Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Four days after the Republican convention, and a day after he had stepped aboard the ill-fated Stonington, Charles Guiteau arrived in New York. While the other survivors of the deadly steamship collision in Long Island Sound huddled with family and friends, wondering at the twist of fate that had spared their lives, Guiteau walked through the city alone, unburdened by guilt or doubt. To his mind, which had long ago descended into delusion and madness, the tragedy was simply further proof that he was one of God’s chosen few.
From an early age, Guiteau had been confident of his importance in the eyes of God. Motherless by the time he was seven years old, he had been raised by a zealously religious father, a man so certain of his relationship with God that he believed he would never die. “My mother was dead and my father was a father and a mother to me,” Guiteau said, “and I drank in this fanaticism from him for years. He used to talk it day after day, and dream over it, and sleep over it.” Charles’s own fanaticism grew until, when he was eighteen years old, he left the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to join a commune in upstate New York founded by his father’s religious mentor, John Humphrey Noyes.
The central tenet of Noyes’s doctrine—and the idea that appealed most to men like Guiteau’s father—was perfectionism. Noyes believed that, through prayer and the right kind of education, a person could become intellectually, morally, and spiritually perfect, and so would be free from sin. Noyes believed that he had reached perfection and was anointed by God to help others shed their own sins. With this goal in mind, he had founded his commune, the Oneida Community, named for the town in which it was established in 1848. Oneida would last more than thirty years, becoming the most successful utopian socialist community in the United States.
Like most of Noyes’s followers, Guiteau moved into the “Mansion House,” a sprawling brick Victorian Gothic building that, over time, would grow to ninety-three thousand square feet. It held thirty-five apartments for the nearly three hundred members of the commune. Although the private rooms were small and unadorned, the property had a wide variety of fairly elaborate communal amenities—from theaters to a photographic studio to a Turkish bath.
Guiteau’s father dreamed of living in the Mansion House, but his second wife refused to follow him, perhaps in part because of the community’s practice of “complex marriage,” or free love—a concept that Noyes had developed himself, and practiced liberally. According to Noyes, monogamous love was not only selfish but “unhealthy and pernicious,” and the commune’s members were encouraged to have a wide variety of sexual partners in the hope that they would not fall in love with any one person.
In an effort to avoid too many pregnancies, Noyes preached what he called “male continence.” Intercourse, “up to the very moment of emission,” he insisted, “is voluntary, entirely under the control of the moral faculty, and can be stopped at any point. In other words, the presence and the motions can be continued or stopped at will, and it is only the final crisis of emission that is automatic or uncontrollable.… If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I know it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” It was like rowing a boat, Noyes said. If you stay near the shore, you’ll be fine. It’s only when you row too near a waterfall that you find yourself in danger.
Guiteau was enthusiastic about complex marriage, and was willing to try male continence, but he quickly found that life at Oneida required far more humility than he could tolerate. Members of the commune were not only expected to help anywhere they were needed—from the kitchen to the fields—doing work that Guiteau found tiresome and demeaning, but to accept the work gratefully and humbly. Guiteau felt that Noyes and his followers should be grateful to him, rather than the other way around. In a letter to Noyes he wrote, “You prayed God … to send you help, and he has sent me. Had he not sent me, you may depend upon it, I never should have come.” Believing that he should be shown special deference, and offended by the disapproval and, at times, disdain with which he was treated in the community, he said, “I ask no one to respect me personally, but I do ask them to respect me as an envoy of the true God.” He was, he believed, “God’s minute man.”
Although Guiteau claimed to work directly for God—to be “in the employ of Jesus Christ & Co., the very ablest and strongest firm in the universe”—he expected more than heavenly rewards. He wanted all the pleasures the world had to offer, chief among them fame. On one occasion, a member of the commune picked up a slip of paper he had seen Guiteau drop. On it Guiteau, uneducated, isolated, and friendless, had written a strangely grandiose, utterly delusional announcement: “Chas. J. Guiteau of England, Premier of the British Lion will lecture this evening at seven o’clock.”
Guiteau’s extravagant dreams and delusions persisted in the face of consistent and complete failure. Although the commune promised the pleasures of complex marriage, to Guiteau’s frustration, “the Community women,” one of Oneida’s members would later admit, “did not extend love and confidence toward him.” In fact, so thorough was his rejection among the women that they nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.” He bitterly complained that, while at the commune, he was “practically a Shaker.”
Guiteau also frequently found himself the object of “criticisms,” a method Noyes had designed to help his followers identify and overcome their faults so that they could reach perfection. During a criticism, Guiteau was forced to sit in a room, encircled by the men and women with whom he worked and lived most closely, and listen in silence as they described his faults. Again and again, he was accused of “egotism and conceit.”
In Guiteau’s case at least, the criticisms apparently had little effect. When, in 1865, he finally left the commune, after having lived there for nearly six years, he announced that his departure was necessary because he was “destined to accomplish some very important mission.” “God and my own conscience,” he proclaimed, “drive me to the battle and I dare not draw back.”
Guiteau’s plan was to start a religious newspaper called The Theocrat, which he said would be a “warm friend of the Bible, though it may develop many new and strange biblical theories, differing widely from the teachings of popular theologians.” His brother-in-law, George Scoville, recalling Guiteau’s outsized enthusiasm and confidence, said that he “labored there for weeks and months to start that project, supposing that he was going right into the matter with entire success, and that this newspaper was going to take its place every morning at every breakfast table in the land.” After just four months, Guiteau gave up and begged Noyes to allow him to return to the commune. A year later, however, he left again, sneaking out at night so as to avoid another criticism.
Although Guiteau would never again return to Oneida, his life outside the commune was far from what he had envisioned. Rather than achieving success on a grand scale, he suffered a series of disappointments, rejections, and disasters. Even his brief marriage, which took place soon after he left Oneida, ended in divorce.
Guiteau spent nearly an entire year doing nothing at all, living on a small inheritance while he struggled to free himself from his fear that, by leaving the commune, he had “lost [his] eternal salvation.” “The idea that I was to be eternally damned haunted me and haunted me and haunted me every day, and day and night,” he said. “So I was unable to do any business.”
Finally, desperate for money, Guiteau decided to take up a profession, choosing one that he thought would be lucrative—the law. In a time when law school was encouraged but not required he read a handful of books, served as a clerk for a few months, and then stood for the bar. His examiner was a prosecuting attorney named Charles Reed, who, according to Guiteau’s brother-in-law, himself a lawyer, was a “good-hearted fellow,” if not particularly discerning. Reed “asked him three questions and he answered two and missed one,” Scoville recalled, “and that was the way he got to be a lawyer.”
In the courtroom, Guiteau was as unpredictable and egotistical as he had been at Oneida. “The style and plea of his conduct,” reported a psychiatrist who would later study his life, “were such as to convince all the lawyers who were present that he was a monomaniac.” Arguing on behalf of a client in a criminal case, Guiteau “talked and acted like a crazy man.” After he leapt over the bar that separated him from the jury and put his fist directly in the face of one of the jurists, prompting an explosion of laughter in the courtroom, “his client was convicted, without the jury leaving their seats.” In another case, Reed, Guiteau’s bar examiner, recalled that, instead of addressing the petty larceny of which his client was accused, Guiteau “talked about theology, about the divinity, and about the rights of man.… It was a very wandering speech, full of vagaries and peculiarities.”
Much more than the work itself, Guiteau enjoyed the prestige that accompanied his new profession. He would frequently take out his business cards simply to admire them. There were eight lines of text on the front of the cards alone, including a proud note that his office building had an elevator. The back had fourteen lines, which made up a reference list, separated by city, of businessmen Guiteau had met only briefly, if at all.
Over the next fourteen years, Guiteau opened, and then quickly abandoned, a succession of law practices in Chicago and New York. In between, he tried his hand at more exciting lines of work. Among his most ambitious endeavors was a plan to purchase one of Chicago’s largest newspapers—the Inter Ocean. He hoped to convince some of the city’s wealthiest citizens to give him $75,000 to fund the project. In exchange for their investment, he promised to use the paper to win for them any statewide political office they desired. “I asked Mr. John H. Adams to put money into it,” Guiteau openly admitted. “He was the president of the Second National Bank … worth about half a million dollars. I offered to make him governor of Illinois [but] he didn’t have any political aspirations. I wanted to get hold of these men that had money and political aspirations. They were the kind of men to help me in that scheme.”
After two months of fruitless searching for a financier, Guiteau decided it was time to return to religion, this time as a traveling evangelist. As he did with each new venture, he threw himself into evangelism with astonishing passion and complete confidence. For nearly a year, he traveled to dozens of cities across several states, from Buffalo, New York, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Adopting as his own Noyes’s theory that the second coming of Christ had already occurred, in AD 70, he gave lectures to anyone who was willing to listen—and pay a small fee.
People “have been in the habit of looking way off into the indefinite future for the second coming,” Guiteau would explain. “ ‘Hold!’ I say, ‘it occurred eighteen hundred years ago.’ ”
Guiteau would later admit that his attempt at evangelism was a “failure all the way through,” but, he said, “I stuck to it like a hero.” After arriving in a town, he would find the business district and walk through it, scattering handbills announcing his lecture and trying to sell printed copies for twenty-five cents. On most nights, only a handful of people showed up, and after Guiteau began to speak they either heckled him or simply left. After he gave a lecture titled “Is There a Hell?” to an unusually large crowd at the Newark Opera House, the Newark Daily Journal ran a jeering review with the headline “Is there a hell? Fifty deceived people are of the opinion that there ought to be.”
Whatever his occupation, Guiteau survived largely on sheer audacity. As he traveled between towns by train, he never bought a ticket. “You may say that this is dead beating, and I had no business to go around in this kind of style,” he argued. “I say I was working for the Lord and the Lord took care of me, and I was not to find fault with the way he took care of me.” When the conductor asked for his ticket, Guiteau would simply explain that he was doing God’s work and had no money for train fare. Frequently, the man would take pity on him and let him ride for free, but occasionally he would meet a conductor who “was not a Christian man evidently,” and would be roughly put off the train at the next station.
Guiteau took the same approach to board bills that he did to train fares. Each time he entered a town, he would choose the nicest boarding house he could find, never planning to pay for his room. “I had no trouble all this time in getting in first-class places,” he proudly recalled. “They always took me for a gentleman.” When he was ready to move on, he would sneak out under cover of night, or simply leave town immediately following his lecture.
This strategy, however, was riskier than traveling on a train without a ticket. In Michigan, Guiteau learned to his great discomfort, “you can arrest a man for a board-bill the same as you can for stealing a coat.” One night in Detroit, he was arrested after his lecture and sent back on the express train to Ann Arbor, where, as always, he had left without paying his bill. Fortunately for Guiteau, the deputy sheriff assigned to travel with him fell asleep on the train. “I kept watching him and he kept bobbing his head,” Guiteau later recalled. “When we got to Ypsilanti I says, ‘I guess I will get out of this,’ and I jumped up and ran off just as tight as I could for about a mile. I had not been gone more than a minute by the clock before I heard them whistle down-brakes; the fellow had missed me.”
Guiteau was not always so lucky. In 1874, after not paying rent on the office space for his law firm in New York, he spent a month in the grim lower Manhattan prison that would become known as the Tombs. “I never was so much tortured in my life,” he said of the experience. “I felt as if I would go crazy there. I was put in a little miserable hole, and three or four of the nastiest, dirtiest bummers were put in there with me.” As searing as the experience had been, the first thing Guiteau did upon release—after “soak[ing] my body in the hottest kind of suds I could find”—was to open another law office, this time in Chicago, and begin again.
As Guiteau’s life careened out of control, he began asking anyone he knew—even the most distant acquaintance—for money. His most reliable source was his sister, Frances, and her husband, George Scoville, whom he badgered incessantly with requests for loans they knew he would never repay. At one point, he wrote to Frances, “If Mr. Scoville would let me have a hundred dollars for a month or two, it would greatly oblige me, and I would give him my note with interest for the same.” Never subtle, Guiteau ended the letter with an appeal that was strikingly direct even for him. “But to leave this: money, to meet my personal wants, is what I desire now,” he wrote. “Write soon.”
Much larger sums of money, Guiteau believed, might be acquired through lawsuits. At one point, he attempted to sue the New York Herald for $100,000, accusing the newspaper of libel after it ran a story warning its readers of his unethical practices as a lawyer. The Herald cited one occasion in which Guiteau, acting as a bill collector—the primary work of his practice—had collected $175 of a $350 bill, and then refused to turn any of it over to his client. He claimed that he had been unable to collect anything beyond his own fee, and so owed his client nothing. After another enraged client stepped forward with a complaint against him, however, Guiteau quickly dropped the suit and fled the city.
Searching for another target, Guiteau even tried to sue Oneida. Ignoring the fact that he had signed a waiver of compensation when he joined the commune, he claimed that he was owed $9,000, plus interest, in back pay for the six years he had worked there. When Noyes learned of the suit, he replied drily that, while at Oneida, Guiteau had been not only “moody [and] self-conceited” but “a great part of the time was not reckoned in the ranks of reliable labor.” After speaking with Noyes, Guiteau’s lawyer realized that his client had lied to him and resigned from the case.
Undeterred, Guiteau continued to rail against the commune. In a series of letters to Noyes, he threatened to expose Oneida’s controversial sexual practices and to send the founder himself to prison. “If you intend to pay my claim say so,” he warned. “If you want to spend 10 or 20 years in Sing Sing and have your Communities ‘wiped out,’ don’t pay it.” When Noyes did not reply, Guiteau quickly wrote again. “I infer from your silence that you do not intend to pay the claim. All right. If you find yourself arrested within a week, it will be your own fault.”
Noyes’s reaction to these threats mirrored the thoughts of nearly everyone who came into contact with Guiteau: He was certain he was insane. “I have no ill will toward him,” Noyes wrote to Guiteau’s father. “I regard him as insane, and I prayed for him last night as sincerely as I ever prayed for my own son, that is now in a Lunatic Asylum.” Luther Guiteau, furious with his son and ashamed of his behavior, did not hesitate to agree. Only the lack of money to pay for an asylum, he assured Noyes, prevented him from having his son institutionalized. Luther’s oldest son, John, who was a successful insurance salesman in Boston and had been repeatedly humiliated by Charles, wrote with restrained fury that he believed his brother “capable of any folly, stupidity, or rascality. The only possible excuse I can render for him is that he is absolutely insane and is hardly responsible for his acts.”
Throughout Guiteau’s life, the only person who remained his unwavering ally was his sister, Frances. After their mother’s death, Frances, who was six years older than Charles, had done her best to fill the void in her brother’s life. She had not wanted him to join Oneida, but after he left the commune, she had tried to help him when no one else would. As well as giving Charles money, she and her husband allowed him to live with their family on several occasions, even after he was released from the Tombs.
Finally, though, even Frances had to admit that her brother was deeply disturbed, and likely dangerous. This painful realization came in the summer of 1875, when Charles was living with her family in Wisconsin. One hot afternoon, as he lay on his back on her sofa, she called out to him from the kitchen, asking if he would “cut up a little wood for us.” He “immediately said, ‘Yes,’ ” Frances remembered, “and got up and went out and did it willingly.” After he cut the wood, however, instead of taking it to the shed, he dumped it on a walkway leading to the house. Since his arrival, Charles had been sullen and easily angered, so when Frances saw the wood, rather than chastising him, she quietly bent down to pick it up herself. “As quick as I did that he raised the ax, without any provocation or words,” she would recall years later, still shaken by the memory. “It was not so much the raising of the ax as it was the look of his face that frightened me. He looked to me like a wild animal.” Terrified, she dropped the wood and ran into the house.
Fearing as much for her own safety as for Charles’s sanity, Frances reluctantly admitted that her brother needed to be institutionalized. Before taking such a drastic step, however, she asked her family physician to examine him. After one conversation with Guiteau, the doctor, deeply concerned about the young man’s “explosions of emotional feeling,” strongly advised Frances to place him in an asylum without delay. Frances planned to travel with Charles to Chicago, where he would be tried by a jury and, she was certain, found insane. “I had no doubt then of his insanity,” she said. “He was losing his mind.” Before the trip could even be arranged, however, Charles made his escape.
For the next five years, Guiteau continued his peripatetic life, moving from city to city and scheme to scheme until, in 1880, he drifted to Boston, where he developed a new, all-consuming obsession: politics. A voracious reader, he followed the political machinations of men like Ulysses S. Grant and Roscoe Conkling with intense interest and growing admiration. It did not take long for him to decide that he was a Republican Stalwart, and that the best way to enter politics was through the spoils system.
The upcoming presidential election was irresistible to Guiteau. By forcibly inserting himself into the Republican campaign, he believed, he would win not only the gratitude of high-ranking men in the party, but, ultimately, an important political appointment. In the weeks leading up to the national conventions, Guiteau spent every day in a Boston library, feverishly working on a campaign speech. Believing, as did most of the country, that the Republicans would nominate Grant, and knowing that Winfield Scott Hancock, a highly decorated Union general, was heavily favored among the Democrats, he titled his speech “Grant against Hancock.” After Garfield’s surprise nomination—and Hancock’s predictable one, on the second ballot—he changed the title, and virtually nothing else, to “Garfield against Hancock.”
Three days later, clutching his speech and a small, frayed bag, Guiteau had boarded the Stonington, his sights set on the Republican campaign headquarters in New York. “I remember distinctly,” he would later say, “that I felt that I was on my way to the White House.” Garfield’s sudden rise to prominence, he was certain, only foreshadowed his own.