CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A Mysterious Correspondent

MOST AMERICANS DREADED the prospect of an Arthur presidency. The Chicago Tribune called it “a pending calamity of the utmost magnitude,” while the Nation noted the widespread fear that “a very obnoxious person named Conkling will ‘run’ the government as he has long run the ‘machine.’” Some newspapers, pointing out that Arthur and Conkling were the main beneficiaries of the crime, accused the Stalwarts of inspiring Guiteau—and perhaps directing him. “What the country will not forget is that the deed is done in their name, and that they and their followers will derive place and power from the President’s death,” the Charleston News and Courier declared.

The Louisville Courier-Journal compared Arthur and Conkling to Mary Surratt, the Washington boardinghouse owner executed for aiding the assassination of President Lincoln. “Mrs. Surratt was hanged on less circumstantial evidence than occurs to the mind as to Roscoe Conkling and Chester A. Arthur,” the newspaper seethed.

Reformers were disappointed with Garfield, but they were appalled at the idea of a President Arthur. Former president Hayes wrote in his diary that Garfield’s death “would be a national calamity whose consequences we can not now confidently conjecture. Arthur for President! Conkling the power behind the throne, superior to the throne!” Andrew Dickson White, a New York state senator who became president of Cornell University and a diplomat, recalled that when news of the shooting reached him in Europe, his first reaction was not “horror at the death of Garfield, but stupefaction at the elevation of Arthur.” According to White, “it was a common saying of that time among those who knew him best, ‘“Chet” Arthur President of the United States! Good God!’’’

Arthur was afraid to appear in public. He received death threats, and was deeply shaken by the widespread belief that he was complicit in the crime. “No one deplores the calamity more than Senator Conkling and myself. These reports are so base and unfounded that I cannot believe they will be credited,” he protested to one reporter. “Good God! If such a thing were possible then liberty is impossible. Such a calamity as this should be treated as national, not only by every citizen but by the entire press of the country. Party and faction should be forgotten in the general grief.”

Arthur arrived in Washington early on Sunday morning and went directly to the home of Senator John Jones, who had accompanied him to the capital. For most of the day, the vice president remained secluded inside Jones’s large granite house. In the afternoon, Arthur sent the Nevada senator to the White House with a request to visit the wounded president, but Garfield’s doctors said their patient needed absolute quiet, and forbade any visitors except the First Lady. Even outside the mansion, where businessmen and fashionably dressed ladies clung to the iron railings with hatless and coatless laborers, an eerie quiet prevailed, broken only by the occasional shouts of newsboys.

The next morning Arthur and Jones showed up at the White House at 10 a.m. The pair’s sudden appearance in the vestibule surprised the gaggle of reporters there, who pressed forward shouting questions. Arthur and Jones ignored them and bounded upstairs, where they were ushered into the darkened cabinet room, next to Garfield’s sick chamber. The sound of water splashing in a fountain tiptoed through the open window, and a gentle breeze from the Potomac tickled the draperies. Secretary of the Treasury William Windom, Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh, and Postmaster General Thomas James slumped in their chairs or paced the floor, anxiously awaiting the next scrap of news from Garfield’s doctors.

Soon Blaine joined them. The other cabinet members watched with trepidation as Conkling’s greatest enemy strode across the room toward Conkling’s greatest friend. “General, I am glad that you have arrived,” Blaine said. He extended his hand toward the sitting Arthur, who seized it eagerly. “And Mr. Secretary, I am glad to be here, but cannot too fully regret the great trouble that has fallen upon us,” Arthur replied, his voice breaking. Arthur asked to see Mrs. Garfield and was taken into her private parlor. Smiling bravely at the sight of the vice president, Lucretia inquired about his health and apologized for the sudden summons to Washington. With God’s help, she said, her husband would be spared. Arthur had tears in his eyes as he clasped both of her hands in his and lamented the tragedy that had befallen her and the nation. After 20 minutes, Arthur returned to the cabinet room. “I pray to God that the president will recover,” he told the men assembled there. “God knows I do not want the place I was never elected to.”

Returning to Jones’s house, Arthur retreated to a first-floor parlor where furniture was being stored for the summer. A reporter found him sitting on a covered sofa with his head bowed, staring out an open window. Hearing somebody enter the room, Arthur looked up: his eyes were bloodshot and moist, and there were traces of tears on his ruddy cheeks. When the reporter addressed him, the vice president replied softly in just a few words, afraid that if he said too much his emotions would overcome him. His friends said he was as distraught as when Nell died. The reporter described him as “still in a kind of stupor. He sees, of course, what is going on, and he has not lost possession of his faculties, but he is overwhelmed by the magnitude of the calamity and of the task which he may be called upon to perform.”

In the following days, members of the cabinet visited Arthur with regular updates. Gradually, their reports grew sunnier. A week after the shooting, Garfield’s doctors still could not locate the bullet in his back, but they knew they didn’t have to remove it to save him—after all, hundreds of Civil War veterans were thriving with lead balls inside them. “With the lapse of every 24 hours the condition of the President has seemed to improve,” the Times reported one week after the shooting. “His doctors feel that the grand crisis has passed, and that unless something which is now totally unexpected occurs there is no danger whatever of his life being taken by the bullet of the assassin.” With Garfield increasingly cheerful and confident, the doctors turned their attention to his comfort: As temperatures climbed into the 90s, navy engineers were rigging up a primitive air conditioner using a compressor from a Nevada silver mine and 10 tons of ice they carted into the White House basement. In the meantime, Almon Rockwell fanned his friend with an Indian punkah. With only good news coming out of the White House, the crowds that had been glued to the gates outside melted away.

On July 13, 1881, Garfield’s temperature was normal and his pulse was 90—the lowest since the shooting. The doctors continued to drain his wound using a flexible bone pipe, but they no longer feared sepsis or abdominal inflammation. Garfield had been subsisting on chicken broth and milk with rum. Now his doctors felt he was ready for breast of woodcock, which he chewed but did not swallow. Arthur felt so confident in the president’s recovery he returned to Manhattan.

In Albany, meanwhile, Conkling fought on to regain his Senate seat. Like Arthur, he read the newspaper editorials that blamed him for the shooting, but unlike the vice president, he didn’t let the charges shake his confidence. The attacks would all “in due time rebound upon the assassins who fulminate them,” he assured a friend. His critics, he said, “have seized a dark and dangerous hour for what you call their ‘devilish’ machinations; but in the end reason and judgment will prevail.”

But Guiteau’s bloody act had fatally wounded the Stalwart chieftain. For nearly three weeks, Conkling and his supporters managed to prevent anybody else from securing a majority in the Senate contest. On July 22, on the 56th ballot, the Lordly Roscoe’s magnificent edifice finally crumbled: Republicans chose Congressman Elbridge Lapham, who had defected from the Conkling ranks, to replace the boss in the Senate.

Conkling received the news in his suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. He walked outside and wandered the streets of the neighborhood, “alone and apparently in deep thought.” When he returned, he sent a telegram to one of his legislative supporters. “The heroic constancy of the spartan [sic] band which so long has stood for principle and truth has my deepest gratitude and admiration.… The near future will vindicate their wisdom and crown them with approval.” And what of Conkling’s future? One of his followers suggested he might run for New York’s open House seat (Congressman Warner Miller had taken Platt’s place in the Senate), and bid to become Speaker of the House. But Conkling refused to talk about the defeat or what he might do next.

That evening a handful of reporters came to call on the once mighty boss, “and they were, as usual, denied the pleasure of conversing with him.” Many expected Arthur to come to the Fifth Avenue Hotel to comfort his longtime patron, but the vice president never showed up.

Lying in his White House sickbed, the recovering Garfield was magnanimous. “I am glad it is over. I am sorry for Conkling. He has made a great mistake [in resigning], in my judgment,” Garfield said. “I will offer him any favor he may ask, or any appointment he may desire.”

With the exception of a brief relapse the day after Conkling’s defeat in Albany, Garfield’s condition steadily improved for the next several weeks. By early August, he was doing so well his convalescence dropped off the front pages. New York newspapers turned their attention to the summer season in Saratoga, which was in full swing. The resort suffered when vacationing businessmen packed up their families and abruptly returned to New York after the shooting, “fearing the unsettled state of things that must follow the sudden death of the President.” Now the crowds were coming back, and hotel managers were predicting a prosperous season.

With Garfield recovering and the Albany drama finished, Arthur slipped back into the shadows. He left Manhattan to spend a few days in Newport, but people no longer paid much attention to his comings and goings. The main thing on New Yorkers’ minds was the heat, which quivered over the pavement, turning the city into a steaming saucepan. Drivers leaned back under the hoods of their vehicles to find a sliver of shade, and flakes of foam fell from the mouths of overheated horses. Only the saloonkeepers were happy: they hustled all day to supply the thirsty masses with iced drinks and beer, too busy to mop their glistening faces. The night offered scant relief, especially for the city’s tenement dwellers. They lingered on the stoops under a blood-red moon, dreading the slog up to their airless bedrooms. Some slept in chairs tipped against houses, or in wagons. In barroom doorways, men and women gulped three-cent schooners of beer and bellowed songs into the panting dark.

Several times a day, Garfield’s doctors posted bulletins on a large tree near the east gate of the White House. On August 15, the 8:30 a.m. bulletin roused the nation from its summer torpor: the president’s fever and pulse had reached frightening heights, and he was vomiting. His vital signs had spiked before, but now they were staying at elevated levels. Doctors were even more concerned about his inability to retain any nourishment, even water. “The great trouble now is that the stomach refuses to assist us by performing its legitimate functions,” said Dr. Bliss, still playing the chief physician’s role he claimed on the day of the shooting. Once again, the concerned and the curious gathered outside the White House gates.

There were minor improvements in Garfield’s condition over the next 10 days, but they were always followed by setbacks. The newspapers dutifully documented every twist and turn, but gradually the full picture was coming into focus, and it was grim. Arthur’s old patron, former governor Edwin Morgan, felt compelled to write a reassuring letter to his former protégé. “I have said elsewhere, and very often, that you will make a good President—I have never doubted it, I do not doubt it now,” Morgan wrote. “It is a great and unlooked for responsibility thrown upon you, but with this responsibility there is a great opportunity … only exercise your own good judgment in meeting this responsibility, and all will be well. You have talent and qualifications equal to it.”

By August 25, members of the cabinet had nearly given up hope, and Garfield’s doctors were telling the First Lady it was highly unlikely her husband would recover. “I have not lost hope, but I feel very anxious now. The case is very critical,” Bliss said. “The outlook is less promising than ever before.”

For the first time in weeks, New Yorkers converged on the Fifth Avenue Hotel seeking the latest bulletins from Washington. Politicians and merchants, lawyers and men of leisure clustered in the vestibule, on the sidewalk and under the portico, exchanging opinions on the president’s prospects. The consensus was that the end was fast approaching. Hidden in his Lexington Avenue brownstone behind drawn curtains, Arthur waited for the latest news and prepared to leave for Washington at a moment’s notice. Conkling and other machine boys came to advise him on strategy. Surrounded by decanters and cigar smoke, they tried to disentangle the thorny problem vexing the vice president: How could Arthur fulfill his constitutional responsibilities and exhibit the appropriate level of concern for the president, without appearing too eager to assume the presidency?

On August 26, Lucretia Garfield sent a telegram to her brother, who was taking care of the youngest Garfield sons at the Mentor homestead, urging him to come to Washington at once. The cabinet met to discuss whether it was time to summon Arthur, too. They called in Garfield’s surgeons for an assessment of his condition, and they were alarmed by what they heard. Nevertheless, they “decided that they would not subject Gen. Arthur to the embarrassment of a criticism that he had come to Washington to wait for a dead man’s shoes.”

Outside, the August sun baked the broad, dusty streets and parched parks of the sleepy capital. A single soldier in a white helmet stood sentry on Pennsylvania Avenue with his saber drawn, while a policeman posted behind him twirled his club, chatting with bystanders. On the White House steps, clusters of reporters quietly debated how long Garfield might last. When a carriage rumbled away from the mansion, people craned their necks to peek inside. It was Blaine. “He looks downhearted, don’t he?” one man commented. The crowd of reporters on the steps thickened when it was almost time for the next bulletin. Some waited inside the White House vestibule, where a full-length portrait of the murdered Lincoln seemed to deepen the gloom.

In New York, the Sun could not post updates fast enough to satisfy the public’s voracious appetite for information. Crowds blocked the sidewalks outside 170 Nassau Street, and many drivers drew rein in front of the Sun building to read the large, plain lettering on the boards. At the corner of Park Row and Broadway, two hundred people gathered to read the latest news projected by electric light. An army of shrill-voiced newsboys mingled with the crowd, peddling extra editions of the evening newspapers. Pickpockets also circulated, collecting about $6,000 from distracted spectators.

On August 27, Postmaster General James sneaked into New York for several hours to meet secretly with Arthur, who was still secluded in his home with Conkling and Jones. The cabinet had sent James as an envoy to communicate the seriousness of Garfield’s condition. Spotted by a reporter on the midnight train back to Washington, a nervous and exhausted James refused to divulge his mission, admitting only that he had been in New York “on private business.” The next day, Arthur didn’t emerge from his home until 8:30 in the evening, when he took a solitary ride through Central Park in an open barouche.

On East 74th Street, a 31-year-old woman read the dire accounts in the newspapers and sat down to write a seven-page letter to the vice president.

Julia I. Sand was the unmarried eighth daughter of Christian Henry Sand, a German immigrant who rose to become president of the Metropolitan Gas Light Company of New York. When Christian Sand died in 1867, his family left Brooklyn for Pleasant Valley, New Jersey. In 1880, the Sands settled at 46 East 74th Street, which was owned by Julia’s brother, Theodore V. Sand, a banker. As the pampered daughter of a wealthy father, Julia read French, enjoyed poetry, and vacationed in Saratoga and Newport. But by the time she wrote Arthur she was an invalid, plagued by spinal pain and other ailments that kept her at home. As a woman, Julia was excluded from public life, but she followed politics closely through the newspapers, and she had an especially keen interest in Chester Arthur.

The vice president had never met Sand, or even heard of her. They were complete strangers. But her words penetrated the husk that had grown around the son of Elder Arthur. “The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” the letter began. “The people are bowed in grief; but—do you realize it?—not so much because he is dying, as because you are his successor.”

What president ever entered office under circumstances so sad! The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce? Your best friends said: “Arthur must resign—he cannot accept office, with such a suspicion resting upon him.” And now your kindest opponents say: “Arthur will try to do right”—adding gloomily, “He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.”

Julia Sand did not share that pessimistic view. “But making a man President can change him!” she declared. “Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine.”

Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform! It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong—but it is a proof of it, sometime in one’s career, to pause & ponder, to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it & devote the remainder of one’s life to that only which is pure & exalted. Such resolutions of the soul are not common. No step towards them is easy. In the humdrum drift of daily life, they are impossible. But once in a while there comes a crisis which renders miracles feasible. The great tidal wave of sorrow which has rolled over the country has swept you loose from your old moorings and set you on a mountain top, alone.

As president—especially one who had not been elected—Arthur could sever his unsavory political associations and make a clean start, Sand argued. “You are free—free to be as able & as honorable as any man who ever filled the presidential chair.” She continued with words that could have come from the pen of Elder Arthur:

Your past—you know best what it has been. You have lived for worldly things. Fairly or unfairly, you have won them. You are rich, powerful—tomorrow, perhaps, you will be President. And what is it all worth? Are you peaceful—are you happy? What if a few days hence the hand of the next unsatisfied ruffian should lay you low & you should drag through months of weary suffering in the White House, knowing that all over the land not a prayer was uttered in your behalf, not a tear shed, that the great American people was glad to be rid of you—would not worldly honors seem rather empty then?

It was still possible, she contended, for Arthur to chart a different course. “Rise to the emergency. Disappoint our fears. Force the nation to have faith in you. Show from the first that you have none but the purest aims,” she wrote. “It may be difficult at once to inspire confidence, but persevere. In time—when you have given reason for it—the country will love & trust you.

“Your name is now on the annals of history,” she concluded. “You cannot slink back into obscurity, if you would. A hundred years hence, school boys will recite your name in the list of Presidents and tell of your administration. And what shall posterity say? It is for you to choose whether your record shall be written in black or in gold.”

Arthur was intrigued—who was this mysterious woman who dared to challenge him so boldly? She signed the letter, “Yours Respectfully, Julia I. Sand,” but she included no other personal information. Eager to learn more about her, Arthur checked the return address. On a card embossed with “The Union League Club” at the top, he jotted down what he discovered: “Theodore V. Sand, Banker, 54 Wall St (Sand, Hamilton & Co.) lives at No. 46 East 74 St.” Then he folded Julia Sand’s letter and filed it away in a safe place.

On a breathless gray morning a week later, an Adams Express wagon and four carriages were arrayed in front of the North Portico of the White House. At about 5:40 a.m., the large crowd pressed against the gates watched as President Garfield was carried out of the mansion on a stretcher. He lay under a white wool blanket with red borders, and his forehead was wrapped in a white cloth. Gently, several attendants lifted the stretcher into the wagon and placed it on a low walnut bed. Once the patient was safely situated, some of Garfield’s doctors and family members climbed into the carriages and sped off, but Colonel Rockwell, Dr. Bliss, and several other doctors and attendants joined the president in the wagon. Rockwell and Bliss fanned him vigorously, Bliss using his straw hat. Two stout bay horses were hitched to the vehicle. Its springs had been carefully oiled, and the most experienced driver in Washington held the reins.

The doctors had decided the swampy Washington weather was impeding Garfield’s recovery, and that breathing the fresh sea air of Long Branch, New Jersey, might revive him. The journey was risky, but after two months of Garfield’s making little progress, they were ready to try a change of scenery. As the wagon left the White House grounds, the public got its first look at the wounded president, and they were encouraged by what they saw: his face was pale with a yellowish tint, but it was fuller than recent bulletins had led them to expect.

Some of the onlookers walked alongside the procession as it made its way down Pennsylvania Avenue. At the Department of the Treasury, a group of men standing on a platform used to receive bullion doffed their hats as the wagon passed by. To avoid jostling the president, the horses proceeded at a slow walk, and sawdust had been piled on the streetcar tracks at some intersections to cushion the wagon wheels. A stray dog howled, but a bystander promptly grabbed it and shook it into silence. At 11th Street, the president opened his eyes and turned his head to look at the citizens lined up along the route, some them weeping. “How good it is to see the people,” he murmured before dozing off again.

About 20 minutes after leaving the White House, the wagon arrived at 6th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where the presidential train waited on temporary tracks that had been laid on the street. The horses were detached from the wagon and a squad of soldiers wearing cork helmets surrounded it and gently maneuvered it against the door of the railroad car. It took them three tries to get it lined up perfectly. “God save the president!” one onlooker cried, but otherwise the large crowd watched silently. Attendants grasped the handles of Garfield’s stretcher and lifted him, feet first, into the car. When one of the handles banged into the doorway, the president winced in pain.

The journey north was uneventful and about seven hours after leaving the White House Garfield was resting comfortably in a seaside room in Francklyn Cottage, behind the Elberon Hotel. During the next two weeks, no detail was overlooked in the desperate attempt to restore the president’s health. His attendants used only well-seasoned hardwood to fuel the fire in his room, and the Red Gate Farm in nearby Newton sent the pick of its herd of Alderney cows to provide the highest-quality milk for the president. Installed in the Elberon stables, two-year-old “Repartee” received thrice-daily meals of 10 quarts of cottonseed meal, linseed, and corn meal, mixed with six quarts of bran.

For about a week, Garfield seemed to be gaining strength. But on September 16, 1881, he suffered another serious relapse. The president’s agony appeared to be nearing its end; Arthur feared his was just beginning. The vice president, speaking “with a depth of feeling that no man could ever forget,” told Chauncey Depew he was terrified Garfield would die. “The most frightful responsibility which ever devolved upon any one would be the casting of the Presidency upon me under the conditions which you and all my friends so well understand,” he said.

Shortly before 11 a.m. on September 19, Arthur received a telegram from Attorney General MacVeagh, who was with Garfield in New Jersey. “It is impossible to conceal from ourselves that the President is rapidly growing worse,” MacVeagh wrote. “The two chills occurring within fourteen hours warn us to be prepared for any sorrow with which God in His mercy may afflict us.” For the next 11 hours, Arthur remained shut inside his house. At around 10 p.m., his personal secretary, John Reed, arrived with New York District Attorney Daniel Rollins and prominent Republican lawyer Elihu Root. After greeting them, Arthur grabbed his cane and announced he was stepping out for a walk. He wanted to be alone, but asked them to wait for his return.

Arthur walked to 28th Street, then east to Third Avenue. He was wearing a dark sack suit that matched his mood. Making his way uptown, he crossed Third Avenue in front of the streetcar depot and paused to read some posters, but the words hardly registered in his brain. Only three years before, he had been sacked as Custom House collector, his political career apparently finished. Now he would be president—incredible! Despite the presence of his political friends—did he have any other kind?—he felt utterly alone. Nell was gone. Many of his countrymen believed him to be a party hack—or worse. The rigid moralism of Elder Arthur and the hopeful idealism of his youth could not buttress him now, for he had tossed away both long before. For years he had been a machine politician. Certainly, he was skilled at greasing the wheels with jobs and clever conversation, supplemented by liquor, cigars, and girls. But did that qualify him to be president?

When Arthur walked up the steps of his brownstone, it was nearly 10:30 p.m. For the next hour, the only sound outside was the occasional clatter of a passing milk wagon or butcher’s cart.

At 11:30, a Sun reporter knocked on the door. Had the vice president received the news? Arthur’s doorkeeper and valet, a black man named Aleck Powell, said his employer had received nothing since the regular evening bulletin issued by Garfield’s doctors. “The president is dead,” the reporter said. At that moment, Arthur appeared in the hall. “The president is dead,” the reporter repeated.

Arthur blanched. “Oh, no! It cannot be true. It cannot be. I have heard nothing.”

“The dispatch has just been received at the Sun office.”

“I hope—my God, I do hope it is a mistake!” Arthur’s voice broke, and his eyes welled up. He rushed into the back room where Root and Rollins were waiting. “They say he is dead,” Arthur murmured. “A dispatch has been received at the Sun office.” Nobody said a word.

The official telegram from the Cabinet arrived a few moments later. Arthur broke it open slowly, read its contents, and buried his head in his hands. He remained in that position as the men passed it around.

“It becomes our painful duty to inform you of the death of President Garfield, and to advise you to take the oath of office as President of the United States without delay,” the telegram said. “If it concur with your judgment, we will be very glad if you will come here on the earliest train tomorrow morning.”

A reporter from the Times arrived on Arthur’s doorstep several minutes later. He asked Powell whether the next president of the United States would like to make a statement regarding his future plans. “I daren’t ask him,” Powell replied. “He is sitting alone in his room sobbing like a child, with his head on his desk and his face buried in his hands. I dare not disturb him.”