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

by Candice Millard

Charles Guiteau was an unremarkable figure. He had failed at everything he had tried, and he had tried nearly everything, from law to ministry to even a free-love commune. He had been thrown in jail. His wife had left him. His father believed him insane, and his family had tried to have him institutionalized. In his own mind, however, Guiteau was a man of great distinction and promise, and he predicted a glorious future for himself.

Like Guiteau, Garfield had started out with very little in life, but where Guiteau had found failure and frustration, Garfield had found unparalleled success. The excitement surrounding the unexpected, charismatic candidate was palpable, and Guiteau was determined to be a part of it.

Eliza Garfield’s greatest ambition for her second son was a good education. She came from a long line of New England intellectuals, including a president of Tufts College and the founder and editor of a Boston newspaper.

Unable to afford tuition, he convinced the school to allow him to work as a janitor in exchange for his education. He swept floors, hauled wood, and made fires, and he never tried to hide his poverty from his fellow students. As he walked to the tower every morning, having left the first lecture of the day early so he could ring the school’s enormous bell, his “tread was firm and free,” a friend would recall years later. “The same unconscious dignity followed him then that attended him when he ascended the eastern portico of the Capitol to deliver his Inaugural address.”

Beast. I like James Garfield already.

His day began at 5:00 a.m., as he immersed himself in Virgil before breakfast, and it continued, unabated, with studying, classes, work, and more studying until just before midnight. No one worked harder, and if they came close, Garfield took it as a personal challenge.

‘Some other fellow in the class will probably master it.’ ” As determined as Garfield was to outpace his fellow students, his fiercest competition was with himself. “He had a great desire and settled purpose to conquer,” a classmate and student of his wrote. “To master all lessons, to prove superior to every difficulty, to excel all competitors, to conquer and surpass himself.”

In 1854, Garfield was accepted to Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where the competition was greater than he had ever experienced, stirring in him an even fiercer ambition. “There is a high standard of scholarship here and very many excellent scholars, those that have had far better advantages and more thorough training than I have,” he wrote to a friend soon after arriving in Williamstown. “I have been endeavoring to calculate their dimensions and power and, between you and me, I have determined that out of the forty-two members of my class thirty-seven shall stand behind me within two months.”

Four months after Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter, he was made a lieutenant colonel in the Union Army. Soon after, at thirty years of age, he was promoted to colonel and enthusiastically began recruiting men from Ohio to join the ranks of his regiment—the 42nd.

Worse, its commander was a young academic who had spent the past decade thinking about Latin and higher math and had absolutely no military experience, in war or peace.

It was in that moment, Garfield would later tell a friend, that “something went out of him … that never came back; the sense of the sacredness of life and the impossibility of destroying it.”

Throughout his life, Garfield had been an ardent abolitionist.

Garfield would not take his congressional seat until more than a year later, when Abraham Lincoln asked him to.

When it came to the presidency, Garfield simply looked the other way. He spent seventeen years in Congress, and every day he saw men whose desperate desire for the White House ruined their careers, their character, and their lives.

“This world,” he had learned long before, “does not seem to be the place to carry out one’s wishes.”

In 1880, the Republican Party was sharply divided into two warring factions. At the convention, delegates had little choice but to choose a side—either the Stalwarts, who were as fiercely committed to defending the spoils system as they were opposed to reconciliation with the South; or the men whose values Garfield shared, a determined group of reformers who would become known as the Half-Breeds.

If anyone was considered a safe bet in this turbulent convention, it was Grant. The idea of a third term, for anyone, was controversial, and the two terms Grant had already served as president had been notoriously rife with corruption.

On the first anniversary of President Lincoln’s assassination, he had been asked to give an impromptu eulogy, even though he was then one of the most junior members of Congress.

the crowd roared its approval, Conkling went on, never deigning to qualify or explain, never hesitating to ridicule the competition or to use the most extravagant praise for his candidate.

“Gentlemen of the Convention,… when your enthusiasm has passed, when the emotions of this hour have subsided, we shall find below the storm and passion that calm level of public opinion from which the thoughts of a mighty people are to be measured, and by which final action will be determined.

On the thirty-fourth ballot, however, an extraordinary thing happened.

In an effort to avoid too many pregnancies, Noyes preached what he called “male continence.” Intercourse, “up to the very moment of emission,” he insisted, “is voluntary, entirely under the control of the moral faculty, and can be stopped at any point. In other words, the presence and the motions can be continued or stopped at will, and it is only the final crisis of emission that is automatic or uncontrollable.… If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” It was like rowing a boat, Noyes said. If you stay near the shore, you’ll be fine. It’s only when you row too near a waterfall that you find yourself in danger.

Theological basis for edging

On it Guiteau, uneducated, isolated, and friendless, had written a strangely grandiose, utterly delusional announcement: “Chas. J. Guiteau of England, Premier of the British Lion will lecture this evening at seven o’clock.”

Delusions of grandeur.. felt as if he was divinely called.

Whatever his occupation, Guiteau survived largely on sheer audacity.

It was a habit that may have given him some release but little rest, as he succumbed to what his mother described as a “musical fever.”

Even to Bell’s father, a highly regarded elocutionist who for years had worked in his study until two in the morning, developing a universal alphabet, his work habits seemed not just extreme, but dangerous.

“James A. Garfield, who had known all the hardship of abject poverty, in the presence of a mother who had worked with her own hands to keep him from want—was about to assume the highest civil office this world knows. As the party so stood for a moment, cheer after cheer, loud huzzas which could not be controlled or checked, echoed and reechoed about the Capitol.”

Knowing that without New York it would be difficult to win the presidency, and that without Conkling it would be almost impossible to win New York, they had decided to offer the vice presidential nomination to one of Conkling’s men. No one in the Republican Party was more Conkling’s man than Chester Arthur.

Garfield had resolved to stop speaking to a journalist who had tried to vilify him in the press. The next time he saw the man, however, he could not resist greeting him with a cheerful wave. “You old rascal,” he said with a smile. “How are you?” Garfield realized that, in a political context, the ease with which he forgave was regarded as a weakness, but he did not even try to change. “I am a poor hater,” he shrugged.

“Of course I deprecate war,” he wrote, “but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”

The Secret Service had been established sixteen years earlier, just a few months after President Lincoln’s assassination, but it had been created to fight counterfeiting, not to protect the president. Over the years, the agency’s duties had broadened to include law enforcement, but no particular attention was given to the White House.

Their courtship was long, awkward, and far more analytical than passionate.

In 1855, when Garfield returned to Ohio from Massachusetts, where he was attending Williams College, Lucretia seemed to him as cold and remote as the first time he met her. “For the past year, I had fears before I went away, that she had not that natural warmth of heart which my nature calls so loudly for,” he

a White House employee who helped shepherd callers through the president’s anteroom later explained. “It was just the usual human method of saving trouble and avoiding a scene.” Guiteau, however, believed that the president was carefully studying his application and that his appointment was only a matter of time.

This guy reminds me of Joaquín Phoenix in the joker

Herald in his war against the president. Connery agreed, although he knew there was not much he could do to save Conkling from himself.

Notes on where we left off: C. lost his post in NYC, and wanted to launch an attack on Garfield through the press.

“If the President was out of the way every thing would go better.” Guiteau

On June 30, as the cabinet was about to adjourn for the last time before the president’s trip, Garfield suddenly turned to Lincoln with an unusual question. He had heard, he said, that his father had had a prophetic dream shortly before his assassination, and he wondered if Robert would describe it. Although a private and reserved man, Lincoln agreed to tell the story.

Lincoln had believed deeply in dreams, seeing in them omens that he dared not ignore. After having “an ugly dream” about their son Tad, he had advised his wife to put Tad’s pistol away. Another time, while in Richmond, Virginia, he had asked her to return to Washington after he dreamed that the White House was on fire. When questioned about his belief in dreams, Lincoln had often cited the Bible as support. He pointed to Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, as well as several other chapters in the Old and New Testaments. These passages, he said, “reveal God’s meaning in dreams.”

Science would soon exceed even Bell’s expectations. 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.

For the review

Although five years had passed since Lister presented his case to the Medical Congress at the Centennial Exhibition, many American doctors still dismissed not just his discovery, but even Louis Pasteur’s. They found the notion of “invisible germs” to be ridiculous, and they refused to even consider the idea that they could be the cause of so much disease and death.

Arthur had never been seen as anything more than Conkling’s puppet, with no mind or ambition of his own. A large man with a long, fleshy face, carefully groomed sideburns that swept to his chin, and a heavy mustache that drooped dramatically, Arthur put nearly as much thought into his appearance as did the famously preening Conkling. He had even changed his birth date, quietly moving it forward a year out of what a biographer would term “simple vanity.”

Kamala Harris

Arthur was also widely known as a man of leisure, someone who liked fine clothes, old wine, and dinner parties that lasted late into the night. As collector of the New York Customs House, he had rarely arrived at work before noon. In stark contrast to Garfield, he had been a lackluster student, and even now seemed to have little interest in the life of the mind.

What an NPC

What made the suffering even harder to bear was that, despite the fury directed at men like Conkling and Arthur, it was devastatingly clear that there was nothing and no one to blame. In no man’s mind save the assassin’s had the shooting achieved anything. It had not been carried out in the name of personal or political freedom, national unity, or even war. It had addressed no wrong, been the consequence of no injustice.

Having long thirsted for fame and recognition, he found the intense interest in his life and the frenzy of activity that surrounded him at the District Jail not terrifying but thrilling. “I felt lighthearted and merry the moment I got into that cell,” he would later say.

Lincoln had lived only a few hours after he was shot; Zachary Taylor had succumbed to cholera in just a few days; and William Henry Harrison had survived only one month after contracting pneumonia while giving the longest inaugural address in history on a cold, rainy day. Garfield—much younger, stronger, and with a family to care for—had already lived twice as long as Harrison. Finally,

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.”