Destiny of the Republic (15 page)

While the White House did what it could to protect Lucretia from the outside world, banning carriages from the grounds and occasionally even closing the front gates, Charles Guiteau inched closer. When he had first submitted his application for an appointment, he had been told, as was every office seeker, that it would be put on file and considered. “In the majority of cases there was not the slightest possibility of any position being granted,” 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. When, after handing the doorman a note for Garfield one day, he was told, “The President says it will be impossible to see you to-day,” he seized on the word “to-day.” This was Garfield’s way, he thought, of telling him that, “as soon as he got Walker [the current consul-general to France] out of the way gracefully then I would be given the office.”

While he waited for his appointment, Guiteau survived as he always had. As well as skipping out on board bills, he had a long history of convincing people to lend him money, and he was proud of his straightforward approach. “I will tell you how I do it,” he would later explain. “I come right out square with a friend. I do not lie and sneak and do that kind of business, or anything. I say, ‘I want to get $25; I want to use a little money’; and the probability is that if he has got the money about him he will pull the money right out and give it to me. That is the way I get my money. I take it and thank him, and go about my business.”

The technique had worked often enough that Guiteau was reluctant to abandon it, but he was quickly running out of lenders. In mid-March, he finally tracked down a man named George Maynard, whom he barely knew and had not seen for more than twenty years. He had met Maynard in 1859, when he was a student boarding at Maynard’s mother’s home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Maynard had been living in Washington for the past seventeen years, working as an electrician, and knew nothing of Guiteau’s life since he had seen him last. He was the perfect person to ask for a loan.

When Guiteau suddenly appeared in Maynard’s office, he did not waste time with pleasantries but came quickly to the point. “Mr. Guiteau came into my office and said that he wanted to borrow $10 for a few days; that he was very hard up for money to pay his board bills,” Maynard would later recall. Guiteau told him that he was expecting a check for $150 and would pay him back as soon as he received it. Taking pity on the small, shabbily dressed man, Maynard gave him the money and in return accepted a card on which was written: “March 12th, $10 until the 15th.” He would not see Guiteau again until June.

In the meantime, Guiteau went about his solitary life. He had very little contact with people outside of his boardinghouse and the White House waiting room, and no social interaction at all. He had lived this way for most of his adult life, with the surprising exception of the four years he had been married.

Soon after leaving Oneida, Guiteau had met and married a young librarian named Annie Bunn, launching her into the most desperate and frightening period of her life. “I lived,” Annie would later say, “in continual anxiety and suspense of mind.” Not only was she forced to flee boardinghouse after boardinghouse, often leaving behind her clothing and belongings when her husband did not pay the rent, but she was constantly dunned by his creditors and a string of furious clients whom he had cheated.

Despite the constant humiliations, Annie likely would have stayed with Guiteau had he not treated her so cruelly. If she disagreed with him in the smallest way, he would literally kick her out the door and into the hallway, even if other boarders were walking by. On more occasions than she could count, he wrenched her out of bed in the middle of the night and locked her in a bitterly cold closet until morning. Although Annie was convinced that her husband was “possessed of an evil spirit,” it was not until he openly visited a prostitute that she finally filed for divorce.

Had Annie seen Guiteau now, almost ten years after she left him, she would hardly have recognized him. He had always been “very proud and nice and particular about his dress and general appearance,” she said. “He always dressed well, wore the best of everything.” While Annie begged the landlords her husband had deceived to let her have one of her dresses so that she might have a single change of clothes, Guiteau shopped as though he were a wealthy man. “He would not think that a suit of clothes was fit to wear that did not cost at least sixty or seventy-five dollars,” Annie remembered. He would obtain the clothes by paying part of the price up front and then never return to pay the balance.

After years of living as a traveling evangelist, however, Guiteau no longer had enough money even for a down payment. His clothes were frayed, torn, and too light for the early-spring weather. He pulled his sleeves down over his hands and, in an effort to conceal the fact that he did not have a collar, buttoned his coat to the very top. While everyone else was wearing boots or heavy shoes, he walked around in rubber sandals. Always a small, slight man, he had grown even thinner and was pale and drawn. To George Maynard, he looked “somewhat haggard and weak … as I have seen many a man look when they haven’t had a good square meal for two or three days.” When Guiteau did have an opportunity for a meal at a boardinghouse, the other guests recalled him eating with a savage determination and a distinct reluctance to pass the plates.

Despite his desperate circumstances, Guiteau did what he could to give the impression that he was a man of influence and means. When writing letters, he used the stationery either of the well-respected Riggs House, the hotel where Garfield had stayed on the night before his inauguration, or the White House. One day, when a White House staff member refused to give him more stationery, Guiteau slapped one of his enormous business cards down on a table and shouted, “Do you know who I am?… I am one of the men that made Garfield President.”

He also continued to try to associate himself with powerful men. 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.”

A few days later, however, Guiteau was back. This time, he was more forceful in his request, insisting that, as he had once lived in Chicago, Logan was his senator and so was obliged to recommend him for the position. Again he thrust the handwritten recommendation at Logan. The senator ignored the piece of paper but assured Guiteau, “The first time that I see the Secretary of State I will mention your case to him.” While he did intend to mention Guiteau’s application to Blaine, Logan later explained, “I intended to mention it probably in a different way from what he supposed I would.… I must say that I thought there was some derangement of his mental organization.”

As was his habit with the president at the White House, Guiteau followed up his frequent visits to the State Department with letters to the secretary of state. Late in March, he wrote to Blaine that it was his understanding that he was “to have a consulship” and that he hoped it was “the consulship at Paris, as that is the only one I care for.” After making the argument that he was entitled to the office and that it should be given to him “as a personal tribute,” he ended the letter by suggesting to Blaine that he too owed his position to Garfield’s generosity. “I am very glad, personally, that the President selected you for his premier,” Guiteau wrote. “It might have been someone else.”

In the end, Blaine was the only man to give Guiteau an honest answer. He had received his letters and seen him on dozens of occasions at the State Department, brushing off his persistent questions about the consulship with a terse “We have not got to that yet.” So frequent were Guiteau’s visits to the State Department that the chief clerk had instructed the messengers not to forward his notes and to do what they could to shield the secretary of state.

Finally, after nearly two months of being chased by Guiteau, Blaine had had enough. When Guiteau cornered him one day, the secretary of state abruptly turned and addressed him directly. He told Guiteau that “he had, in my opinion, no prospect whatever of receiving” the appointment. Determined to end the matter once and for all, he snapped, “Never speak to me about the Paris consulship again.” Guiteau watched in shock as Blaine walked away, and then he returned to his boardinghouse, determined to warn Garfield that his secretary of state was a “wicked man” and that there would be “no peace till you get rid of him.”

Blaine forgot Guiteau as soon as he turned his back on him. The war that Conkling had been waging against Garfield’s administration had taken a sudden and unexpected turn, and the secretary of state could smell blood. Before Lucretia had fallen ill, Garfield, still trying to find common ground with the Stalwarts, had appointed five of Conkling’s men to New York posts. He believed, however, that Grant had made a fatal mistake in surrendering New York to Conkling, and he was not about to put himself in the same position. The day after his appointments of Conkling’s men, he announced another appointment. This one was only a single recommendation, but it was for the post that Conkling prized above all others, the one he had bestowed upon Chester Arthur—the collectorship of the New York Customs House.

Shocked and enraged, Conkling spluttered that the nomination was “perfidy without peril.” Not only had Garfield not consulted him, but the man he had chosen, Judge William Robertson, was high on Conkling’s long list of enemies. At the Republican convention, Robertson had been the first delegate to abandon Grant, thus, Conkling believed, causing the hemorrhaging of votes that had ultimately resulted in Grant’s defeat. Robertson had, Conkling raged, “treacherously betray[ed] a sacred trust,” and he demanded that Garfield withdraw the nomination.

By nominating Robertson, Garfield knew, he had given Conkling his “
casus belli
,” his justification for war, but the president was prepared for battle, and confident of victory. “Let who will, fight me,” Garfield wrote in his diary after making the nomination. This battle was about more than Robertson or even Conkling. It was about the power of the presidency. “I owe something to the dignity of my office,” he wrote. This post was critical to the nation’s financial strength, and he was not about to let someone else fill it. “Shall the principal port of entry in which more than 90% of all our customs duties are collected be under the direct control of the Administration or under the local control of a factional Senator,” he asked. “I think I win in this contest.”

The American people agreed. Garfield’s refusal to back down was widely hailed as a courageous and necessary stand against a dangerous man. Even Conkling’s own state turned against him. Of the more than one hundred newspapers in the state of New York, fewer than twenty supported their senior senator, the rest lining up behind the president. Garfield, the
New York Herald
argued, “has recognized Republicans as members of a great party and not of mean factions. He has chosen men for office because of their fitness and ability, and not because they have stuck to the political fortunes of loved leaders.” Conkling, in stark contrast, “would be Caesar or nothing.” He “makes the mistake of supposing that he, and not Gen. Garfield, was elected President,” the newspaper chided. “He declares war, and the President accepts the situation.”