Despite the prayers and tears, and earnest pleading,
And piteous protest o’er a hero’s fall,
Despite the hopeful signs, our hearts misleading,
Death cometh after all
Over the brightest scenes are clouds descending;
The flame soars highest ere its deepest fall;
The glorious day has all too swift an ending;
Night cometh after all
O’er bloom or beauty now in our possession
Is seen the shadow of the funeral pall;
Though Love and Life make tearful intercession,
Death cometh after all
ANONYMOUS POEM, UPON THE DEATH OF
PRESIDENT GARFIELD, SEPTEMBER 1881
While Lucretia was forced to watch the slow, cruel approach of death, for Bell it came suddenly, blindsiding him while he was caught up in another man’s tragedy. Although he had returned to Boston to be with Mabel, he continued to work feverishly on the induction balance at his old work space in Charles Williams’s machine shop.
Just a week after Bell returned from Washington, Mabel suddenly went into labor. That day she gave birth to a little boy, whom they named Edward. He was, Mabel would later write wistfully, a “strong and healthy little fellow.” As the baby struggled to breathe, however, it was immediately apparent that he had been born too soon. After Bell had seen his son for the first time, he sent his parents in Washington a telegram with the wrenching news.
LITTLE BOY BORN PREMATURELY THIS AFTERNOON DIED IN THREE HOURS. MABEL DOING AS WELL AS CAN BE EXPECTED. NO NEED TO COME ON.
A GRAHAM BELL
Years later, Alec would admit to Mabel that he had yet to recover from the death of their son, and did not think he ever would. He was haunted by the belief that his selfishness had brought about their tragedy. “Nothing will ever comfort me for the loss,” he wrote, “for I feel at heart that I was the cause.”
Engulfed in his own grief and mourning, Bell responded by plunging even more deeply into his quest for an answer to the president’s suffering. After his son’s funeral, he returned immediately to his work. He devised an attachment to the induction balance, and he wanted Tainter to re-create it in their laboratory in Washington so that he could take it to the White House.
Just three days after Edward’s death, Tainter successfully tested the induction balance’s new attachment for one of Garfield’s surgeons, Frank Hamilton, in the Volta Laboratory in Washington. But with Garfield’s condition deteriorating gravely, and Bell stranded in Boston with his devastated family, unable to force the issue in person, his desperate, single-minded race to save the president came to an end. Bliss refused to let Tainter try the invention on Garfield. The president was too weak, he said. He would not risk the exhaustion that another test might cause.
Unwilling to accept defeat, Bell redoubled his efforts from Boston, still believing that the president’s life could be saved or, failing that, that his invention would prove to have lasting value for others. Perfecting the induction balance was a personal and scientific obligation, and he was not about to abandon it now, whatever the cost. “Heartless science,” he would write years later, “seeks truth, and truth alone, quite apart from any consequences that may arise.”
As a practical matter, however, Bell knew that whatever benefits the induction balance might have, they would come too late for President Garfield. The clock had run out, and there was simply nothing more that Bell could do.
At the White House, the siegelike atmosphere surrounding the stricken president’s sickbed only seemed to worsen with each passing day. Strenuously resisting anything that might further weaken Garfield, Bliss was outraged when, upon entering the sickroom one day, he found a barber cutting the president’s hair. Bliss “stopped the proceedings immediately,” a reporter wrote, “much to the barber’s disgust.” Try as he might, however, Bliss could do nothing to banish the unbearable heat, which was sapping what little strength his patient had left. In the city, it was 90 degrees in the shade. Inside the president’s room, even with the help of the air conditioner the navy had built for him, the temperature was never below 80.
Finally, Garfield had had enough. When Bliss walked into his room on the morning of September 5, the president made it clear that he would be going to the sea, with or without Bliss. “Well,” he said, “is this the last day in the White House?” Bliss tried to calm him, promising that he “might soon be so far recovered as to make the journey.” Garfield, however, was not going to be put off any longer. He was still the president, and he demanded to have some control over whatever was left of his own life. “No, no,” he said. “I don’t want any more delay.”
At two o’clock the next morning, a specially equipped train pulled into the Baltimore and Ohio depot. It had been prepared weeks earlier so that it would be ready to take the president wherever he wished to go, whenever he was ready. Finally, the time had come. That day, Garfield was to be taken to Elberon, New Jersey, “in the hope,” a member of the White House staff wrote, “that the air and the sight of the sea might do for him what the doctors could not.”
The train, which pulled four cars—three passenger and one baggage—had been thoroughly renovated for the sick president. One of the principal concerns was dust, both from the tracks and from the train itself. To protect Garfield, the train had been outfitted with an engine that used only clean-burning anthracite coal. Wire gauze had been wrapped around the outside of his car, and heavy curtains had been hung inside.
The president’s car, number 33, bore almost no resemblance to a normal train car. The seats had been removed, and thick Brussels carpet laid on the floors. Taking up most of the space was a new bed with strong springs to try to soften the tracks’ jolts and bumps. In an attempt to keep Garfield cool, ice had been placed in the car, and a false ceiling had been installed a few inches from the actual ceiling to encourage air circulation.
Before he would allow the president to be moved, Bliss insisted that everything be tested. The train was driven nearly twenty miles in a trial trip, to “determine,” Bliss explained, “the amount and nature of the motion of the bed.” The attendants who had been chosen to carry Garfield—among them, Swaim and Rockwell, his closest friends—were drilled over and over again, so “as to make a mistake almost impossible.” Bliss even considered having tracks laid from the White House door. He finally decided, however, that the “perfectly even surface of Pennsylvania Avenue really rendered such an expenditure needless.”
Finally, at 6:00 a.m., Bliss walked into Garfield’s room and said, “Mr. President, we are ready to go.” Garfield replied, “I am ready.” Edson, who had spent that night watching over the president, vividly recalled the scene in his room that morning. It was, she would later write, “the saddest I have ever witnessed. The patient, while he spoke cheerfully, had a sad expression of countenance which was so unusual for him, but which I do not think indicated that he had given up hope, but rather that he had realized the danger of the situation.”
Garfield was carried, Bliss wrote, “by no strange hands.” Standing on either side of his bed, Rockwell and Swaim grasped the sheet on which he lay, lifted it, and gently placed him on a stretcher, which they then carried down the stairs and out the door. Members of the White House staff filled the windows with tear-streaked faces, watching the solemn procession to the express wagon that waited on the gravel drive. As they looked down, Garfield looked up, caught sight of them, and lifted his hand in a feeble but warm wave. “A last token of amity,” one of the staff wrote, “from a man who loved the world and the people in it.”
The train ride to Elberon had been planned as carefully as Garfield’s transfer from the White House to the station. Every conductor and engineer in the region stood ready, waiting for word that the president’s train had left the Baltimore and Ohio. As soon as they heard that Garfield was on his way, they switched off their engines and waited for him to pass so that their trains would not disturb him in any way. “No sound of bell or whistle was heard,” Bliss wrote. The doctor had also arranged to have private homes available for his patient all along the route, so that, if Garfield needed to stop, he would have a safe, clean place to stay. “I must now say,” Bliss would later write, “that this whole journey was a marvel even to myself.”
The American people were acutely aware that their president was being moved from the White House. “At every station crowds of men and women appeared,” Bliss would later recall, “the former uncovered, with bowed heads, the latter often weeping.” Thousands of people stood in silence along the train tracks. “It was indeed a strange and affecting journey,” a doctor traveling with Garfield would write, “as we silently sped along.”
When the train finally reached Elberon, it switched to a line of railroad track that had been laid just the night before. Two thousand people had worked until dawn to lay 3,200 feet of track so that the president’s train could take him to the door of Franklyn Cottage, the twenty-two-room summer home a wealthy New Yorker had offered for as long as it was needed. While determining where the track would have to go, a surveyor had realized that he would need to cut through a neighboring garden, and he apologized to the owner. “I am willing that you should ruin my house,” she replied, “all I have—if it would help to save him.”
Before the train could reach its final destination, however, it stopped short. The cottage sat at the top of a hill, and the engine was not strong enough to breach it. No sooner had the problem become apparent than, out of the crowd of people who had waited all day in the tremendous heat for Garfield’s arrival, two hundred men ran forward to help. “Instantly hundreds of strong arms caught the cars,” Bliss wrote, “and silently … rolled the three heavy coaches” up the hill.
When he was carried into his room, the first thing Garfield noticed was that the bed was turned away from the window. He asked to have it moved, so that he could look out at the sea. A few days later, when he was lifted into a chair so that he could better see the wide expanse of ocean just beyond the cottage walls, he was thrilled. “This is delightful,” he said. “It is such a change.”
Despite the relentless suffering Garfield had endured for more than two months, he had maintained not only the strength of his mind, but the essence of his personality. “Throughout his long illness,” Rockwell would later recall, “I was most forcibly impressed with the manner in which those traits of his character which were most winning in health became intensified.” Even as he lay dying, Garfield was kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful.
When Bliss told him that a fund was being raised for Lucretia, Garfield was overcome with gratitude. “What?” he said in surprise. Then, turning his face to his pillow to hide his emotion, he continued, “How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!” Garfield was then “silent and absorbed for a long time,” Bliss remembered, “as if overwhelmed with the thought.”
Garfield was also deeply grateful to the people who had cared for him for so long, and with such devotion. One day, he placed his hand on the head of one of his attendants and said, “You have been always faithful and forebearing.” For Bliss, who was visibly weakened by exhaustion and worry, he tried to provide a measure of comfort. “Doctor, you plainly show the effect of all this care and unrest,” he said. “Your anxious watching will soon be over.”
Bliss still refused to admit that he could not save the president’s life. A few days after they arrived in Elberon, he issued a bulletin announcing that the last of the attending physicians had been dismissed, leaving him with only occasional assistance from the surgeons Agnew and Hamilton. Garfield was doing so well, Bliss explained in his bulletin, that he wished to relieve the doctors “from a labor and responsibility which in his improved condition he could no longer impose upon them.” To a reporter from the Washington Post, Bliss said that Garfield had a “clearer road to recovery now than he ever has had.” There was “no abscess, no pus cavity, no pyemia,” he insisted. “The trouble has now passed its crisis, and is going away.”
Bliss’s assurances, however, no longer went unquestioned. “Despite the announcements that the condition of the President is hopeful and that he is making slight gains daily,” a reporter for the Medical Record wrote, “it is quite evident that his chances for ultimate recovery are very poor indeed.” Even Agnew admitted to a friend that he thought the president had very few days left to live. He “may live the day out,” he said, “and possibly tomorrow, but he cannot live a week.”
Garfield was “perfectly calm, sentient,” Bliss wrote, content to live out his last days in this borrowed cottage, gazing at the sea. The president could not help but wonder, however, if, after such a brief presidency, he would leave behind any lasting legacy. “Do you think my name will have a place in human history?” he asked Rockwell one night. “Yes,” his friend replied, “a grand one, but a grander place in human hearts.”
Rockwell was again with Garfield on the evening of September 19. The president had been suffering from chills, fever, and a persistent cough, but still he longed for companionship. Looking over at his old friend, with whom he had passed many happy evenings, he lifted his hands slightly above the bedcovers and wistfully pantomimed dealing a deck of cards. Soon after, Swaim arrived to relieve Rockwell for the night, and Garfield fell asleep.
At 10:00 p.m., as Swaim sat in silence in the president’s room, he suddenly heard Garfield make a gasping sound, as if he were struggling to speak. Rushing to his bedside, he saw, by the light of a single candle, Garfield open his eyes and look at him for a moment. “Well, Swaim,” he said, and then, suddenly pressing his hand to his heart, he cried out, “Oh my! Swaim, what a pain I have right here.”
Bliss was in his room, reading through the day’s multitude of letters offering sympathy and medical advice—“wonderful productions of the human imagination”—when one of Garfield’s attendants appeared at the door. “General Swaim wants you quick!” he said. As soon as he reached the room, Bliss knew that there was nothing he could do. Garfield was unconscious, his breathing shallow and fast. “My God, Swaim!” Bliss cried.
Moments later, Lucretia, who had been woken by the attendant, was standing next to Bliss, looking at her husband in terror. “Oh!” she said, “What is the matter?” For once, Bliss had no words of encouragement to offer the first lady. “Mrs. Garfield,” he replied quietly, “the President is dying.”
As Lucretia bent over James, kissing his brow, the attendant sent word throughout the house and to nearby cottages. One of the first to come was Joseph Stanley Brown. For the rest of his life, Brown would write, he could “hear the long, solemn roll of the sea on the shore as I did on that night of inky darkness, when I walked from my cottage to his bedside.” Before many minutes had passed, the room was filled with everyone who had come with them to Elberon—Garfield’s surgeons, his friends, and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Mollie. They were, Bliss would later write, “the witnesses of the last sad scene in this sorrowful history.”
As Bliss tried in vain to stop what was happening, he could feel Garfield slipping away. “A faint, fluttering pulsation of the heart,” he would remember, “gradually fading to indistinctness.” For several minutes, the only sound in the room was the president’s ragged, irregular breathing. Finally, at 10:35 p.m., Bliss raised his head from Garfield’s chest. “It is over,” he said.
There was not a movement or a sound, even of crying. “All hearts,” Bliss would write, “were stilled.” After a moment, the room slowly began to empty, until Lucretia was left alone with James. She sat by his bed for more than an hour, staring at his frail and lifeless body. Finally, Rockwell returned and, gently touching her arm, “begged her to retire.” Without a word, she stood, and allowed him to lead her away.