you quick!” he said. As soon as he reached the room, Bliss knew that there was nothing he could do. Garfield was unconscious, his breathing shallow and fast. “My God, Swaim!” Bliss cried.

Moments later, Lucretia, who had been woken by the attendant, was standing next to Bliss, looking at her husband in terror. “Oh!” she said, “What is the matter?” For once, Bliss had no words of encouragement to offer the first lady. “Mrs. Garfield,” he replied quietly, “the President is dying.”

As Lucretia bent over James, kissing his brow, the attendant sent word throughout the house and to nearby cottages. One of the first to come was Joseph Stanley Brown. For the rest of his life, Brown would write, he could “hear the long, solemn roll of the sea on the shore as I did on that night of inky darkness, when I walked from my cottage to his bedside.” Before many minutes had passed, the room was filled with everyone who had come with them to Elberon—Garfield’s surgeons, his friends, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Mollie. They were, Bliss would later write, “the witnesses of the last sad scene in this sorrowful history.”

As Bliss tried in vain to stop what was happening, he could feel Garfield slipping away. “A faint, fluttering pulsation of the heart,” he would remember, “gradually fading to indistinctness.” For several minutes, the only sound in the room was the president’s ragged, irregular breathing. Finally, at 10:35 p.m., Bliss raised his head from Garfield’s chest. “It is over,” he said.

There was not a movement or a sound, even of crying. “All hearts,” Bliss would write, “were stilled.” After a moment, the room slowly began to empty, until Lucretia was left alone with James. She sat by his bed for more than an hour, staring at his frail and lifeless body. Finally, Rockwell returned and, gently touching her arm, “begged her to retire.” Without a word, she stood, and allowed him to lead her away.

•
CHAPTER 22
•
A
LL THE
A
NGELS OF THE
U
NIVERSE

If a man murders you without provocation, your soul bears no burden
of the wrong; but all the angels of the universe will weep for the
misguided man who committed the murder.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

J
ust after midnight, as he worked late at his house in Washington, Alexander Graham Bell’s concentration was suddenly interrupted by a newsboy’s shout ringing through the streets. “Extra Republican!” the boy cried. “Death of General Garfield!”

Unable to bear his isolation in Boston any longer, Bell had finally made his way back to the city the day before. Although he was still mourning the death of his son, his thoughts about the induction balance continued to churn urgently even as he had rattled into Washington on the Baltimore and Potomac. “Please hunt in the study and see if you can find [a] bundle of letters and papers in [a] large envelope concerning [the] Induction Balance,” he had written quickly to Mabel as the capital came into view. “If so please send me the names and addresses of the poor people who want to have bullets located.… One especially is from the father of a little boy who was shot last year.”

Now, as he listened to the newsboy’s cries, an exhausted Bell could only reflect on the injustice of the ordeal he had witnessed from such a personal vantage point. “How terrible it all is,” he wrote to Mabel, who was still at home in Boston. “After seventy-nine days of suffering to be obliged to give up at last. I hope indeed that there may be an immortality for that brave spirit. It is too horrible to think of annihilation and dust.”

Science had not been able to prevent the president’s death, Bell conceded, but neither had religion. “If prayers could avail to save the sick,” he reasoned sadly, “surely the earnest heartfelt cry of a whole nation to God would have availed in this case.”

At four o’clock that afternoon, Garfield’s doctors assembled in the Franklyn Cottage for what Brown would refer to as “the final agony.” The president’s autopsy was performed by Dr. D. S. Lamb of the Army Medical Museum, with the assistance of a local doctor and six of Garfield’s original physicians, including Bliss, Hamilton, and Agnew. Brown was also there, having agreed to represent “the official household,” but was so grief-stricken and horrified by the “ghoulish business” that he found it almost impossible to bear.

In the end, the autopsy would take four, excruciating hours to complete. As afternoon turned to evening, Lamb, working slowly and painstakingly, finally had to ask for more lamps to be brought into the room. Across the street, on the porch of the Elberon Hotel, a growing crowd stood peering at the cottage in the fading light, anxious to know why they had lost their president after months of hope and prayers.

The results of the autopsy would surprise no one more than Garfield’s own doctors. Soon after they had opened his abdomen, with a long, vertical incision and then another, transverse cut, they found the track of the bullet. “The missile,” they realized with sickening astonishment, “had gone to the left.” Following its destructive path—as it shattered the right eleventh and twelfth ribs, moved forward, down, and to the left, through the first lumbar vertebra, and into connective tissue—they finally found Guiteau’s lead bullet. It lay behind Garfield’s pancreas, safely encysted, on the opposite side of the body from where they had been searching.

Running down the right side of Garfield’s body was a long channel, which Bliss and eleven other doctors had probed countless times, convinced that, at the end of it, lay the bullet. The autopsy report stated that, while “this long descending channel was supposed during life to have been the track of the bullet,” it was “now clearly seen to have been caused by the burrowing of pus from the wound.” Pus, however, does not burrow. It simply follows an open path, which, in this case, was made by the doctors’ own fingers and instruments. Alongside the channel lay Garfield’s liver, slightly enlarged but untouched. There was, the report noted, “no evidence that it had been penetrated by the bullet.”

What was perhaps as stunning to the doctors as the location of the bullet was the infection that had ravaged Garfield’s body. Evidence of the proximate cause of his death, profound septic poisoning, was nearly everywhere they looked. There were collections of abscesses below his right ear, in the middle of his back, across his shoulders, and near his left kidney. He had infection-induced pneumonia in both of his lungs, and there was an enormous abscess, measuring half a foot in diameter, near his liver. “The initial point of this septic condition probably dates as far back as the period of the first chill,” one of Garfield’s doctors would later admit. “The course of this … infection was practically continuous, and could only result in inevitable death.”

The immediate cause of Garfield’s death was more difficult to determine. After removing most of his organs, they finally found it—a rent, nearly four-tenths of an inch long, in the splenic artery. The hemorrhage had flooded Garfield’s abdominal cavity with a pint of blood, which by now had coagulated into an “irregular form … nearly as large as a man’s fist.” This, they realized, had been the cause of the terrible pain that had forced him to cry out to Swaim just before his death.

After the examination was finally complete, Agnew silently approached the president’s body. As everyone in the room watched, he reached out with one hand and ran his little finger down Garfield’s spinal column. The finger “slipped entirely through the one vertebra pierced by the bullet,” Brown would later recall. Dropping his hand, Agnew turned to the men standing around him and said, “Gentlemen, this was the fatal wound. We made a mistake.” Without another word, he left the room.

In New York, as soon as the press learned of the president’s death, reporters rushed to Chester Arthur’s house on Lexington Avenue, eager for his reaction. His doorkeeper, however, not only refused to let them in but would not even bring them a statement from the vice president. “I daren’t ask him,” he said. “He is sitting alone in his room sobbing like a child with his head on his desk and his face buried in his hands.”

That morning, Arthur had received a telegram from Washington warning him that Garfield’s condition was perilous. Still, he had not been prepared when a messenger had knocked on his door late that night. Just a few hours later, he found himself standing in his parlor, its green blinds closed to the newsmen gathered outside, with a New York state judge standing before him, swearing him into office. By 2:15 a.m. on September 20, Arthur had become the twenty-first president of the United States.

Two days later, in the presence of two former presidents, seven senators, six representatives, and several members of Garfield’s cabinet, Arthur delivered his inaugural address at the Capitol. To the surprise of everyone present, the new president made it clear that he had no wish to strike a different path from his predecessor. On the contrary, he seemed to hope for nothing more than to be the president that Garfield would have been, had he lived. “All the noble aspirations of my lamented predecessor which found expression in his life,” Arthur said, “will be garnered in the hearts of the people, and it will be my earnest endeavor to profit, and to see that the nation shall profit, by his example.”

Although Arthur was well aware that, had they been given the opportunity, his countrymen never would have elected him, he was grateful that they now seemed willing to accept him, perhaps even trust him. Even the governor of Ohio, Garfield’s proud and devastated state, predicted that “the people and the politicians will find that Vice-President Arthur and President Arthur are different men.”

After his inaugural address, Arthur received another letter from his mysterious young adviser, Julia Sand. “And so Garfield is really dead, & you are President,” she began. Her advice now was not action, but compassion. The American people were exhausted and grief-stricken, and Arthur must let them mourn. “What the nation needs most at present, is rest,” Sand wrote. “If a doctor could lay his finger on the public pulse, his prescription would be, perfect quiet.”

Garfield’s body, which was returned to Washington by the same train, now swathed in black, that had carried him to Elberon, lay in state in the Capitol rotunda for two days and nights. The line to see the president stretched for more than a quarter mile, snaking through the hushed streets of Washington, under flags bordered in black and flying at half-mast, and in the shadow of buildings wrapped in so much dark fabric they were nearly hidden from view. “The whole city was draped in mourning,” Garfield’s daughter Mollie would write in her diary. “Even the shanties where the people were so poor that they had to tear up the[ir] clothes in order to show people the deep sympathy and respect they had for Papa.… All persons are friends in this deep and great sorrow.”

The scene near the Capitol, a reporter wrote, was “in many respects the most remarkable that has ever been witnessed in the United States.” More extraordinary even than the size of the crowd, said to include some one hundred thousand mourners, was its unprecedented diversity. “The ragged and toil-stained farm hands from Virginia and Maryland and the colored laborers of Washington,” the reporter marveled, “stood side by side with the representatives of wealth and fashion, patiently waiting for hours beneath the sultry September sun for the privilege of gazing for a minute on the face of the dead President.”

Only one man had no place in this national mourning. In fact, he was told nothing of the president’s death. For Charles Guiteau there was no official notification, nor even a word spoken in passing. He overheard the news from a guard who happened to be standing near his cell at the District Jail. As soon as he realized what had happened, he fell to his knees, desperately mumbling a prayer.

Even before the president’s death, Guiteau’s fantasy that he had the support and sympathy of the American people had begun to crack. More than a week earlier, as he had been standing at his cell window, watching three wagonloads of fresh troops pull up to the prison to stand guard through the night, he suddenly saw a flash and heard the distinct ripping sound of a bullet as it shot past him. Missing his head by just an inch, the bullet sliced through a coat hanging from a nail and slammed into the whitewashed wall.

The bullet, “a great big musket-bullet,” Guiteau would later complain, had come from the gun of one of his own guards, Sergeant William Mason. Although he would later be sentenced to eight years in prison, Mason never expressed regret for his actions. He was tired, he said, of coming to work every day, only to protect a dog like Guiteau.

Throughout the country, there was little condemnation for Mason’s act, and widespread sympathy for his feelings of frustration. Newspapers were filled with letters suggesting creative ways to make Guiteau not only pay for his crime, but suffer in the process. One man proposed that he be thrown to a pack of dogs. Another wanted him to be forced to consume himself, by being fed two ounces of his own flesh every day. Others simply wanted to see him dead, as quickly and with as little fanfare as possible. “There is an American judge whose decisions are almost always just, and whose work is always well done,” one editorial read. “His name is Judge Lynch; and if he ever had a job that he ought to give his whole attention to, he has it waiting for him in Washington.”