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Barnes & Noble Exclusive Essay
Destiny of the Republic
By Candice Millard
At the heart of Destiny of the Republic is the story of the assassination of President James Garfield. What made me want to write this book, however, was not what I knew about President Garfield—that he had been shot by a deranged man in the summer of 1881—but all that I did not.
In everything I read, I am always looking for the thread of an idea, something that surprises me, and leaves me wanting to know more. To me, that's the best part of being a writer—following an idea to see where it leads. Most of the time, after doing a little research, I quickly come to a dead end. One day four years ago, however, I found much more than I had ever expected.
While reading a biography of Alexander Graham Bell, I learned that Bell had tried to help save Garfield's life after the President was shot. I wondered why a man as famous and powerful as Bell, who had invented the telephone just five years earlier, would abandon everything he was working on, put his life on hold, to help any man, even a President. The only way to answer that question, I realized, was to understand exactly what Bell had invented, and, more than that, to find out what kind of man Garfield had been.
After the assassination attempt, Bell devoted himself night and day to inventing something called an induction balance, a type of metal detector, to locate the bullet lodged in the President's body. The induction balance that Bell used for the final time on Garfield is on display in the National Museum of American History, on the National Mall. What most people don't know, however, is that the museum also has all of the versions of Bell's induction balance, in various shapes and sizes, with hanging wires and unfinished edges, that he created while trying to perfect his invention. As I held these fragile instruments in my gloved hands, carefully examining their intricate workings, I could almost see Bell's mind working, and his heart racing, as the President drew closer and closer to death.
Although, in the end, I would spend three years working on this book, it took only a few days of research to realize what Bell must have known—that President Garfield was not only a tragic figure, but one of the most extraordinary men ever elected President of the United States. A passionate abolitionist, Garfield was not only hailed a hero in the Civil War, but was a fierce champion of the rights of freed slaves. At the same time, he was a supremely gifted scholar who had become a university president at just 26 years of age, and, while in Congress, wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
With each diary entry and letter I read, each research trip I took, Garfield came more clearly and vividly to life. It was not until I visited the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C., however, that I began to understand the extent of the suffering that Garfield, and the nation with him, had endured. In its archives, in a large metal cabinet with long, deep drawers, the museum keeps the remains of two presidential assassins: John Wilkes Booth and Charles Guiteau, the man who shot Garfield. In the same cabinet, in a drawer just below Guiteau's, lies a six-inch section of Garfield's spine, a red pin inserted through a hole in the knobby, yellowed bone to show the path of Guiteau's bullet. It is impossible to look at this heartbreaking collection without being struck by the fact that this story, now hardly remembered, was once a tragedy so wrenching that it transfixed and terrified an entire nation.
This book is my attempt to step back in time, to understand these men and this moment in history, and to tell a story that should never have been forgotten.
Q&A with Candice Millard, author of DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC:
Q: The assassination of President James A. Garfield is a long-forgotten moment in American history. What sparked the idea for DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC and why do you feel it's important to tell this story?
A: I didn't start out to write about President Garfield. To be honest, I knew very little about him beyond the fact that he had been shot after four months in office. I was interested in Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. While researching Bell, however, I learned that he had worked night and day, turning his own life upside down, to try to save Garfield's life after the President was shot. I had never before heard this story, and I was fascinated that a genius like Bell would go to such lengths to help another man, even a President. So I wondered what kind of man Garfield was. What I learned was what Bell must have known: that Garfield was, without question, one of the most extraordinary men ever elected President. The more I learned about Garfield, the more I knew I had to tell this story.
Q: Garfield was a self-made man whose extraordinary rise from poverty to the Presidency is the stuff of American legend—congressman, Senator, Civil War general. How did Garfield rise above his humble beginnings? And how did education shape and inform him as a politician?
A: Garfield knew from painful personal experience that the nation's only hope for real progress—for freedom from poverty, ignorance and intolerance—was education. Although he had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter and janitor, by his sophomore year he was promoted to professor of literature and ancient languages. By the time he was 26 years old, he was the college president. Even while he was in Congress, Garfield could recite the entire Aeneid by heart, in Latin, and he wrote an original proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. So strong was Garfield's belief in the power of education that it largely defined his years in Congress. He gave countless speeches on the importance of education, argued that the best way to bring the South back into the Union was through the education of its children, advocated the establishment of schools at military camps, and proposed the first federal Department of Education.
Q: DESTINY opens with Garfield attending the 1876 United States Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Two key men that figured in the electrifying race to save Garfield's life after the assassination—Joseph Lister and Alexander Graham Bell—were exhibitors at the Centennial. Why did Garfield attend? What were Bell and Lister promoting at the Exhibition?
A: Garfield attended the exhibition because he believed in the power of ideas, and he wanted to see what the world's finest minds had achieved. There were no more shining examples of intellectual achievement in the nineteenth century than Alexander Graham Bell and Joseph Lister. Bell, who was only 29 years old, had just invented the telephone, and had brought it to the exhibition to publicly display it for the first time. Lister, a British surgeon, had discovered antisepsis—one of the most important advances in medical history—and had traveled to Philadelphia to try to convince American doctors of the importance of sterilization. Unfortunately for Garfield, and the nation, they were not yet ready to listen.
Q: The spoils system was alive and well in late 19th century U.S. politics, and no one reaped the rewards more than Senator Roscoe Conkling. How was Conkling arguably the most powerful politician in the country? And what was his relationship to Garfield's Vice President, Chester A. Arthur?
A: Conkling was a vain, preening, ruthlessly powerful senator from New York. He tightly controlled the New York Custom's House, which collected 70% of the country's customs revenue, and he expected complete and unquestioning loyalty. Politically, Arthur was utterly Conkling's creation. The only other political position he had held before the vice presidency was as the controller of the New York customs house, a job that Conkling, through President Grant, had given him. Even after the election, Arthur made it clear where his loyalties lay. He vacationed with Conkling, even lived with him in New York, and took every opportunity to publicly criticize the President.
Q: Garfield was surprisingly named the Republican nominee for President at the 1880 Chicago Republican Convention. How did the rivalry between the two factions—the Stalwarts and the Half-Breeds—of the Republican party thrust Garfield to the nomination? And why did Garfield consider the presidency a "bleak mountain" that he was obliged to ascend?
A: Not only was Garfield not a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1880, he didn't want to be one. He had never had what he called "presidential fever." He attended the convention to give a speech nominating another man. So eloquent and powerful was that speech, however that it deeply moved the raucous crowd of 15,000. When the balloting began, to Garfield's shock and horror, delegates began casting their votes for him. Before he knew it, despite his fervent objections, he had won the nomination.
Q: Charles Guiteau, Garfield's deranged assassin, led a peripatetic, lonely life and by 1880 had become obsessed with politics. At that time, the President kept calling hours for the American public Monday through Friday at the White House and Guiteau visited several times. What did Guiteau expect to receive from Garfield? And at what point did he decide to kill the President?
A: This was the height of the spoils system. Not only did many Americans feel entitled to government appointments, regardless of their abilities or experience, but they insisted on making their case directly to the President himself. Garfield was expected to meet with office seekers, one on one, face to face, from 10:30 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., every day. The idea of political patronage appealed to no one more than Charles Guiteau. Guiteau had failed at everything he had tried—from law to evangelism to even a free-love commune—but he was deeply, dangerously delusional. He believed that Garfield would not only give him a political appointment, but would make him the consul-general to France. All that was necessary, he believed, was persistence. Guiteau went to the State Department and White House nearly every day for months—even walking into the President's office at one point, while Garfield was in it—expecting to be given the consulship. Finally, frustrated and desperate, he had what he believed was a divine inspiration: God wanted him to kill the President.
Q: On July 2, 1881—four months after his inauguration — Garfield was assassinated by Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac Station in Washington. Two shots hit the President, but the bullets didn't kill him. How did the immediate actions of Garfield's doctors—led by Dr. Doctor Bliss—cause more harm than the bullets?
A: By an incredible stroke of luck, the bullet that tore through Garfield's back did not hit his spinal cord or any of his vital organs. Today, he would have spent a few nights in the hospital. Even if his doctors had just left him alone, he almost certainly would have survived. For more than two months, however, Bliss and a small team of doctors repeatedly inserted unsterilized fingers and instruments in the President's back, probing for the bullet. The resulting infection that coursed through Garfield's body was far more lethal than Guiteau's bullet.
Q: First Lady Lucretia Garfield was the center of Garfield's world. Yet their marriage had taken years to blossom. Why was their courtship difficult and how had their marriage changed over the course of 30 years?
A: During the first five years of their marriage, James and Lucretia were separated almost constantly, by Garfield's service during the Civil War and his work in Washington, D.C. Even when they were together, their starkly different personalities—Lucretia was as quiet and private as James was cheerful and outgoing—made it very difficult for them to understand each other. Slowly, however, and after enduring great heartache—from the death of their first child to James's brief affair with a young widow—they fell deeply in love, a love that was as vibrant as it was abiding. "I hear record the most deliberate conviction of my soul," James wrote to Lucretia one night from Washington. "Were every tie that binds me to the men and women of the world severed, and I free to choose out of all the world the sharer of my heart and home and life, I would fly to you and ask you to be mine as you are."
Q: Bliss supervised Garfield's care with an iron fist and complete control, much to the President's detriment. How did Bliss transform the White House into a hospital? And how did he manipulate the public into believing that Garfield's condition was improving, when in fact he was suffering greatly?
A: No one gave Bliss authority over Garfield's medical care. He just took it. He took advantage of the chaos that followed the shooting to establish himself as the President's chief physician, and then he dismissed all the other doctors. So completely did Bliss isolate Garfield in his sick room—refusing nearly all visitors, even the Secretary of State—that rumors began to circulate that the President had died. Bliss began issuing medical bulletins about Garfield's condition, but they were unwaveringly optimistic. Even when Garfield was suffering from severe septicemia, Bliss took great satisfaction in the "healthy pus" issuing from the President's wound, and insisted that his condition was steadily improving. Only in a private letter to a friend did Bliss admit that he feared for the President's life. "I can't afford to have him die," he wrote.
Q: How did Bliss enlist Alexander Graham Bell's help in trying to find the bullet and save Garfield's life? How did Bell's induction balance perform? Where is the device today?
A: Bell was not interested in wealth or fame. He wanted to help people. His wife and his mother were deaf, and he had lost both of his brothers to tuberculosis. He knew that, through his ideas and his inventions, he could improve lives, maybe even save them. When he learned of the President's shooting, he abandoned everything he was working on and devoted all of his time, energy, and genius to saving Garfield. He worked night and day for months to invent an induction balance, basically a metal detector, to find the bullet lodged in the President's body. Bell was ultimately defeated, but not because his invention didn't work. It did work. In fact, it went on to save countless lives before the invention of the medical x-ray. Bell was defeated by the President's own doctors, who didn't tell him that Garfield was lying on a metal-spring mattress—which was very unusual at the time—and wouldn't allow him to test the President's left side, where the bullet actually lay, because Bliss believed—and had publicly stated—that it was on the right. Bell's induction balance is now in the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. The final instrument he used on the President is on display, but Bell built many versions of the invention, desperately trying to perfect it while Garfield lay dying. In 1898, he donated those instruments to the museum's archives, where they remain today.
Q: Garfield spent his last days at the ocean in Elberon, NJ. Can you describe the train journey from the White House to Elberon? Why was dying near the water important to Garfield?
A: Garfield knew that he was dying, and he was determined not to spend his final days in the miserably hot, lonely sick room in the White House. If he could not go home to his beloved farmhouse in Ohio, he wanted to go to the sea. "I have always felt that the ocean was my friend," he had written in his diary just a few weeks before the shooting. "The sight of it brings rest and peace." As a specially outfitted train carried Garfield from Washington to Elberon, thousands of people lined the tracks, watching in silence as their President passed by. Although 2,000 people had worked until dawn to lay enough track to take the President directly to the house where he would be staying, the train could not breach the hill on which the cottage sat. Out of the crowd that had waited for hours for Garfield, two hundred men rushed forward to help, solemnly pushing the train cars to the door of the cottage.
Q: Guiteau's trial became one of the media events of the century, and one of the earliest proceedings in which an insanity defense was asserted. Can you describe Guiteau's courtroom behavior as well as what he considered his defense?
A: In their grief and rage, the American people were determined to see Garfield's assassin hanged for his crime. If any murderer, however, deserved to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, it was Charles Guiteau. Although he was extremely intelligent and incredibly articulate, the more he spoke during his trial, the more apparent his insanity became. He constantly attacked his own lawyer—who was his brother-in-law, the only man in the country willing to represent him—he refuted testimony, questioned witnesses, and even made a public appeal for money. Although he had taken the insanity defense, Guiteau wanted to make it clear that he had been insane only at the time of the shooting—not before, and certainly not after. More important, he argued that, while he had shot the President, Garfield's doctors had killed him. "They ought to be indicted for murdering James A. Garfield," Guiteau wrote in a public statement, "and not me."
Q: Chester Arthur was horrified by Garfield's assassination and even more terrified of becoming President. How did the letters from a mysterious friend transform Arthur from a widely distrusted Vice President into a respected President?
A: After the attempt on Garfield's life, Chester Arthur made a transformation so complete and stunning that no one could believe it. Sickened and grief stricken by the shooting, Arthur hid himself away, refusing even to go to Washington for fear that it would look like he was waiting in the wings. He even cut himself off from Conkling, the man who had made him, and found moral strength in the most unlikely of places—the letters of a young invalid woman named Julia Sand. Sand believed in Arthur when no one else did, when he didn't even believe in himself. While the rest of the world was horrified by the idea of Arthur becoming President, Sand urged him not to walk away. "Do what is more difficult & more brave," she wrote. "Reform!" And, to everyone's astonishment, not least of all his own, Arthur did. He tried to become the President Garfield would have been had he lived. He became an honest and respected leader, and a reform-minded President. Arthur also never forgot Julia Sand. Not only did he keep her letters and write her back, but he even went to see her. Sand had just finished Sunday dinner at her brother's house, when a highly polished carriage pulled up out front. To everyone's astonishment, out stepped the President, who had come to thank one of his most important advisers in person.
