CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“An Ugly Wound”

AS THE WIND and the current pushed the St. John toward Manhattan, the preacher who had been a passenger on the Stonington lay on his bed at the Riggs House, a downtown Washington hotel where President Garfield liked to play billiards. As the preacher stared at the ceiling, the events of the past year flashed through his feverish mind.

Originally a Grant man, he had accepted Garfield’s nomination as the will of God. “Nothing but an Act of God can prevent Grant’s nomination,” Conkling had proclaimed in Chicago. That meant that God must have selected Garfield as the GOP nominee, so the preacher did what he could to help the Republican ticket.

After Garfield won, the preacher revised a campaign speech he had written for Grant and sent it to GOP headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He met Arthur and other party leaders at the hotel, and they were friendly to him, but they assigned him to deliver the speech only once, to a black audience. He didn’t like the crowd, and it was a sultry night made hotter by torches and gaslights, so he cut short his remarks. For the rest of the summer and fall, the preacher was a frequent presence at the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

In October he wrote to Garfield at Mentor and sent him the speech. His letter also called attention to the fact that he was about to marry a wealthy lady in New York, and that the two of them could represent the United States at Vienna with dignity and grace. But after Blaine was appointed secretary of state he knew he had no chance of getting the Austrian mission, because it would go to a Blaine man, and the preacher was a Stalwart.

In March, the week after the inauguration, he called on Garfield again. The president recognized him immediately and was cordial. This time, since the Austrian mission was out of the question, he requested Paris. Garfield was noncommittal.

In the following weeks, he called on Blaine at the State Department a half dozen times and sent him as many notes regarding the Paris post. The last time, Blaine lost his patience. “Never speak to me again on the subject of the Paris consulship,” he said. Stung by Blaine’s rejection, the preacher turned his attention to the president. He called frequently at the White House but would find 50 or 100 people already there, petitioning the president for jobs. He wrote a note to Garfield asking, “Can I have the Paris Consulship?” The doorkeeper brought back an answer from Garfield’s private secretary saying it would be impossible for the president to see him that day. He understood that response to mean that as soon as Garfield got the current consul out of the way gracefully, he would give him the office.

The preacher was worried about the dangerous split in the Republican Party. He wrote several more times to Garfield, warning him that if he did not do something, if he did not hurry, the Republican Party would go to wreck and ruin and there would be trouble in the country. But Garfield’s decision to appoint Robertson as New York collector, over the objections of Conkling and Platt, signaled the president’s intent: he didn’t care about party unity, and wanted to crush the Stalwarts and clear the way for his renomination in 1884.

When the preacher read in the newspaper that Senators Conkling and Platt had resigned in protest, he was perplexed and depressed. But before he fell asleep that night, the solution came to him in a flash: if only President Garfield were out of the way, the difficulty would all be solved. For the next two weeks, the idea kept grinding and oppressing him. At first he was horrified, and tried to throw off the idea. But it kept growing on him, until at the end of the two weeks he had made up his mind.

By now, the divinity of his inspiration was no longer in doubt. The preacher prayed that if the Lord objected to the removal of the president, He should in some way interrupt it. He didn’t.

The preacher had no ill will toward President Garfield—on the contrary, he considered him a political and personal friend. But he was determined to execute the divine will for the good of the American people, to unite the two factions of the Republican Party and thus prevent a Democratic takeover and another civil war.

It was “the Deity” who furnished the money with which he bought the revolver, on June 8, from John O’Meara’s sporting goods store in Washington. The preacher was not familiar with firearms, and so frightened by the sight of the gun he had the storekeeper load it for him. He asked how to test the gun’s accuracy, and O’Meara recommended that he go down to the Potomac River to practice. He followed that advice, firing the weapon at a sapling on the shore, and into the water.

When he felt confident enough, he began watching the president’s movements. In the middle of June he began to spend time in Lafayette Park, opposite the Executive Mansion.

On June 18, he trailed Garfield to the railway station, but was held back by the presence of Mrs. Garfield, who was frail and clung tenderly to the arm of her husband. The shock might have killed her, and he felt sorry for her.

On his bed at the Riggs House, the preacher recalled his latest chance, just a few hours before. Sitting in Lafayette Park early in the evening, he had seen President Garfield exit the White House alone. He trembled with delight—surely fate or something else was working in his favor. Walking on the opposite side of the street, he followed the president as he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue toward 15th Street. But there were too many people in the road to take a clear shot, and then Garfield disappeared into Blaine’s house. The preacher waited around the corner on H Street, slipping into an alley when people began to take notice of him. While he waited patiently for the president to reappear, he examined his pistol. Finally Garfield emerged, accompanied by Blaine. The preacher followed the two men back to the White House. Once or twice he thought he had his man, but at the last moment somebody got in the way.

Now the preacher cursed his cowardice. The president had come right to him to be shot, and he had let his heart get in the way of his head and his hand. It was time to stiffen up, to show some backbone. He swore he would not let the next opportunity slip by.

Weary of Washington, Garfield awoke on the morning of July 2 eager to start his summer vacation in New Jersey (where he would meet his wife and daughter), New York, and New England. He was so giddy at the prospect of leaving the capital he turned handsprings over the bed of his 17-year-old son Harry, then he wrestled with the boy and his 15-year-old brother James while singing “I mixed those children up” from “A Many Years Ago,” a popular song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s new comic opera, H.M.S. Pinafore. At 9 a.m., he shook hands with members of the White House staff who had lined up to bid him farewell and climbed into a carriage with Blaine, who would accompany him to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad depot at the corner of 6th and B Streets. Harry and James followed in a second carriage.

They arrived at the brick-and-stone depot at about 9:20 a.m. A policeman named Patrick Kearney strode forward to open the carriage door. “How much time have we, officer?” Garfield asked. “About 10 minutes, sir,” Kearney replied.

Inside, the preacher was waiting. He had gotten his shoes shined, and now he was pacing the floor. He wore a ragged dark suit, and his gray eyes flashed under his black slouch hat. In his coat pocket, he carried an ivory-handled British Bulldog revolver.

As Garfield and Blaine crossed the ladies’ waiting room, arm in arm, the preacher crept up behind the pair, drew his pistol, and fired a shot at the president from about five feet away. “My God, what is that?” Garfield cried out, flinging up his arms. The bullet passed through the president’s right coat sleeve, grazing his shoulder. The preacher squeezed the trigger once more, firing a bullet into Garfield’s back. When this bullet struck him, Garfield turned sharply to the right and then collapsed, hitting a chair as he tumbled to the floor. Blood spurted from his wound. “Rockwell! Rockwell! Where is Rockwell?” Blaine shouted, looking for Garfield’s personal assistant and longtime friend, Colonel Almon Rockwell. Sarah White, the railroad employee in charge of the ladies’ waiting room, rushed to Garfield’s side and called for water. When it was brought, White gently raised Garfield’s head onto her lap and bathed his face. The president was silent, but when Harry came running from an outer platform and knelt by his father’s side, weeping, Garfield opened his eyes and murmured something to him. The first physician to arrive on the scene was Dr. Smith Townsend, who tried to locate the bullet by probing the president’s wound with his finger.

Within minutes the depot was packed with people, desperate for a glimpse of the wounded president. The crowd pressed in closer, sucking the oxygen out of the stifling room. A mattress appeared, and several men took Garfield in their arms and gingerly placed him on it. Then they lifted the mattress and carried the president, his light gray trousers soaked with blood, up to the railroad offices on the second floor. Upstairs, Secretary of the Treasury William Windom bent over Garfield and asked him where he was wounded. “Go and telegraph my wife that I am hurt and ask her, if she feels able, to come on to Washington at once,” Garfield mumbled.

Another cabinet officer on the scene was Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, whose father had been assassinated 16 years before. Lincoln ordered several police officers to summon Dr. D. Willard Bliss, who had treated President Lincoln when he was shot. The officers mounted their horses and raced off. When they brought back Bliss, Townsend pulled him aside and whispered his assessment of the president’s condition. Bliss examined Garfield himself and concluded it would be too dangerous to probe again for the bullet. “This is an ugly wound,” he said.

About an hour after the shooting, Townsend and Bliss agreed that Garfield should be moved to the White House, and they called for a police ambulance. When it arrived, a pathway was cleared and the president was carried downstairs. As Garfield was lifted into the ambulance, witnesses noticed that he was ghostly pale. His eyes were half closed, and his lips were slightly parted. A huge throng followed the ambulance, which was accompanied by a detachment of mounted police, as it rumbled toward the White House. Most of the streets between the depot and the White House were smoothly paved, but as the ambulance rolled down 15th Street it hit a rough patch of road and Garfield moaned in agony. The crowd followed the ambulance as it drove into the broad carriageway on the White House grounds, even as police officers tried to push them back. As men carefully lifted the mattress out of the vehicle, Garfield glanced up at the windows of the mansion and spied some familiar faces. He smiled wanly, raised his right hand, and saluted.

Garfield was carried up to a bedroom in the southwest corner of the White House. He was feverish and his pulse was rapid. The surgeons were concerned when he complained of a twitching in his feet—evidence, they feared, of spinal injury—and did not dare probe his wound. But the president’s head remained clear.

“Blaine, what motive do you think that man could have had in trying to assassinate me?” he asked the secretary, who sat at his bedside.

“I do not know, Mr. President. He says he had no motive. He must be insane.”

But the would-be assassin had expressed a motive—one that cast suspicion on Vice President Arthur.

After shooting Garfield, the preacher calmly put his pistol back in his pocket and turned to leave the station. He did not intend to flee. Instead, he planned to ride to jail in a cab waiting outside. But as he made his way down the steps, the police officer who had greeted Garfield just moments before grabbed him. “I must arrest you,” Kearney said. “Alright,” replied the preacher, whose name was Charles Julius Guiteau. “I did it and I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.”

Guiteau’s attack on Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac depot was the violent climax of a tortured life.

Born in Freeport, Illinois, in 1841, Guiteau’s mother died when he was seven. His father, Luther, was an officer at the local bank who also served two terms as a court clerk and founded Freeport’s first Sunday school. Luther was an ardent opponent of slavery, a Republican who revered Horace Greeley and Henry Ward Beecher. When Charles was a child, Luther became interested in the “Bible communism” of John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, a religious commune in New York State that practiced free love. Noyes and his followers, called “Perfectionists,” rejected traditional moral standards. It was possible to be free of sin, Noyes preached, because the perfection God demanded was based not on external deeds but on one’s internal attitude. Luther sought to inculcate Charles with Noyes’s beliefs.

In 1859, Charles told his father he wanted to go to college, and Luther reluctantly agreed. Charles’s intention was to spend two years at the University of Michigan studying for a career in the law. But in June 1860, encouraged by his father, Charles quit college and joined Noyes’s Oneida Community. “I pray that God may open your mind and heart to the great and glorious truths of ‘Bible communism,’” Charles wrote to his sister Frances in 1861, about a year after he joined the commune.

But Guiteau left the Oneida Community in April 1865. Years later, he described Noyes as harsh and cruel, and complained that women in the commune treated him poorly. But in a letter he wrote to his father around the time he left, he said he remained faithful to Noyes’s beliefs but wanted to promote them by founding a daily newspaper, to be called the Daily Theocrat. He moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, to chase his dream, but his attempt to launch a newspaper failed, and in November 1865 he rejoined the commune. He quit again a year later.

For the next decade, Guiteau moved between New York and Chicago, floundering in a series of jobs in law offices and at newspapers. In 1869 he married a librarian named Annie Bunn, whom he had met at the local YMCA. But Guiteau abused her, reportedly locking her in a closet at night, and in 1874 she divorced him. Over the next couple of years, after failing to obtain the collateral for another newspaper venture, Guiteau lived off and on with his sister Frances and her husband. His behavior became stranger: he threatened Frances with an axe and dropped the family’s puppy over a bannister, breaking its leg. When guests visited, Guiteau preached from a religious tract he had written and violently denounced anyone who dared to question it. “I wanted him taken to Chicago and tried by a jury, and found insane, as I had no doubt he would be, and put in an insane asylum,” Frances recalled.

After disappearing for a time, Guiteau reemerged as a regular participant in evangelist Dwight Moody’s revivalist meetings. For the next several years, he became a traveling preacher himself. In 1880, he turned his attention to politics.

“I knew that my brother had been for years insane to a certain degree,” John Guiteau said after his younger brother’s political obsession exploded into violence. What lit the fuse? John Guiteau believed that Charles “committed the act in a moment of mad frenzy under the hallucination excited by the failure of his crazy attempt to get an office and the interest he had taken in the Senatorial fight at Albany.”

In the issue of Harper’s Weekly published the day Arthur and Conkling left Albany, cartoonist Thomas Nast drew the vice president of the United States as a bootblack in an apron, polishing the shoes of New York’s ex-senators. “Out-‘shining’ everybody in humiliation at Albany,” the caption read. Arthur’s employer in the cartoon—a woman symbolizing the American people—says, “I did not engage you, Vice-President Arthur, to do this kind of work.” It was a demeaning image, and it wounded Arthur all the more deeply because he knew it was accurate. Lounging in the saloon of the St. John, listening to his longtime boss plot his next moves, Arthur was ashamed of what his loyalty had cost him.

Looking outside, Arthur saw black-smudged sky ahead—they were close to the northern tip of Manhattan. Within minutes, swirling ferry traffic enveloped the St. John. The shrieking of the gulls mingled with the shouts of stevedores and the slapping of the waves against the hulls of ships in their berths. At about 10:30 a.m., from the Canal Street pier, there was a shout directed at the St. John: President Garfield has been assassinated!

Standing on the St. John, Steward Burdett heard the message, but he could hardly believe it. He rushed into the saloon to tell Arthur and Conkling. “It can’t be true,” Arthur gasped. “This must be some stock speculation.” When he read the telegram confirming the news, he crumpled into his chair, overcome with grief and fear. In the feud between Conkling and Garfield, he had cast his lot with the New York boss. The vice presidency was a higher office than he had ever dreamed of attaining; he could not conceive of being president. Would his countrymen accept him as Garfield’s replacement? Would they blame him for the president’s murder?

The shocking news of Garfield’s shooting momentarily paralyzed Arthur and Conkling, but they soon sprang into action. Ordering their baggage to be sent after them, they flew off the ship and hailed a two-wheeled hansom cab. They clambered in and Conkling opened the trap door in the roof to bark out their destination: the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The driver snapped the reins and headed east on Canal Street. At the corner of Canal and Broadway, he turned uptown, navigating through coupes and cabs, four-wheeled growlers and omnibuses.

At Astor Place, Arthur and Conkling glimpsed the Cooper Union, the Italianate brownstone sanctified by Lincoln’s famous speech two decades before, and the elevated railway rising beyond it. They rode past the great publishing houses and A. T. Stewart’s six-story “Iron Palace,” fronted by long rows of private carriages. Grace Church, with its white marble rectory, was just above Stewart’s. A few blocks farther uptown, the cab passed Tiffany & Company, the country’s largest jewelry store, and Brentano’s News Depot.

By this time, there was scarcely a man, woman, or child in Manhattan who hadn’t heard the horrifying news. The newspapers had received the first dispatch from the capital at around 10 a.m., just when the downtown streets were starting to fill up with merchants and businessmen. That initial report included few details, but it left the impression that Garfield had been killed. New York’s leading newspapers were all clustered in Printing House Square, across Park Row from City Hall Park, and they immediately posted bulletins outside their buildings.

“My God! President Garfield has been shot!” exclaimed one man who was strolling by the Tribune building and was one of the first to see the plain white piece of paper posted on the granite wall.

“It can’t be true. It must be a canard,” another replied.

“If it is true,” a third said solemnly, “this will be a sad day for the country.”

People converged around the grand buildings housing the Tribune, the Times, the Herald, and the Sun. The police dispatched half a dozen officers to each newspaper building to clear the sidewalks, but the throngs quickly bubbled over into the street. One white-haired old man forced his way through the crowd outside the Tribune. “What is the country coming to!” he declared, raising his hand in a despairing gesture. “I’m glad of it,” growled a rough-looking man at the edge of the crowd. “It’s just what Garfield deserved!” Shouts of “Let me at that man!” and “Kill him!” and “Shoot the scoundrel!” rang out. The crowd scuffled and swayed, and several men detached themselves from the mass to confront the speaker, but he fled down Nassau Street and was swallowed up by the shade of its somber houses.

The telegraph spread the word to all the principal hotels. In Wall Street offices, it appeared on the tape that delivered stock quotes, and it was posted on bulletin boards outside drug stores. Soon the news had radiated to every corner of the island, from the mansions on Fifth Avenue to the tenements on the Lower East Side. Scores of men rushed to the Western Union Telegraph office hoping to debunk it, only to have their worst fears confirmed.

Suddenly the flags on the post office and on City Hall were lowered to half-staff, and a shudder went through the crowd in Printing House Square.

When they arrived at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Conkling and Arthur stepped into the marble-tiled and frescoed reception hall and were engulfed by friends who supposed they had the latest information. But Arthur told them he had just returned from Albany, and was desperate for news himself. “What is the latest news from Washington? Have you anything further?” he inquired frantically. He was trying to remain calm. As always, his hair was carefully combed, but his normally ruddy cheeks were ashen, and his blue eyes were glassy. A reporter asked him whether he wanted to make any public statement regarding the shooting of the president. Arthur paused. He did not know any particulars, he said haltingly, and was not certain about the danger the president might be in. Yes, of course, he was horrified at the crime and extremely sorry for the president and his family. He was shocked—so shocked he did not feel capable of expressing his feelings. Begging to be excused, he left to join Conkling in room 38, where the boss always stayed when he was in the city. A stream of visitors’ cards followed them, but the two men declined to see anybody.

At 11 a.m., the flags on City Hall and the post office were suddenly raised again, prompting cheers from the crowd broiling in the sun: the latest bulletins suggested that Garfield’s physicians did not think his wounds were fatal. The same news reached the Fifth Avenue Hotel via telegraph, and shortly after 11 Arthur emerged from Conkling’s room and left the hotel to return to his home on Lexington Avenue. At about 11:15, the vice president alighted from his carriage in front of his brownstone and was met by his neighbor, New York City Comptroller Allan Campbell.

“What is your latest information?” Campbell asked.

“From all I can learn I do not believe the president’s wounds are mortal,” Arthur replied. Then he hurriedly bade Campbell good morning and went inside.

At noon the newspaper extras appeared, and the newsboys and newsgirls pushed their way into the throngs around the bulletin boards and flew uptown as fast as the elevated trains could carry them. The demand for papers was intense, and their bundles disappeared quickly. Many buyers were so eager to devour their papers they didn’t bother the peddlers for their change. Nearly all the passengers riding the horse-drawn streetcars, which ran on rails along the major avenues, held newspapers in their hands. Over the next several hours, the dispatches from Washington grew more optimistic: the president had been moved to the White House, he was conscious, and the doctors thought he might survive his wounds.

Early in the afternoon, an encouraging telegram arrived at Arthur’s home. It was from Blaine, who was at Garfield’s bedside at the White House: “At this hour, 1 o’clock, P.M., the President’s symptoms are not regarded as unfavorable, but no definite assurance can be given until after the probing of the wound at 3 o’clock,” Blaine wrote. “There is strong ground for hope, and at the same time the greatest anxiety as to the final results.”

Meanwhile, additional details trickled out of Washington. Word spread that the shooter was named Guiteau, that he was a Stalwart who wanted Arthur to be president. A letter the police found in Guiteau’s pocket shed additional light on his motives. “The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican Party and save the Republic,” the letter stated. “I had no ill-will toward the President. His death was a political necessity.”

This intelligence created a stir in Printing House Square.

“Is a man of so pure and noble a character as President Garfield to be shot because his ideas do not happen to suit a certain lot of politicians?” one man exclaimed when the Tribune posted a bulletin detailing Guiteau’s motives.

Another man objected. “But you don’t know that the assassin was prompted by anyone,” he said. “He is probably some lunatic.”

The first man scoffed at that suggestion. “So was the assassin Booth a lunatic. There is altogether too much method about this kind of madness, however.”

At the Fifth Avenue Hotel, former secretary of the navy Richard W. Thompson rejected comparisons to the assassination of Lincoln 16 years before. “Lincoln was assassinated when the bitterness and strife of war was all over the land. President Garfield is struck down in a time of peace. Assassination in a time of peace is worse than assassination in a time of war,” Thompson said, as men around him nodded in agreement. “The country has seldom been in a better condition than now, and, with the exception of a local faction contest in this state, harmony prevails everywhere.”

At around 3 p.m. the bulletins began to take on a darker cast: Garfield was hemorrhaging, they reported, and fading fast. The Fifth Avenue Hotel even received one dispatch that claimed, falsely, that the President had died. This news was quickly determined to be untrue, but the crowds in Printing House Square grew silent, mournfully anticipating the bulletin that would announce Garfield’s demise. Common laborers stood in the sun side-by-side with wealthy merchants, speaking, when they spoke at all, in subdued tones. Grizzled men in ragged clothes, who under normal circumstances would have attracted police attention if seen loitering near more respectable citizens, stood with tears in their eyes, utterly harmless. There was some pushing and edging forward to get a better view of the bulletins, but it was done gently and quietly.

On Lexington Avenue, Arthur received another telegram from Blaine. “At this hour, 3:30, the symptoms of the President are not favorable,” it stated. “Anxiety deepens.” This prompted the vice president to return to the Fifth Avenue Hotel to consult with Conkling and other Stalwarts. After meeting with them for a couple of hours, he drove back to his home to sit in his doorway and await further dispatches. A reporter found him there. “I am utterly broken down,” Arthur murmured. He had tears in his eyes, and his voice faltered. Several times, he had to turn away to compose himself. “I have nothing to say. What can I say? The news is terrible.”

Park Row was now “a solid, throbbing mass” of men, women, and children. Hundreds of newsboys ran through the crowd shouting “Extra!” Streetcar drivers had to slow their horses to a walk, and they shouted themselves hoarse urging people to clear the way. Their passengers recklessly stuck their heads out of the car windows, trying to read the bulletins as they passed by. At the corner of Park Row and Beekman Street, a crowd clustered around a newsstand that had numerous portraits of President Garfield on display.

Still the crowds grew larger, spilling south onto Broadway. In front of St. Paul’s Church, five hundred people stood in the middle of the street, seemingly indifferent to the danger of being trampled by passing vehicles. Outside the 10-story brick-and-stone headquarters of the Evening Post on the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street, about six hundred people waited impatiently for the next bulletin. Finally, at 4 p.m., a copyist began writing the latest news on the board in front of the building. “President Garfield’s symptoms are very…” Here he paused to begin a new line. “Oh, I hope they are good,” somebody said softly. But the copyist’s next word was “unfavorable.” Several people melted away from the board when the depressing news was posted, but others quickly filled their places.

Sitting in his doorway on Lexington Avenue, Arthur received another telegram from Blaine: “At this hour, 6 o’clock, the condition of the President is very alarming. He is losing his strength, and the worst may be apprehended.” Once again Arthur returned to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where he received yet another message from Blaine. “Mrs. Garfield has just arrived, at 6:45 o’clock. The President was able to recognize and converse with her, but, in the judgment of his physicians, he is rapidly sinking.”

On a normal evening, the Fifth Avenue Hotel was a mecca for merchants, stockbrokers, and the idle rich—clusters of well-dressed men bathed in honey-colored gaslight. The second-floor parlors, which overlooked the fountains and statues of Madison Square, hummed with conversation. Glasses clinked in the bar, barbers worked on customers in the shaving saloon, and porters carrying huge trunks pushed their way through the crowd in the lobby. The office bell rang constantly, summoning servants to execute the orders of the guests. Tonight, an anxious, surging crowd made it almost impossible to get from one end of the main hall to the other. The densest crush was around the telegraph in the reading room, and around the stock indicator in the bar. Occasionally, someone would forget himself for a moment, and puncture the gloom by laughing in conversation with a friend. When that happened, every man within hearing turned and frowned at the offender.

Arthur made his way through the crowd surrounding the telegraph and dictated a response to Blaine: “Your 6:45 telegram is very distressing. I still hope for more favorable tidings, and ask you to keep me advised. Please do not fail to express to Mrs. Garfield my deepest sympathy.” Asked whether he intended to go to Washington, Arthur insisted he would not go until officially notified of Garfield’s death. He did not want to seem overly eager to assume the presidency—especially in light of Guiteau’s stated wish for his succession. Arthur ordered a coupe and returned to Lexington Avenue, this time in the company of New York City Police Commissioner Stephen B. French, a close friend and political confidant. At 10:30 p.m., he received another telegram there, this one from the current secretary of the navy, William H. Hunt, and Postmaster General Thomas L. James. “Sincere thanks for your expressions of sympathy,” the cabinet officers wrote. “The President is no better, and we fear is sinking.” Once again, Arthur rode to the Fifth Avenue Hotel to consult with Conkling.

On most nights, Broadway pulsed with life, ablaze in electric light shining on people pouring in and out of theaters, restaurants, and cafés. Respectable families jostled for scarce sidewalk space with swaggering toughs and flashily dressed prostitutes trolling for customers. Lit up by lanterns, the omnibuses and carriages skittered on the roadway like fireflies. Tonight, at the corner of Broadway and 23rd Street, New Yorkers were waiting for their president to die. A large crowd stood in Madison Square, where a stereopticon projected the latest bulletins on a wall. At 10:30 p.m., there was a ray of hope: a bulletin announced that when Garfield’s physicians had told him he had a “slight chance” for recovery, the president had replied, “I’ll take that chance.” A hearty cheer rent the air at this evidence of Garfield’s fighting spirit. But gloom settled on the square again as the hours passed without any news of improvement in the president’s condition.

To Arthur and Conkling, it now seemed certain that Garfield would die, and soon. After conferring with other members of the New York machine, they decided that Arthur should go to Washington after all. Shortly after 11 p.m., Arthur, Conkling, French, and Senator John P. Jones of Nevada climbed into a coach that was waiting in front of the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s marble porch. Frank Cosgrove, a police detective, had orders to drive the party to the Desbrosses Street pier, where they planned to catch the last ferry to the Pennsylvania Railroad depot in Jersey City. Vice President Arthur would ride on the midnight train to the capital.

At the depot the entire party boarded the sleeping car, but Conkling, still focused on the struggle in Albany for his old Senate seat, would not be traveling with his protégé. Before the train left he stepped out and bade Arthur goodbye on the platform. The two men shook hands. “Goodbye. God bless you. I’ll meet you on Thursday,” Conkling said. The ex-senator stood on the platform until the train departed. A reporter asked him why Arthur had changed his mind. If Garfield was going to die, Conkling explained, it would be best for the vice president to be there when it happened. And if he survived, it was an act of courtesy for Arthur to be present. “I am not going to Washington myself now,” he added. “I cannot say about the future.”

At 41 Park Row, the five-story stone headquarters of the Times, an editorial writer was putting the finishing touches on his piece for the next day’s newspaper.

“When James A. Garfield was yesterday reported as lying at the point of death new bitterness was added to the poignancy of public grief by the thought that Chester A. Arthur would be his successor,” it read. “Gen. Arthur is about the last man who would be considered eligible to that position, did the choice depend on the voice either of a majority of his own party or of a majority of the people of the United States.”

From midnight until 7 a.m., the immense Hoe presses in the basement would be running constantly to print the daily edition. By the time readers held it in their hands, President Garfield almost surely would be dead.