Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [27]
People “have been in the habit of looking way off into the indefinite future for the second coming,” Guiteau would explain. “ ‘Hold!’ I say, ‘it occurred eighteen hundred years ago.’ ”
Guiteau would later admit that his attempt at evangelism was a “failure all the way through,” but, he said, “I stuck to it like a hero.” After arriving in a town, he would find the business district and walk through it, scattering handbills announcing his lecture and trying to sell printed copies for twenty-five cents. On most nights, only a handful of people showed up, and after Guiteau began to speak they either heckled him or simply left. After he gave a lecture titled “Is There a Hell?” to an unusually large crowd at the Newark Opera House, the Newark Daily Journal ran a jeering review with the headline “Is there a hell? Fifty deceived people are of the opinion that there ought to be.”
Whatever his occupation, Guiteau survived largely on sheer audacity. As he traveled between towns by train, he never bought a ticket. “You may say that this is dead beating, and I had no business to go around in this kind of style,” he argued. “I say I was working for the Lord and the Lord took care of me, and I was not to find fault with the way he took care of me.” When the conductor asked for his ticket, Guiteau would simply explain that he was doing God’s work and had no money for train fare. Frequently, the man would take pity on him and let him ride for free, but occasionally he would meet a conductor who “was not a Christian man evidently,” and would be roughly put off the train at the next station.
Guiteau took the same approach to board bills that he did to train fares. Each time he entered a town, he would choose the nicest boarding house he could find, never planning to pay for his room. “I had no trouble all this time in getting in first-class places,” he proudly recalled. “They always took me for a gentleman.” When he was ready to move on, he would sneak out under cover of night, or simply leave town immediately following his lecture.
This strategy, however, was riskier than traveling on a train without a ticket. In Michigan, Guiteau learned to his great discomfort, “you can arrest a man for a board-bill the same as you can for stealing a coat.” One night in Detroit, he was arrested after his lecture and sent back on the express train to Ann Arbor, where, as always, he had left without paying his bill. Fortunately for Guiteau, the deputy sheriff assigned to travel with him fell asleep on the train. “I kept watching him and he kept bobbing his head,” Guiteau later recalled. “When we got to Ypsilanti I says, ‘I guess I will get out of this,’ and I jumped up and ran off just as tight as I could for about a mile. I had not been gone more than a minute by the clock before I heard them whistle down-brakes; the fellow had missed me.”
Guiteau was not always so lucky. In 1874, after not paying rent on the office space for his law firm in New York, he spent a month in the grim lower Manhattan prison that would become known as the Tombs. “I never was so much tortured in my life,” he said of the experience. “I felt as if I would go crazy there. I was put in a little miserable hole, and three or four of the nastiest, dirtiest bummers were put in there with me.” As searing as the experience had been, the first thing Guiteau did upon release—after “soak[ing] my body in the hottest kind of suds I could find”—was to open another law office, this time in Chicago, and begin again.
As Guiteau’s life careened out of control, he began asking anyone he knew—even the most distant acquaintance—for money. His most reliable source was his sister, Frances, and her husband, George Scoville, whom he badgered incessantly with requests for loans they knew he would never repay. At one point, he wrote to Frances, “If Mr. Scoville would let me have a hundred dollars for a month or two, it would greatly