Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [124]
Arthur refused to see John, knowing that, if he gave Guiteau’s brother even a few moments of his time, there would be a public outcry. He did, however, agree to meet with the psychiatrist George Beard, and with Miss A. A. Chevaillier, an advocate for the insane. After listening to them for twenty minutes, Arthur forwarded their appeal to his attorney general, Benjamin Harris Brewster. Brewster replied almost immediately, advising Arthur to reject the appeal. Two days later, the newspapers reported that, after careful consideration, the president and his cabinet had come to the conclusion that there were “no grounds to justify Executive interference with the verdict of the jury and the action of the courts.”
Frances Scoville, who had for most of her life been more of a mother to Charles than a sister, also tried desperately to stay the hand of the court. She directed her appeal, however, not to Garfield’s successor, but to his widow. In a letter to Lucretia just two weeks after the verdict was read, she openly begged for her brother’s life.
Dear Madam:
Humbly I address you, trusting you will not turn a deaf ear even upon despised Guiteau’s sister.
All these weary months I have patiently waited until the time should come for me to speak: when, after the verdict, which I believed would be “Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I could say without shamefacedness, “My heart bleeds for you and the sainted dead.”…
I have counted the hours for the time when I could boldly say to you, as I have said from the moment when the terrible news was brought me on that dark day in July: “He was brain sick, deluded, crazy; forgive him, even as Christ shall forgive us all.…”
In Heaven we know, as we are known. The sainted Garfield knows now that he “had to do it,” and I feel sure if he could speak he would say, “Forgive that deluded man, even as I forgive him; safely keep him from doing any more harm, but forgive.”
Lucretia never replied. When she could wait no longer, Frances packed a bag, took a train from Chicago to Cleveland, Ohio, walked up to the home where Garfield’s widow was living, and knocked on the door. Lucretia and Mollie were down the street, and so Frances, who had traveled under the name of Mrs. Smith, was asked to wait in the library. When Lucretia returned home to find that Charles Guiteau’s sister was waiting for her, she went up to her room and sent down word that she would not see her.
Mollie was sitting on the front steps when Frances left. When she later learned who the strange visitor had been, she felt nothing but fury and outrage that she had “dared to come.” For her father’s assassin, Mollie would write bitterly in her diary, “nothing could be too awful… & my heart is like stone toward him.”
By the day of his execution, even Guiteau had accepted that there would be no stay, no pardon, no fearsome act of God to save his life. When John Crocker, the warden of the District Jail, appeared at his cell door just after twelve noon on June 30, 1882, Guiteau was sitting on his cot, wearing a black suit that he had paid a prison worker to wash and press the day before, and shoes that he had sent to be polished that morning. Beside him was Reverend Hicks, a Washington minister who had visited him every day for nearly a month, and with whom Guiteau had become so close he had made him the executor of his will. “I’m fully resigned,” Guiteau had told Hicks the night before, when he had woken just before midnight and asked to see the minister. “God has smoothed over the road to glory which I will travel tomorrow.”
Now, as he looked up and saw Crocker standing before him, Guiteau’s face whitened, but he quickly stood and, holding Hicks’s hand, listened quietly as the warden began to speak. “With the events of the past year crowding around you now, as the hours of life enfold around you,” Crocker said, “I find myself called upon to perform a last solemn duty in connection with the death of our President.” Then, his voice trembling slightly, he read aloud