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

by Candice Millard

At five feet seven inches tall, with narrow shoulders, a small, sharp face, and a threadbare jacket, 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.

Guiteau, however, believed that luck had nothing to do with his survival. As he stepped off a steamship that had come to the Stonington’s rescue, Guiteau felt certain that he had not been spared, but rather selected—chosen by God for a task of tremendous importance. Disappearing into the crowd, he dedicated himself to what he now saw clearly as the divine mission before him.

James Garfield. A former professor of ancient languages, literature, and mathematics who had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter, Garfield’s interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad. In fact, so detailed was his interest in mathematics, and so acute his understanding, that he had recently written an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem during a free moment at the Capitol. The New England Journal of Education had published the proof just the month before, transparently astonished that a member of Congress had written it.

he believed that it was science, above all other disciplines, that had achieved the greatest good. “The scientific spirit has cast out the Demons and presented us with Nature, clothed in her right mind and living under the reign of law,” he wrote. “It has given us for the sorceries of the Alchemist, the beautiful laws of chemistry; for the dreams of the Astrologer, the sublime truths of astronomy; for the wild visions of Cosmogony, the monumental records of geology; for the anarchy of Diabolism, the laws of God.”

In Garfield’s experience, education was salvation. It had freed him from grinding poverty. It had shaped his mind, forged paths, created opportunities where once there had been none. Education, he knew, led to progress, and progress was his country’s only hope of escaping its own painful past.

When he was still a very young man, he had hidden a runaway slave.

In Congress, he fought for equal rights for freed slaves.

Leaning into a transmitter he had set up earlier in the day, he slowly began to recite Hamlet’s famous soliloquy. For Bell, it was a natural choice. He had known the speech by heart since he was fourteen, when his grandfather had taught it to him in Scotland. As he spoke, Shakespeare’s words now traveled by wire, traversing the gallery to where the judges waited in suspense. Sitting at the table, with the iron box receiver pressed tightly to his ear, Dom Pedro heard an extraordinary sound—Bell’s voice, heart-wrenchingly clear. “To be, or not to be,” he said. Leaping from his chair, the emperor shouted, “I hear! I hear!”

In that moment, Bell’s life was transformed. To the rest of the world, he would no longer be a teacher, or even simply an inventor, but the creator of the telephone.

Standing before a crowded hall at the centennial fair’s Medical Congress, the British surgeon struggled to convince his audience, a collection of the most experienced and admired physicians and surgeons in the United States, of the critical importance of antisepsis—preventing infection by destroying germs. Although the men listened politely, very few of them believed what Lister was telling them, and almost none of them seriously considered putting his theory into practice.

Although the results were dramatic—the death rate among Lister’s surgical patients immediately plummeted—antisepsis had provoked reactions of deep skepticism, even fury. In England, Lister had been forced repeatedly to defend his theory against attacks from enraged doctors. “The whole theory of antisepsis is not only absurd,” one surgeon seethed, “it is a positive injury.” Another charged that Lister’s “methods would be a return to the darkest days of ancient surgery.”

In the early 1800s, Ohio was the American frontier. Wild and largely unmapped, it had not joined the Union until 1803, becoming the country’s seventeenth state. Ohio was the first state to be created out of the Northwest Territory. Iroquois and Shawnee tribes were still scattered throughout the Ohio Valley, fiercely fighting for the little land they had left, but time was running out. They had lost their British allies after the War of 1812, and Andrew Jackson would pass the Indian Removal Act less than twenty years later, forcing them all onto reservations.

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.”

So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor. Along with the subjects he was taking as a student, he was given a full roster of classes to teach, including literature, mathematics, and ancient languages. He taught six classes, which were so popular that he was asked to add two more—one on penmanship and the other on Virgil.

Two things ended Garfield’s academic career: politics and war. When an Ohio state senator died unexpectedly in the summer of 1859, Garfield was asked to take his place in an upcoming election.

Little more than a year after Garfield entered politics, the country was plunged into civil war. Garfield, anxious to leave the legislature for the battlefield, wrote to a friend that he had “no heart to think of anything but the country.” 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.

“I hope to have God on my side,” Lincoln reportedly said, “but I must have Kentucky.” Garfield’s regiment did not have a hope of succeeding. The Confederate force it faced was two thousand men strong, fortified with a battery of four cannons and several wagonloads of ammunition, and led by Humphrey Marshall, a well-known, well-seasoned brigadier general who had graduated from West Point the year after Garfield was born. In sharp contrast, the 42nd had five hundred fewer soldiers and no artillery. 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.

out. In the end, the struggle for Kentucky’s allegiance came down to a single, seminal battle—the Battle of Middle Creek—and a military strategy that some would call brilliant, others audacious.

the 42nd finally reached Marshall’s men. Despite the Confederate force’s size and artillery, Garfield refused to wait for additional troops. Instead, he divided his already small regiment into three even smaller groups. The plan was to attack the rebels from three different sides, thus giving the impression, Garfield hoped, of a regiment that was much larger and better equipped than his. Incredibly, Marshall believed everything Garfield wanted him to, and more.

Finally, convinced that a “mighty army”—a force of four thousand men with “five full regiments of infantry, 200 cavalry, and two batteries of artillery”—had surrounded him, Marshall ordered his men to retreat, leaving Kentucky solidly in Union hands.

For Garfield, however, the Civil War was about more than putting down a rebellion or even preventing the country from being torn in two. It was about emancipation. Throughout his life, Garfield had been an ardent abolitionist.

In the fall of 1862, just ten months after the Battle of Middle Creek, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, receiving nearly twice as many votes as his opponent, although he had done nothing to promote his candidacy.

Inexplicably, it seemed that the only cause for which Garfield would not fight was his own political future. In an early-adopted eccentricity that would become for him a central “law of life,” he refused to seek an appointment or promotion of any kind. “I suppose I am morbidly sensitive about any reference to my own achievements,” he admitted. “I so much despise a man who blows his own horn, that I go to the other extreme.”

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. The Stalwarts had nothing but contempt for their rivals within the party, particularly Rutherford B. Hayes, who was about to complete his first term in the White House.

By the time Garfield entered Congress, he was a highly skilled rhetorician. The only problem was that, as good as he was at speaking, he enjoyed it even more, perhaps too much. It was not unheard of for him to speak on the floor of Congress more than forty times in a single day, and when he gave a speech, it was rarely a short one.

Hayes was not alone in his assessment of Conkling’s character. As is true of most men who wield their power like a weapon, Conkling was widely feared, slavishly obeyed, and secretly despised.

The last state was called, and Garfield was left with 399 votes, 20 more than were needed to win. Having never agreed to become even a candidate—on the contrary, having vigorously resisted it—he was suddenly the nominee.

Finally, desperate for money, Guiteau decided to take up a profession, choosing one that he thought would be lucrative—the law. In a time when law school was encouraged but not required he read a handful of books, served as a clerk for a few months, and then stood for the bar. His examiner was a prosecuting attorney named Charles Reed, who, according to Guiteau’s brother-in-law, himself a lawyer, was a “good-hearted fellow,” if not particularly discerning. Reed “asked him three questions and he answered two and missed one,” Scoville recalled, “and that was the way he got to be a lawyer.”

While Garfield worried over his crops, political war was being waged in his name. The principal target of attack was the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Widely known as “Hancock the Superb,” he was famous for his courage and resounding success during the Civil War, but he had never held an elected office and was perceived to have little more than a clouded understanding of his own platform. The Republicans, naturally, did everything in their power to encourage this perception, including distributing a pamphlet that was titled “Hancock’s Political Achievements” and filled with blank pages. Hancock’s greatest liability, however, was his own party. Although he had been a Union hero, he could do nothing to change the fact that, in the minds of the American people, the Democratic Party was still inextricably linked to the South. Garfield himself referred to it as the “rebel party”

1880 presidential campaign.

The keynote speaker that night, and the cause of all the excitement, was Frederick Douglass. After climbing to the platform, the august former slave, now a human rights leader and marshal of the District of Columbia, wasted no time in telling his audience which presidential candidate would receive his vote. “James A. Garfield must be our President,” he said to riotous cheers. “I know [Garfield], colored man; he is right on our questions, take my word for it. He is a typical American all over. He has shown us how man in the humblest circumstances can grapple with man, rise, and win. He has come from obscurity to fame, and we’ll make him more famous.” After pausing once more as the cheers reverberated through the hall, Douglass went on. Garfield, he said, “has burst up through the incrustations that surround the poor, and has shown us how it is possible for an American to rise. He has built the road over which he traveled. He has buffeted the billows of adversity, and to-night he swims in safety where Hancock, in despair, is going down.”

Although Garfield did not allow himself to campaign, he could not resist addressing the thousands of people who traveled to Mentor to see him. In what came to be known as “front porch talks,” he would stand on his wide veranda, talking to enormous groups—from five hundred members of an Indianapolis Lincoln Club, to nine hundred women who had traveled together from Cleveland.

When a group of Germans stood before him, he spoke to them in their native language, delivering the first speech by an American presidential candidate that was not in English.

Although Garfield did not show a great deal of interest in the election, the rest of the country did. Voter turnout was 78 percent, and as the results began to come in, it quickly became clear that it was going to be a close race.

Interest was particularly high in the wake of the previous presidential election, when Rutherford B. Hayes was widely believed to have stolen the presidency from Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden, the governor of New York, had won the popular vote by a clear and undisputed margin, and, with all but four states accounted for, had 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 165. However, when the remaining four states reported two different sets of returns, Congress formed an electoral commission to distribute their votes. The commission, a highly partisan group made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats, awarded all twenty of the disputed votes to Hayes, handing him the presidency by one electoral vote.

he had won the election and was to be the twentieth president of the United States,

While the telephone had lifted him from poverty, made him famous, and won him the respect of the world’s most accomplished scientists, it had also robbed him of what he valued most: time. Bell had always believed in the telephone, not just its inventiveness but its usefulness. But even he had not anticipated how quickly and widely it would be embraced. “I did not realize,” he would admit years later, “the overwhelming importance of the invention.”

Alexander Graham Bell.

Just beyond the Mall stood the painfully incomplete Washington Monument, which, in the words of Mark Twain, looked like “a factory chimney with the top broken off.”

Status as of Garfield’s Inauguration Day, 3/4/1881.

Sherman was, a reporter wrote, “the very picture of an old soldier in his slouch hat and great coat,” his orderlies “dash[ing] up to him on horseback from all directions.” Behind him marched twenty thousand militia, including thirteen companies of artillery, the red-lined capes of their coats carefully pinned over their shoulders and their bayonets glittering in the sun. Soon after, the first strains of music from the Marine Corps Band could be heard. The band, which had accompanied the inaugural procession since Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, was now led by the twenty-seven-year-old John Philip Sousa.

Although nearly a dozen people stepped onto the portico, all eyes were on only three: Frederick Douglass, who led the procession; the president-elect; and his mother, Eliza. It was an extraordinary scene, a testimony to the triumph of intelligence and industry over prejudice and poverty, and it was not lost on those who witnessed it. “James A. Garfield sprung from the people,” a reporter marveled. “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.

When he finished his address, Garfield stood for a moment on the portico, his hands raised to the sky. “There was the utmost silence,” one reporter wrote, as the new president appealed “to God for aid in the trial before him.” The trial, in fact, had already begun. The rivalry between the two factions within the Republican Party had only deepened since the convention in Chicago nine months earlier. Roscoe Conkling’s fury at Grant’s defeat had turned to outrage when it became clear that Garfield would not bow to his every demand. In August, in a desperate attempt at reconciliation, party bosses had arranged a meeting at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. Garfield had traveled all the way from Mentor for it, but Conkling, who lived in New York, had not even bothered to appear.

Since Garfield’s election, Conkling had decided to take a more direct approach. If Garfield would not let him personally select the cabinet, he would dismantle it, one appointee at a time. In a letter he had written to Garfield just days before the inauguration, Conkling had warned the president-elect that he would be wise to keep in mind who was really in charge. “I need hardly add that your Administration cannot be more successful than I wish it to be,” he wrote. “Nor can it be more satisfactory to you, to the country, and to the party than I will labor to make it.”

Garfield’s biggest problem was his own vice president—Chester Arthur. Not only had the Republican nomination been thrust upon Garfield without his consent, but so had his running mate. Flush with victory, Garfield’s supporters had begun to plan the campaign while still at the convention hall, and without consulting their candidate. 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. Politically, Arthur was wholly Conkling’s creation. The only public position Arthur had held before becoming vice president of the United States was as collector of the New York Customs House, a job that Conkling had secured for him and which paid more than $50,000 a year—as much as the president’s salary, and five times as much as the vice president’s. Even then, he had been forced out of office amid widespread allegations of corruption.

“The Ohio men have offered me the Vice Presidency,” Arthur told him. Conkling, with barely suppressed fury, replied, “Well, sir, you should drop it as you would a red hot shoe from the forge.” For the first time in his life, however, Arthur defied his mentor. “The office of the Vice President is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining,” he said. “I shall accept the nomination.” Although Conkling had stormed out of the room that night, it had not taken him long to realize that having Arthur in the office of vice president was nearly as useful as having Grant in the White House. Perhaps even more so. While Grant was very much his own man, Conkling had complete control over Arthur.

Arthur even lived in Conkling’s home at Fourteenth and F Streets in Washington. By the time Conkling witnessed his protégé’s swearing in, in a private ceremony that took place inside the Capitol just before Garfield’s inauguration, he was thrilled at the prospect of advising Arthur in his new role in Washington.

while Garfield was a poor hater, he was a very good fighter. As president, he wrote in his diary, he was “determined not to be classified the friend of one faction only,” and he vowed to “go as far as I can to keep the peace.” That said, he had never before walked away from a fight, and he was not about to do so now. He had fought everyone from hardened canal men to unruly students to Confederate soldiers, and he knew that, whether he liked it or not, he now had another battle on his hands. “Of course I deprecate war,” he wrote, “but if it is brought to my door the bringer will find me at home.”

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. When he learned what awaited him, he was dismayed but not surprised. Office seekers had begun showing up at his home in Mentor the day after the election, parking themselves on his front lawn, his porch, and, if they could get in the door, even his living room sofa. Most painful to Garfield was the fact that, within the throng, he often found his own friends. “Almost everyone who comes to me wants something,” he wrote sadly, “and this embitters the pleasures of friendship.” Those who waited outside the White House, moreover, did not want simply to apply for a position. They wanted to make their case directly to Garfield himself. As the leader of a democratic nation, the president of the United States was expected to see everyone who wanted to see him.

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. Then, the year before Garfield took the oath of office, Congress cut the Secret Service’s annual budget nearly in half, to just $60,000, and restricted its agents, once again, to investigating counterfeiting cases.

Americans, however, felt somehow immune to this streak of political killings. Although in his dispatch to Russia, Garfield made “allusion to our own loss in the death of Lincoln,” Lincoln’s assassination was widely believed to have been a tragic result of war, not a threat to the presidency. Americans reasoned that, because they had the power to choose their own head of state, there was little cause for angry rebellion. As a result, presidents were expected not only to be personally available to the public, but to live much like them.

“Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he wrote, “and it is best not to worry about either.”

James A. Garfield.

He found out where John Logan, a Republican senator from Illinois, was staying and took a room in the same boardinghouse. One morning, hearing footsteps in the outer room of his suite, Logan stepped out from his bedroom to find Guiteau sitting in a chair near the door. When he saw the senator, Guiteau quickly stood up, greeted him by name, and handed him a copy of his “Garfield against Hancock” speech. Logan, who had no idea who this strange man was, found himself listening helplessly as Guiteau told him that the speech he was holding had “elected the President of the United States, Mr. Garfield,” and that he was now waiting to be appointed consul-general to France. Secretary Blaine, Guiteau said, had promised him the appointment if Logan would give him a recommendation. He then pulled from his pocket a piece of paper on which he had written a three-line recommendation in large print and asked Logan to sign it. Logan declined. “He did not strike me as a person that I desired to recommend for an office of that character, or for any other office,” he would later say. “I treated him as kindly and as politely as I could; but I was very desirous of getting rid of him.”