Guiteau was not always so lucky. In 1874, after not paying rent on the office space for his law firm in New York, he spent a month in the grim lower Manhattan prison that would become known as the Tombs. “I never was so much tortured in my life,” he said of the experience. “I felt as if I would go crazy there. I was put in a little miserable hole, and three or four of the nastiest, dirtiest bummers were put in there with me.” As searing as the experience had been, the first thing Guiteau did upon release—after “soak[ing] my body in the hottest kind of suds I could find”—was to open another law office, this time in Chicago, and begin again.
As Guiteau’s life careened out of control, he began asking anyone he knew—even the most distant acquaintance—for money. His most reliable source was his sister, Frances, and her husband, George Scoville, whom he badgered incessantly with requests for loans they knew he would never repay. At one point, he wrote to Frances, “If Mr. Scoville would let me have a hundred dollars for a month or two, it would greatly oblige me, and I would give him my note with interest for the same.” Never subtle, Guiteau ended the letter with an appeal that was strikingly direct even for him. “But to leave this: money, to meet my personal wants, is what I desire now,” he wrote. “Write soon.”
Much larger sums of money, Guiteau believed, might be acquired through lawsuits. At one point, he attempted to sue the New York Herald for $100,000, accusing the newspaper of libel after it ran a story warning its readers of his unethical practices as a lawyer. The Herald cited one occasion in which Guiteau, acting as a bill collector—the primary work of his practice—had collected $175 of a $350 bill, and then refused to turn any of it over to his client. He claimed that he had been unable to collect anything beyond his own fee, and so owed his client nothing. After another enraged client stepped forward with a complaint against him, however, Guiteau quickly dropped the suit and fled the city.
Searching for another target, Guiteau even tried to sue Oneida. Ignoring the fact that he had signed a waiver of compensation when he joined the commune, he claimed that he was owed $9,000, plus interest, in back pay for the six years he had worked there. When Noyes learned of the suit, he replied drily that, while at Oneida, Guiteau had been not only “moody [and] self-conceited” but “a great part of the time was not reckoned in the ranks of reliable labor.” After speaking with Noyes, Guiteau’s lawyer realized that his client had lied to him and resigned from the case.
Undeterred, Guiteau continued to rail against the commune. In a series of letters to Noyes, he threatened to expose Oneida’s controversial sexual practices and to send the founder himself to prison. “If you intend to pay my claim say so,” he warned. “If you want to spend 10 or 20 years in Sing Sing and have your Communities ‘wiped out,’ don’t pay it.” When Noyes did not reply, Guiteau quickly wrote again. “I infer from your silence that you do not intend to pay the claim. All right. If you find yourself arrested within a week, it will be your own fault.”
Noyes’s reaction to these threats mirrored the thoughts of nearly everyone who came into contact with Guiteau: He was certain he was insane. “I have no ill will toward him,” Noyes wrote to Guiteau’s father. “I regard him as insane, and I prayed for him last night as sincerely as I ever prayed for my own son, that is now in a Lunatic Asylum.” Luther Guiteau, furious with his son and ashamed of his behavior, did not hesitate to agree. Only the lack of money to pay for an asylum, he assured Noyes, prevented him from having his son institutionalized. Luther’s oldest son, John, who was a successful insurance salesman in Boston and had been repeatedly humiliated by Charles, wrote with restrained fury that he believed his brother “capable of any folly, stupidity, or rascality. The only possible excuse I can render for him is that he is absolutely insane and is hardly responsible for his acts.”
Throughout Guiteau’s life, the only person who remained his unwavering ally was his sister, Frances. After their mother’s death, Frances, who was six years older than Charles, had done her best to fill the void in her brother’s life. She had not wanted him to join Oneida, but after he left the commune, she had tried to help him when no one else would. As well as giving Charles money, she and her husband allowed him to live with their family on several occasions, even after he was released from the Tombs.
Finally, though, even Frances had to admit that her brother was deeply disturbed, and likely dangerous. This painful realization came in the summer of 1875, when Charles was living with her family in Wisconsin. One hot afternoon, as he lay on his back on her sofa, she called out to him from the kitchen, asking if he would “cut up a little wood for us.” He “immediately said, ‘Yes,’ ” Frances remembered, “and got up and went out and did it willingly.” After he cut the wood, however, instead of taking it to the shed, he dumped it on a walkway leading to the house. Since his arrival, Charles had been sullen and easily angered, so when Frances saw the wood, rather than chastising him, she quietly bent down to pick it up herself. “As quick as I did that he raised the ax, without any provocation or words,” she would recall years later, still shaken by the memory. “It was not so much the raising of the ax as it was the look of his face that frightened me. He looked to me like a wild animal.” Terrified, she dropped the wood and ran into the house.
Fearing as much for her own safety as for Charles’s sanity, Frances reluctantly admitted that her brother needed to be institutionalized. Before taking such a drastic step, however, she asked her family physician to examine him. After one conversation with Guiteau, the doctor, deeply concerned about the young man’s “explosions of emotional feeling,” strongly advised Frances to place him in an asylum without delay. Frances planned to travel with Charles to Chicago, where he would be tried by a jury and, she was certain, found insane. “I had no doubt then of his insanity,” she said. “He was losing his mind.” Before the trip could even be arranged, however, Charles made his escape.
For the next five years, Guiteau continued his peripatetic life, moving from city to city and scheme to scheme until, in 1880, he drifted to Boston, where he developed a new, all-consuming obsession: politics. A voracious reader, he followed the political machinations of men like Ulysses S. Grant and Roscoe Conkling with intense interest and growing admiration. It did not take long for him to decide that he was a Republican Stalwart, and that the best way to enter politics was through the spoils system.
The upcoming presidential election was irresistible to Guiteau. By forcibly inserting himself into the Republican campaign, he believed, he would win not only the gratitude of high-ranking men in the party, but, ultimately, an important political appointment. In the weeks leading up to the national conventions, Guiteau spent every day in a Boston library, feverishly working on a campaign speech. Believing, as did most of the country, that the Republicans would nominate Grant, and knowing that Winfield Scott Hancock, a highly decorated Union general, was heavily favored among the Democrats, he titled his speech “Grant against Hancock.” After Garfield’s surprise nomination—and Hancock’s predictable one, on the second ballot—he changed the title, and virtually nothing else, to “Garfield against Hancock.”
Three days later, clutching his speech and a small, frayed bag, Guiteau had boarded the Stonington, his sights set on the Republican campaign headquarters in New York. “I remember distinctly,” he would later say, “that I felt that I was on my way to the White House.” Garfield’s sudden rise to prominence, he was certain, only foreshadowed his own.
• CHAPTER 5 •
BLEAK MOUNTAIN
This honor comes to me unsought. I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
That night, as Guiteau’s steamship collided with the Narragansett, the object of his ambitions, James Garfield, slept in the farmhouse he shared with his wife and five children in Mentor, Ohio, far removed from the tempestuous workings of his presidential campaign. The house, which the reporters who stretched out on its wide lawn that summer christened Lawnfield, sat on 160 acr
es of land about twenty miles from the log cabin Garfield’s father had built half a century before. Mentor, as one reporter described it, was less a “regular town [than] a thickly settled neighborhood.” A few houses and small farms, encircled by orchards and gardens in heavy bloom, were scattered along a dirt road that ran for two miles between the train station and Lawnfield. While traveling along this road in 1877, Garfield had been impressed with the area’s “quiet country beauty” and decided it would be a good place to teach his sons the lessons he believed they could learn only on a farm.
For the past three years, Garfield had worked on his farm every chance he got. He built a barn, moved a large shed, planted an orchard, and even shopped for curtains for the house. To the house itself, which was one and a half stories high with a white exterior and a dark red roof, he added an entire story, a front porch, and a library. Even with the new library, Garfield’s books filled every room. “You can go nowhere in the general’s home without coming face to face with books,” one reporter marveled. “They confront you in the hall when you enter, in the parlor and the sitting room, in the dining-room and even in the bath-room, where documents and speeches are corded up like firewood.”
Although Garfield enjoyed improving the farmhouse, his greatest interest lay in the land, which he approached as if it were an enormous science experiment. His first large project had been to build a dam to irrigate the fields. Then, the summer before his nomination, he experimented with a fertilizer made up of a carefully calibrated combination of pulverized limestone and ground bone. “I long for time,” he lamented in his journal, “to study agricultural chemistry and make experiments with soils and forces.”
Garfield finally got his wish during his presidential campaign. Although he argued that he should “take the stump and bear a fighting share in the campaign,” traveling from town to town and asking for votes was considered undignified for a presidential candidate. Abraham Lincoln had not given a single speech on his own behalf during either of his campaigns, and Rutherford B. Hayes advised Garfield to do the same. “Sit crosslegged,” he said, “and look wise.”
Happily left to his own devices, Garfield poured his time and energy into his farm. He worked in the fields, planting, hoeing, and harvesting crops, and swung a scythe with the confidence and steady hand he had developed as a boy. In July, he oversaw the threshing of his oats. “Result 475 bushels,” he noted. “No[t] so good a yield as last year.”
While Garfield worried over his crops, political war was being waged in his name. The principal target of attack was the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock. Widely known as “Hancock the Superb,” he was famous for his courage and resounding success during the Civil War, but he had never held an elected office and was perceived to have little more than a clouded understanding of his own platform. The Republicans, naturally, did everything in their power to encourage this perception, including distributing a pamphlet that was titled “Hancock’s Political Achievements” and filled with blank pages.
Hancock’s greatest liability, however, was his own party. Although he had been a Union hero, he could do nothing to change the fact that, in the minds of the American people, the Democratic Party was still inextricably linked to the South. Garfield himself referred to it as the “rebel party” and growled that “every Rebel guerilla and jayhawker, every man who ran to Canada to avoid the draft, every bounty-jumper, every deserter, every cowardly sneak that ran from danger and disgraced his flag,… every villain, of whatever name or crime, who loves power more than justice, slavery more than freedom, is a Democrat.” At every opportunity, Republicans reminded voters of the Democratic Party’s ties to the South, and accused Hancock of having, at best, divided loyalties.
Democrats, in turn, focused their attentions on Garfield, who, unlike Hancock, had a long public career to plumb. As Garfield had known it would be, the Democrats’ first point of attack was the Crédit Mobilier scandal of 1872. At that time, Garfield had been accused, along with several other members of Congress, of accepting from a fellow congressman a good deal on stock in a railroad company called Crédit Mobilier of America. In fact, Garfield had turned down the stock, but soon after had accepted a $300 loan from the same congressman. Although he had repaid the loan before he was aware of the shadow that had fallen over Crédit Mobilier—which, as well as attempting to bribe congressmen, was involved in fraud—and a congressional committee had absolved him of any intentional wrongdoing, Garfield knew that his name would always be linked with the scandal. “There is nothing in my relation to the case for which [the] tenderest conscience or the most scrupulous honor can blame me,” he wrote to a friend at the time. But “it is not enough for one to know that his heart and motives are pure, if he is not sure but that good men … who do not know him, will set him down among the list of men of doubtful morality.”
In the end, the effort to renew public interest in the scandal failed, but it was not for lack of trying. In an impressive, nationwide campaign to remind voters of Crédit Mobilier, and to exploit any lingering questions about Garfield’s role in it, Democrats covered every available surface in every major city with the numbers 329—the amount of money Garfield had been accused of earning in stock dividends. The numbers were on sidewalks, buildings, streets, and barns. Somehow, they even made their way into the homes and offices of members of the incumbent Republican administration. When the secretary of war sat down to breakfast one morning, 329 was scrawled on his napkin. The secretary of the treasury found the numbers on a piece of mail addressed to him, the secretary of agriculture on a beet someone had placed on his desk, and the secretary of state on his hat and, incredibly, the headboard of his bed.
When dredging up an old scandal proved ineffective, zealous Democrats invented a new one. At the height of the campaign, the editor of a New York newspaper found on his desk a letter supposedly written by Garfield professing his support for Chinese immigration. “Individuals or companys [sic] have the right to buy labor where they can get it cheapest,” the letter, which was written on congressional stationery, read. The issue of Chinese immigration was then highly inflammatory, guaranteed to inflame racist sentiment, incite the anger of American labor forces, and threaten the future of any presidential candidate who argued for it. The signature on the letter, however, did not remotely resemble Garfield’s, and after some investigation, the plot behind the forgery was revealed. After the election, a man from Maryland would confess his role in the plot in a New York courtroom, and be sentenced to the Tombs.
Throughout the campaign, despite an onslaught of attacks and accusations, and Garfield’s silence in the face of them, his supporters steadily grew. In New York, Garfield campaign clubs sprang up among completely disparate groups, from 52 students at the University of the City of New-York, to 150 German immigrants in Manhattan, to 50 young ladies from Jefferson County, who “raised a pole 50 feet high, and swung out a handsome streamer.” The New York Times reported that a judge who had been a lifelong Democrat announced his intention of switching party allegiance so that he could “support Gen. Garfield for President, as the best and fittest thing for an honest and patriotic citizen to do.” In Washington, D.C., a former slave named John Moss lost his job at the Library of Congress when he pummeled a fellow worker who had torn to pieces a lithograph of Garfield that Moss had sitting on his desk.
Freed slaves were arguably Garfield’s most ardent supporters. One of the best-known, and most enthusiastically sung, election songs of the contest was “The Battle Cry of Freemen.” Americans could hear the final stanza ringing through the convention halls and city streets, sung with joy and determination:
Now we’ll use a Freemen’s right, as thinking freemen should.
Shouting the battle cry of Garfield.
And we’ll place our ballots where they’ll do the toiling millions good.
Shouting the battle cry for Garfield.
Hurrah! Boys for Garfield.
On October 25, a political meeting of “co
lored citizens” at the Cooper Institute in New York filled an entire hall to overflowing. “It could not have been larger,” a reporter said of the gathering, “for every inch of space in the large hall was crowded. The seats were filled almost as soon as the doors were opened, and in a very few minutes all the standing room was taken.” Even more remarkable than the size of the crowd was its complete racial integration, just fifteen years after the end of the Civil War. “Black men and white,” a newspaper reported, “were in almost equal proportion throughout the hall and on the platform.”
The keynote speaker that night, and the cause of all the excitement, was Frederick Douglass. After climbing to the platform, the august former slave, now a human rights leader and marshal of the District of Columbia, wasted no time in telling his audience which presidential candidate would receive his vote. “James A. Garfield must be our President,” he said to riotous cheers. “I know [Garfield], colored man; he is right on our questions, take my word for it. He is a typical American all over. He has shown us how man in the humblest circumstances can grapple with man, rise, and win. He has come from obscurity to fame, and we’ll make him more famous.” After pausing once more as the cheers reverberated through the hall, Douglass went on. Garfield, he said, “has burst up through the incrustations that surround the poor, and has shown us how it is possible for an American to rise. He has built the road over which he traveled. He has buffeted the billows of adversity, and to-night he swims in safety where Hancock, in despair, is going down.”
Although Garfield did not allow himself to campaign, he could not resist addressing the thousands of people who traveled to Mentor to see him. In what came to be known as “front porch talks,” he would stand on his wide veranda, talking to enormous groups—from five hundred members of an Indianapolis Lincoln Club, to nine hundred women who had traveled together from Cleveland. On a single day in October, despite the rain, five thousand people converged on Garfield’s farm. When a group of Germans stood before him, he spoke to them in their native language, delivering the first speech by an American presidential candidate that was not in English.