Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [26]
Although Guiteau would never again return to Oneida, his life outside the commune was far from what he had envisioned. Rather than achieving success on a grand scale, he suffered a series of disappointments, rejections, and disasters. Even his brief marriage, which took place soon after he left Oneida, ended in divorce.
Guiteau spent nearly an entire year doing nothing at all, living on a small inheritance while he struggled to free himself from his fear that, by leaving the commune, he had “lost [his] eternal salvation.” “The idea that I was to be eternally damned haunted me and haunted me and haunted me every day, and day and night,” he said. “So I was unable to do any business.”
Finally, desperate for money, Guiteau decided to take up a profession, choosing one that he thought would be lucrative—the law. In a time when law school was encouraged but not required he read a handful of books, served as a clerk for a few months, and then stood for the bar. His examiner was a prosecuting attorney named Charles Reed, who, according to Guiteau’s brother-in-law, himself a lawyer, was a “good-hearted fellow,” if not particularly discerning. Reed “asked him three questions and he answered two and missed one,” Scoville recalled, “and that was the way he got to be a lawyer.”
In the courtroom, Guiteau was as unpredictable and egotistical as he had been at Oneida. “The style and plea of his conduct,” reported a psychiatrist who would later study his life, “were such as to convince all the lawyers who were present that he was a monomaniac.” Arguing on behalf of a client in a criminal case, Guiteau “talked and acted like a crazy man.” After he leapt over the bar that separated him from the jury and put his fist directly in the face of one of the jurists, prompting an explosion of laughter in the courtroom, “his client was convicted, without the jury leaving their seats.” In another case, Reed, Guiteau’s bar examiner, recalled that, instead of addressing the petty larceny of which his client was accused, Guiteau “talked about theology, about the divinity, and about the rights of man.… It was a very wandering speech, full of vagaries and peculiarities.”
Much more than the work itself, Guiteau enjoyed the prestige that accompanied his new profession. He would frequently take out his business cards simply to admire them. There were eight lines of text on the front of the cards alone, including a proud note that his office building had an elevator. The back had fourteen lines, which made up a reference list, separated by city, of businessmen Guiteau had met only briefly, if at all.
Over the next fourteen years, Guiteau opened, and then quickly abandoned, a succession of law practices in Chicago and New York. In between, he tried his hand at more exciting lines of work. Among his most ambitious endeavors was a plan to purchase one of Chicago’s largest newspapers—the Inter Ocean. He hoped to convince some of the city’s wealthiest citizens to give him $75,000 to fund the project. In exchange for their investment, he promised to use the paper to win for them any statewide political office they desired. “I asked Mr. John H. Adams to put money into it,” Guiteau openly admitted. “He was the president of the Second National Bank … worth about half a million dollars. I offered to make him governor of Illinois [but] he didn’t have any political aspirations. I wanted to get hold of these men that had money and political aspirations. They were the kind of men to help me in that scheme.”
After two months of fruitless searching for a financier, Guiteau decided it was time to return to religion, this time as a traveling evangelist. As he did with each new venture, he threw himself into evangelism with astonishing passion and complete confidence. For nearly a year, he traveled to dozens of cities across several states, from Buffalo, New York, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin.