Destiny of the Republic (33 page)

Determined to drown out men like Spitzka, the prosecution brought to the stand nearly twice as many experts as the defense. The star witness for the prosecution was Dr. John Purdue Gray, the superintendent of the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Gray had spent two days interviewing Guiteau, and was convinced that his only ailment was moral depravity. “A man may become profoundly depraved and degraded by mental habits and yet not be insane,” he insisted. “It is only depravity.”

Guiteau listened to these testimonies with avid interest. Although he had pleaded insanity, he was anxious to make clear that he had been insane only at the time of the shooting—not before, and certainly not after. Now, he argued, he was as sane as any man in the courtroom. As Gray attempted to define insanity for the jury, explaining that it was a “disease of the brain, in which there is a … change in the individual, a departure from himself,” Guiteau abruptly broke in. “That is my case,” he said. “I shot the President on the second of July. I would not do it again for a million dollars, with the mind I have got now.”

The central question of the trial—whether or not Guiteau was insane—seemed to most Americans a waste of time. Insane or not, they wanted to see him hanged, at the very least. “Hanging is too good for you, you stinking cuss,” a Union veteran had written to him. “You ought to be burned alive and let rot. You savage cannibal dog.” A farmer from Maryland tried to accomplish what William Mason had failed to do. As the prison coach carried Guiteau from the courtroom back to the District Jail one day, he rode up on his horse, drew his pistol, and fired at the prisoner. Once again, the shot missed Guiteau, but left him terrified, with a singed hole in his coat.

The trial, punctuated by Guiteau’s constant outbursts and heightened by testimony from members of the Senate, the secretary of state, and, by letter, even President Arthur, finally ended on January 26, 1882. At 4:35 that afternoon, after more than two months of testimony, the prosecution rested. Less than an hour later, the jury returned with a verdict.

“Gentlemen of the jury,” the clerk called out, his voice harsh against the perfect silence of the courtroom, “have you agreed upon a verdict?” The foreman, a man named John Hamlin, replied that they had. “What say you,” asked the clerk. “Is the defendant guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty as indicted, sir,” Hamlin said.

Before Hamlin had even finished speaking, the courtroom erupted in thunderous applause. So deafening were the cheers that the bailiff’s shout for order could hardly be heard. When the crowd, under threat of expulsion from the courtroom, finally quieted, one voice alone rang out. “My blood be on the head of the jury, don’t you forget it,” Guiteau cried. “That is my answer.… God will avenge this outrage.”

Even after he had been found guilty and sentenced to death, Guiteau believed that he would be set free. It was only a matter of time—and presidential influence. He had already written to Arthur several times, demanding a full pardon, but after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeal, he wrote again. The letter was a window into Guiteau’s strained mind. “I am willing to DIE for my inspiration,” he wrote, “but it will make a terrible reckoning for you and this nation. I made you … and the least you can do is to let me go.” Then, suddenly switching tracks from dire threat to friendly advice, he offered what seemed to him a reasonable compromise. “But I appreciate your delicate position,” he wrote, “and I am willing to stay here until January, if necessary.”

Besides Guiteau himself, the only people who believed that his life might yet be spared were his brother and sister. John Guiteau, although he had long been deeply ashamed of his younger brother, and had often been bitterly angry with him, could not bear to see him die. “Whatever your impressions may be,” he had written to Charles after the trial ended, “I want you to know that I feel towards you as a brother and a friend, and shall, in the short time remaining, do all I can to save your life.” He was convinced that Charles was insane, and that if the American people could only be made to understand that fact, they would want to see him locked away in an asylum, not hanged. “The public have never had the facts, nor the Court,” he wrote to Charles. “And they know not what they are about to do.”

Finally, John also wrote to the president, seeking not a pardon, but simply a stay of execution. In his letter to Arthur, he asked only for enough time to present further evidence of his brother’s insanity. He hoped that the president would give him “an audience before a decision is reached, that I may make a brief statement of my brother’s unfortunate life, which will explain much of what now appears to his disadvantage.”

Arthur refused to see John, knowing that, if he gave Guiteau’s brother even a few moments of his time, there would be a public outcry. He did, however, agree to meet with the psychiatrist George Beard, and with Miss A. A. Chevaillier, an advocate for the insane. After listening to them for twenty minutes, Arthur forwarded their appeal to his attorney general, Benjamin Harris Brewster. Brewster replied almost immediately, advising Arthur to reject the appeal. Two days later, the newspapers reported that, after careful consideration, the president and his cabinet had come to the conclusion that there were “no grounds to justify Executive interference with the verdict of the jury and the action of the courts.”

Frances Scoville, who had for most of her life been more of a mother to Charles than a sister, also tried desperately to stay the hand of the court. She directed her appeal, however, not to Garfield’s successor, but to his widow. In a letter to Lucretia just two weeks after the verdict was read, she openly begged for her brother’s life.

Dear Madam:

Humbly I address you, trusting you will not turn a deaf ear even upon despised Guiteau’s sister.

All these weary months I have patiently waited until the time should come for me to speak: when, after the verdict, which I believed would be “Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I could say without shamefacedness, “My heart bleeds for you and the sainted dead.”…

I have counted the hours for the time when I could boldly say to you, as I have said from the moment when the terrible news was brought me on that dark day in July: “He was brain sick, deluded, crazy; forgive him, even as Christ shall forgive us all.…”

In Heaven we know, as we are known. The sainted Garfield knows now that he “had to do it,” and I feel sure if he could speak he would say, “Forgive that deluded man, even as I forgive him; safely keep him from doing any more harm, but forgive.”

Lucretia never replied. When she could wait no longer, Frances packed a bag, took a train from Chicago to Cleveland, Ohio, walked up to the home where Garfield’s widow was living, and knocked on the door. Lucretia and Mollie were down the street, and so Frances, who had traveled under the name of Mrs. Smith, was asked to wait in the library. When Lucretia returned home to find that Charles Guiteau’s sister was waiting for her, she went up to her room and sent down word that she would not see her.

Mollie was sitting on the front steps when Frances left. When she later learned who the strange visitor had been, she felt nothing but fury and outrage that she had “dared to come.” For her father’s assassin, Mollie would write bitterly in her diary, “nothing could be too awful… & my heart is like
stone
toward him.”

By the day of his execution, even Guiteau had accepted that there would be no stay, no pardon, no fearsome act of God to save his life. When John Crocker, the warden of the District Jail, appeared at his cell door just after twelve noon on June 30, 1882, Guiteau was sitting on his cot, wearing a black suit that he had paid a prison worker to wash and press the day before, and shoes that he had sent to be polished that morning. Beside him was Reverend Hicks, a Washington minister who had visited him every day for nearly a month, and with whom Guiteau had become so close he had made him the executor of his will. “I’m fully resigned,” Guiteau had told Hicks the night before, when he had woken just before midnight and asked to see the minister. “God has smoothed over the road to glory which I will travel tomorrow.”

Now, as he looked up and saw Crocker standing before him, Guiteau’s face whitened, but he quickly stood and, holding Hicks’s hand, listened quietly as the warden began to speak. “With the events of the past year crowding around you now, as the hours of life enfold around you,” Crocker said, “I find myself called upon to perform a last solemn duty in connection with the death of our President.” Then, his voice trembling slightly, he read aloud the warrant for Guiteau’s death.

After Crocker had finished, Guiteau asked of him a final favor. He wanted to give the executioner’s signal, to choose for himself the moment of his death. He had written a prayer that morning, he said, and planned to read it on the scaffold. When he was ready, he would drop the prayer. Crocker agreed.

A few minutes later, Hicks, Crocker, and a small contingent, which included several guards as well as the executioner, followed Guiteau as he was led from his cell to the prison’s northeast corridor, where a scaffold had been erected. As they passed a window, Guiteau stopped to look out on a bright summer day, green hills swelling under a blue sky. He paused at the window for just a moment, and then, without being asked, turned away and walked on.

Finally, the procession came to a set of stairs that led down to a narrow courtyard, at the far end of which sat the scaffold. The courtyard was flanked on the east by the jail’s outer wall, and on the west by tiers of cells rising sixty feet to the ceiling. The cells had been emptied, and the tall windows on the eastern wall had been covered by heavy curtains.

Twenty thousand people had requested tickets to the execution. Two hundred and fifty had been issued. More than a thousand people stood outside, waiting for the announcement of Guiteau’s death, while those who had seats inside watched in silence as he made his way toward the scaffold, his footsteps echoing on the brick floor. As he ascended the steps of the scaffold, struggling a little because his arms were tied tightly behind his back, Guiteau tripped on the first step. Smiling, he turned to Hicks and said, “I stubbed my toe going to the gallows.”

When they had all assembled on the scaffold, Hicks, who was visibly shaken, spoke first, giving a brief supplication. Then he held a Bible before Guiteau, who proceeded to read fourteen verses from Matthew 10, beginning with the words “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” After he had finished, Guiteau looked out at the silent, stone-faced crowd and announced that he would now read a prayer of his own composition.

He began by paraphrasing Matthew 18:3. “Except ye become as a little child,” he said, “ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Then, in a falsetto meant to evoke the pleadings of a child, he began to read “Simplicity.”

I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.

I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.

I am going to the Lordy,

Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!

I am going to the Lordy!

The poem continued for four more stanzas. Guiteau’s voice, although high, remained strong until the final line. “Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!” he said, his voice finally breaking. “I am with the Lord.”

When Guiteau had finished, Hicks stepped forward once again to give the benediction. “God the Father be with thee,” he said, “and give thee peace evermore.” Nothing more was said as Guiteau’s legs were bound together, a noose looped around his neck and carefully adjusted, and a heavy black hood placed over his head. He stood with his shoulders pulled back, his head held high.

“Glory, glory, glory,” he called out, and then, opening his hand, he let the prayer fall.

•
EPILOGUE
•
F
OREVER AND
F
OREVER
M
ORE

There is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the Dead.
They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no
glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us,
but forever and forever more we need them.

JAMES A. GARFIELD, AUGUST 1880

T
he death of Charles Guiteau, which was greeted by a triumphant shout that echoed through the courtyard and was picked up and carried by the crowd pressed against the prison walls, accomplished nothing. It did not prevent future assassinations, brought no solace to a heartbroken nation, no comfort to Lucretia or her children, nor even lasting satisfaction to those who had screamed for vengeance.

After the doors were opened and the throng was allowed to parade past Guiteau’s body, while his brother silently fanned flies from his face, he was buried in the prison courtyard. As the casket was being covered with dirt, John Guiteau did not say a word or shed a tear. Before he left, however, he bent over the grave and placed a small clutch of white flowers at its head.

A few days later, Guiteau’s body was quietly exhumed and taken to the Army Medical Museum, where Dr. Lamb, the same man who had performed Garfield’s autopsy, studied it for signs of insanity. Guiteau’s brain was removed, divided into small sections, and sent to psychiatrists across the country. Besides a malaria-infected spleen that was twice the normal size, however, the scientists found nothing notable in the remains of Charles Guiteau.

Today, two sections of Guiteau’s spleen, parts of his skeleton—including his ribs, left hand, and left foot—and a glass jar containing the pieces of his brain, which were eventually returned to Washington, remain in the Army Medical Museum, now known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine. These specimens are kept in a large metal cabinet with long, deep drawers. The drawer just below Guiteau’s holds the vertebrae of another presidential assassin—John Wilkes Booth—as well as a six-inch section of Garfield’s spine, which had served as an exhibit at Guiteau’s trial. A red, plastic rod rests in a hole in the knobby, yellowed bone, indicating the path of the bullet.

Even as they mourned the death of their president, Americans understood that, as time passed, Garfield would begin to fade from memory. “His ultimate place in history will be far less exalted than that which he now holds in popular estimation,” the
New York Times
warned its readers. More painful even than the realization that his brief presidency would be forgotten was the thought that future generations would never know the man he had been. A few years after Garfield’s death, a reporter, gazing at a formal portrait of him that hung in the White House, wrote, “I fear coming generations of visitors who pass through this grand corridor will see nothing in the stern, sad face of Garfield to remind them that here was a man who loved to play croquet and romp with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”

What has survived of Garfield, however, is far more powerful than a portrait, a statue, or even the fragment of his spine that tells the tragic story of his assassination. The horror and senselessness of his death, and the wasted promise of his life, brought tremendous change to the country he loved—change that, had it come earlier, almost certainly would have spared his life.

Garfield’s long illness and painful death brought the country together in a way that, even the day before the assassination attempt, had seemed to most Americans impossible. “Garfield does not belong to the North alone,” read a letter that was written by a southerner to Lucretia soon after the shooting, and printed in papers across the country. “From this common vigil and prayer and sympathy in the travail of this hour there shall be a new birth of the Nation.” That prediction was realized the day Garfield’s death was announced, when his countrymen mourned not as northerners or southerners, but as Americans. “This morning from the depth of their grief-stricken hearts all Americans can and will thank God that there is no North, no South, no East, no West,” a minister said from his pulpit. “Bound together in one common sorrow, binding in its vastness, we are one and indissoluble.”

Out of this common sorrow grew a fierce resolve to prevent such a tragedy from ever happening again. Americans did not believe, however, that Garfield had been assassinated because he had walked into the train station, just as he had traveled everywhere since the day of his election, wholly unprotected. Even after losing two presidents to assassins, the idea of surrounding them with guards, and so distancing them from the people they served, still seemed too imperial, too un-American. In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. The day McKinley was shot—he would die from his wounds eight days later—Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation’s four presidential assassinations.

To Americans in 1881, the principal danger their presidents faced was not physical attack but political corruption. With a determination that shocked even the most senior politicians, they turned their wrath on the spoils system, the political practice that had made Garfield the target of the delusional ambitions of a man like Guiteau. “We do not think we have taken up a newspaper during the last ten days which has not in some manner made the crime the product of ‘the spoils system,’ ” an article in the
Nation
had read soon after the shooting. “There has hardly been an allusion to it in the pulpit which has not pointed to the spoils system as the
fons et origo mali
. In fact, the crime seems to have acted on public opinion very like a spark on a powder-magazine. It has fallen on a mass of popular indignation all ready to explode.” With Garfield’s death, the cries of indignation reached such a fevered pitch that they could no longer be ignored.

Finally, civil service reform would find its most powerful advocate in the most unlikely of men—Chester Arthur. No man in the country owed more to the spoils system—or to its most powerful advocate, Roscoe Conkling—than Arthur. Since Garfield’s death, however, it had become strikingly apparent that Arthur was no longer the man Conkling had made. “He isn’t ‘Chet Arthur’ any more,” one of Conkling’s men mournfully said after he had taken office. “He’s the President.”

In his first official address as president, Arthur called for civil service reform. Just one year later, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Act. This act, named for the Ohio Senator who sponsored it, transformed government appointments from what men like Conkling and Guiteau believed them to be—gifts given at the pleasure of powerful officials to those who had been most useful to them—into positions won on the basis of merit. Pendleton had introduced the bill two years earlier, but Congress had ignored it. It took Garfield’s assassination, the resounding defeat in 1882 of several congressmen who had publicly opposed reform, and President Arthur’s support to finally make it law.

Conkling learned this too, when he visited Arthur in the White House soon after his inauguration. Now that Arthur was president, Conkling expected his protégé to redeem his reputation, and avenge his humiliating defeat at Garfield’s hands. He demanded that Arthur strip William Robertson of the collectorship of the New York Customs House, the appointment that had led to his disastrous decision to resign his Senate seat, and he expected to be made secretary of state. Blaine had resigned in December, writing to a friend that Garfield’s death was still a “fresh grief to me,” and Conkling relished the idea of taking up the powerful position from which his old enemy had limped away.

Arthur, however, to Conkling’s amazement, not only refused to do his bidding, but was offended by the assumption that he would. Conkling’s demands, he said angrily, were “outrageous.” Conkling, realizing that he was suddenly powerless to control a man who had for years been his most loyal minion, stormed out of the room, sick with rage and “swearing that all of his friends have turned traitor.” Even more than the loss of his Senate seat, this betrayal was, for Conkling, a staggering blow. “When I saw him
afterwards
,” his mistress, Kate Sprague, would later write to Arthur, “& saw
how he was suffering
, I urged his quitting Washington without delay. Friends who have seen him within a day or two, report him as very ill.”

Arthur had, in part, found the strength to free himself from Conkling’s grasp in the bold letters of his mysterious friend, Julia Sand. So much did he admire her strong, intelligent advice that he finally decided that he must meet her. After dinner on August 20, 1882, a highly polished carriage pulled up to the front door of number 46 East Seventy-Fourth Street, the house where Sand lived with her brother. Sand was inside, stretched out on the sofa, having “disdained roast beef and scorned peach-pie,” when she suddenly heard a man talking to her brother in the front parlor. She was just “wondering who that gentle-voiced Episcopal minister … might be” when President Arthur walked into the room. Arthur would stay for nearly an hour, pleased to finally have a face-to-face discussion with one of his most trusted advisers.

Although Arthur would go on to become a respected leader, his presidency marked by earnest effort and honest, if modest, achievement, his political career would end with his first term. In 1884, the Republican Party chose for its presidential candidate not the man who had inherited the White House, but the one who had fought longest and hardest to occupy it—James G. Blaine. Blaine, although he had promised Garfield he would never again seek the presidency, could not resist a final chance to hold the office he had hungered for most of his life. So desperately did he want to be president that, after he won the nomination, he even had his men approach Conkling, in the hope that the former senator might set aside his hatred for him to help secure the election for his party. “Gentlemen, you have been misinformed,” Conkling coolly replied. “I have given up criminal law.” Soon after, Blaine lost the election to Grover Cleveland, who became the first Democratic president to be elected since the Civil War.

When Arthur left the White House, after having meticulously and beautifully renovated it, he was almost unrecognizable as the man who had been Garfield’s running mate and vice president. “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted,” the well-known journalist Alexander McClure wrote, “and no one ever retired … more generally respected.” It was not until after Arthur had moved back to New York City that it became widely known that he was suffering from Bright’s disease, an excruciatingly painful and, at that time, fatal kidney disease. He died two years later, at the age of fifty-six.

Although he attended Arthur’s funeral, Conkling never forgave him. For years after their falling-out, he nursed a bitter grudge, jeeringly referring to Arthur as “His Accidency” and taking pleasure in refusing an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court after Arthur had risked his reputation nominating him. After Garfield’s death and Arthur’s betrayal, Conkling bitterly turned his back on public life. “How can I speak into a grave?” he railed. “How can I do battle with a shroud? Silence is a duty and a doom!”

Like his life, Conkling’s death, which came just two years after Arthur’s, was a pitched battle for control. Early in the spring of 1888, over a period of little more than two days, New York City was buried under twenty-two inches of snow, more than twice as much snow as it had seen all winter. The wind howled at forty-five miles per hour, with gusts nearly twice as fast, and the city was littered with towering snow drifts, some as high as fifty feet. Before it was over, four hundred people along the northeastern coast would die—two hundred in New York City alone.