Destiny of the Republic

James Garfield is at the center of the book, which is about his presidency, assassination, and medical care. Born in 1831, in Mentor, Ohio, he was raised in poverty after his father died when he was two. However, he managed to go to Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, a preparatory school, where he excelled in his studies. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts, he returned to the institute to teach, later becoming its president when he was only 26 years old.

He married his wife, Lucretia, in 1858, and entered politics, first as a state senator, and then as a US Congressman, elected in 1862. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, however, Garfield had joined the army, so his early years as a lawmaker were spent on the battlefield. He worked his way up to brigadier general before President Lincoln urged him to take his seat in Congress, where he served for seventeen years. In 1880, he attended the Republican National Convention to make the nominating speech for John Sherman. When the delegates remained divided over the candidates, however, a move to nominate Garfield began and, despite his efforts to derail it, he was voted the party’s nominee from the faction known as the Half-Breeds.

After winning the general election over General Winfield Scott Hancock, he was in office for only several months when he was shot by Charlies Guiteau at the train station in Washington, DC. He did not die from the gunshot itself, living from July 2 to mid-September, but the methods used by the doctors in charge of his care introduced germs into his wound, and he succumbed to the severe infection that had spread throughout his body. He left behind his wife, four sons, and a daughter, and was succeeded as president by Chester Arthur. 

Guiteau was the man who shot President Garfield in 1881. He was born in Illinois to a very religious father and a mother who died when he was young. Forgoing college, he joined the Oneida Community, a religious utopian society in upstate New York. After several years, he left there and became, among other things, a lawyer and traveling evangelist. He also became increasingly mentally unbalanced, to the point where his sister was preparing to have him committed to an asylum. However, he disappeared before she could do so.

In 1880, he became obsessed with politics while following the Republican National Convention, traveling to Washington, DC, after the election to try to obtain a position from the new Garfield administration. When he felt slighted upon being turned down, he devised a plan to assassinate the president. (He claimed the idea came from God.) After tracking Garfield on several occasions without following through, he finally shot the president in the train station of the nation’s capital on July 2, 1881. He was tried and convicted of murder after Garfield died, and was put to death by hanging on June 30, 1882.

Bliss was almost preordained to become a doctor when his parents gave him the name “Doctor” upon his birth in 1825. Bliss had helped to treat President Lincoln when he had been shot, so Robert Todd Lincoln (the president’s son) called for his help when Garfield was shot. From among the many physicians who had a hand in Garfield’s care early on, Bliss assumed control, eventually leading the effort to save the president’s life. Earlier in life, he had run into trouble with District of Columbia Medical Society for his less orthodox views, so Millard argues that Bliss’s care of Garfield may have suffered from now being too traditional. For instance, he did not accept Joseph Lister’s new theory regarding germs, so his unsterilized probing of the wound caused it to become infected. He also had a reputation to protect, which may have prevented his acceptance of ideas other than his own. When Alexander Graham Bell attempted to use his induction balance to locate the bullet in Garfield’s body, Bliss only allowed him to check Garfield’s right side. In fact, the bullet came to rest on the left side.

Bell was born in Scotland in 1847, immigrating first to Canada and then to the US. He had invented the telephone and worked at a school for the deaf in Boston by the time Garfield was shot. He believed he could help the president by using the methods used to balance electrical induction to create a device that could detect metal, and thus locate the bullet in the president. His invention worked properly, but Dr. Bliss only allowed him to check the right side of Garfield’s body, when in fact the bullet was in Garfield’s left side.

Lister was an English surgeon born in 1827 who developed a technique of antisepsis using carbolic acid to kill germs and thus sterilize wounds and surgical instruments. His theory that germs were the cause of infection was slower to catch on in the US than in Europe, however, and at the time of Garfield’s shooting, most older doctors like Bliss dismissed it. Had his technique been adopted by the doctors treating Garfield, the president might very well have lived. 

Arthur was Garfield’s vice president, chosen by the Republican Party to balance the ticket for the election. He was part of the faction known as the Stalwarts and was from New York, a must-win state to succeed in the election. The Stalwarts were in favor of retaining the spoils system of political patronage, a system of which Arthur was a prime example. Before being selected as vice president, he had not held any elected office, having only been appointed collector of the New York Customs House by his political patron, Senator Roscoe Conkling. After he became president upon Garfield’s death, he rejected the spoils system, along with Conkling, and helped usher in civil service reform by signing the Pendleton Civil Service Act in 1883. He may have been influenced by a young woman named Julia Sand, who wrote him many letters urging him to rise to the occasion and be a better president than most people expected him to be.

Conkling was a senator from New York and one of Garfield’s leading political rivals. They belonged to different factions within the Republican Party (Conkling to the Stalwarts, and Garfield to the Half-Breeds). Conkling personified the spoils system in politics and reaped its benefits, becoming a force to be reckoned with not only in New York but nationally. He had been given control of the New York Customs House by President Grant and oversaw all appointments to it, including that of Chester Arthur as collector. Since Garfield wanted to abolish this system, Conkling fiercely opposed him. As a political ploy, Conkling resigned his Senate seat, expecting to be swiftly re-appointed by the New York legislature–but he was not. When Arthur became president, Conkling likewise expected to be returned to the center of power, only to be rebuffed by his former political protégé.