JAMES A. GARFIELD
20th President, 1881
Overall Rank: 29
Total Score: 481
The second of four presidents to be assassinated, Garfield’s presidency lasted barely six months. Historians have given him relatively high rankings in pursued equal justice for all (20th), public persuasion (21st), and moral authority (22nd). These rankings support an overall ranking that keeps him out of the bottom 25 percent of all presidents.
Party: Republican
b. November 19, 1831, Orange (now Chagrin Falls), Ohio
d. September 19, 1881, Elberon, New Jersey
First Lady: Lucretia Rudolph Garfield
Age entering office: 49
Historian: Kenneth D. Ackerman
In addition to being an author, Ken Ackerman practices law in Washington, DC, and has served as legal counsel to two committees of the US Senate. He spoke to C-SPAN on June 19, 2003, for Booknotes about his book, The Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield.
I thought,… wouldn’t it be good to write a book about a political convention when they really mattered, when they were passionate, exciting, bare-knuckled contests, unpredictable fights? I started looking for a good one to write about, and I came up with 1880, which was James Garfield. You put that together with the Garfield assassination, one of the more misunderstood events in American history, and the fact that there was a line of causation between the convention and the shooting of the president—to me, it made a compelling story for a book.
[When he was elected in 1880, James Garfield] was forty-eight years old. He was kind of a career congressman. He had been in Washington for sixteen years serving in the House of Representatives. He had been the Republican leader. He had been chairman of several committees. He was one of the up-and-coming members of the Republican Party. He was also a Civil War veteran, and that made him a very popular figure. He had a house on I Street in Washington. He was from Ohio and had a farm that he had bought a few years earlier in Mentor, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland.
Garfield was very lucky in life in a lot of ways. He had a very good marriage. Early on, it was a very shaky marriage. During his first five years of marriage to Lucretia Rudolph, he was off fighting the Civil War, and then he was off on the political stump. In their first five years of marriage, I believe they lived together about twenty weeks. The rest of the time he was off being James Garfield.
The politics at that time, the Gilded Age, after the Civil War, was very much dominated by factional contests, raw power struggles, very similar to what was going on in the business world, very similar to what was going on in the Western frontier. At that time, the big fight was between two groups in the Republican Party called the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds. Garfield got stuck in the middle of that fight. His nomination came after a thirty-six-ballot deadlock because the two sides were having a very strenuous tug-of-war that year, and he got caught in the middle. That’s what eventually got him killed.
Charles Guiteau is the man who pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Garfield. He, at the time in 1880, was about thirty-nine years old. He was living in Boston, Massachusetts, selling insurance. What I tried to do that was a little different than other Garfield books was to show that the assassination of the president was not simply the result of a disappointed office seeker who took out his anger on the president. Charles Guiteau, while he may have, in fact, been insane, was someone who was very caught up in the political process. He was identified with one of the major factions. He worked with the Stalwarts. He considered himself a Stalwart. He went to New York at the beginning of the campaign and became chummy with their people. He hung out at their headquarters. He gave a couple of speeches. Even though the leaders of the Stalwart branch, people like General Grant and Roscoe Conkling, considered him very minor, he considered himself very major. And what happened to him was very much wrapped up with the larger politics of the era.
What Charles Guiteau tried to do was different than what any other presidential assassin had tried to do. What he tried to perform was a regime change. It wasn’t simply to kill a person. It wasn’t simply to destroy the president. He wanted to replace one ruling group, the Republican Half-Breeds led by Garfield and [Maine senator James] Blaine, with a different ruling group, the Republican Stalwarts, led by [New York politician Chester A.] Arthur, [New York senator Roscoe] Conkling, and [ex-president Ulysses S.] Grant. That’s what he was trying to do. He was able to do it because at the convention a compromise had been reached. Garfield won the presidential nomination, but as a payback to the Stalwarts, to give them something because they lost, they made Chester Alan Arthur, the Stalwart, vice president. So what Guiteau was trying to do was to put Arthur, who had befriended him personally during the campaign, into the White House. That’s very different from any other presidential assassination. It’s a very frightening thing, and it’s very different than the way the assassination is remembered in most history books.
… The Stalwarts were the Republicans most loyal to Grant, and that’s how they defined themselves; they were the hard-line true believers in General Grant. In a way, the Radical Republicans of the Reconstruction era evolved into the Stalwarts of the post-Reconstruction era. They were the true believers. They were the hard core. There was very little ideology here; the differences between them became very much factional and personality-driven.
The Half-Breeds—that word came from the same era—it started out as an insult. The people who weren’t very strong toward Grant were considered Half-Breeds. It was the way you would refer to someone almost as a traitor, that they weren’t strong enough in their support of the team. After a while, though, when the Grant administration became tarnished with scandal and Grant’s reputation fell, the Half-Breeds started to view that name as a compliment. They included a number of reformers at first, but over time, they simply became the opposite side of the Stalwarts.
[The two groups] were led by two very strong personalities: the Stalwarts by General Grant and increasingly by a group of Senate bosses, primarily Roscoe Conkling; the Half-Breed side was taken over by James G. Blaine, who was their leader in 1880.
[The two men’s enmity began one] day in 1866.… James Blaine and Roscoe Conkling had a real dust-up [while they were both serving] in the House of Representatives, which caused a bitter lifelong feud between the two men. It started over an argument about whether to take away the job of an obscure military bureaucrat. In the course of it, Conkling used language which Blaine perceived as calling him a liar and possibly threatening him to a duel. This took place over two or three days, but in the end of the final day of it, Blaine took the [House] floor, read a long letter that accused Conkling virtually of fraud, of taking double payments from the government. Conkling responded with a very arrogant, dismissive gesture towards Blaine. Blaine came back and gave a two-paragraph speech, spontaneously, extemporaneously, where he referred to Conkling and his “grandiloquent turkey gobbler’s strut,” referring to his arrogance. He used classical allusion. He referred to Hercules and Thucydides. And at the end of it, the two men would never talk to each other for virtually the rest of their lives. This was all intramural within the Republican Party, and… it occurred to me that if an elder Republican had sat the two of them down—this is when the two of them were still young; they were in their thirties—and said, “Cool it. You’re on the same side. Bury the hatchet,” they probably would have done it. But instead, this got out of control and went on from there.
Ulysses Grant plays a very interesting role in this period. General Grant was not on good terms with Garfield. He very much wanted to win a third term in 1880, more than he let on. Grant was known for not sharing his feelings, for having immovable features. Those words are used with him a lot, his not being very expressive. But in 1880, he wanted to be president. People close to him noticed how anxious he got around the time of the convention, how he was counting the delegates, how he was following the news coming in on the telegraph.
After the Republican convention was over, and his backers failed to win it for him, after this thirty-sixth-ballot tug of war, Grant was very bitter. And he let some friends know it. He was disappointed in James Garfield because Garfield didn’t pay attention to him when he went to see him and asked for patronage for friends of his, or made recommendations, or said, “You should support this person over that person.” Grant was very close to Roscoe Conkling. Conkling had been very loyal to Grant over the years. So, when Garfield and Conkling had their falling out, Grant took Conkling’s side. After that, the feelings between [Grant and Garfield] were very tense.
[Their falling out was over the position of] collector of the port of New York,… the most important political appointive post in the country and, clearly, in New York State. The reason was because it controlled the patronage. It controlled about two thousand jobs, plus a payroll of $2 million at a time when the political parties collected money by making federal employees pay a part of their salary to the party. So, the collector of the port of New York was an extremely powerful political position, and it was very heavily fought over. Roscoe Conkling, as the New York senator representing the Stalwart wing of the party, insisted that he have control of that position. Garfield, when he became president, after some hesitation, after being pulled back and forth on this, ultimately decided that he, as the president, needed to control the position, and so Garfield appointed a man who was a political enemy of Conkling.
Guiteau made the decision he wanted to kill James Garfield in mid-May. It was two days after Roscoe Conkling resigned from the US Senate because of the outcome of his battle with President Garfield over the control of the port of New York. Guiteau very much recognized his fate as being tied up in the fate of these larger political players. Guiteau at the time was lobbying very hard to become the consul to Paris for the US government. He came to Washington after the election and decided he wanted a political appointment. He felt he had worked in the campaign. He gave a couple of speeches. He was close to the Stalwart leaders. He had met Chester Alan Arthur several times during the campaign. He got a few recommendations, and he decided he wanted a job.
Guiteau was short; he had short dark hair, a beard. He had a strange walk. If he walked up to you, you wouldn’t hear him. You would notice him standing next to you, but you wouldn’t have heard him walk up to you. He talked in what’s described as a confidential nature. He would talk standing right next to you in kind of a whisper. When you looked at his face, his eyes are a little bit uneven. In fact, when he was on trial for murder, the psychiatrists who claimed that he was insane pointed to the way his eyes lined up as a piece of evidence for his insanity. He dressed shabbily in the sense that he couldn’t afford new clothes. He didn’t have a job in Washington. He didn’t have a bankroll. So, after a while, his clothes had rips that were never fixed. Several people pointed out that he wore rubbers instead of shoes, like you wear in the rainstorm to keep your feet dry, but very thin. He came to Washington, and many of his meetings were in March, in a year when there was snow on the ground. He wore very thin clothes. He didn’t keep up his wardrobe very well, and that was very much noticed.
He actually got as far as meeting with President Garfield. They had a face-to-face job interview, but it was a very strange one. Guiteau had written a speech for the campaign. He got in to see the president. He gave the president a copy of his speech to look at. Garfield started reading it, and as he was reading it, Guiteau stood up and walked out of the room. He felt it was enough that Garfield was reading his speech, and he didn’t want to press the point. It was three pages long. It was not especially striking in the sense of being terribly good or terribly bad, it was a typical speech of the time repeating the campaign slogans of the Republicans.
Guiteau also went to a reception at the White House; receptions were open to everyone. You could just go and get in line and shake hands with the president and the first lady. You didn’t have to go through security; that was not a problem. And at this point, most of the ushers at the White House, who acted as guards to the extent that they needed guards, all knew who Guiteau was. He had been around several times waiting to see if there was any news on his job. He was always trying to get in, to push his application. When you think about it, it’s a very logical thing to do if you’re a job hunter, to go to the White House, to go to a reception, to make a point to meet the first lady, to try to put in a good word about yourself, and this is what he did. He walked right up to her, shook her hand, and said, “I’m one of the men who made your husband the president.” They had a nice talk. She didn’t think twice about it, and then she went on to talk to the next person in line.
Guiteau got in several times to the White House [but] he got to see the president just once. Then he walked over to the State Department, and he got in to see James Blaine [whom Garfield had appointed as his secretary of state]. Blaine would hold an open meeting several days a week that people could come in and simply see him; you didn’t need an appointment, and Guiteau went repeatedly to those meetings. Most of the time, Blaine would put him off. He would say, “We’re waiting.” At the time, this was when the battle on Capitol Hill was going on between Garfield and Conkling over the collectorship in New York. Blaine would keep saying, “We’re not going to make a decision about Paris, France, until the deadlock in the Senate is cleared up.” And once that did clear up, once there was an outcome, Guiteau went back to Blaine, and Blaine snapped at him: “Never talk to me about the Paris consulship again.”
Guiteau [then] decided he wanted to “remove” the president. He was a very methodical person. He would sit in Lafayette Park [across from the White House], and he would track the president’s comings and goings. There was no Secret Service protection at the time; that would not start until about fifteen, sixteen years later. President Garfield felt no compunctions at all about walking the streets of Washington himself alone at night. [And this was only sixteen years after Lincoln had been assassinated.]
[Guiteau] had never owned a gun before and did not quite know what to do with it. He would walk down Seventeenth Street to the Potomac River. At the time there was nothing at the river; it was just a deserted stretch of waterfront. He would take out his gun and practice shooting… either at a twig or at a bird or at just the water, just to see what it felt like to have a gun in his hand, to get used to the feeling of the discharge, the smell of the gunpowder, the way the gun would jolt back at him—so that he would get used to having it; so that he would be comfortable with it. For the two or three weeks that he was stalking the president, which is a frightening thing to think about in itself, he was walking around with a gun in his pocket most of the time.
One of the odd things about Guiteau was that he never had anything personal against the president. He said he liked Garfield as a man; he liked his wife when he met her. There was one of the early times when he followed them with a gun, thinking about shooting them, and Mrs. Garfield had a very bad case of typhoid or pneumonia. No one was quite sure what it was, but she had a very bad fever during the spring when Garfield was president. She really came within an inch of losing her life. Afterwards, Garfield took her to the ocean to help her recuperate. Guiteau followed them to the train station that morning with the thought of maybe shooting the president that day. But when he saw them getting on the train, and he saw how Mrs. Garfield was clinging to his arm, and how she looked very frail and very sick, he felt sorry for her and didn’t want to shoot the president that day.
The Garfields went to Elberon, New Jersey, which is on the Jersey shore; it’s the northernmost point. That was a very stylish resort at the time because it was just an hour-long boat ride from New York City. [Ironically] at the time, General Grant was there as well… in the cottage just across the street.
[The first lady stayed behind at the Jersey shore, and the president would travel back and forth.] Guiteau went to the train station a couple of times. When Garfield came back from the Jersey shore, he was there at the train station with his gun.… He was there, watching. All of this [logistical] information was in the newspapers. All you had to do was to read the New York Herald or the Washington Star, and you would know where the president was going.
Guiteau shot President Garfield on July 2, [1881]. Garfield had been president for just about four months when he was shot. He shot him in the… Baltimore and Potomac train station, which is on the site of where the National Gallery of Art is today. It was about 9:30 in the morning.… He chose the weapon that he shot him with for a reason. Guiteau, in a way, had delusions of grandeur about himself, and in a way, they weren’t unrealistic.… He recognized his gun would probably end up in a museum. So, when he went to buy a gun, there were two that he saw in the shelf. One had an ivory handle and the other had a wooden handle. The calculation in his mind was that the one with the ivory handle would look better in a museum if he used that one to shoot the president. It cost an extra buck, but that’s what he bought. I understand the gun is in the Smithsonian museum, but I have not seen it.
President Garfield was shot twice. One bullet hit him in the arm and grazed him. The other one hit him flat in the back.
Garfield lived for seventy-nine days. For most of the time, he was in the White House. They turned an upstairs room in the White House into a sick room for him, where the doctors took care of him, or arguably where the doctors killed him.… And then for the last few days, he was in Elberon, at the ocean. It was felt, both by the doctors and by Garfield and his family, that the atmosphere in Washington during the summer was very unhealthy. It was very hot; it was very uncomfortable. Washington at the time was a very swampy city. It was prone to epidemics during the summer, of malaria and other diseases. There were very bad smells and odors coming off the Potomac River. They felt it was very unhealthy, so the doctors agreed to let Garfield go to the ocean. The feeling at the time was that the salt air, the bracing ocean wind would maybe restore his health, or at least let him enjoy perhaps the last few days of his life.
One of the bullets was never found, the one that grazed him in the arm. The one that hit the president in the back, this was a question of some debate. They did ultimately find the bullet. The body had formed a cyst around the bullet, which ultimately formed an aneurysm. During the time, those seventy-nine days when Garfield was being treated by the doctors, they had no idea where the bullet was. They kept trying to figure it out. At one point they even brought in Alexander Graham Bell, the man who invented the telephone. He had invented a very crude form of metal detector, and they tried to use it to find the bullet. But the doctors were so far off, it turned out, in where they thought the bullet was, that the machine never worked.
Once he was arrested, Guiteau felt no embarrassment, no shame at any of it. He felt that he would be a hero, and so he very outwardly talked about everything he did. He dictated a long autobiography of himself to the New York Herald that was published. He wrote several long letters, and then he testified for several days.… What I tried to do with Guiteau, which I think is a little bit different than what other historians have done, is to take him at his word—to not start with the assumption that he was insane, but just take him at his word and see how he fit into context. Because it struck me that when you take him and put him into context, he oddly makes sense. I say oddly because where his logic led him is a very scary place. He decided in the end that… God was telling him to remove the president of the United States.
However, even given his personal insanity—whether it’s medical or not—it very much fit in the context of the largest public debate going on in the country at the time. It was a time when the level of partisanship, of bad feelings, of personal attacks had reached such a level that Guiteau simply took it one step further.
They waited until Garfield had died [to charge Guiteau] because, for one thing, they needed to know whether it would be a murder charge or an attempted murder charge. The trial started about a month after the president died. [He was convicted and hanged early the next year in Washington.]
Part of Guiteau’s defense was—and he had very good evidence behind him—that it was really the doctors who killed President Garfield. Guiteau shot him, but then the doctors examined him without washing their hands. And in the end, James Garfield directly died from a combination of infections and blood poisoning.