Destiny of the Republic (34 page)

On March 11, while most New Yorkers stayed home, or huddled in bars or train stations—three hundred people slept in Grand Central Terminal—Conkling insisted on going to work. Then, as the storm steadily worsened, he refused a hack driver’s offer to drive him for fifty dollars, and insisted on walking home. It took even Conkling, who was a famously vigorous walker, three hours to walk the three miles from his office to the New York Club at Broadway and Twenty-first Street. Moments after he walked in the door, he fell facedown onto the entryway floor. “He didn’t crumble, he didn’t collapse,” his biographer would write. “He fell full length. For he was that kind of man.”

Conkling survived that night, even returned to work, but on April 4 he fell ill again. For nearly two weeks, he fought to gain the upper hand, falling in and out of a feverish delirium. Twelve years earlier, while suffering from a severe case of malaria, Conkling had told a friend through clenched teeth, “I am
not
going to die.” Now, he paced the floor of his room, fighting off those who tried to help him as his temperature soared. The battle lasted until two o’clock on the morning of April 17, when, more than a month after he had walked through one of the deadliest snowstorms in New York history, Conkling died from pulmonary edema.

Although there were many deaths in the late nineteenth century that even the most skilled physicians had no ability to prevent, Garfield’s was not one of them. In fact, following his autopsy, it became immediately and painfully apparent that, far from preventing or even delaying the president’s death, his doctors very likely caused it.

Bliss had a few loyal defenders, but as a whole, the international medical community forcefully condemned the decisions he had made and the actions he had taken, particularly the repeated, unsterilized probing of the president’s wound. Just six months after Garfield’s death,
The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
printed a lecture by the renowned German surgeon Friedrich Esmarch. “It seems that the attending physicians were under the pressure of the public opinion that they were doing far too little,” Esmarch had said. “But according to my opinion they have not done too little but too much.”

American physicians were less gentle in their assessment. Bliss had done “more to cast distrust upon American surgery than any time heretofore known to our medical history,” one doctor wrote. Young surgeons, especially, were scornfully critical of Bliss’s care. “None of the injuries inflicted by the assassin’s bullet were necessarily fatal,” wrote Arpad Gerster, a thirty-three-year-old New York surgeon who had recently been in Europe, studying the “Listerian method of wound treatment,” and would write the first American surgical textbook based on that method. To the physicians of his generation, Gerster continued, Garfield’s death proved with certainty that, as the poet Thomas Gray had written more than a century earlier, “ignorance is Bliss.”

Bliss, however, refused to be cowed. Garfield, he said, had died not from a massive blood infection, but as the result of a broken backbone. He insisted, moreover, that the care he had given the president had been not only adequate, but exemplary. In a document titled “Statement of the Services Rendered,” Bliss and the few surgeons he had allowed to work with him argued that “he should receive, as he merits, the sympathy and goodwill (as well as the lasting confidence) of every patriotic citizen for the great skill, unequalled devotion and labor performed in this notable case, which … secured to the distinguished patient the perfection of surgical management.”

To the astonishment of the members of Congress, Bliss confidently presented them with a bill for $25,000—more than half a million dollars in today’s currency. While caring for the president, Bliss said, he had lost twenty-three pounds, and his health was “so greatly impaired as to render him entirely unable to recover or attend to his professional duties.” Congress agreed to pay Bliss $6,500, and not a penny more. Bliss, outraged, refused to accept it, bitterly complaining that it was “notoriously inadequate as a just compensation.” Seven years later, Bliss would die quietly at his home following a stroke, having never recovered his health, his practice, or his reputation.

The day after her husband’s funeral, Lucretia Garfield returned home to Mentor. At first, even surrounded by family and friends—her children, her mother-in-law, Rockwell and his family, and Swaim and his wife had all gone with her—the house felt achingly empty. “Now that Papa has gone,” James, her second son, wrote that night, “our home will be desolate.” For Lucretia, the farmhouse had always been filled with her husband’s great, booming laughter, or with the happy anticipation of his return. “Had it not been that her children needed her more than at any time in their lives,” Mollie would write of her mother years later, “life would have meant very little to her.”

Lucretia, however, would not surrender to grief. One of the few outward concessions she would make to a life of mourning was her stationery, which, from the day of James’s death until her own, would be trimmed in black. The letters she wrote, however, were strong and fearless—most often in the protection either of her children’s future, or her husband’s memory. She had become, in the words of Garfield’s mother, James’s “armed defender.”

Although it was a role that Lucretia did not enjoy, she was determined to do it well. She spent countless hours correcting articles about James, keeping private letters out of books and newspapers, and trying to discourage eager but talentless portraitists. She informed one painter that his portrait of Garfield was “not very good” and that she hoped he would not let anyone else see “such an imperfect representation.”

Lucretia’s first concern, however, was for her husband’s papers. She asked Joseph Stanley Brown for his help in organizing them, and she used some of the money from the fund that had been established for her to build an addition to the farmhouse. The second floor of this wing was made into a library, which would become the nation’s first presidential library.

Within the library, Lucretia installed a fireproof vault. Today, that vault still holds the wreath that Queen Victoria sent upon Garfield’s death. Among the first items Lucretia placed in it, however, were the letters that she and James had written to each other over twenty-two years of marriage. She included all that she had, even the most painful. To one small bundle of letters, she attached a note. “These are the last letters and telegrams received from My Darling,” she wrote, “during the five days I remained at Elberon previous to the fearful tragedy of July 2nd, 1881.”

The most precious product of her marriage to James, their children, would, under her firm guidance, grow up to live full and useful lives, lives that would have made their father exceedingly proud. Their oldest son, Harry, would become a lawyer, a professor of government at Princeton, and, like his father, a university president—of Williams College, Garfield’s alma mater. James, also a lawyer, would become Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior in 1907. Of James, Roosevelt would write, “He has such poise and sanity—he is so fearless, and yet possesses such common sense, that he is a real support to me.” Irvin would become a lawyer as well, and Abe, the youngest, an architect. All of Garfield’s sons, no matter where they settled, remained close to their mother, often visiting her and the family farm that had shaped their boyhoods.

Perhaps more than her brothers, Mollie would struggle to accept the loss of their father. “Sometimes I feel that God couldn’t have known how we all loved & needed him, here with us,” she wrote in her diary two months after his death. “I don’t believe I shall ever learn to say ‘Thy will be done’ about that.” The holidays were particularly painful, when she kept expecting to hear the little song, “Ring out wild bells,” that her father used to sing, “to a tune he made himself.” “Oh! me!” she wrote, “How I miss my darling father.”

In the end, Mollie would find comfort and strength in an emotion even more powerful than grief—love. Little more than a year after her father’s death, Mollie, now sixteen, wrote in her diary not a lament, but a confession. She had fallen in love with the young man who had been like a son to her father—Joseph Stanley Brown. “I believe I am in love,” she wrote. “I don’t believe I will ever in my life love any man as I do Mr. Brown—and it can’t be merely like. For I
like
Bentley, Don, and Gaillard Hunt. And it isn’t infatuation, for when I first knew Mr. Brown I didn’t like him at all. No, I’m sure it is nothing but honest & true love.”

Brown had turned down Arthur’s request to stay on in the White House as the president’s private secretary. He wished, he said, to complete the work he had begun. When he had finished that work—organizing Garfield’s papers and preparing them for binding—he left Mentor for New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School.

Little more than two years later, Brown returned to Ohio, a college-educated man. When Mollie arrived home after a trip to England with her mother, he was waiting for her at the dock, with a ring in his pocket. The diamond was, Mollie would later tell her daughter, “a small stone, but a
very
good one.” Three months later, Mollie and Joseph were married, in a double wedding with Harry Garfield and his fiancée, Belle Hartford Mason. The wedding took place before the large bay window of the library that Lucretia had built for James.

After Garfield’s death, Alexander Graham Bell stayed on in Washington, still convinced that his induction balance would save lives. The reason for its failure remained a frustrating and demoralizing mystery to Bell until the day Garfield’s autopsy results were announced. “It is now rendered quite certain why it was that the result of the experiment with the Induction Balance was ‘not satisfactory,’ as I stated in my report,” he wrote soon after to Mabel, in a letter filled with as much anger as sorrow. “For the bullet was not in any part of the area explored.”

The realization that, while he had carefully searched Garfield’s right side for the bullet, it had been lying on the left, was sickening to Bell. “This is most mortifying to me and I can hardly bear to think of it,” he confessed to Mabel. “I feel that now the finger of scorn will be pointed at the Induction Balance and at me—and all the hard work I have gone through—seems thrown away.” More painful to him than the damage to his reputation was the thought that his invention would be dismissed as useless, or even dangerous. “I feel that I have really accomplished a great work—and have devised an apparatus that will be of inestimable use in surgery,” he wrote, “but this mistake will re-act against its introduction. The patients I am anxious to benefit would hardly be willing to risk an operation … after what has occurred.”

As dejected as Bell was, however, he could not give up on his invention. On October 7, less than a month after Garfield’s death, he again tested the induction balance, this time on several patients of Dr. Hamilton, who had been one of Garfield’s surgeons. The tests were an unqualified success—the first time the invention had found a bullet “the position of which was previously unknown”—and they left Bell even more convinced that, had he been permitted to search both sides of Garfield’s body, he would have found Guiteau’s bullet.