Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (12 page)

Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, serving as Garfield’s secretary of war, was present at the train station, and remarked, “How many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”

Garfield was moved to the White House, where for weeks on end he was treated by doctors disdainful and dismissive of germ theory and the sorts of antiseptic medical procedures that had, by this point, become commonplace in Europe. Consequently, the president’s injuries festered and become severely infected.

To help locate the bullet still lodged in Garfield’s back, Alexander Graham Bell invented the first metal detector. The doctor in charge, however, only used the device to search the side of the body where he incorrectly presumed the bullet had come to rest.

In jail, giving interviews with the press, Guiteau expressed his certainty that the American people were on his side and that Chester Arthur would soon pardon him without a trial. He made plans for a speaking tour that would he would embark on that fall and for his own eventual run for the presidency in 1884.

Guiteau offered his autobiography to the New York Herald and tacked on to the end of it a personal ad indicating that he was looking to marry “an elegant Christian lady of wealth, under 30, belonging to a first-class family.”

Unable to keep food down, Garfield lost seventy-five pounds. In September, the president was moved to the Jersey Shore to avoid the stifling heat of Washington, DC. His body now racked with infectious disease, the forty-nine-year-old president died on September 19, 1881.

“Oh! Why am I made to suffer this cruel wrong?” said First Lady Lucretia Garfield over her husband’s body. It is widely believed that with modern medical practices, Garfield would have recovered from his injuries within weeks.

At Guiteau’s trial, he compared his own patriotic heroism to George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant. He maintained that God had compelled him to “remove” President Garfield and that nothing that God commands can violate any law.

Guiteau’s brother-in-law acted as his defense lawyer but was continually berated by his own client with outbursts such as, “You are a jackass on the question of cross-examination. I must tell you that right in public, to your face.”

Flabbergasted to be found guilty and sentenced to hang, Guiteau spent his last days writing warnings to President Arthur (who failed to pardon him) that he would burn in hell, and that God would “get even” with the American people for killing God’s man as he had with the Jews when they killed Jesus.

Standing on the gallows, Guiteau recited a last poem he had written, called, “I Am Going to the Lordy.” “I saved my party and my land, Glory Hallelujah!” said Guiteau. “But they have murdered me for it, and that is the reason I am going to the Lordy.”