The Assassination of James Garfield

The case

Charles Guiteau chose an ivory-handled revolver over a cheaper wooden-gripped one because he thought it would look better in a museum. The store owner knocked a dollar off so he could afford it. That detail, which he cheerfully volunteered, tells you most of what the country later learned about the man who shot James Garfield: he was certain of his own historical importance, broke, and entirely untroubled by the gap between the two.

Guiteau, born in Freeport, Illinois, in 1841, had drifted through a utopian religious commune at Oneida, a short-lived newspaper, a thin law practice and a career as a lecturer and bill collector. His family had tried to have him committed in 1875. In the 1880 campaign he wrote a speech, first in praise of Ulysses Grant and then, when Garfield won the Republican nomination, hastily retitled for Garfield. He never delivered it in public, but he had copies printed and became convinced it had won the election. He came to Washington the day after the inauguration in March 1881 to collect his reward, a consulship in Vienna or, failing that, Paris.

For two months he haunted the White House waiting room and the State Department, until he was barred from the one and told by Secretary of State James Blaine never to raise the Paris consulship again. Guiteau then decided that God wanted the president removed, and that Vice President Chester Arthur, a member of the Stalwart faction Guiteau admired, would be grateful. He bought the revolver, practised with it, wrote to General Sherman requesting troops to protect him from the mob, and asked to tour the city jail in advance. In June he followed the president about the city and once let a chance pass because Lucretia Garfield, recovering from illness, was at his side.

On the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, at Sixth Street and the Mall, to begin a summer journey that was to include a visit to his old college, Williams. He had no bodyguard; presidents then rarely did. Guiteau stepped up behind him in the waiting room and fired twice. One bullet grazed Garfield's shoulder. The other entered his back beside the spine and lodged behind the pancreas. A policeman, Patrick Kearney, seized Guiteau at the door, where he announced that he was a Stalwart and that Arthur was now president.

The wound need not have been fatal. Over the next eleven weeks a succession of physicians, led by Dr. D. Willard Bliss, searched for the bullet with unwashed fingers and instruments, opening a false track that filled with infection. Alexander Graham Bell built an induction balance, an early metal detector, to locate it, but the president's metal bed spring confused the readings and Bliss allowed only the side where he believed the bullet lay to be tested. The country followed daily bulletins as Garfield wasted from about 210 pounds to 130. In early September he was moved by train to a seaside cottage at Elberon, New Jersey, in the hope that the air would help. He died there on the night of September 19, 1881, two months short of his fiftieth birthday.

Guiteau's trial opened in Washington in November before Judge Walter Cox. His brother-in-law, George Scoville, a lawyer whose practice lay in land titles, argued that he was insane. Guiteau himself interrupted constantly, abused his own counsel, recited verse and told the court that God and the doctors, not he, had killed the president. The jury convicted him on January 25, 1882. His appeal failed, and he was hanged at the District of Columbia jail on June 30, 1882, after reading on the scaffold a poem he had written that morning, "I am Going to the Lordy."