Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [105]
After leaving the White House, Arthur returned to the house on Capitol Hill where he was staying, the enormous granite home of Senator John Jones, a Stalwart Republican from Nevada. For the next few days, he did not leave, turning away a stream of visitors and causing an undercurrent of alarm that ran just below the surface of the larger national crisis. This was the man who could be called upon at any moment to lead the nation, and he had effectively disappeared.
Finally, a journalist from New York managed to gain entry into Senator Jones’s home. Jones and his family, who had fled the heat and filth of the summer, intending to return a few months later, had left the house in a state of complete disarray. The little light that slanted through cracks in the shuttered windows revealed furniture shoved into corners or piled in the middle of rooms. Arthur, who was as famously fastidious in his home decor as he was his dress, had done nothing to make sense of the confusion.
Stepping into one of the home’s several parlors, the reporter finally found the vice president, sitting on a sofa, “his head bowed down and looking vacantly out through a low, open window.” At the sound of footsteps, Arthur looked up in surprise, and the reporter could see with startling clarity “the impression which the calamity … had left on his countenance.” Arthur’s eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with tears, and it was clear from the streaks on his face that he had been crying. “His whole manner,” the reporter would later write, “rather than the words he uttered, showed a depth of feeling … which would astonish even many of those who think they know the man well.”
Although he soon returned to New York, anxious to allay fears that he was about to seize control of the White House, Arthur had already begun a transformation so complete that few would have believed it possible. He had, whether out of fear or force of habit, continued to help Conkling try to regain his Senate seat, but as soon as the election was over, he had begun to pull away. Conkling had “received no visit from the Vice-President since the news of the election of Mr. Lapham was received in this City,” the New York Times reported, “and this was remarked as very queer conduct for Gen. Arthur.”
Not only had Arthur begun to pull away from Conkling, but he had started taking political advice from a very different and, even to him, completely unknown source. After Garfield’s shooting, he had received a letter from a woman named Julia Sand. Although he had never met Sand and knew nothing about her, Arthur read the letter, and was surprised to find in it a reflection of his own tortured thoughts. “The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” Sand had written. “The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce?”
Sand, Arthur would later learn, was an unmarried, thirty-two-year-old invalid. For the past five years, she had felt “dead and buried,” but the attempt on Garfield’s life and Americans’ complete lack of faith in Arthur had inspired her to attempt to inspire him. She was as brutally honest in her assessment of the situation as she was galvanizing. “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!”
Arthur not only read Sand’s letters, he kept them. Over the years, he would keep twenty-three of her letters, each one urging him to be a better man than he had once believed he could be. “It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong,” Sand assured him,