If a man murders you without provocation, your soul bears no burden
of the wrong; but all the angels of the universe will weep for the
misguided man who committed the murder.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Just after midnight, as he worked late at his house in Washington, Alexander Graham Bell’s concentration was suddenly interrupted by a newsboy’s shout ringing through the streets. “Extra Republican!” the boy cried. “Death of General Garfield!”
Unable to bear his isolation in Boston any longer, Bell had finally made his way back to the city the day before. Although he was still mourning the death of his son, his thoughts about the induction balance continued to churn urgently even as he had rattled into Washington on the Baltimore and Potomac. “Please hunt in the study and see if you can find [a] bundle of letters and papers in [a] large envelope concerning [the] Induction Balance,” he had written quickly to Mabel as the capital came into view. “If so please send me the names and addresses of the poor people who want to have bullets located.… One especially is from the father of a little boy who was shot last year.”
Now, as he listened to the newsboy’s cries, an exhausted Bell could only reflect on the injustice of the ordeal he had witnessed from such a personal vantage point. “How terrible it all is,” he wrote to Mabel, who was still at home in Boston. “After seventy-nine days of suffering to be obliged to give up at last. I hope indeed that there may be an immortality for that brave spirit. It is too horrible to think of annihilation and dust.”
Science had not been able to prevent the president’s death, Bell conceded, but neither had religion. “If prayers could avail to save the sick,” he reasoned sadly, “surely the earnest heartfelt cry of a whole nation to God would have availed in this case.”
At four o’clock that afternoon, Garfield’s doctors assembled in the Franklyn Cottage for what Brown would refer to as “the final agony.” The president’s autopsy was performed by Dr. D. S. Lamb of the Army Medical Museum, with the assistance of a local doctor and six of Garfield’s original physicians, including Bliss, Hamilton, and Agnew. Brown was also there, having agreed to represent “the official household,” but was so grief-stricken and horrified by the “ghoulish business” that he found it almost impossible to bear.
In the end, the autopsy would take four, excruciating hours to complete. As afternoon turned to evening, Lamb, working slowly and painstakingly, finally had to ask for more lamps to be brought into the room. Across the street, on the porch of the Elberon Hotel, a growing crowd stood peering at the cottage in the fading light, anxious to know why they had lost their president after months of hope and prayers.
The results of the autopsy would surprise no one more than Garfield’s own doctors. Soon after they had opened his abdomen, with a long, vertical incision and then another, transverse cut, they found the track of the bullet. “The missile,” they realized with sickening astonishment, “had gone to the left.” Following its destructive path—as it shattered the right eleventh and twelfth ribs, moved forward, down, and to the left, through the first lumbar vertebra, and into connective tissue—they finally found Guiteau’s lead bullet. It lay behind Garfield’s pancreas, safely encysted, on the opposite side of the body from where they had been searching.
Running down the right side of Garfield’s body was a long channel, which Bliss and eleven other doctors had probed countless times, convinced that, at the end of it, lay the bullet. The autopsy report stated that, while “this long descending channel was supposed during life to have been the track of the bullet,” it was “now clearly seen to have been caused by the burrowing of pus from the wound.” Pus, however, does not burrow. It simply follows an open path, which, in this case, was made by the doctors’ own fingers and instruments. Alongside the channel lay Garfield’s liver, slightly enlarged but untouched. There was, the report noted, “no evidence that it had been penetrated by the bullet.”
What was perhaps as stunning to the doctors as the location of the bullet was the infection that had ravaged Garfield’s body. Evidence of the proximate cause of his death, profound septic poisoning, was nearly everywhere they looked. There were collections of abscesses below his right ear, in the middle of his back, across his shoulders, and near his left kidney. He had infection-induced pneumonia in both of his lungs, and there was an enormous abscess, measuring half a foot in diameter, near his liver. “The initial point of this septic condition probably dates as far back as the period of the first chill,” one of Garfield’s doctors would later admit. “The course of this … infection was practically continuous, and could only result in inevitable death.”
The immediate cause of Garfield’s death was more difficult to determine. After removing most of his organs, they finally found it—a rent, nearly four-tenths of an inch long, in the splenic artery. The hemorrhage had flooded Garfield’s abdominal cavity with a pint of blood, which by now had coagulated into an “irregular form … nearly as large as a man’s fist.” This, they realized, had been the cause of the terrible pain that had forced him to cry out to Swaim just before his death.
After the examination was finally complete, Agnew silently approached the president’s body. As everyone in the room watched, he reached out with one hand and ran his little finger down Garfield’s spinal column. The finger “slipped entirely through the one vertebra pierced by the bullet,” Brown would later recall. Dropping his hand, Agnew turned to the men standing around him and said, “Gentlemen, this was the fatal wound. We made a mistake.” Without another word, he left the room.
In New York, as soon as the press learned of the president’s death, reporters rushed to Chester Arthur’s house on Lexington Avenue, eager for his reaction. His doorkeeper, however, not only refused to let them in but would not even bring them a statement from the vice president. “I daren’t ask him,” he said. “He is sitting alone in his room sobbing like a child with his head on his desk and his face buried in his hands.”
That morning, Arthur had received a telegram from Washington warning him that Garfield’s condition was perilous. Still, he had not been prepared when a messenger had knocked on his door late that night. Just a few hours later, he found himself standing in his parlor, its green blinds closed to the newsmen gathered outside, with a New York state judge standing before him, swearing him into office. By 2:15 a.m. on September 20, Arthur had become the twenty-first president of the United States.
Two days later, in the presence of two former presidents, seven senators, six representatives, and several members of Garfield’s cabinet, Arthur delivered his inaugural address at the Capitol. To the surprise of everyone present, the new president made it clear that he had no wish to strike a different path from his predecessor. On the contrary, he seemed to hope for nothing more than to be the president that Garfield would have been, had he lived. “All the noble aspirations of my lamented predecessor which found expression in his life,” Arthur said, “will be garnered in the hearts of the people, and it will be my earnest endeavor to profit, and to see that the nation shall profit, by his example.”
Although Arthur was well aware that, had they been given the opportunity, his countrymen never would have elected him, he was grateful that they now seemed willing to accept him, perhaps even trust him. Even the governor of Ohio, Garfield’s proud and devastated state, predicted that “the people and the politicians will find that Vice-President Arthur and President Arthur are different men.”
After his inaugural address, Arthur received another letter from his mysterious young adviser, Julia Sand. “And so Garfield is really dead, & you are President,” she began. Her advice now was not action, but compassion. The American people were exhausted and grief-stricken, and Arthur must let them mourn. “What the nation needs most at present, is rest,” Sand wrote. “If a doctor could lay his finger on the public pulse, his prescription would be, perfect quiet.”
Garfield’s body, which was returned to Washington by the same train, now swathed in black, that had carried him to Elberon, lay in state in the Capitol rotunda for two days and nights. The line to see the president stretched for more than a quarter mile, snaking through the hushed streets of Washington, under flags bordered in black and flying at half-mast, and in the shadow of buildings wrapped in so much dark fabric they were nearly hidden from view. “The whole city was draped in mourning,” Garfield’s daughter Mollie would write in her diary. “Even the shanties where the people were so poor that they had to tear up the[ir] clothes in order to show people the deep sympathy and respect they had for Papa.… All persons are friends in this deep and great sorrow.”
The scene near the Capitol, a reporter wrote, was “in many respects the most remarkable that has ever been witnessed in the United States.” More extraordinary even than the size of the crowd, said to include some one hundred thousand mourners, was its unprecedented diversity. “The ragged and toil-stained farm hands from Virginia and Maryland and the colored laborers of Washington,” the reporter marveled, “stood side by side with the representatives of wealth and fashion, patiently waiting for hours beneath the sultry September sun for the privilege of gazing for a minute on the face of the dead President.”
Only one man had no place in this national mourning. In fact, he was told nothing of the president’s death. For Charles Guiteau there was no official notification, nor even a word spoken in passing. He overheard the news from a guard who happened to be standing near his cell at the District Jail. As soon as he realized what had happened, he fell to his knees, desperately mumbling a prayer.
Even before the president’s death, Guiteau’s fantasy that he had the support and sympathy of the American people had begun to crack. More than a week earlier, as he had been standing at his cell window, watching three wagonloads of fresh troops pull up to the prison to stand guard through the night, he suddenly saw a flash and heard the distinct ripping sound of a bullet as it shot past him. Missing his head by just an inch, the bullet sliced through a coat hanging from a nail and slammed into the whitewashed wall.
The bullet, “a great big musket-bullet,” Guiteau would later complain, had come from the gun of one of his own guards, Sergeant William Mason. Although he would later be sentenced to eight years in prison, Mason never expressed regret for his actions. He was tired, he said, of coming to work every day, only to protect a dog like Guiteau.
Throughout the country, there was little condemnation for Mason’s act, and widespread sympathy for his feelings of frustration. Newspapers were filled with letters suggesting creative ways to make Guiteau not only pay for his crime, but suffer in the process. One man proposed that he be thrown to a pack of dogs. Another wanted him to be forced to consume himself, by being fed two ounces of his own flesh every day. Others simply wanted to see him dead, as quickly and with as little fanfare as possible. “There is an American judge whose decisions are almost always just, and whose work is always well done,” one editorial read. “His name is Judge Lynch; and if he ever had a job that he ought to give his whole attention to, he has it waiting for him in Washington.”
Lucretia tried to feel some Christian sympathy for Guiteau, and she urged her children to do the same. Her daughter, however, found it almost impossible. “Mama says he ought to be pitied—Pitied!” Mollie wrote. “I suppose Mama darling is right. But I can not feel that way.” Mollie, who had watched her father die a long and agonizing death, wished for nothing more than a tortured end for his assassin. “I suppose I am wicked but these are my feelings,” she confessed in her diary. “Guiteau ought to be made to suffer as much and a thousand times more than Papa did.… Nothing is to[o] horrible for him, & I hope that everything that can be done to injure him, will be done.”
One of the few voices of calm and reason was that of General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had organized the troops now protecting Guiteau. His request for restraint, however, was couched in terms that made it clear that he fully understood how difficult it was to wait for justice. “For this man Guiteau I ask no soldier, no citizen, to feel one particle of sympathy,” he wrote in an open letter that was printed in papers across the country. “On the contrary, could I make my will the law, shooting or hanging would be too good for him. But I do ask every soldier and citizen to remember that we profess to be the most loyal Nation on earth to the sacred promises of the law. There is no merit in obeying an agreeable law, but there are glory and heroism in submitting gracefully to an oppressive one.”
Now that Garfield was dead, Americans’ greatest fear was that Guiteau would get away with murder—not because he was innocent, but because he was insane. The insanity defense was already widely known and almost uniformly despised. Even Garfield, ten years before his own murder, had expressed deep skepticism about the plea. “All a man would need to secure immunity from murder would be to tear his hair and rave a little,” he had written, “and then kill his man.”
The legal standard for determining insanity—known as the M’Naghten Rule—had been established nearly forty years earlier, across the sea. The rule was named for Daniel M’Naghten, a Scottish woodworker who, believing that he was the target of a conspiracy between the pope and the British prime minister Robert Peel, had attempted to assassinate Peel. Instead, he had shot and mortally wounded Peel’s private secretary, Edward Drummond. M’Naghten’s lawyers had successfully argued that he was insane, and so not responsible for his actions. M’Naghten would live another twenty-two years, finally dying in an insane asylum in 1865, from “gradual failure of heart’s action.”
The verdict had sparked immediate outrage in England, and awakened bitter memories of the trial of Edward Oxford just three years earlier. Oxford, who had attempted to shoot Queen Victoria while she was riding in a carriage, pregnant with her first child, had also been found not guilty by reason of insanity. “We have seen the trials of Oxford and MacNaughtan [spelling variation] conducted by the ablest lawyers of the day,” Queen Victoria had written in disgust to Peel after the M’Naghten ruling, “and they allow and advise the Jury to pronounce the verdict of Not Guilty on account of Insanity,—whilst everybody is morally convinced that both malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did!” Before her eventual death in 1901, at the age of eighty-one, Queen Victoria would survive several more assassination attempts. Her husband, who had lived to witness four of them, was convinced that the would-be assassins had been encouraged by Oxford’s acquittal.
The House of Lords, in agreement with the queen, decided that the country needed a clear, strict definition of criminal insanity. Less than four months after M’Naghten’s trial, the judges of the British Supreme Court ruled that, in essence, the difference between a sane man and one who was insane lay in the ability to distinguish between right and wrong. A defendant, they declared, could use the insanity defense only if, “at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from a disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing; or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.”
The M’Naghten Rule, while quickly adopted in the United States as well as in England, did little to improve the reputation of the insanity defense. In America, it became known as the “insanity dodge,” the refuge not of the mad but of the guilty. Celebrity cases only made matters worse. In 1859, Congressman Daniel Edgar Sickles was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity after shooting to death Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key, author of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Thirteen years later, Edward Stokes, the man who murdered James Fisk, Jay Gould’s partner, used the same defense and spent only four years in prison.
It came as no surprise, therefore, when, on October 14, Garfield’s assassin submitted his plea to Judge Walter Cox. “I plead not guilty to the indictment,” Guiteau stated, in a plea that he had drafted himself. His first and primary defense was “Insanity, in that it was God’s act and not mine. The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.” Although Guiteau laid blame for the shooting squarely on God’s shoulders, he made it clear that his faith in divine intervention—at least when his own life was at stake—remained unshaken. “I have entire confidence in His disposition to protect me,” he wrote in the plea, “and to send me forth to the world a free and innocent man.”
Guiteau would follow the lead of M’Naghten, Oxford, Sickles, and Stokes, and attempt to use his insanity to save his life. Legally, he was allowed this argument, and there was nothing anyone could do to prevent it. It was clear to all involved in the case, however, that the American people would accept no verdict but guilty, no sentence but death. “Guiteau should have a fair trial. Everything that can be urged in his behalf should be patiently heard. It is the right of the meanest thing that bears a human form,” one editorial argued. “But such a trial, such a hearing, in a community of intelligent beings can have but one result.”
The case of the United States v. Charles J. Guiteau began on the morning of November 14, less than two months after Garfield’s death. Guiteau’s attorney was his brother-in-law, George Scoville, who had come to his rescue countless times in the past with a place to live and loans to keep him alive and out of prison. Scoville was a patent lawyer, and knew almost nothing about the criminal justice system, but he was one of the few lawyers in the country willing to represent the president’s assassin. Even Scoville admitted, “If I didn’t think the unfortunate man was insane, I would not defend him at all.”
As difficult as it was to find a competent defense attorney, it had been nearly impossible to assemble a dispassionate jury. When asked if he would be able to render an impartial verdict in the trial of Guiteau, one prospective juror had replied, “I think he ought to be hung or burnt or something else.… I don’t think there is any evidence in the United States to convince me any other way.” It took three days of jury selection and 175 men to find 12 jurors. In the end, however, Guiteau faced a jury that was, if not unbiased, at least diverse. Deciding his fate were a machinist, two grocers, three merchants, an iron worker, a retired businessman, a restaurant manager, a cigar dealer, and two plasterers. Eleven of the men were white, and one was black.
Before the trial began at 10:00 a.m., a crush of people gathered outside the courtroom, clutching tickets and staring at the closed doors. Deputy marshals wearing bright red badges surrounded the throng, checking the authenticity of their tickets and examining media passes, which, “for the first time in anyone’s memory,” journalists were required to carry.
The courtroom itself had been renovated just for the trial. A temporary floor had been installed, and more seating added. Half the seats were reserved for lawyers, distinguished guests—a group that included even Frederick Douglass—and journalists. The rest were first come, first served. Those fortunate enough to find seats were so worried that they would lose them during the noon recess that they carried picnic baskets when they arrived in the morning, and had their lunch on their laps.
Guiteau had planned to make an opening statement that day, but the judge refused to allow it. Frustrated, he turned to the long row of reporters seated behind him and handed them his statement. It was not a defense of his actions, or even an argument for insanity, but an indictment of the men who were, he argued, the president’s true murderers—his doctors.
The situation, Guiteau insisted, was perfectly clear. “General Garfield died from malpractice,” he wrote. “According to his own physicians, he was not fatally shot. The doctors who mistreated him ought to bear the odium of his death, and not his assailant. They ought to be indicted for murdering James A. Garfield, and not me.” A few days later, Guiteau would himself announce his argument to the courtroom, interrupting a witness who was describing the scene at the train station when Garfield was shot. “I deny the killing, if your honor please,” he said. “We admit the shooting.”
Day after day, as the trial slowly advanced, Guiteau repeatedly tried to insert himself into the proceedings. Often, his outbursts were harsh, humiliating critiques of his brother-in-law’s legal skill. “Now, don’t spoil the matter on cross-examination,” he shouted at Scoville at one point. “That is the way you generally do. You spoil everything by cross-examination.… You are a jackass on the question of cross-examination. I must tell you that right in public, to your face.”
When he wasn’t attacking his own attorney, Guiteau attempted to question witnesses, refute testimony, address the judge directly, and even make public appeals for legal and financial assistance. After learning that a fund had been established for Lucretia and her children, he made an announcement to the courtroom. “The rich men of New York gave Mrs. Garfield $200,000 or $300,000,” he said. “It was a splendid thing—a noble thing. Now, I want them to give me some money.”
Finally, Scoville himself asked the court to force his client to keep quiet. Judge Cox, determined that there not be any possible grounds for appeal, was reluctant to remove Guiteau from the courtroom. There was little he could do, therefore, beyond issuing repeated warnings and moving the defendant farther from the witness stand. Guiteau’s “declarations,” the judge would later complain, “could not have been prevented except by resorting to the process of gagging him.”
The more Guiteau spoke, the more apparent his insanity became. He was highly intelligent and surprisingly articulate, but his mind did not work like that of a sane man. “All the links in the chain are there,” George Beard, a psychiatrist who would interview Guiteau on four separate occasions, explained, “but they are not joined, but rather tossed about hither and thither, singly, like quoits, each one good and strong of itself, but without relation to any other.” When Guiteau speaks, Beard said, “his insanity forces itself constantly to the front, breaking in upon his eloquence.”
Guiteau spent nearly a week on the stand, talking about his childhood, his years at the commune, his life as a traveling evangelist, and his motivations for shooting the president. The prosecution did everything in its power to prove that he was not insane, but simply immoral. Scoville countered by tracing the history of insanity in Guiteau’s family—from an uncle who had died in an asylum to several aunts, cousins, and even Guiteau’s own mother.
Before the trial had ended, thirty-six experts would testify on the subject of Guiteau’s sanity. Scoville placed most of his hope in a controversial but widely admired young neurologist named Edward Spitzka, who had studied in Vienna and Leipzig and was well known for openly questioning, even attacking, the most powerful psychiatrists in the nation. Even before meeting Guiteau, Spitzka had written in a medical journal that, if the defendant, “with his hereditary history, his insane manner, his insane documents and his insane actions were to be committed to any asylum in the land, he would be unhesitatingly admitted as a proper subject for sequestration.” In the courtroom, after Spitzka testified that he had examined Guiteau and found him to be insane, Scoville asked, “Did you have any question on that subject?” Without hesitating, Spitzka replied, “Not the slightest.”
Determined to drown out men like Spitzka, the prosecution brought to the stand nearly twice as many experts as the defense. The star witness for the prosecution was Dr. John Purdue Gray, the superintendent of the New York State Lunatic Asylum. Gray had spent two days interviewing Guiteau, and was convinced that his only ailment was moral depravity. “A man may become profoundly depraved and degraded by mental habits and yet not be insane,” he insisted. “It is only depravity.”
Guiteau listened to these testimonies with avid interest. Although he had pleaded insanity, he was anxious to make clear that he had been insane only at the time of the shooting—not before, and certainly not after. Now, he argued, he was as sane as any man in the courtroom. As Gray attempted to define insanity for the jury, explaining that it was a “disease of the brain, in which there is a … change in the individual, a departure from himself,” Guiteau abruptly broke in. “That is my case,” he said. “I shot the President on the second of July. I would not do it again for a million dollars, with the mind I have got now.”
The central question of the trial—whether or not Guiteau was insane—seemed to most Americans a waste of time. Insane or not, they wanted to see him hanged, at the very least. “Hanging is too good for you, you stinking cuss,” a Union veteran had written to him. “You ought to be burned alive and let rot. You savage cannibal dog.” A farmer from Maryland tried to accomplish what William Mason had failed to do. As the prison coach carried Guiteau from the courtroom back to the District Jail one day, he rode up on his horse, drew his pistol, and fired at the prisoner. Once again, the shot missed Guiteau, but left him terrified, with a singed hole in his coat.
The trial, punctuated by Guiteau’s constant outbursts and heightened by testimony from members of the Senate, the secretary of state, and, by letter, even President Arthur, finally ended on January 26, 1882. At 4:35 that afternoon, after more than two months of testimony, the prosecution rested. Less than an hour later, the jury returned with a verdict.
“Gentlemen of the jury,” the clerk called out, his voice harsh against the perfect silence of the courtroom, “have you agreed upon a verdict?” The foreman, a man named John Hamlin, replied that they had. “What say you,” asked the clerk. “Is the defendant guilty or not guilty?” “Guilty as indicted, sir,” Hamlin said.
Before Hamlin had even finished speaking, the courtroom erupted in thunderous applause. So deafening were the cheers that the bailiff’s shout for order could hardly be heard. When the crowd, under threat of expulsion from the courtroom, finally quieted, one voice alone rang out. “My blood be on the head of the jury, don’t you forget it,” Guiteau cried. “That is my answer.… God will avenge this outrage.”
Even after he had been found guilty and sentenced to death, Guiteau believed that he would be set free. It was only a matter of time—and presidential influence. He had already written to Arthur several times, demanding a full pardon, but after the U.S. Supreme Court denied his appeal, he wrote again. The letter was a window into Guiteau’s strained mind. “I am willing to DIE for my inspiration,” he wrote, “but it will make a terrible reckoning for you and this nation. I made you … and the least you can do is to let me go.” Then, suddenly switching tracks from dire threat to friendly advice, he offered what seemed to him a reasonable compromise. “But I appreciate your delicate position,” he wrote, “and I am willing to stay here until January, if necessary.”
Besides Guiteau himself, the only people who believed that his life might yet be spared were his brother and sister. John Guiteau, although he had long been deeply ashamed of his younger brother, and had often been bitterly angry with him, could not bear to see him die. “Whatever your impressions may be,” he had written to Charles after the trial ended, “I want you to know that I feel towards you as a brother and a friend, and shall, in the short time remaining, do all I can to save your life.” He was convinced that Charles was insane, and that if the American people could only be made to understand that fact, they would want to see him locked away in an asylum, not hanged. “The public have never had the facts, nor the Court,” he wrote to Charles. “And they know not what they are about to do.”
Finally, John also wrote to the president, seeking not a pardon, but simply a stay of execution. In his letter to Arthur, he asked only for enough time to present further evidence of his brother’s insanity. He hoped that the president would give him “an audience before a decision is reached, that I may make a brief statement of my brother’s unfortunate life, which will explain much of what now appears to his disadvantage.”
Arthur refused to see John, knowing that, if he gave Guiteau’s brother even a few moments of his time, there would be a public outcry. He did, however, agree to meet with the psychiatrist George Beard, and with Miss A. A. Chevaillier, an advocate for the insane. After listening to them for twenty minutes, Arthur forwarded their appeal to his attorney general, Benjamin Harris Brewster. Brewster replied almost immediately, advising Arthur to reject the appeal. Two days later, the newspapers reported that, after careful consideration, the president and his cabinet had come to the conclusion that there were “no grounds to justify Executive interference with the verdict of the jury and the action of the courts.”
Frances Scoville, who had for most of her life been more of a mother to Charles than a sister, also tried desperately to stay the hand of the court. She directed her appeal, however, not to Garfield’s successor, but to his widow. In a letter to Lucretia just two weeks after the verdict was read, she openly begged for her brother’s life.
Dear Madam:
Humbly I address you, trusting you will not turn a deaf ear even upon despised Guiteau’s sister.
All these weary months I have patiently waited until the time should come for me to speak: when, after the verdict, which I believed would be “Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I could say without shamefacedness, “My heart bleeds for you and the sainted dead.”…
I have counted the hours for the time when I could boldly say to you, as I have said from the moment when the terrible news was brought me on that dark day in July: “He was brain sick, deluded, crazy; forgive him, even as Christ shall forgive us all.…”
In Heaven we know, as we are known. The sainted Garfield knows now that he “had to do it,” and I feel sure if he could speak he would say, “Forgive that deluded man, even as I forgive him; safely keep him from doing any more harm, but forgive.”
Lucretia never replied. When she could wait no longer, Frances packed a bag, took a train from Chicago to Cleveland, Ohio, walked up to the home where Garfield’s widow was living, and knocked on the door. Lucretia and Mollie were down the street, and so Frances, who had traveled under the name of Mrs. Smith, was asked to wait in the library. When Lucretia returned home to find that Charles Guiteau’s sister was waiting for her, she went up to her room and sent down word that she would not see her.
Mollie was sitting on the front steps when Frances left. When she later learned who the strange visitor had been, she felt nothing but fury and outrage that she had “dared to come.” For her father’s assassin, Mollie would write bitterly in her diary, “nothing could be too awful… & my heart is like stone toward him.”
By the day of his execution, even Guiteau had accepted that there would be no stay, no pardon, no fearsome act of God to save his life. When John Crocker, the warden of the District Jail, appeared at his cell door just after twelve noon on June 30, 1882, Guiteau was sitting on his cot, wearing a black suit that he had paid a prison worker to wash and press the day before, and shoes that he had sent to be polished that morning. Beside him was Reverend Hicks, a Washington minister who had visited him every day for nearly a month, and with whom Guiteau had become so close he had made him the executor of his will. “I’m fully resigned,” Guiteau had told Hicks the night before, when he had woken just before midnight and asked to see the minister. “God has smoothed over the road to glory which I will travel tomorrow.”
Now, as he looked up and saw Crocker standing before him, Guiteau’s face whitened, but he quickly stood and, holding Hicks’s hand, listened quietly as the warden began to speak. “With the events of the past year crowding around you now, as the hours of life enfold around you,” Crocker said, “I find myself called upon to perform a last solemn duty in connection with the death of our President.” Then, his voice trembling slightly, he read aloud the warrant for Guiteau’s death.
After Crocker had finished, Guiteau asked of him a final favor. He wanted to give the executioner’s signal, to choose for himself the moment of his death. He had written a prayer that morning, he said, and planned to read it on the scaffold. When he was ready, he would drop the prayer. Crocker agreed.
A few minutes later, Hicks, Crocker, and a small contingent, which included several guards as well as the executioner, followed Guiteau as he was led from his cell to the prison’s northeast corridor, where a scaffold had been erected. As they passed a window, Guiteau stopped to look out on a bright summer day, green hills swelling under a blue sky. He paused at the window for just a moment, and then, without being asked, turned away and walked on.
Finally, the procession came to a set of stairs that led down to a narrow courtyard, at the far end of which sat the scaffold. The courtyard was flanked on the east by the jail’s outer wall, and on the west by tiers of cells rising sixty feet to the ceiling. The cells had been emptied, and the tall windows on the eastern wall had been covered by heavy curtains.
Twenty thousand people had requested tickets to the execution. Two hundred and fifty had been issued. More than a thousand people stood outside, waiting for the announcement of Guiteau’s death, while those who had seats inside watched in silence as he made his way toward the scaffold, his footsteps echoing on the brick floor. As he ascended the steps of the scaffold, struggling a little because his arms were tied tightly behind his back, Guiteau tripped on the first step. Smiling, he turned to Hicks and said, “I stubbed my toe going to the gallows.”
When they had all assembled on the scaffold, Hicks, who was visibly shaken, spoke first, giving a brief supplication. Then he held a Bible before Guiteau, who proceeded to read fourteen verses from Matthew 10, beginning with the words “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul.” After he had finished, Guiteau looked out at the silent, stone-faced crowd and announced that he would now read a prayer of his own composition.
He began by paraphrasing Matthew 18:3. “Except ye become as a little child,” he said, “ye cannot enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Then, in a falsetto meant to evoke the pleadings of a child, he began to read “Simplicity.”
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.
I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.
I am going to the Lordy,
Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!
I am going to the Lordy!
The poem continued for four more stanzas. Guiteau’s voice, although high, remained strong until the final line. “Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!” he said, his voice finally breaking. “I am with the Lord.”
When Guiteau had finished, Hicks stepped forward once again to give the benediction. “God the Father be with thee,” he said, “and give thee peace evermore.” Nothing more was said as Guiteau’s legs were bound together, a noose looped around his neck and carefully adjusted, and a heavy black hood placed over his head. He stood with his shoulders pulled back, his head held high.
“Glory, glory, glory,” he called out, and then, opening his hand, he let the prayer fall.