Buried: Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, Ohio
Twentieth President - 1881
Born: November 19, 1831, in Orange, Ohio
Died: 10:35 p.m. on September 19, 1881, in Elberon, New Jersey
Age at death: 49
Cause of death: Infection resulting from assassin’s bullet
Final words: “Oh, Swaim, there is a pain here. Oh, Swaim!”
(to David Gaskill Swaim, his chief of staff)
Admission to Lake View Cemetery: Free
Medical incompetence may have been partially to blame for the death of the twentieth president. Clean instruments and a different sickbed might have prolonged James Garfield’s life.
On July 2, 1881, Garfield became the second president to be wounded seriously while in office. Four months into his term, Garfield, accompanied by Secretary of State James Blaine, set off for a trip to the Northeast. As Garfield and Blaine walked arm-in-arm through Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac railroad station (now the site of the National Gallery of Art) at about 9:30 a.m., a man came within a yard of the president and shot him twice with a .44-caliber British Bulldog pistol.
The first bullet superficially wounded Garfield’s right arm. The second shot passed through his lower back and lodged deep in his body. Garfield cried out, “My God, my God, what is this?” and fell, bleeding heavily. A doctor was on the scene within moments.
The Garfield Monument houses the remains of James and Lucretia Garfield
The assassin, Charles Julius Guiteau, was arrested at the station. A former Garfield supporter, he unsuccessfully sought a patronage position from the president and secretary of state. Turned down, he began shadowing the president. In the weeks prior to the shooting, Guiteau had come within range of the president three times—each time, he found a reason not to shoot. Several letters were found in his pockets, including one which read, “The president’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican party and save the Republic…. I had no ill will towards the president.”
Moved to the White House, surrounded by a half dozen physicians, Garfield sipped brandy to ease the pain. Doctors trying to find the bullet probed the wound in Garfield’s back with bare hands and unsterilized instruments. Their prognosis was grim; they did not expect the president to live through the night. Garfield’s family gathered at his bedside. Garfield tried to cheer his sixteen-year-old son Jimmy, saying, “Don’t be alarmed. The upper story is all right, it is only the hull that is a little damaged.”
A metal detector invented by Alexander Graham Bell was used in an attempt to find the bullet, but failed due to the unforeseen attraction of metal springs in Garfield’s bed; doctors were mystified as to why the machine made the president’s body appear bullet-riddled. They operated three times to remove bone fragments and drain abscesses near the wound. Newspapers across the country carried daily updates on the president’s condition.
On September 6, Garfield asked to be taken by special train to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating. But on September 19, 1881, he complained of severe pains near his heart and fell unconscious. James Garfield died at 10:35 that evening at age forty-nine. Bells tolled across the country announcing his death. Vice President Chester Arthur took the oath of office a few hours later at his home in New York City.
A three-hour autopsy discovered that the bullet’s actual trajectory was nowhere near what doctors originally thought. That miscalculation and a blood infection caused by the lack of sterile procedures were factors in Garfield’s death.
At a private viewing held at his home, friends of the late president were shocked by his emaciated appearance. The New York Times reported: “The President’s face was shockingly ghastly. The skin was drawn tightly over the projecting bones, except on the forehead, where it was deeply corrugated. The lips were apart, disclosing set teeth. The hair and whiskers had whitened perceptibly. No signs of the swelling or incisions were visible, but the face was blotched and covered with black specks—the result, it is said, partly, of the taking of a plaster cast of the face last night.”
Garfield’s body was carried by train to Washington on Wednesday, September 21, and was escorted up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol by Chester Arthur and former president Ulysses S. Grant. Garfield’s body lay in state in the Capitol rotunda for two days.
On Monday, September 26, 1881, Garfield’s body was taken to his hometown for burial in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery. Artillerymen lifted the casket from its platform onto a carriage led by twelve black horses. Former President Rutherford B. Hayes, a fellow Ohioan, led the procession. As rain began to fall, a band played “Nearer My God, to Thee,” and James Garfield’s body was placed into the cemetery’s public vault.
Nine years later, Garfield was re-interred in Lake View Cemetery at the site of the newly completed James A. Garfield Monument. His wife Lucretia was buried there in 1918.
The crypt containing the caskets of James and Lucretia Garfield
Two months after James Garfield was buried, Charles Guiteau went on trial. Guiteau believed that God had ordered him to kill the president; his attorney (also his brother-in-law) argued that Guiteau was not guilty by reason of insanity. After an hour of deliberation, the jury found him guilty. Guiteau was sentenced to death. On his way to the gallows, Guiteau sang a hymn he had written about going to God. He was hanged before a crowd of spectators in Washington, D.C., on June 30, 1882.
Touring James Garfield’s Tomb at Lake View Cemetery
The Lake View Cemetery is located in Cleveland, Ohio. The cemetery is open daily 7:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The James A. Garfield Memorial Monument is open April 1 through the president’s birthday, November 19, 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Admission is free.
From Akron: Take I-480 northbound to I-271. Take I-271 North to the Mayfield Road exit. Go west on Mayfield Road for about four miles. The Mayfield gate of the cemetery is located at the intersection of Mayfield and Kenilworth Roads on the right.
From Toledo: Take I-90 East to exit 177. Take exit 177 to Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive. Turn left and proceed south for three miles to Euclid Avenue. Turn left on Euclid Avenue and drive east to the gates of Lake View Cemetery.
To reach the Garfield Monument, follow Garfield Road after entering the cemetery gates.
For additional information
Lake View Cemetery
12316 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44106
Phone: (216) 421-2665
Fax: (216) 421-2415
www.lakeviewcemetery.com
“One hundred thousand mourners paid their respects to the late president…”
—Richard Norton Smith
Whether Garfield died at the hands of an assassin, or from the unsanitary probings of his doctors, remains a topic of scholarly debate. Beyond question was the depth of popular grief occasioned by his passing. One hundred thousand mourners paid their respects to the late president as he lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda; another twenty thousand requested tickets for Guiteau’s hanging. In the aftermath, Congress enacted civil service legislation, much as lawmakers eight decades later would be shamed into passing a civil rights bill associated with the martyred John F. Kennedy.
That is not all Guiteau’s crime inspired, as any visitor to Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery can see for himself. Part of a distinguished company that includes John D. Rockefeller, Mark Hanna, and John Hay, the twentieth president rests in a turreted red sandstone tower soaring 180 feet into the air. Beneath Memorial Hall, whose ornate mosaics and elegant tilework have recently been restored to their original splendor, a nineteen-foot white Carrara marble Garfield stands forever poised on the edge of a campaign oration. Downstairs a crypt holds the caskets of the president and his wife, Lucretia. Forget the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; when in Cleveland, head for Lake View.
One of Garfield’s neighbors in Lake View Cemetery
—RNS