If there be one thing upon this earth that mankind love and
admire … it is a brave man.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
As cries of “Catch him!” echoed through the train station, Guiteau’s face “blanched like that of a corpse,” the Venezuelan chargé d’affaires, Camacho, would remember. Literally trembling with fear, his eyes rolling “from side to side as if he was a hunted man,” Guiteau sprang for the door that led to B Street and his waiting carriage. Before he could reach it, however, Camacho, who was closer to the exit and had suddenly realized what was happening, lunged forward, blocking the door and desperately waving his arms in the air for help. Guiteau spun around and darted for the Sixth Street exit just as Blaine, who had instinctively raced after him, shouted for the doors to be barred.
The first man to catch Guiteau was a ticket agent named Robert Parke. As the assassin raced past him, Parke grabbed him by the back of his neck and his left wrist, calling out, “This is the man.” Officer Kearney, who had exchanged a smile and a tip of the hat with Garfield just minutes earlier, ran to Parke’s side, seizing Guiteau powerfully and shaking him.
At first Guiteau twisted and turned, trying to free himself, but as the crowd surged around him, pulsing with shock and fury, he realized that, on his own, he would not survive. Across the station, a group of enraged black men, joined by a growing chorus, began shouting “Lynch him!” and the lethal momentum of the mob became all but unstoppable. “I truly believe that if they hadn’t been so many officers present,” a porter would later say, “the man would have been strung up then and there.” Guiteau, fear “in his eyes, in his color, in his every movement,” turned to Kearney and said, “I want to go to jail.”
Guiteau gladly acquiesced as Kearney dragged him outside the station and onto the street, but he had something he wanted to say, and he repeated it over and over, in a desperate refrain. Taking the letter he had written to General Sherman out of his breast pocket and waving it frantically in the air, he said, “I have a letter that I want to see carried to General Sherman. I want Sherman to have this letter.” As they hurried along, Kearney assured Guiteau that his letter would be delivered. By the time they reached police headquarters, Guiteau, surrounded by policemen and safely away from the raging mob, had recovered the calm, determined expression he had had before firing the first shot. “He had a rather fierce look out of his eyes,” one of the officers would later recall, “but he did not appear to me to be excited at all.”
The men who had arrested Guiteau, on the other hand, had lost all professional bearing in the face of a presidential assassination. So excited and flustered were they that not one of them had thought to take the gun. They did not discover their extraordinary oversight until they emptied Guiteau’s pockets. Kearney found his papers first, then a couple of coins—which amounted to all the money he was carrying with him, and likely all he had—and then finally, reaching into his hip pocket, he pulled out the weapon Guiteau had used to shoot the president, still loaded with three thick cartridges.
Just ten minutes after he had arrived at police headquarters, as word of the shooting spread and the streets began to fill with angry men searching for the assassin, Guiteau was moved to the District Jail. To his mind, he was going to jail only for his own protection, not because he was an accused murderer who would face trial. “I did not expect to go through the form of being committed,” he would later say. “I went to jail for my own personal protection. I had sense enough for that.”
By the time he stepped into a police department carriage, Guiteau had little thought for the crime he had just committed, or the man he assumed he had killed. His mind was too preoccupied with the celebrity that awaited him. Sherman, he was confident, would soon receive his letter and send out the troops to free him, and Vice President Arthur, overwhelmed with gratitude, would be eager to be of any assistance. Until they could reach him, however, he would need the help of someone less exalted to make his prison stay as comfortable as possible. Recalling what he knew about the District Jail from his trip there the week before, he turned to the detective seated next to him and attempted to strike a deal. “You stick to me and have me put in the third story, front, at the jail,” he said. “Gen. Sherman is coming down to take charge. Arthur and all those men are my friends, and I’ll have you made Chief of Police.”
Although he was in police custody, on his way to prison, Guiteau could not have been more pleased had he been bound for Paris, the consulship to France finally his. He complained that, for weeks, he had been “haunted and haunted and oppressed and oppressed, and could get no relief.” Now that he had finally carried out his divine mission, he could relax and enjoy what was to come. He believed he was about to shake off the poverty, misery, and obscurity of his former life, and step into the national spotlight. He felt happy for the first time in a long time. “Thank God it is all over,” he thought.
For Harry Garfield, who stood in the train station waiting room, desperately trying to fend off the crush of people pressing in upon his father, the nightmare into which Guiteau had plunged his family was only beginning. “Keep back! That my father may have air!” he cried, as his younger brother knelt beside Garfield, sobbing. “Keep them back!” Garfield’s eyes were open, but it was not clear if he was conscious. He “was very pale, and he did not say a word,” Jacob Smith, a janitor who had been the first person to reach the president, would later recall. Smith tried to help Garfield to his feet, but quickly realized that he could not stand and lowered him back to the floor. Garfield looked “very hard” into his eyes, as if trying to make sense of what was happening.
Watching Smith struggle to help Garfield, Sarah White, the ladies’ waiting room attendant, rushed over and placed the president’s head in her lap. Although he was able to ask her for water, and drink what she gave him, he immediately began vomiting again, turning his head so that he would stain his own suit rather than her dress. As tears streamed down White’s face, a station agent leaned over her to remove Garfield’s collar and tie.
Although it seemed to everyone in the station that the president was surely dying, the injury he had sustained from Guiteau’s gun was not fatal. The second bullet had entered his back four inches to the right of his spinal column. Continuing its trajectory, it had traveled ten inches and now rested behind his pancreas. It had broken two of Garfield’s ribs and grazed an artery, but it had missed his spinal cord and, more important, his vital organs.
Just five minutes after the shooting, Dr. Smith Townsend, the District of Columbia’s health officer, arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac. Although he was the first doctor to reach the station, within the hour he would be joined by a succession of nine more physicians, each of whom wanted to examine the president.
Townsend’s first concern was simply keeping Garfield conscious. After asking White to place his head back on the floor so that it would not be elevated, he gave the president half an ounce of brandy and aromatic spirits of ammonia. When Garfield was alert enough to speak, Townsend asked him where he felt the most pain, and Garfield indicated his legs and feet.
What Townsend did next was something that Joseph Lister, despite years spent traveling the world, proving the source of infection and pleading with physicians to sterilize their hands and instruments, had been unable to prevent. As the president lay on the train station floor, one of the most germ-infested environments imaginable, Townsend inserted an unsterilized finger into the wound in his back, causing a small hemorrhage and almost certainly introducing an infection that was far more lethal than Guiteau’s bullet.
After he made his initial examination, Townsend, finally realizing that he needed to get his patient away from the crowd, asked for help moving Garfield. A group of men who worked at the station disappeared into a nearby room and walked out a few minutes later carrying a mattress made of hay and horsehair. As they lifted the president onto the mattress, a groan of pain escaped from his lips, but he did not speak. The conductor of the train Garfield was supposed to be on had run to the scene of the shooting and now cleared the way as the men carried the president out of the waiting room and up a set of winding stairs that led to a large, empty room over the station.
As Garfield lay on the crude mattress, vomiting repeatedly and falling in and out of consciousness, he worried about Lucretia, who expected to see him that day. She was still recovering from an illness that had nearly killed her, and he was terrified that when she learned of the shooting the shock would be too much for her to bear. There was nothing he could do to protect her from the news. The best he could hope for was to somehow tell her himself. Motioning for his old friend Almon Rockwell to come close, he said, “I think you had better telegraph to Crete.” Rockwell listened intently to Garfield, determined to faithfully convey his words, and then left to send the most difficult telegram he had ever had to write.
On his way to the telegraph station, Rockwell passed the members of Garfield’s cabinet who had intended to travel with the president. They had been walking on the train station platform, waiting for Garfield to arrive, when Colonel John Jameson, an agent of the Postal Railway Service, came running up to them, shouting that the president had been shot. So unexpected and shocking was the news that at first they did not believe him. It was not until they heard the chaos and screaming in the station that they realized that Jameson was telling the truth, and quickly followed him to the somber room above the tracks.
As soon as the cabinet members appeared, Blaine pulled them aside and told them that he knew the assassin. “I recognized the man … before, I think, the police had even discovered his name,” Blaine would later say. He had not seen Guiteau pull the trigger, but he had caught sight of him as he fled toward the exit, and with a shock of recognition had realized that he was the same man who had sat in the State Department waiting room day after day, insisting that he be given a consulship.
While the cabinet members discussed Guiteau, a second doctor entered the room—Charles Purvis, surgeon in chief of the Freedmen’s Hospital. Although he was only thirty-nine years old, Purvis had already made history several times over. He was one of the first black men in the country to receive his medical training at a university, had been one of only eight black surgeons in the Union Army during the Civil War, and was one of the first black men to serve on the faculty of an American medical school. Now, as he leaned over Garfield, recommending that blankets be wrapped around his body and hot water bottles placed on his feet and legs, he became the first black doctor to treat a president of the United States.
As the tension rose, and everyone around him spoke in hushed, panicked voices, Garfield remained “the calmest man in the room,” Robert Todd Lincoln marveled. Lying on his left side, his coat and waistcoat removed so that the wound was exposed, Garfield turned to one of the doctors closest to him and asked what chance he had of surviving. “One chance in a hundred,” the doctor gravely replied. “We will take that chance, doctor,” Garfield said, “and make good use of it.”
Secretary Lincoln watched the events unfolding around him with an all-too-familiar horror. His memory of standing at his father’s deathbed sixteen years earlier was vivid in his mind, and he was shocked and sickened by the realization that he was now witnessing another presidential assassination. “My God,” he murmured, “how many hours of sorrow I have passed in this town.”
Suddenly, Lincoln decided that he would not simply stand by and watch Garfield die. Remembering that his own carriage was waiting just outside the station, he rushed out of the room, down the stairs, and to the door. Calling for his driver, he instructed him to find Dr. D. Willard Bliss, one of the doctors who had tried without hope to save his father.
Lincoln chose Bliss in part because he knew he would be a familiar sight to Garfield. Bliss had lived near the president’s childhood home in Ohio, and had known him as “an earnest, industrious boy … whose ambitions were evidently far above his apparent advantages.” Years later, when he was a congressman, Garfield had supported and encouraged Bliss when the doctor was expelled from the powerful District of Columbia Medical Society after disagreeing with its policy to bar black doctors and showing an interest in the relatively new medical field of homeopathy. When the society repeatedly and openly attacked Bliss, accusing him of conferring with “quacks” and seriously damaging his reputation, Garfield had written to him, praising his actions. By their condemnation, the society had “decorated” Bliss, Garfield insisted. “I have no doubt it will do you good.”
In the end, Bliss could not hold up under the pressure. After six years he had buckled, apologizing to the society, returning to its fold, and turning his back on the men he had once championed. By doing so, he had regained his reputation and lucrative medical practice. By the time of Garfield’s shooting, Bliss had been a practicing surgeon for thirty years. He had had a thriving practice in Michigan, had served as a regimental surgeon during the Civil War, and had run the Armory Square Hospital across the street from the Smithsonian Institution. Over the years, he had won the respect and admiration of a wide segment of the population, including even Walt Whitman, who had been a steward at the Armory Square Hospital and had described him as a “very fine operating surgeon.”
Bliss’s record, however, was far from spotless. Although it seemed that his occupation had been determined at birth, when his parents named him Doctor Willard, giving him a medical title for his first name, Bliss’s desire for recognition and financial compensation was nearly as all-consuming as Guiteau’s. While at the Armory Square Hospital, he had been accused of accepting a $500 bribe and was held for several days in the Old Capitol Prison. Just ten years earlier, he had been heavily involved in a controversy surrounding a purported cure for cancer called cundurango, a plant native to the Andes Mountains. Believing that cundurango would be to cancer what quinine was to malaria, he had staked his professional reputation on it, selling it wherever he could and even posting hyperbolic advertisements: “Cundurango!” one ad read. “The wonderful remedy for Cancer, Syphilis, Scrofula, Ulcers, Salt Rebum, and All Other Chronic Blood Diseases.”
More ominous for Garfield was the fact that Bliss had very little respect for Joseph Lister’s theories on infection, and even less interest in following his complicated methods for antisepsis. Although he had once been open to working with not only black doctors but also homeopaths, physicians who believed in using very small doses of medicine, Bliss’s approach to medicine had changed dramatically after his battle with the Medical Society. Now, like most doctors at that time, he was a strict adherent to allopathy, which often involved administering large doses of harsh medicines that, they believed, would produce an effect opposite to the disease.
As soon as Bliss arrived at the station in Lincoln’s carriage, he assumed immediate and complete control of the president’s medical care. Striding into the room where Garfield lay, he briefly questioned Townsend and Purvis and then quickly began his own, much more invasive examination of the patient. Opening his bag, Bliss selected a long probe that had a white porcelain tip. Fourteen years before the invention of the X-ray, doctors used these probes to determine the location of bullets. If the tip came against bone, it would remain white, but a lead bullet would leave a dark mark.
With nothing to even ease the pain, Garfield lay silent as Bliss searched for the bullet inside him. Pressing the unsterilized probe downward and forward into the wound, Bliss did not stop until he had reached a cavity three inches deep in Garfield’s back. At this point, he decided to remove the probe, but found that he could not. “In attempting to withdraw the probe, it became engaged between the fractured fragments and the end of the rib,” he later wrote. He finally had to press down on Garfield’s fractured rib so that it would lift and release the probe.
Although the probe was finally out, Garfield had no respite. Bliss immediately began to explore the wound again, this time with the little finger of his left hand. He inserted his finger so deeply into the wound that he could feel the broken rib and “what appeared to be lacerated tissue or comparatively firm coagula, probably the latter.”
By this time, Purvis had seen enough. With a boldness that was then extraordinary in a black doctor addressing a white one, he asked Bliss to end his examination. Ignoring Purvis, Bliss removed his finger from the wound, turned once again to his bag, and calmly selected another probe, this one made of flexible silver. Bending the probe into a curve, he passed it into Garfield’s back “downward and forward, and downward and backward in several directions” while Purvis looked on, unable to stop him.