I love to deal with doctrines and events. The contests
of men about men I greatly dislike.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
From an open window in his office in the White House, Garfield could smell the honeysuckle in full bloom on the southern portico, and he could see the broad stretch of the south lawn, dotted with diamond-, circle-, and star-patterned flower beds. In the distance was a lake, a glittering glimpse of the Potomac River, and the Washington Monument. Inside his office, which was on the second floor, just steps from his bedroom, a life-size portrait of George Washington hung on the north wall. “The eyes of Washington,” wrote a reporter who visited the new president, “look out upon the unfinished monument, and there is marked sadness in their expression.” Since Garfield’s inauguration, however, a derrick now sat on the flat top of the truncated monument—the promise of progress.
The White House itself was also about to receive some much-needed and long-awaited attention. Soon after she moved in, Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, “sat down to a good rattling talk over the dilapidated condition of this old White House” with two journalists, one of whom was Joseph Harper, a founding brother of Harper’s Magazine. With their help, she convinced Congress to appropriate $30,000 for renovation and restoration, funds it had withheld for four years from President Hayes. As the structure had slowly disintegrated around them, Hayes and his wife had used rugs to cover holes in the Brussels carpeting and steered visitors away from rooms with curtains that were stained and torn.
With a family to raise in a dangerously neglected house, Lucretia was eager to get started, but she refused to paint a wall or replace a curtain before she did her research. Garfield accompanied her on her trip to the Library of Congress so that he could see his old friend Ainsworth Rand Spofford. Spofford, who had been the Librarian of Congress since 1864, knew Garfield well, ranking him among the most diligent researchers he had ever met and marveling at how, in the midst of a hectic work schedule, Garfield managed to keep “abreast of current literature, allowing no good book to escape him.” Whenever Spofford received a box of books from New York or Europe, he would send word to Garfield so he could have the first look. Garfield enjoyed this proximity to knowledge so much that, when in Ohio one summer, he confided to a friend, “Every day I miss Spofford and our great Library of Congress.”
As much as Garfield loved books, however, he spent the great majority of his time between congressional sessions not reading but playing. He and Lucretia had five living children: Harry, Jim, Mary—who was known as Mollie—Irvin, and Abe, who was named for his grandfather, Abram. While home in Mentor, Garfield had always made the most of his time with them, swimming, playing croquet, working on the farm, correcting their Homer recitations from memory, or simply reading to them by lantern light after dinner. With his daughter and four sons gathered at his feet, he read for hours without rest, eager to introduce them to his favorite works, from Shakespeare’s plays to The Arabian Nights to Audubon’s detailed descriptions of the woodchuck, the brown pelican, and the ferruginous thrush. His summers and holidays at home, however, always seemed too short, and he regretted deeply the time he was away from his family. “It is a pity,” he wrote, “that I have so little time to devote to my children.”
For Garfield, being able to work from home was one of the few advantages of being president. He could check in on Harry and Jim as their tutor prepared them to attend Williams College, their father’s alma mater, in the fall. He could give fourteen-year-old Mollie a quick hug before she scurried out of the house, books tucked under her arm, on her way to Madame Burr’s School, which she walked to alone every day. His youngest sons, Irvin and Abe, were more easily heard than seen, their laughter echoing through the house. While nine-year-old Abe liked to race his friends through the East Room on his high-wheeled bicycle, with its enormous front wheel, Irvin preferred to ride his bike down the central staircase and over the slippery marble floor, startling visitors and carving deep scratches into the wainscoting his mother was trying to carefully restore.
Garfield adored his children, but he was determined not to spoil them, or allow anyone else to. “Whatever fate may await me, I am resolved, if possible, to save my children from being injured by my presidency,” he wrote. “ ‘Hoc opus, hic labor est.’ Every attempt, therefore, to flatter them, or to make more of them than they deserve, I shall do all I can to prevent, and to arm them against.” In this endeavor, he had the help not only of his wife but of his practical and disciplined mother, Eliza, who had moved into the White House with the family. “I am the first mother that has occupied the White House and her son President,” she wrote to a friend. “I feel very thankful for such a son. I don’t like the word proud, but if I must use it I think in this case it is quite appropriate.”
Although Eliza found the White House “cozy and home like,” settling into it with her usual quiet confidence, she worried for her son’s safety. During the campaign, she had noticed two strangers in Mentor who looked suspicious to her and had warned James about them. “Dear old mother,” Garfield later told a friend, “she takes such an interest in her son.” The new president and first lady, however, were too overwhelmed by political battles and social obligations to worry about anything else. “Slept too soundly to remember any dream,” Lucretia wrote in her diary after her family had spent its first night in the White House. “And so our first night among the shadows of the last 80 years gave no forecast of our future.”
While living in the White House allowed Garfield to see his children more often, it made it impossible for him to escape the long lines of office seekers who waited outside his front door. A few hoped to impress the president with their skills or knowledge, but the great majority of them simply intended to wear him down with dogged determination and lists of influential friends. “This is the way in which we transact the public business of the Nation,” a New York newspaper had recently complained. “No man has the slightest chance of securing the smallest place because of his fitness for it.… If your streets are so unclean to-day as to threaten a pestilence, it is because those in charge were appointed through political influence, with no regard to their capacity to work.”
On March 5, Garfield’s first day at work, a line began to form before he even sat down to breakfast. By the time he finished, it snaked down the front walk, out the gate, and onto Pennsylvania Avenue. When he learned what awaited him, he was dismayed but not surprised. Office seekers had begun showing up at his home in Mentor the day after the election, parking themselves on his front lawn, his porch, and, if they could get in the door, even his living room sofa. Most painful to Garfield was the fact that, within the throng, he often found his own friends. “Almost everyone who comes to me wants something,” he wrote sadly, “and this embitters the pleasures of friendship.”
Those who waited outside the White House, moreover, did not want simply to apply for a position. They wanted to make their case directly to Garfield himself. As the leader of a democratic nation, the president of the United States was expected to see everyone who wanted to see him. In 1863, a journalist close to President Lincoln and his wife had given his readers a tour of the White House. “Let us go into the Executive mansion,” he wrote. “There is nobody to bar our passage, and the multitude, washed and unwashed, always has free egress and ingress.”
Garfield realized with a sinking heart that a large portion of his day, every day, would be devoured by office seekers. His calling hours were 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, and he faced about a hundred callers every day. “My day is frittered away by the personal seeking of people, when it ought to be given to the great problems which concern the whole country,” he bitterly complained. “Four years of this kind of intellectual dissipation may cripple me for the remainder of my life. What might not a vigorous thinker do, if he could be allowed to use the opportunities of a Presidential term in vital, useful activity?”
For Garfield, who treasured time not just to work but to read and think, the situation was untenable. “My God!” he wrote after a day spent wrestling with office seekers. “What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?” So voracious were the people who prowled the halls of the White House searching for a job, that they sounded to one member of the administration like nothing more than “beasts at feeding time.” “These people would take my very brains, flesh and blood if they could,” Garfield wearily told his private secretary.
Nor was the White House the only point of attack. In the opening days of Garfield’s administration, so many people came to see Blaine at the State Department, asking for an appointment, that before the week was out their audacity no longer surprised him. “Secretary Blaine is especially sought after,” reported the Washington Post, “and it requires all the paraphernalia of messengers and ante-rooms for which the State department is noted, to protect him.”
Conkling, naturally, was delighted. The annoyance that the spoils system caused Blaine and Garfield only made him more determined to defend it. Not that he needed any encouragement. During Hayes’s administration, Conkling had taken every opportunity to belittle the president’s efforts at civil service reform, which he jeeringly dubbed “snivel service.” “When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel,” Conkling told reporters, “he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘Reform.’ ”
Although Garfield found the relentless flow of office seekers maddening and time-consuming, he did not consider them dangerous, and he brushed off any suggestion that he might need protection. Even had he wanted bodyguards, he would have had a difficult time finding them. The Secret Service had been established sixteen years earlier, just a few months after President Lincoln’s assassination, but it had been created to fight counterfeiting, not to protect the president. Over the years, the agency’s duties had broadened to include law enforcement, but no particular attention was given to the White House. Then, the year before Garfield took the oath of office, Congress cut the Secret Service’s annual budget nearly in half, to just $60,000, and restricted its agents, once again, to investigating counterfeiting cases.
While the president of the United States was allowed to walk the streets of Washington alone, as Garfield often did, news of assassinations continued to come in from across the sea. In 1812, the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval, had been shot and killed while he was standing in the House of Commons. A series of assassins had tried to kill Queen Victoria at least half a dozen times. Emperor William I of Germany survived an assassination attempt in the spring of 1878, only to be seriously wounded in another one just a month later. Soon after taking office, Garfield sent a “strong dispatch of sympathy and condolence” to Russia following the assassination, on March 13, of Czar Alexander II. The czar, despite the fact that he had abolished serfdom in his country twenty years earlier, had been the target of several previous assassination attempts.
Americans, however, felt somehow immune to this streak of political killings. Although in his dispatch to Russia, Garfield made “allusion to our own loss in the death of Lincoln,” Lincoln’s assassination was widely believed to have been a tragic result of war, not a threat to the presidency. Americans reasoned that, because they had the power to choose their own head of state, there was little cause for angry rebellion. As a result, presidents were expected not only to be personally available to the public, but to live much like them. When President Hayes had traveled to Philadelphia five years earlier for the opening ceremony of the Centennial Exhibition, he had bought a ticket and boarded the train like everyone else.
The general consensus in the United States, moreover, was that if the president did happen to be at a slightly greater risk than the average citizen, there was simply nothing to be done about it. “We cannot protect our Presidents with body guards,” an editorial in the New York Times read. “There is no protection with which we can surround them that will ward off danger or disarm it more effectively than our present refusal to recognize its existence.” Garfield, unwilling to forfeit any more of his liberty than he had already lost to political enemies and office seekers, could not have agreed more. “Assassination can no more be guarded against than death by lightning,” he wrote, “and it is best not to worry about either.”
Beyond a doorman and the occasional presence of an aging police officer who had worked in the White House for nearly two decades, the only buffer between the president and the public was Garfield’s twenty-three-year-old private secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown. Brown had met Garfield two years earlier, when he was doing secretarial work for the legendary explorer John Wesley Powell. Powell was anxious to get funding from Congress for his survey of the American West and was counting on Garfield’s help. Garfield was deeply interested in Powell’s work, but his secretary had been ill for quite some time, and he was buried under stacks of correspondence. Powell’s solution was to lend him his own secretary.
The next morning, on his way to work, Brown stopped by Garfield’s house in Washington, D.C. When Garfield was told that a young man was waiting for him, he crossed the hall and, entering the room, said in his characteristically cheerful and booming voice, “Good morning, what can I do for you?” His casual smile quickly turned to a look of surprise as Brown, then just twenty-one, replied boldly, “It is not what you can do for me, General Garfield. It is what I can do for you.”
Over the following weeks, as Garfield came to know Brown, one of the things he liked best about the young man was that he relied on his own intelligence and ingenuity. Like Garfield, Brown had come from humble origins but had risen through hard work and disciplined study. “Aspirations for the reflected glory of a long lineage of illustrious progenitors—the solace of ignoble minds,” he would later write, “furnishes no part of the ‘motif’ of my ancestral inquiries.” Brown’s grandfather Nathaniel Stanley had come to the United States from England in 1819 in order to avoid debtor’s prison, changing his name to Brown upon arrival in Baltimore. In America, Nathaniel’s son became a carpenter, and his grandson, Joseph, was expected to do the same. Although Joseph dutifully learned carpentry during the day, he studied Latin at night. When he was twelve, he also began to teach himself shorthand, recording the speeches of every public speaker he met, most of whom were ministers. He won his first job with Powell by offering to work for free.
Soon after Brown began working for Garfield, Powell won his funding from Congress, but lost his secretary to Garfield, who had come to rely on him. Brown, who was not much older than Garfield’s oldest sons, quickly became part of the family. He traveled to Mentor, joined family dinners and croquet tournaments, listened as Garfield tried out his speeches, and even gave him advice on relating to his teenagers. “The gracious, affectionate home life of the Garfield family was a revelation to one whose own home life was rather severe and austere,” Brown would later recall. “It was like having two homes.”
Garfield made it clear to Brown from the beginning that he not only liked him, but genuinely needed his help. When Garfield had returned to Washington for a few days after his nomination, Brown decided not to call on him, worried that his boss would think he was just another person asking for a favor. He realized how wrong he had been when he ran into Garfield on the street. “Where have you been,” Garfield asked him. “I need all my friends now.” Exhausted and worried, Garfield was in earnest, but he roared with laughter when Brown, who knew that he had had hardly a moment to himself since his nomination, replied, “General, I do not think you could have been very lonesome.”
As much as Garfield had come to rely on Brown, when it was time to fill the position of private secretary to the president, the young man who had served him so well was not even a candidate. The position, which was one of great influence and proximity to power, traditionally went to men of considerable political skill and experience. Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary had been Meriwether Lewis, whom he soon after entrusted with exploring and charting the Pacific Northwest. Garfield wanted for his private secretary John Hay, who had been Lincoln’s assistant private secretary twenty years earlier, and would, in another twenty years, be Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He felt strongly that Hay was the right man for the job, but Hay, who had greater ambitions, delicately declined. “He is very bright and able,” Garfield wrote in discouragement. “I more and more regret that I cannot have him for my private secretary.”
When Garfield finally offered the job to Brown, it came as a surprise to no one but Garfield. One night, as the family sat before a fire in the farmhouse in Mentor, he ruminated aloud on his options for private secretary after the disappointment of Hay’s refusal. Suddenly, he turned to Brown and said, “Well, my boy, I may have to give it to you.” The young man replied drily, “Well that is complimentary, to say the least, when all these other fellows have been first considered.” Everyone in the room burst into laughter.
As prestigious as it was to be the president’s private secretary, Brown had no illusions about what the job would entail. Immediately following Garfield’s nomination, more than five thousand letters had poured into Mentor from all parts of the country, and Brown had been forced to quickly devise a system to deal with them. On the morning of Garfield’s inauguration, when the president-elect had collapsed into bed after finally finishing his speech, Brown had stayed up to make a clean copy of it, leaving him too tired to attend any of the day’s events until the ball that night. Since then, he had been opening, sorting, and responding to as many as three hundred letters every day, and there was no one to help him. “There was no organized staff … with expert stenographers and typists,” he later recalled. “Only one pair of hands.”
Although Brown insisted that everyone who called on the president at the White House be treated with courtesy and respect, regardless of influence or station, he became very adept at shielding Garfield from office seekers. His first official act as private secretary was to issue an order that anyone who wished to see the president had to go through him first. This rule applied to even high-ranking politicians and old friends, many of whom exploded in rage when asked to wait in an anteroom filled from wall to wall with office seekers. “How the President and his Private Secretary stand the pressure of the many callers seems a mystery,” one reporter marveled. “They must have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and brains with more extent of cell and surface than fall to the lot of most mortals.”
In a small room across town, Garfield’s most persistent office seeker grew more determined and delusional with each passing day. The day after Garfield’s inauguration, Charles Guiteau had taken a train from New York to Washington, D.C. With only a few dollars in his pocket and no intention of looking for a job outside the White House, he quickly resumed his habit of moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse when the rent came due. While he was forced to flee some rooms after just a day or two, he was able to keep others for several weeks by assuring his landlady that he was about to be given an important political appointment.
Guiteau had begun laying the groundwork for his appointment as soon as Garfield was elected. In November, he had sent a note of congratulations that sounded as though he and Garfield were the oldest of friends. “We have cleaned them out just as I expected. Thank God!” A few days later he had written to then secretary of state William Evarts, asking if he was correct in assuming that President Hayes’s foreign ministers would step aside to make way for Garfield’s appointments. “Please answer me at the Fifth Ave. Hotel at your earliest convenience,” he instructed one of the highest-ranking men in the country. “I am solid for General Garfield and may get an appointment from him next spring.”
Assuming that Garfield would soon be handing out appointments, Guiteau wanted to be first in line. After deciding that the position to which he was best suited was minister to Austria, he again wrote to the president-elect. “Dear General, I, Charles Guiteau, hereby make application for the Austrian Mission.… On the principle of first come first served, I have faith that you will give this application favorable consideration.” Although Garfield received hundreds of letters every day from people asking for government appointments, this letter in particular impressed him as an “illustration of unparalleled audacity and impudence.”
Guiteau, however, believed not only that he was entitled to a position of importance, but that he had the necessary credentials for one. “I have practiced law in New York and Chicago,” he wrote, “and presume I am well qualified for [the position].” He also let it be known that he expected to come into some money. “Being about to marry a wealthy and accomplished heiress of this city,” he told Garfield, “we think that together we might represent this Nation with dignity and grace.” The heiress in question, however, knew Guiteau only as an annoying and potentially dangerous stalker. After spotting her in church and learning that she came from a wealthy family, he had begun sending her letters, following her on the street, and knocking on her front door. Despite his vigorous efforts, or perhaps because of them, she had never spoken a word to him.
While still in New York, Guiteau had done all he could to make himself known to anyone of importance in the Republican Party. Every day, he had gone to campaign headquarters or the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a regular meeting place for Republicans. He had been in the hotel when Garfield arrived from Mentor for the meeting that Conkling refused to attend, and he had stayed all day, eagerly greeting senators and cabinet members whenever they happened to pass through the lobby. “All those leading politicians … knew me,” Guiteau would proudly recall, “and were very glad to see me.”
Even Chester Arthur had met Guiteau, who had made it a point to seek out the vice president–elect wherever he happened to be—at campaign headquarters, on the street, even in his home. “I have seen him at least ten times,” Arthur would later recall, “possibly as often as twenty times altogether.” On several occasions, Arthur’s butler opened the door to find Guiteau standing before him, clutching his “Garfield against Hancock” speech. Although he never set foot in the door, Guiteau believed that he had developed a close relationship with Arthur and was “on free-and-easy terms” with him.
The most fail-proof way to secure an appointment, Guiteau had decided, was to convince Arthur to let him stump for Garfield. Finally, Arthur agreed, giving Guiteau an opportunity to deliver a single speech at a small gathering in New York. Guiteau had spoken for only a few minutes, explaining later that it was too hot, he didn’t like the torch lights, and there were plenty of other speakers waiting to talk. He was convinced, however, that the speech he gave that night had played a pivotal role in putting Garfield in the White House, and that it should certainly guarantee him a position of prominence in the administration.
Within days of his arrival in Washington, Guiteau was at the White House. As he entered the waiting room, he handed the doorman his calling card and quietly took his place among the dozens of other office seekers, perched on wooden tables and chairs before a large, unlit fireplace. The day Guiteau chose to make his first visit to the White House was, even by the standards of the time, an exceptionally busy one. “No day in 12 years has witnessed such a jam of callers at each Executive Dep’t,” Garfield would write in his diary that night, complaining that “the Spartan band of disciplined office hunters … drew paper on me as highway men draw pistols.”
After waiting for a few hours without seeing anyone, Guiteau put his hat back on and left, disappointed but not discouraged. Since November, he had had a change of heart about the Austrian Mission, and he wrote to Garfield that day to deliver the news. “I think I prefer Paris to Vienna, and, if agreeable to you, should be satisfied with the consulship at Paris,” he wrote from the lobby of a hotel where he was not staying but which had more impressive stationery than his own. “Senators Blaine, Logan, and Conkling are friendly to me, and I presume my appointment will be promptly confirmed. There is nothing against me. I claim to be a gentleman and Christian.”
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.