Destiny of the Republic (14 page)

Guiteau also made the case to Garfield that he had been instrumental in his election. He argued that the speech he had delivered in New York, and had handed to every man of influence in the Republican Party to whom he had access, including Garfield’s own vice president, had not only won votes, but had been the source of an idea that was central to the campaign’s success. “The inclosed [
sic
] speech was sent to our leading editors and orators in August,” he argued. “Soon thereafter they opened on the rebel war-claim
idea
, and it was
this
idea that resulted in your election.”

Not long after Guiteau began visiting the White House, he met Garfield face-to-face. One day, after entering the anteroom as usual and handing the doorman his card, he was led upstairs to Brown’s office, which connected directly to the president’s office. A moment later, he found himself standing before Garfield, watching silently as he spoke with Levi Morton, one of the men Conkling had forced to resign from the cabinet. Guiteau waited for the two men to finish their conversation, and then, introducing himself as an applicant for the Paris consulship, handed Garfield the campaign speech he had been carrying in his pocket for the past year. On the first page of the speech, he had written “Paris Consulship” and drawn a line between those words and his name, “so that the President would remember what I wanted.” “Of course, [Garfield] recognized me at once,” Guiteau would later say. He watched with satisfaction as the president glanced down at the speech, and then left, confident that his appointment was now only a matter of time.

After that day, Guiteau quickly became a familiar face at the White House. “His visits were repeated … quite regularly,” Brown would remember. “I saw Mr. Guiteau probably fifteen times altogether at various places, about on the street and about in the Executive Mansion and on the grounds.” When he wasn’t waiting in the president’s anteroom, Guiteau was sending notes into him by the doorman, or simply sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square, staring at the White House.

Before the end of March, Guiteau found another opportunity to insert himself into Garfield’s life, this time even more intimately. The White House held an afternoon reception that was open to anyone who wished to attend, and there was, Garfield would write in his diary that night, a “very large attendance.” Guiteau quietly joined the immense crowd, watching as, for two hours, the president and first lady smiled and shook hands with what Lucretia later referred to as “the great roaring world.”

Suddenly, Lucretia heard someone say, “How do you do, Mrs. Garfield?” Looking up, she saw a small, thin man in a threadbare suit who, although he had spoken to her with a strange urgency, did not meet her eyes. Guiteau had a strikingly quiet walk, so quiet that people who knew him often complained that he seemed to appear out of nowhere. Now, standing close enough to the first lady to touch her, he told her that he had recently moved to Washington from New York, where he had been “one of the men that made Mr. Garfield President.” Although Lucretia, a very private woman who dreaded receptions, was “aching in every joint,” and “nearly paralyzed” with fatigue, Guiteau would remember her as “chatty and companionable,” clearly “quite pleased” to see him. Before giving way to the crush of callers impatiently waiting to meet the first lady, Guiteau leaned in closely to Lucretia, handed her his card, and carefully pronounced his name, determined that she would not forget him.

•
CHAPTER 9
•
C
ASUS
B
ELLI

I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

O
n the morning of May 3, Lucretia woke with a fever. “She is not well … almost a chill,” Garfield wrote in his diary that night. When she was not better the next day, he fretted over her, blaming the pressures of his presidency. “Crete,” as he called her, “has been too hard worked during the past two months.” As the week progressed and Lucretia’s fever rose, Garfield’s concern turned to alarm. He sent for four different doctors, sat at her bedside late into the night every night, and then stumbled through the day, trying with little success to tamp down a growing terror. “My anxiety for her dominates all my thoughts,” he wrote on the night of May 8, “and makes me feel that I am fit for nothing.”

Lucretia was the center of Garfield’s world. They had met thirty years earlier, while attending the same rural school in Ohio when he was nineteen and she was eighteen. Like Garfield’s mother, Lucretia’s parents were determined that their children would receive a good education. Her father, Zeb Rudolph, was a farmer and carpenter, but he was also one of the founders of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. When the school opened in 1850, he enrolled Lucretia in its first class, watching with pride as she edited the school magazine, helped to start a literary society, and studied Latin with a discipline, if not a passion, that would rival Garfield’s.

When Garfield arrived on campus the following year, the boy Lucretia had known in high school transformed before her eyes. She would tell her daughter years later that James at first seemed to her just a “big, shy lad with a shock of unruly hair … as awkward and untutored as he was dead in earnest and determined to learn any and everything that came his way.” As he immersed himself in his studies, however, the last traces of his life in the log cabin and on the canal seemed to vanish, not just from his mind, but from his face. “Mental development and culture,” Lucretia marveled, “seemed, literally, to chisel fineness and delicacy into features that were, if not rugged, at least unformed.”

Although Lucretia and James shared a common background and desire for education, they were very different people. Bighearted and cheerful, Garfield was nearly impossible to resist. Throughout his life, he was just as likely to give a friend, or even a determined enemy, a bear hug as a handshake, and he had an enormous, booming laugh that was unfailingly contagious. Years later, the son of a friend of Garfield’s would remember watching as his father and Garfield laughed their hearts out, literally rolling “over and over upon the ground and stirring the very trees with their Olympian laughter.”

Lucretia, in stark contrast, was soft-spoken and very private. Her parents, although kind and deeply interested in her education, had never been demonstrative. Zeb Rudolph’s neighbors would remember him as being almost without emotion, “never elated and never greatly depressed.” Although Lucretia would at times complain that James let the “generous and gushing affection of your warm impulsive nature” affect his good judgment, she worried that she leaned too far in the opposite direction. “The world,” she feared, would judge her to be “cold,” even “heartless.”

Their courtship was long, awkward, and far more analytical than passionate. It began with a painfully polite letter from Garfield to Lucretia when he was on a trip to Niagara Falls in 1853. “Please pardon the liberty I take in pointing my pen towards
your
name this evening,” he began stiffly, “for I have taken in so much scenery today I cannot contain it all myself.” As the years passed and they slowly moved toward marriage, Garfield waited impatiently for Lucretia to express her love for him, but she remained distant. Finally, in frustration, he wrote to her, “It is my desire to ‘know and be known.’ I long to hear from you … to know your heart and open mine to you.… Let your heart take the pen and your hand hold it not back.” Lucretia, however, could only ask James to try to understand. “I do not think I was born for constant caresses, and surely no education of my childhood taught me to need them,” she would one day tell him. “I am only sorry that my own quiet and reserve should mean to you a lack of love.”

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 wrote dejectedly in his diary. “It seems as though all my former fears were well founded and that she and I are not like each other in enough respects to make us happy together.… My wild passionate heart demands so much.” When he visited her again the following day, however, Lucretia bravely handed him her diary. To Garfield’s astonishment, it was filled with the love that she had always felt but had never been able to express. “Never before did I see such depths of suffering and such entire devotion of heart as was displayed in her private journal which she allowed me to read,” he wrote that night. “For months, when I was away in the midst of my toils, her heart was constantly pouring out its tribute of love.”

Although Garfield now believed that Lucretia loved him, when they finally married in 1858, they both knew that he was not yet in love with her. “I am not certain I feel just as I ought toward her,” he had admitted in his diary. “I have the most entire confidence in her purity of heart, conscientiousness and trustfulness and truly love her qualities of mind and heart. But there is no delirium of passion nor overwhelming power of feeling that draws me to her irresistibly.” Lucretia was painfully aware that Garfield’s feelings toward her had not deepened over the years, and she was tormented by the thought that he was marrying her because he felt he had to. The summer before their wedding, she wrote miserably to him, “There are hours when my heart almost breaks with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold stern word
duty
.”

If their courtship was difficult, the first years of their marriage were nearly unbearable. Between the Civil War and Garfield’s congressional duties in Washington, they spent only five months together during the first five years. The constant separation made it almost impossible for Lucretia to overcome her natural reserve, although she tried in earnest. “Before when you were away my heart missed you,” she wrote after they had been married for four years. “Now my whole self mourns with it and longs and pines for your presence, my lips for your kisses, my cheek for the warm pressure of yours. In short, I understand what you meant when you used to say, ‘I want to be touched!’ ”

Finally able to express herself in a letter, Lucretia still struggled to show physical affection, and Garfield’s frustration deepened until he confessed that he had grave doubts about their marriage. “It seemed a little hard to have you tell me … that you had for several months felt that it was probably a great mistake that we ever tried married life,” Lucretia wrote to James while he was in Columbus, working in the state senate, and she was home, expecting their first child. “I am glad you are coming home so soon, but you must come with a light face, or the shadow of those hours of terrible suffering, which are so surely and steadily coming upon me, will steal over me with its chill of death.”

Not even Trot, whose birth in 1860 brought James and Lucretia joy, and whose death, just three years later, knit them in a shared grief, could help them overcome their differences. The divide that had always separated them continued to widen until, in 1864, Garfield nearly destroyed any hope they had ever had of happiness together. In the spring of that year, he had an affair with a young widow named Lucia Gilbert Calhoun. He had met her in New York, where she was a reporter for the
New York Tribune
, and they had fallen in love, the kind of love he had for so long yearned to feel for Lucretia.

A month after meeting Lucia, James went home to Ohio and confessed the affair. Although angry and heartbroken, Lucretia forgave him, demanding only that he end the relationship immediately. Garfield agreed. He was certain he was walking away from his one chance at real love, but he was deeply ashamed of his infidelity. “I believe after all I had rather be respected than loved if I can’t be both,” he wrote sadly. He thanked Lucretia for her “brave words of good sense,” adding, “I hope when you … balance up the whole of my wayward self, you will still find, after the many proper and heavy deductions are made, a small balance left on which you can base some respect and affection.”

Garfield feared that, in the wake of his confession, Lucretia would lose all faith in him. Instead, his own feelings began to change. As he watched her bravely endure the pain and heartbreak that he had caused, Garfield suddenly saw Lucretia in a new light. She was not cold and unreachable but strong, steady, and resilient. Slowly, he began to fall in love with his wife.

As the years passed, Garfield’s love for Lucretia grew until it eclipsed any doubts he had ever had. His letters, which once alternated between terse, cold replies and painfully honest confessions, were now filled with passionate declarations of love. Lucretia was finally the object of James’s “gushing affection.” “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” he wrote to her one night from Washington. “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming, but he has come to stay.” A few months later, he again poured out his heart to her. “I here record the most deliberate conviction of my soul,” he wrote. “Were every tie that binds me to the men and women of the world severed, and I free to choose out of all the world the sharer of my heart and home and life, I would fly to you and ask you to be mine as you are.”

During the Republican convention, Garfield missed Lucretia desperately. “You can never know how much I need you during these days of storm,” he wrote to her just days before his nomination. “Every hour I want to go and state some case to your quick intuition. But I feel the presence of your spirit.” When he won the nomination, the first thing he did after making his escape from the convention hall was to send Lucretia a telegram. It said simply: “Dear wife, if the result meets your approval, I shall be content.”

By the time Garfield became president, Lucretia was completely confident of his love for her. For years, she had waited at home for him, asking when he would return, wondering if he missed her, questioning his devotion. Now she knew that her husband felt her absence as strongly as she did his. “It is almost painful for me to feel that so much of my life and happiness have come to depend upon another than myself,” he had written to her. “I want to hear from you so often, and I shall wait and watch with a hungry heart until your dear words reach me.”

For Garfield, Lucretia had become the “life of my life,” and as he now sat by her bed in the White House, watching as her temperature steadily climbed, he realized with a helpless desperation that he could do nothing to save her. She was “the continent, the solid land on which I build all my happiness,” he had once told her. “When you are sick, I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes. They lose all faith in the eternal order and fixedness of things.”

On the night of May 10, after Lucretia had been moved to a room on the north side of the house, “to get her further from the river air,” Garfield sat with her until 4:00 a.m. A few hours later, news of her illness appeared in the newspapers, stirring dark memories of President John Tyler’s wife, Letitia, who had died in the White House less than forty years earlier. “I am sorry to say that I have grave fears about Mrs. Garfield,” James Blaine’s wife, Harriet, wrote to her daughter. “She is very sick, and after hearing exactly how she is, I confess I am very uneasy.”

Garfield could think of nothing but Lucretia. “I refused to see people on business,” he wrote in his diary on May 11. “All my thoughts center in her, in comparison with whom all else fades into insignificance.” Having buried two children, he knew far too well the devastation of losing someone he loved. After Trot’s death, he had been so paralyzed with grief that he had nearly left Congress. “I try to be cheerful, and plunge into the whirlpool of work which opens before me,” he had confided to a friend, “but it seems to me I shall never cease to grieve.”

Every day, Garfield consulted with the group of doctors he had gathered around Lucretia. They had come to the conclusion that she was suffering from a combination of exhaustion and malaria. Sixteen years before malaria was finally traced to mosquitoes, Lucretia’s doctors did not know what caused the disease, but they did have ways to fight it. They gave her “fever powders,” presumably quinine, which had been used to treat malaria in the West since the early 1600s, and bathed her with alcohol and ice water. As Lucretia’s fever worsened, rising ominously to 104 degrees, Garfield hovered over her, helping however he could. “If I thought her return to perfect health could be insured by my resigning the Presidency,” he wrote to a friend, “I would not hesitate a moment about doing it.”