Destiny of the Republic

“By 1876, Lister’s steady and astonishing success had silenced nearly all of his detractors at home and in Europe. The United States, however, remained inexplicably resistant. Most American doctors simply shrugged off Lister’s findings, uninterested and unimpressed. Even Dr. Samuel Gross, the president of the Medical Congress and arguably the most famous surgeon in the country, regarded antisepsis as useless, even dangerous. ‘Little, if any faith, is placed by any enlightened or experienced surgeon on this side of the Atlantic in the so-called carbolic acid treatment of Professor Lister,’ Gross wrote imperiously.” 

This passage comes early in the book, in the chapter describing the Centennial Exhibition, and shows what Joseph Lister was up against in trying to convince American doctors of the value of antisepsis. Thus, it foreshadows the main thesis of the book.

“So vigorously did Garfield apply himself during his first year at the Eclectic that, by his second year, the school had promoted him from janitor to assistant professor.” 

Garfield was an excellent student with a keen mind, which this quote illustrates. Despite growing up in poverty, he succeeded in life through education, hence his strong belief in education for his fellow citizens.

“From a very young age, Garfield had realized that he had one skill above all others–the ability to capture a crowd.” 

This shows one of Garfield’s strengths that helped him succeed in life, along with his sharp intellect. This trait would prove itself by Garfield being able to be nominated the Republican candidate for president without even officially running in the first place.

“From an early age, Guiteau had been confident of his importance in the eyes of God.” 

A theme running through the life of Guiteau is his belief that his actions were preordained by God, and this shows it began early on. As an adult, he would believe that God wanted him to kill President Garfield. 

“In the days that followed, surrounded by celebrations and frantic plans for his administration, Garfield could not shake the feeling that the presidency would bring him only loneliness and sorrow. As he watched everything he treasured–his time with his children, his books, and his farm–abruptly disappear, he understood that the life he had known was gone. The presidency seemed to him not a great accomplishment but a ‘bleak mountain’ that he was obliged to ascend. Sitting down at his desk in a rare moment to himself, he tried to explain in a letter to a friend the strange sense of loss he had felt since the election.

“‘There is a tone of sadness running through this triumph,’ he wrote, ‘which I can hardly explain.’” 

This passage gives some insight into Garfield’s personality and motives. Though he was an outgoing man, he did not seek the presidency. He thoroughly enjoyed family life and, having grown up without his own father, lamented that he did not have more time to spend with his children. Thus, while many would see his election to the highest office in the country as the epitome of success, he did not. Yet he felt it was his duty to serve the country and did not shrink from his responsibilities. Moreover, in hindsight, one can read into this a kind of ominous foreshadowing of the tragedy to come. 

“Guiteau was certain the idea had not come from his own, feverish mind. It was a divine inspiration, a message from God. He was, he believed, in a unique position to recognize divine inspiration when it occurred because it had happened to him before. Even before the wreck of the steamship Stonington, he had been inspired, he said, to join the Oneida Community, to leave so that he might start a religious newspaper, and to become a traveling evangelist. Each time God had called him, he had answered.” 

This quotation shows the state of Guiteau’s mind and the extent of his mental illness. Throughout his life, he felt himself directed by God to pursue certain things. While this might conceivably be argued for something like becoming an evangelist, it makes no sense as an argument for murder.

“Finally, on June 1, thoroughly convinced of ‘the divinity of the inspiration,’ he made up his mind. He would kill the president.”

Following on the previous quotation, this illustrates the moment when Guiteau’s delusions turned violent. This has the potential to be seen as an especially odd message to have intuited from a divine being after Guiteau had his own life spared following the steamship accident. 

“The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican party and save the Republic.” 

Part of Guiteau’s delusions involved thinking that those in authority would support him in killing the president. The above quotation comes from a letter he wrote and addressed to the White House just before shooting Garfield. He believed that the new president, Chester Arthur, would thank him for his actions and reward him with a position in the administration. 

“Just five minutes after the shooting, Dr. Smith Townsend, the District of Columbia’s health officer, arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac. Although he was the first doctor to reach the station, within the hour he would be joined by a succession of nine more physicians, each of whom wanted to examine the president.” 

Millard spends a good amount of time in the book explaining how Dr. Bliss came to oversee Garfield’s care after he was shot. This quotation represents the beginning of the sequence of events by which this took place. Many doctors were present at the train station to help provide the initial care. Bliss was not the first on the scene. He was not the president’s personal physician, nor was he asked by the family or anyone else to take the lead. In other words, it was not preordained that he would be Garfield’s primary caregiver. 

“Had Garfield been shot just fifteen years later, the bullet in his back would have been quickly found by X-ray images, and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.” 

This illustrates one of those “What if?” questions regarding history. Two major changes in medical care in the near future would likely have saved Garfield’s life if the same event had taken place only fifteen years later. 

“Still stretched out on the sofa, Bliss looked up at Baxter with contempt. ‘I know your game,’ he spat. ‘You wish to sneak up here and take this case out of my hands. You just try it on […] I know how you are, sneaking around to prescribe for those who have influence and will lobby for you.’” 

This exchange between Bliss and Jedediah Hyde Baxter, President Garfield’s personal physician of five years, shows the acerbic tenacity Bliss had in clearing the field of competitors who might challenge his control of the president’s medical care.  

“Even as far west as Kansas, Lister’s followers sought to intervene on the president’s behalf. In a letter to Lucretia the day after the shooting, Dr. E. L. Patee, a highly respected surgeon from Manhattan, Kansas, warned her that she must shield her husband from potentially harmful medical care. ‘Do not allow probing of the wound,’ he urged. ‘Probing generally does more harm than the ball.’ Although he lived far from what was then considered the center of medical thought in the United States, Patee had read carefully Lister’s work and understood its importance. ‘Saturate everything with carbolic acid,’ he begged the first lady. ‘Our whole state is in […] great grief. God help you.’” 

This passage shows that there was, as Millard puts it, “a small but growing bastion of doctors who understood the importance of practicing antisepsis” (185). Some, like Dr. Patee, tried to offer their advice, but most were either young or from rural areas, and thus not taken seriously by the entrenched medical establishment that Bliss represented. 

“Although still little more than an idea in Bell’s mind, their invention would be Garfield’s only hope of avoiding death at his doctor’s hands.”

The main thesis of the book is that Garfield’s doctors (unintentionally) killed him, not the assassin’s bullet. Not only does this quotation illustrate that, it is also a good example of Millard’s writing style. As the last sentence in Chapter 14, it leaves the reader in suspense and foreshadows what will follow. 

“The waves of emotion that swept over the country, moreover, were fed not only by the fact that America’s president had been attacked in the train station that morning, but that that president had been Garfield. To his countrymen, a staggeringly diverse array of people, Garfield was at the same time familiar and extraordinary, a man who represented both what they were and what they hoped to be.” 

This quotation illustrates Garfield’s personal popularity among Americans. The second sentence also hints at the theme of Garfield personifying the nation in that he represented the country’s ideals, and sought to reunify American following the Civil War. 

“Mabel understood the importance of her husband’s work, but she also knew that he would literally work himself to death before he would give up. She had seen him sick with worry and determination too many times before, and it frightened her to know that this invention, and the good it could accomplish, meant as much to him as anything he had ever done. ‘I want to know how you are personally,’ she wrote to Alec a few days after he had left for Washington. ‘I fancy you are so eager and excited that you don’t feel the heat as you otherwise would. Only for my sake do take care and don’t wear yourself all out. I […] would think the President’s life a poor exchange for yours.’” 

This passage illustrates well Alexander Graham Bell’s feverish devotion to his work and in trying to invent something useful. His wife, Mabel, home in Boston while expecting a child, wrote this to him in Washington, DC, as he toiled on his induction balance in an effort to save the president.  

“By late July, Garfield had seemed so strong and steady, so much like himself for so long, that it seemed impossible that he would not recover.” 

During July 1881, it was still very much a possibility that Garfield might survive Guiteau’s assassination attempt. The quotation also makes clear the pensive sense of waiting that the nation endured. After a period of optimism, Garfield’s health deteriorated until the American people had to resign themselves to the likelihood he would die.

“Your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’–adding gloomily–‘He won’t succeed, though–making a man President cannot change him,’ she wrote. But making a man President can change him! Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform!” 

This is an excerpt from a letter by Julia Sand, sent to Chester Arthur at the end of August 1881, an example of the exhortations found in many of the letters she sent to him. They may have contributed to his personal transformation that led him to work for civil service reform during his presidency.

“When the train finally reached Elberon, it switched to a line of railroad track that had been laid just the night before. Two thousand people had worked until dawn to lay 3,200 feet of track so that the president’s train could take him to the door of Franklyn Cottage, the twenty-two-room summer home a wealthy New Yorker had offered for as long as it was needed. While determining where the track would have to go, a surveyor had realized that he would need to cut through a neighboring garden, and he apologized to the owner. ‘I am willing that you should ruin my house,’ she replied, ‘all I have–if it would help to save him.’” 

This passage demonstrates both how the country pulled together over this tragedy and the extent of Garfield’s popularity. People from all walks of life pitched in to do what they could for the president. 

“Even as he lay dying, Garfield was kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful.” 

The author has several passages in the book that relate something similar, documented by a variety of sources. It highlights Garfield’s true personality and the depth of his humanity. If anything would bring out one’s negative qualities, lying in pain with failing health certainly would, but Garfield maintained his positive demeanor throughout his ordeal. 

“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.’” 

This passage refers to the crowd waiting to see Garfield lying in state in the Capitol Building and pay their last respects. Once again, it illustrates the depth of his popularity, which cut across social strata. 

“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.’” 

This quotation was the opinion of a neurologist named Edward Spitzka, who testified for the defense in the case against Guiteau. Together with the following quotation, it shows the challenge of using the insanity defense at that point in time, and the disagreement among experts regarding its application.

“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.’” 

This was part of the testimony for the prosecution in the case against Guiteau. Together with the previous quotation, this shows the challenge of using the insanity defense at that point in time and the disagreement among experts regarding its application.

“Americans did not believe, however, that Garfield had been assassinated because he had walked into the train station, just as he had traveled everywhere since the day of his election, wholly unprotected. Even after losing two presidents to assassins, the idea of surrounding them with guards, and so distancing them from the people they served, still seemed too imperial, too un-American. In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901.” 

An interesting point to highlight in this narrative is the lack of protection that American presidents had throughout the 19th century. Even after Lincoln and Garfield were shot and killed within sixteen years of each other, it was thought that the leaders of a democratic nation ought to be fairly accessible and, as noted in the quotation, protecting them with guards was deemed “too imperial.” This would finally change in the 20th century.