President Garfield dead but not buried
President Garfield dead but not buried
America's 20th president was in office for less than seven months due to a crazed assassin. But what really killed him was 19th century medicine.
MENTOR, OHIO — The waif-like man had stalked the president for months. His repeated insistence to administration officials that he be appointed a consul to Europe, preferably Paris, had put him on a blacklist of those who could not enter the White House. But the 41-year-old poorly-educated Midwestern lawyer was convinced he deserved a great reward for delivering a few speeches to small audiences in support of the Republican candidates’s campaign as these acts had certainly been responsible for electing the president. Never mind that he had just changed a few words from a speech in support of a previous president who was hoping to return to office again.
Rebuffed, the wanna-be-appointee, became incensed and obsessive. He moved to Washington, checking into hotels but never paying his bills. He was down to his last few dollars and desperate. The president must pay the price for humiliation. Day after day he sat in Lafayette Park, facing the White House. He plotted and justified his plan. For the good of the Republican Party, to which he had pledged his loyalty, the president must die.
The delusional man thought of buying dynamite. It was too risky. The explosion could kill himself and innocents. The president was a hulk of a man, known for his strength. A knife probably would not do the job. Borrowing money from a friend, he purchased a short-barrel British revolver. This was look good in a museum where it would certainly be displayed after the assassination. (In reality the Smithsonian would lose it).
Following weeks of target practice to master the recoil, he realized he had become a pretty good shot. For once he would succeed at something, he vowed. His life had been filled with rejection. He joined, quit and rejoined a utopian sect. Despite the group’s sexual permissiveness, the man had been rebuffed time and again. He did manage to marry a librarian. She considered him stingy and a cheat.
One Sunday in the park, he spotted the president going to church. It was his first opportunity after weeks of waiting in vain. He ran to his hotel to get his weapon and headed for the church, but it seemed difficult to shoot the president there without also striking worshippers.
The man got within striking distance of the president several more times but could not go through with the act, making excuses to himself that his target was too close to the first lady or to her sons.
The president appeared to give little concern to the threats he received.
“Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning; it is best not to worry about either,” he said.
On a July day, the president’s greatest foe decided to try again, tipped off by a newspaper article that the president would board a train for a well-deserved vacation. The gunman brought along a lady friend he was trying to impress and whom he had told he would become famous. She wondered what he had planned. They took a cab together and he separated from her at the station entrance.
The president arrived in a State Department livery, unprotected. He entered the rail station arm-in-arm with his secretary of state heading to the platform where other members of the cabinet were waiting. The president’s two young son were behind the men.
Charles Guiteau’s first shot struck James Garfield in the back. A second hit the president’s elbow.
“My God! What is this?” Garfield exclaimed before falling forward and vomiting.
The assassin was apprehended before getting off a third shot. He did not resist. He knew he had made history even before the president hit the ground and the floor turned red.
Garfield was taken upstairs and placed on a hay-and-horsehair mattress. The first doctor arrived at the B&O train station and poured down the president’s throat brandy and ammonia salts. More medics arrived, each of them with unwashed hands, digging fingers into the wound to search for the bullet.
The president had regained consciousness and answered questions in a steady voice. Garfield was taken by ambulance to the White House. The president, ignoring the lies of doctors who told him he was not seriously injured, replied he knew he was a dead man.
Garfield had only been president for 120 days. He did not die that day. His vital signs remarkably steadied and the internal bleeding stopped.
Doctors continued to try with un-sanitized fingers to locate the projectile. They compelled the mortally wounded leader to drink champagne, lime water and milk to sooth his stomach. He was injected with morphine. They rolled over their 200-pound patient dozens of times daily to prevent bedsores.
In the subsequent weeks, ounces of pus poured from the president’s body, as did fiber from the coat he had been wearing when shot, along with pulverized bone.
An abscess formed around the bullet hole so the physicians, without anesthetic, cut another hole in the president’s back for drainage.
Alexander Graham Bell was called to examine the president. He brought along what he called an induction balance, a crude metal detector. The inventor detected a weak signal but it did not yield sufficient feedback to locate the bullet.
The president, ashen in color, was an invalid. The amount of pus exiting Garfield’s body increased. He was barely able to keep down the beef extract and liquor the patient was given for medicinal purposes. They switched to enemas for feeding, which triggered tremendous flatus. The president became feverish. His mouth filled with mucus so a slit was cut into his face, again no anesthetic. Carbolic acid was squirted into the incision.
The bullet hole became cavernous. Dead flesh peeled off the body. Boils appeared on his back. The pus began leaking out of his ears. Garfield was now delusional, unsure whether he was in the White House or at his farm in Lake County, Ohio.
Fearing the malarial gas from the marshes of the American capital would do in the president for certain, plans were readied to get him away from the swamp fumes. Elberon, a summer resort community in New Jersey, seemed to be the ideal place to take the gravely ill president.
Garfield was put on a train on September 5th, a custom thick mattress atop springy planks kept him from suffering from the bumpy ride while a hollowed roof provided crude air conditioning. No bells or whistles were rung so that the president could sleep as soundly as possible in such conveyance.
At Elberon, on the morning of September 16th, Garfield spewed lung tissue and hallucinated. Cabinet members were summoned. In a moment of lucidity, the president asked if he was critically ill. A doctor nodded and Garfield replied, “I thought so.”
The following day, the president — who had been promoted by President Lincoln to the rank of brigadier general in the Civil War for successfully leading an insignificant battle in Kentucky — saw a former army comrade in his room and asked him if his name would have a place in history.
Almon Rockwell replied his legacy would be grand, but that Garfield had yet “great work to perform.”
With sadness, Garfield responded, “No, my work is done.”
The next night the 20th president of the United States cried out in great pain and gestured to his heart. His pulse was undetectable. Garfield fell asleep and never woke up.
The presidency of James A. Garfield — 199 days — remains the second shortest in American history and he was the second to be assassinated. The tragedy is compounded because in that crucial era there were few so qualified and honest as Garfield for the office, especially in terms of skill, knowledge and personality.
Garfield never sought office after once unsuccessfully trying to find a teaching job. Providence, he believed, would bring him whatever he was meant to do to earn an honest living. Men sought him out to run for office. He was a nine-term congressman and a senator-elect when in the 1880 Republican convention his name gained momentum after 33 rounds of balloting. On the 36th ballot, Garfield was nominated after supporters of former President Ulysses S. Grant and Senator James G. Blaine — a champion of civil service reform — rallied behind the Ohioan.
“Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it,” noted Garfield, who, keeping to his pledge, did not seek the office.
Garfield barely won the presidency, receiving less than 50 percent of the popular vote, but enough to beat the second-place finisher, a Civil War hero, Winfield S. Hancock, the Democratic Party nominee after a former New York governor, Samuel J. Tilden, the contender four years previous, bowed out.
Garfield was the last president to be born in a log cabin. He was able to leap from poverty when his mother used her life savings of $17 to send her son to a Free Will Baptist seminary.
The teenager flourished after brief sojourn as a mule driver on the Ohio & Erie Canal. His subsequent achievements sound like the elements of legend but it is true that Garfield — who had also been a school janitor — was a Church of Christ preacher, an abolitionist, founder of the first Department of Education, a Supreme Court attorney, a master carpenter, mathematician, economist, a champion for clean government and the owner of 5,000 books by the time he died.
Tall like Lincoln, but beefier, he could a silence a room by walking into it. Garfield’s charisma and charm extended beyond his curious blue eyes. He was a great orator.
President Rutherford Hayes, the lame duck, counseled his fellow Ohioan and fellow Republican to run a low-key campaign so as not to highlight intra-party differences and inflame partisan tensions. In that era, surrogates were to engage in the dirty politicking and campaigning. Dignity demanded the presidential candidates themselves not sling the mud or make boasts.
Garfield partly complied, campaigning from the front porch of his 158-acre farm here in Mentor, Ohio. But he broke from tradition in one way — Garfield humbly talked about himself. Tens of thousands came to listen. His remarks were relayed to the press and telegraphed across the country
Less than 200 days into his presidency, Garfield was dead. The shooting and the subsequent eleven weeks of clinging onto life brought the nation to a standstill. His death cast a pall over the country. With him died a spirit of compromise and a brand of Republican progressivism.
"I hope—my God, I do hope—it is a mistake,” exclaimed Vice President Chester Arthur when informed of the telegram stating Garfield had died. Arthur knew that amid the great political divide of the land, he would be sworn in amid tremendous skepticism and distrust.
Garfield died but was never buried. His flag-draped casket can be viewed in a crypt below a monument at a Cleveland cemetery.
Monuments, Garfield wrote, may be built “to express the affection or pride of friends, or to display their wealth, but they are only valuable for the characters which they perpetuate.”
Garfield prided himself as a radical intent to upend the political status quo of his time, believing that only radicals “ever achieved anything in a great crisis.”
As he lay dying and Garfield pondered whether he had achieved anything great, he certainly reflected on something he had declared as a congressman eight years earlier: “I have always said that my whole public life was an experiment to determine whether an intelligent people would sustain a man in acting sensibly on each proposition that arose, and in doing nothing for mere show or demagogical effect.”