If wrinkles must be written upon our brows, let them not be written
upon the heart. The spirit should not grow old.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
While Mabel’s anxiety for her husband grew, Lucretia’s fears for James slowly began to ease. As the weeks passed and the president, whom few had believed would survive the first night, lived on, clear-eyed and cheerful if too weak even to sit up, the sharp terror that had seized her began to loosen its grip. “I hope the dangers are nearly passed,” she wrote to a friend on July 14. “My heart is full of gratitude … so full that I have no words wherewith to express it.” By late July, she had settled into a nervous but steady vigilance. Although she continued to spend the greater part of her days and evenings at James’s bedside, he had convinced her to sleep in a room in another corner of the house, apart from the shuffling and whispering attendants who always surrounded him, and even to venture out on occasion, taking quiet rides through the city.
When she was not with her family, Lucretia had always preferred to be alone. Since becoming first lady, she had dreaded public functions, painfully aware that she paled in comparison to her immediate predecessors, Julia Grant and Lucy Hayes, who were effortless and enthusiastic hostesses. “I hope I shall not disappoint you,” Lucretia had told a group of women who had called on her after James’s inauguration. She also found the rules of etiquette that accompanied her position confusing and almost impossible to follow. In her last diary entry before James was shot, she had lamented a small misstep in protocol that had been quickly reported in the newspapers. “Blundered!” she wrote. “I wonder if I shall ever learn that I have a position to guard!”
After the assassination attempt, Lucretia endured a far more intense and prolonged public scrutiny than any first lady before her. In the midst of it, she won not only the approval of the American people, but their hearts as well. Throughout the country, families who had lost fathers, sons, and brothers to the Civil War, or had watched them suffer and survive, took pride in Lucretia’s courage, knowing far too well how difficult it was to sustain, day after day. “In these few weeks of trial and anxiety,” the New York Times wrote, “Mrs. Garfield has achieved a distinction grander and more lasting than ever before fell to the lot of a President’s wife.” Although worry had taken its toll, and Lucretia was even thinner and paler than before, she seemed to those around her to have an almost supernatural strength. “She must be a pretty brave woman,” Mabel wrote admiringly to Bell. “The whole nation leans upon her courage.”
Lucretia’s courage was buoyed by genuine hope. She refused to be lied to or shielded in any way, and she had never been one to pretend that things were better than they were. She now felt, however, that she had real reason for optimism. Not only had her husband survived the initial trauma of the shooting, but his natural vitality and strength had made it possible for him to fight off the early infection introduced by the bullet, and his doctors’ fingers, in the train station. Since July 6, Garfield had been making slow but undeniable progress. His pulse and temperature had been steady. He had been eating and sleeping well, and the pain in his feet and legs had eased. “His gradual progress towards recovery is manifest,” Bliss’s morning bulletin announced on July 13, “and thus far without complications.”
Hope filled the White House, and, as the nation eagerly read Bliss’s bulletins, which were posted several times a day, every day, it radiated throughout the country. Every day, newspapers ran headlines proclaiming that the president was “On the Road to Recovery” and announcing that his condition was “More and More Hopeful.” So confident of Garfield’s survival was the governor of Ohio that he wrote to his fellow governors suggesting that all thirty-eight states designate a “day of thanksgiving for the recovery of the President.”
Garfield himself made every effort to assure those around him that he was not only well but content. “You keep heart,” he told Lucretia. “I have not lost mine.” He endured without complaint excruciating pain and daily humiliations. “Every passage of his bowels and urine required the same attendance bestowed upon a young infant,” one of his doctors would recall. He could not bend his spine, so, in an effort to avoid bed sores, his large body was rolled from one side to another as often as a hundred times a day, a ritual that required at least three people and the strongest linen sheets the White House could find. Garfield, however, “rarely spoke of his condition,” an attendant wrote, “seldom expressed a want.”
The president’s only complaint was loneliness. Although Garfield appeared to have improved dramatically, Bliss continued to deny him any visitors. For a man who cherished his friends and delighted in long, rambling conversations, this isolation was more painful than anything else he had had to endure. His only link to the outside world was through the one window not obscured by the screens Bliss had placed around his bed. It was the same view he had had from his office—a stretch of trees on the White House grounds, the unfinished Washington Monument, and a silver thread of the Potomac. Now, however, as he lay on his back, unable to sit up, his bamboo bed frame lifting him just high enough to see out the window, the scene must have seemed lonely and remote, almost unfamiliar.
Turning to his friend Rockwell, Garfield asked for something with which to write. After handing him a clipboard and a pencil, Rockwell watched as the president wrote his name in a loose, drifting hand that was almost unrecognizable as his signature. Then, underneath his name, he scrawled the words “Strangulatus pro Republica”—Tortured for the Republic. “There was never a moment that the dear General was left alone,” Rockwell would later write, “and yet, when one thinks of the loneliness in which his great spirit lived, the heart is almost ready to break.”
Bliss permitted no one to see the president but the handful of friends and family members who had become his nurses. His children, whom he ached to see, were allowed only rare visits. Even Blaine had not seen Garfield since the day he had knelt over him in the train station. Finally, nearly a month after the shooting, Garfield insisted that he see his secretary of state. On a Friday morning in late July, Blaine was ushered into the president’s darkened sickroom. He was relieved to see that Garfield looked better than he had feared, but he had time to do little more than reassure himself that his friend was still alive. Just six minutes after Blaine had entered the room, Garfield’s doctors politely showed him back out.
In part, Bliss defended his decision to keep the president isolated by insisting that it was dangerous for Garfield to talk. By talking, he said, Garfield moved his diaphragm, which in turn moved the liver, the region where Bliss believed the bullet had lodged. “But I move the diaphragm every time I breathe,” Garfield had pointed out. Yes, he was told, but breathing was a gentle movement, while talking was violent.
Garfield did his best to follow his doctors’ instructions, but as his old friend Swaim sat by his bed one night, trying to conjure a small breeze with a fan, he could not resist talking to him. Terrified that Garfield would somehow further injure himself, Swaim asked him several times to stay silent. Finally, when the president tried to strike up yet another conversation, Swaim snapped at him, “I won’t talk to you and won’t listen to you.” Garfield laughed, laid his hand on his friend’s arm, and said, “I will make a treaty with you. If you keep my mouth filled with ice I will keep quiet.”
By late July, Garfield had seemed so strong and steady, so much like himself for so long, that it seemed impossible that he would not recover. Friends and family members in Ohio who had been packing their bags, expecting to go to Washington to be of support and help to Lucretia in her mourning, began canceling their travel plans. “Everywhere,” one reporter wrote, “hope and confidence have taken the place of alarm and doubt.” On July 21, Lucretia told Harriet Blaine that she considered her husband to be “out of danger.”
The very next day, in a descent that seemed as sudden and mysterious as it was terrifying, Garfield began to lose all the ground he had gained. When his wound was dressed that morning, a “large quantity” of pus escaped, carrying with it fragments of cloth that the bullet had dragged into his back and a piece of bone that was about an eighth of an inch long. By evening, he was uncharacteristically restless and so tired he did not even try to speak.
Bliss was not concerned about the pus. On the contrary, he considered it to be a good sign, as did many like-minded surgeons at that time. Just two years earlier, William Savory, a well-regarded British surgeon and prominent critic of Joseph Lister, had proclaimed in a speech to the British Medical Association that he was “neither ashamed nor afraid to see well formed pus.” A wound, he declared, was “satisfactory under a layer of laudable pus.” Bliss could not have agreed more heartily. Garfield’s wound, the medical bulletin announced that night, “was looking very well,” having “discharged several ounces of healthy pus.”
By the next morning, however, even Bliss’s confidence had begun to fade. At 7:00 a.m., the president’s temperature was 101 degrees. By 10:00 a.m., it had risen to 104. “He is feverish and quite restless,” one of Bliss’s attending physicians noted, “and has vomited three times this morning a fluid tinged with bile.”
Quietly, Bliss sent for his surgeons, David Hayes Agnew and Frank Hamilton, who arrived in Washington by a quarter past eight that evening. As Garfield lay in his bed, “drenched with a profuse perspiration,” the two surgeons examined his back and found a small pus sac about three inches below the wound. Using only a sulphuric ether, sprayed directly onto the site, to lessen the pain, Agnew made a deep incision into Garfield’s back and inserted a large drainage tube.
Bliss’s bulletin that day announced that “the President bore the operation well,” and was “much relieved.” Garfield’s condition, however, continued to deteriorate. He vomited repeatedly and was constantly bathed in sweat. Two days after the first surgery, Agnew again operated on the president, enlarging the opening he had earlier made over his rib and pulling out fragments of muscle, connective tissue, and bone, one piece of which was an inch long.
Bliss, Agnew, and Hamilton would later insist that, as they examined and operated on the president, they used an adequate degree of antisepsis. Occasionally, they sprayed Garfield’s back with carbolic acid or rinsed the wound with a “weak solution of car bolic [sic] acid (one-fourth of 1 per cent).” Like the surgeons who sterilized their knives and then held them in their teeth, however, the doctors’ efforts did little more than give the appearance of antisepsis. Each time they inserted an unsterilized finger or instrument into Garfield’s back, something that happened several times every day, they introduced bacteria, which not only caused infection at the site of the wound, but entered Garfield’s bloodstream.
Unbeknownst to his doctors, cavities of pus had begun to ravage the president’s body. One cavity in particular, which began at the site of the wound, would eventually burrow a tunnel that stretched past Garfield’s right kidney, along the outer lining of his stomach, and down nearly to his groin. An enormous cavity, six inches by four inches, would form under his liver, filling with a greenish-yellow mixture of pus and bile.
Nearly a month had passed since the shooting, but Bliss and his team of doctors were still probing Garfield’s wound in the hope of answering one question: Where was the bullet? Eager to help solve the mystery, Americans flooded the White House with letters not just of concern and sympathy but medical advice. “We received every morning literally bushels of letters,” one doctor in the White House would later recall. “Every crank … in the country seemed to think himself called upon to offer to cure the president.” One man sent the doctors plans for a suction device that he assured them would suck the bullet right out of Garfield. Another suggested that they simply hang the president upside down until the bullet fell out. A man in Maryland wrote to Bliss saying that there was no reason for concern. The bullet was not in Garfield at all, but with him in Annapolis.
Although Bliss admitted that he could not be certain where the bullet lay, he had made it clear from the moment he took charge of the case that he believed it was in or near Garfield’s liver. In this belief, he was joined by nearly every other doctor who had examined the president. While Garfield was still at the train station, one doctor had claimed that he could feel his liver as he probed the wound with his little finger. Hamilton had told a reporter that he “had a suspicion, founded upon a good deal of evidence, that the ball was in the right iliac region, not far above the right groin.” So convincing were the doctors that, soon after the shooting, the New York Times had announced that the “bullet has pierced the liver, and it is a fatal wound.”
At least one doctor in Washington, however, believed strongly that the bullet wasn’t anywhere near the president’s liver—that it was, in fact, on the opposite side of his body. Frank Baker, a young man who had recently completed his medical degree and taken a position as an “assistant demonstrator of anatomy” at Columbian University (now George Washington University), had been carefully following Garfield’s case since the day of the shooting. After considering the president’s symptoms and applying some of the basic theories he had learned in medical school, he concluded that, although the bullet had entered Garfield’s back on the right, it had come to rest on the left.
Baker even drew up a diagram, which traced with remarkable accuracy the course of the bullet. On July 7, just five days after the assassination attempt, he showed it to three doctors, one of whom was Smith Townsend, who had been the first doctor to examine Garfield at the train station. Although he had little doubt that he was right, Baker never shared his theory with Bliss, or with any of the doctors caring for the president at the White House. Acutely aware of his own modest position, he worried that it would be disrespectful to question men of their stature. “I felt,” he would later explain, “that it was improper to urge views which were diametrically opposed to those of gentlemen of acknowledged skill and experience.”
As Baker had guessed, Bliss would not have welcomed his help. Even the physicians Bliss had personally invited to advise him on Garfield’s care were strongly discouraged from disagreeing with him. Bliss’s medical bulletins, which were uniformly optimistic, even when there was clear cause for concern, were a central point of contention. “These bulletins were often the subject of animated and sometimes heated discussion between Dr. Bliss and the other attending surgeons,” one of the doctors would later admit. “The surgeons usually taking one side of the question and Dr. Bliss the other.”
Bliss argued that he was only protecting the president, who had the newspapers read to him every morning. “If the slightest unfavorable symptom was mentioned in one of the bulletins,” one of Garfield’s surgeons recalled Bliss saying, “it was instantly telegraphed all over the country, and appeared in every newspaper the next morning.”
Bliss expected the greatest possible discretion from everyone involved in the president’s care, even Alexander Graham Bell. In Bell’s case, however, he need not have worried. The inventor was well aware that his reputation too was at risk. In that respect, in fact, he had more to lose than Bliss, as he was by far the more famous man. By trying a new and largely untested invention on a dangerously wounded president, Bell was jeopardizing the respect and admiration he had so recently won. If the induction balance did not work, it would be his failure alone.
Reporters had been following Bell closely since the day he had arrived in Washington. “Your arrival and ‘Professor’ Tainter’s was in the papers yesterday,” Mabel had warned him on July 16. “Also a full account of what was said to be the instrument you would use.” The day before, the Washington Post had printed a brief description of the induction balance and promised that “the experiment will be watched with great interest.”
In an attempt to retain some privacy, Bell had avoided sending telegrams. “Ordinary telegrams I presume are private enough,” he explained to Mabel in a long-awaited letter, “but in the case of my telegrams to you concerning the experiments to locate the bullet in the body of the President—I have no doubt they are all discussed by the employees of the Telegraph Company—and thus run a great chance of leaking out to the public Press.”
In truth, reporters had little idea what Bell was up to, as he spent every day holed up in his laboratory, desperately trying to perfect his invention so that it would be ready when Bliss was. Since he had agreed to a brief interview with a few reporters nearly a week earlier, the only people Bell had allowed in the lab besides his assistants were fellow scientists and envoys from the White House. That would change on July 22, when he welcomed his first live test subject.
That day, a veteran of the Civil War named Lieutenant Simpson knocked on the door of the Volta Laboratory. Bliss had recommended Simpson to Bell because he had “carried a bullet in his body for many years.” Bell found a “sonorous spot” on the lieutenant’s back, but he worried that it was too faint to be trusted. He ran the test several times, asking Tainter, his father, and even Simpson himself to try to replicate the results. He also attempted a blindfold test, in which Tainter “closed his eyes and turned away.” Tainter thought that he heard something in the same area Bell had noted, but Bell was skeptical. “I find that very feeble sounds like that heard are easily conjured up by imagination and expectancy,” he wrote to Bliss the following day.
Bell needed more time, but as Garfield’s condition continued to worsen, Bliss began to panic. Finally, at noon on July 26, he sat down and wrote a letter to the inventor, avoiding, as had Bell, the telegraph station. “Will you do us the favor to call at the Executive Mansion at about 5 p.m. today and work the experiment with the Induction Balance on the person of the President?” he wrote in an elegant, slanting hand on White House stationery. “We would be glad to have the experiment tried at the time of the dressing changing, about six p.m.”
That morning, Bell had slept until eleven. He felt “tired, ill, dispirited and headachy,” and had crawled into bed the night before “thoroughly exhausted from several days of hard labour.” He was still hunched over his breakfast when Tainter arrived, carrying Bliss’s letter, which had been sent to the laboratory by White House courier. As he held the letter in his hands, Bell regarded it with a mingled sense of excitement and fear. “Our last opportunity for improving the apparatus had come!” he would write Mabel later that night. Throwing on some clothes, he rushed to the laboratory with Tainter at his side and immediately set to work. He had one objective in mind: improving the induction balance’s hearing range, so that it could detect an even deeper-seated bullet.
The day before, Professor Henry Rowland, who occupied the chair of physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, had visited Bell to make a suggestion. If Bell added a condenser, which can store and quickly release an electric charge, to the induction balance’s primary circuit, he could increase the current’s rate of change, and probably obtain a clearer sound. Bell didn’t have a condenser and didn’t have time to find one. That morning, however, in a moment of inspiration, he suddenly remembered that, when returning from his last trip to England, he had brought with him a large induction coil. Inside the coil was a condenser.
Breaking open the instrument, Bell removed the condenser, attached it to his invention, and was thrilled with what he found. Not only did it improve the sound, it increased the induction balance’s range. Bell could now detect a bullet nearly three inches deep in the president’s back. That, he hoped, would be enough.
As he left the laboratory, Bell made a rare stop at the telegraph station. Deciding to try his hand at subterfuge, he wrote to Mabel that the “trial of the apparatus on [the] President” would not take place for several days. The telegram, he later told her, was “intended not for you at all—but for the employees of the Telegraph Company.”
A few hours later, Bell and Tainter arrived at the White House. Between them, they carried the newly improved induction balance, with all of its many parts and a tangle of wires. Approaching the house, they headed not for the front door, where they would risk being seen by the crowds of people still camped out in the park across the street, but to a private entrance in the back.
Bell was uncomfortably aware that the president had expressed reservations about this test. “Mr. Garfield himself is reported to have said that he was much obliged, but did not care to offer himself to be experimented on,” Mabel had written to her mother a week earlier. “Of course not, but Alec isn’t going to experiment upon him.” The test, however, was an experiment. Bell’s invention was less than a month old and had undergone significant changes only that afternoon. He had tested it, moreover, on only one other person, a man who had been perfectly well for many years.
After being quickly ushered inside, Bell and Tainter were shown up the narrow servants’ staircase to the president’s room. When Bell walked in the door, he was astonished by what he saw. The president lay sleeping, a peaceful expression on his face. He looked “so calm and grand,” Bell later wrote Mabel, “he reminded me of a Greek hero chiselled in marble.” Garfield, however, bore little resemblance to the man Bell had seen so many times before in pictures and paintings, always with the appearance of vibrant health—“the look of a man who was accustomed to work in the open air.” The man before him now was an “ashen gray colour,” Bell wrote, “which makes one feel for a moment that you are not looking upon a living man. It made my heart bleed to look at him and think of all he must have suffered to bring him to this.”
While the president slept, Bell worked quickly in an adjoining room to set up the induction balance. Having sent Tainter to the basement with the interrupter, which was too loud to have nearby as they performed the test, he now arranged the battery, condenser, and balancing coils on a simple wooden table. After everything had been connected, Bell lifted the telephone receiver to his ear. To his horror, what he heard was not the cool silence of a balanced induction, but a strange sputtering sound he had never heard before.
Frantically, Bell tried everything he could think of to get rid of the sound. He sent Tainter back to the basement to check on the interrupter, and he carefully adjusted each of the four coils. No matter what he did, the sputtering remained. Pulling a lead bullet out of his pocket, he quickly ran a test and found, to his tremendous relief, that the invention appeared to work. The sound, however, was distracting, and Bell was concerned that the induction balance’s hearing distance might be affected as well.
Before Tainter could even return from the basement, Bell turned to find Garfield’s doctors standing in the door that separated the two rooms, beckoning him to come in. Gripping the handle of the induction balance’s round, wooden detector in one hand and the telephone receiver in the other, Bell stepped back into the president’s room, wires snaking behind him. Bliss had ordered the screen that surrounded the president’s bed to be removed. Garfield was now awake, his wound had been dressed, and he was looking directly at Bell.
Taking in the long wires that stretched out the door and down the hallway, and were about to be draped over his body, Garfield asked Bell to explain to him how the instrument worked. After listening intently, the president allowed himself to be rolled over onto his left side so that the test could begin. He rested his head on an attendant’s shoulder, supporting the weight of his body by clasping his arms around the man’s neck. “His head was so buried on the gentleman’s shoulder,” Bell would later recall, “that he could not see any person in the room.”
Garfield’s bed was surrounded by doctors, eager to see as much of the procedure as possible. The focus of their attention, however, was not just the president and Bell, but Bliss. After carefully pulling Garfield’s dressing gown to one side so that his back was exposed down to his thighs, the doctor turned expectantly to Bell, who handed him the induction balance’s exploring arm. Although it made more sense for Bell to search for the bullet himself while he listened through the telephone receiver, as he had done many times before, Bliss had made it understood that he would be the one to handle the exploring arm, and to decide which areas would be explored.
As everyone in the room looked on in silence, Bliss took the wooden disk by its handle and slowly began to run the coils along the president’s spine, starting at the wound and traveling downward. Bell stood behind Garfield’s bed, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear. Although he waited to hear the distinctive buzzing sound that he knew would indicate the presence of a bullet, the only sound that reached him was the same faint, maddening sputter that had earlier appeared without warning.
Turning Garfield over onto his back, they tried again, this time passing the coils over his abdomen. At one point, Bell thought he heard a “sharp and sudden reinforcement of sound,” but he was unable to find it again. “That horrid unbalanced spluttering kept coming & going,” Bell would later write in bitter frustration. Finally, with the President quickly tiring, he had no choice but to end the experiment.
Although Bliss asked him to try again at another date, Bell felt the sharp sting of humiliation. “I feel woefully disappointed & disheartened,” he admitted to Mabel that night. The only consolation lay in knowing that he would “go right at the problem again tomorrow.”
Returning to his laboratory early the next morning, Bell was sickened to find that the problem lay not in the induction balance at all, but simply in the way he had set it up. In his haste to improve the invention, Bell had added the condenser at the last minute. While setting up the induction balance at the White House, he had connected the condenser to only one side of the instrument. Had he connected it to both sides, the sputtering sound would have been banished immediately, and the instrument would have worked perfectly.
More than ever, Bell was convinced of the necessity for secrecy. He had worked as hard as he possibly could, using every conceivable resource and idea, and still he had made a devastating mistake. Although, in his letter to Mabel, Bell described as faithfully as he could all that had happened at the White House that night, even drawing a sketch of the room, he sternly reminded her that the letter was intended for no one but her. “Private and confidential,” he wrote in a postscript. “Don’t tell any one the contents.”