Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

by Candice Millard

“The children were not pleased with the way the story came out,” he admitted in his diary, but he hoped that they would come to “appreciate stories that [do not] come out well, for they are very much like a good deal of life.”

There is some of the slumbering thunder in my soul and it shall come out.”

“I am aware that I launch out upon a fickle current and am about a work as precarious as men follow,”

he felt “like throwing the whole current of my life into the work of opposing this giant evil.”

In 1856, Brown had planned and participated in the brutal slaying of five proslavery activists near the Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas.

Today he is celebrated in a mural inside the Kansas state capitol in Topeka.

“Servitium esto damnatum.” Slavery be damned.

“I have so long and so often seen the evil effects of the presidential fever upon my associates and friends that I am determined it shall not seize me,”

the Great Chicago Fire.

There is an exhibit on the fire at the Chicago History Museum through August 2025.

removed Conkling’s man, Chester Arthur, from his position as the collector of the New York Customs House,

Arthur's replacement was to be Theodore Roosevelt, father of the future president. Hayes was forced to make a compromise that also kept Roosevelt from the position.

Guiteau claimed to work directly for God—to be “in the employ of Jesus Christ & Co., the very ablest and strongest firm in the universe”—he

“There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,” he wrote, “which I can hardly explain.”

Even Mark Twain, who complained that “the voice already carries entirely too far as it is,” talked his boss at the Hartford Courant into putting a telephone in the newsroom. Then, still grumbling that “if Bell had invented a muffler or a gag he would have done a real service,” he had two installed in his own home, one downstairs for his family and a second in the third-floor billiard room just for himself.

He could give fourteen-year-old Mollie a quick hug before she scurried out of the house, books tucked under her arm, on her way to Madame Burr’s School, which she walked to alone every day.

“Whatever fate may await me, I am resolved, if possible, to save my children from being injured by my presidency,” he wrote.

On March 5, Garfield’s first day at work, a line began to form before he even sat down to breakfast. By the time he finished, it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

“What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?”

presidents were expected not only to be personally available to the public, but to live much like them. When President Hayes had traveled to Philadelphia five years earlier for the opening ceremony of the Centennial Exhibition, he had bought a ticket and boarded the train like everyone else.

watching as her temperature steadily climbed, he realized with a helpless desperation that he could do nothing to save her.

By this time, three presidents had died in office (Harrison, Taylor, and Lincoln), and four wives died during or before their husband's terms (Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren, and Tyler).

“My God,” he murmured, “how many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

Thanks to an extraordinary, spontaneous act of sympathy that united passengers and rail workers all along their journey, however, ten-year-old Irvin and eight-year-old Abe remained completely unaware of what had happened to their father.

Whenever they came to a pothole, policemen would carefully lift the ambulance, trying their best not to jar it.

Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.

About like Ronald Reagan after he was shot.

Even the Fourth of July celebrations had been called off, for the first time in the city’s history.

Three presidents had died on the fourth of July, most famously John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the same one.

it nearly drowned him.

William Henry Harrison had survived only one month after contracting pneumonia while giving the longest inaugural address in history on a cold, rainy day.

This is legend but perhaps not fact. Harrison was not noticeably ill the whole month, and may have died from something else.

The glorious day has all too swift an ending; Night cometh after all

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.

Today, Arthur's brownstone is Kalustyan's, an interntional foods store and deli. His inauguration there is noted only by a small plaque inside an unassuming, locked space.