On
September 19, 1881 President James A.
Garfield died in agony on the Jersey
Shore 78 days after being shot in
the back by a disappointed office
seeker in a Washington train station. He had only been in office a total of 199
days, almost half that time incapacitated
by his injury.
One
of the bullets fired the
morning of July 2 by Charles J. Gateau grazed
the President’s arm. The other lodged in his back near the spine. It could not be found. But the search
for the bullet, rather than missile itself ultimately cost Garfield his
life.
Taken
back to the White House several doctors over the next few days probed for the bullet with instruments, and with their own unwashed hands—a bad practice even in those days.
One doctor even managed to pierce
his liver. The resulting infection, probably caused by Streptococcus, resulted in “blood poisoning,” untreatable in the days before antibiotics.
Alexander Graham Bell tried to locate the bullet--it was lodged in the Presiden't spine--with his metal detecting magnetic devise. He was foiled by metal bed springs. |
Still
desperate to find the bullet, inventor Alexander
Graham Bell was called in. He had developed
a magnetic device to locate the
projectile. It would have worked,
too. But neither he nor the other
doctors realized that the bed on
which Garfield was lying had a metal
frame and springs—relatively
uncommon at the time—rendering the magnetic devise useless. Even if the bullet had been discovered,
however, the infection had already taken hold and it was probably too late to
save the President by surgery.
On
September 9, Garfield was taken by train to a beach home in Elberon
(now Long Branch) New Jersey in hopes that the sea air would revive him. It didn’t.
Garfield
was born in Moreland Hills, Ohio on
November 19, 1831. His father died when
he was small and he was raised by his mother.
A gifted student, he attended college
in nearby Hiram at a school maintained by his family’s Church of Christ (The Christian Church) denomination
before going east to complete his education at Williams College in Williamstown,
Massachusetts from which he graduated with distinction in 1856.
Returning
to Ohio he took up preaching at the Franklin
Circle Christian Church. He decided
against making a career in the ministry, but was ordained as an elder, making him the only clergy person ever elected
President. He remained a devoted church member the rest of his
life.
Garfield
married in 1858 and began supporting
his growing family as a teacher. Meanwhile he privately studied law and entered politics. He was elected to the Ohio State Senate as a Republican in 1859 and passed the bar the following year.
Garfield’s
rise to prominence began as a youthful officer in the Civil War.
He helped raise the 42nd Ohio
Volunteer Infantry Regiment and
was named its Colonel. Major
General Don Carlos Buell gave him a command of a mixed brigade of Ohio and Kentucky
Volunteer infantry and Virginia loyalist
cavalry. He helped clear Confederate forces out of western Kentucky and was promoted to Brigadier.
He was a brigade commander
at Shiloh and at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi.
Pleading
health concerns Garfield asked for leave from the Army and was elected to
the U.S. House of Representatives. He returned to active duty until the new Congress was sworn in and served as Chief of Staff for William S. Rosecrans, Commander of the Army of the Cumberland.
After the Battle of Chickamauga
he was promoted Major General. In December, 1863 he resigned his commission to take his seat in Congress.
Garfield
quickly rose to prominence in the House
as a hawk on the war and for a harsh Reconstruction policy. He was handily re-elected every two years,
despite having been brushed by the Crédit
Mobilier scandal in which members of Congress were alleged to have taken
bribes to support the Union Pacific
Railroad.
In
1876 he was one of the appointed Republican
Special Commissioners that handed the Presidency
to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes
despite lagging Democrat Samuel Tilden in
the popular vote. The same year he became Republican Floor Leader of the House.
In
January 1880 Garfield was elected to the Senate
by the Ohio Legislature, which had just returned to Republican hands. He went to the Republican National Convention later that year pledged to support
the candidacy of fellow Ohioan John
Sherman. At the convention the
leading candidates, former President Ulysses
S Grant and Maine’s James G. Blaine,
were hopelessly deadlocked after multiple ballots. Grant’s partisans, the so-called Stalwarts represented a return to business-as-usual and an aggressive use of political
patronage. Blaine and Sherman represented,
to one degree or another advocates of Civil
Service Reform and were nick-named the Half
Breeds. On the 36th ballot, Blaine
and Sherman threw their combined support behind a surprised Garfield who won
the nomination.
The
election campaign, against another Civil War General, Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock,
was close fought. In addition the perennial issues of the pace
of Reconstruction and Civil Service,
Chinese immigration was a hot button
issue in California, a crucial swing state. Both candidates publicly opposed further
Asian immigration. A handwritten letter purporting to be from Garfield to an H.L. Morey of Massachusetts indicated
he supported unrestricted immigration. The firestorm
threatened to effectively derail his campaign until Garfield proved that the
letter was a forgery and that no H.
L. Morey existed. Public sympathy swung to the wronged Candidate. The popular
vote was tight—Garfield won by only 2,000 votes out of 8.89 million
cast—but he handily won the Electoral
College.
Garfield
spent the first months of his term trying to put together a Cabinet in the face of opposition from
Stalwart leader Senator Roscoe Conkling of
New York. Conkling had succeeded in
getting his protégée, former Collector
of the Port of New York Chester Allan Arthur on the ticket as Vice President, but he could not get the
Cabinet posts he desired for his faction, particularly the patronage rich
position of Post Master General. Garfield nominated Blaine as Secretary of State and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the martyred President as Secretary
of War. He gave the Post Master
General job to a New York state rival of Conkling. Conkling and the other New York Senator
resigned in protest to the affront to Senatorial
privilege, but were surprised when the New York Legislature did not promptly re-elect them. After month of struggle, Garfield had
consolidated his power and defeated the Stalwarts. He finally was ready to turn to his
agenda—the passage of Civil Service Reform and the defense of suffrage for Freedmen
in the South. He never got to either
task.
On
the morning of September 19 Garfield entered the Sixth Street Station of the
Baltimore and Potomac Railroad for a trip to his alma mater Williams College where he was slated to
make a speech. He was accompanied by Blaine and Lincoln and
two of his young sons. He was shot in
the back by Gateau, who had fruitlessly been pursuing an appointment as a U.S. Consul in Paris, a job for which he was manifestly
unqualified. After he was subdued by
onlookers, Gateau told police that, “I am the Stalwart of Stalwarts! Now Arthur is President!”
That
led to brief speculation that the horrified Arthur or other Stalwarts
were somehow involved in an assassination plot.
Gateau, however, was quickly proven to have acted alone. After the President died, his lawyers tried
to defend him on the charge of murder by saying that the bullets he fired did
not kill the Garfield, his doctors did.
Fair enough, but the doctors could have never botched their treatment if
Gateau had not fired. A jury quickly found him guilty and he was hanged on June 30, 1882.
The
new president surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully pushing
Civil Service reform through Congress.
Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil
Service Reform Act into law on
January 16, 1883, a fitting memorial
to Garfield.
Robert
Todd Lincoln, who had endured the assassination of his father and was at
Garfield’s side when he was shot, was also in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American
Exposition at the invitation of the President when William McKinley was shot in 1901.
He understandably felt he was something of a jinx and declined all
invitations to appear with other Presidents until the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. And that day, he was looking over his shoulder.
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