Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [58]
The brief note, one reporter wrote, “seemed to stupefy” everyone in the chamber, and it quickly caused a “sensation.” The reaction that followed, however, was not at all what Conkling had envisioned. After recovering from their initial shock, Stalwarts in the Senate merely mumbled their support, while delighted Half-Breeds, hardly believing their luck, immediately went on the attack. This was nothing more than a stunt, they jeered, and an impotent one at that. Conkling, scoffed one congressman, was just “a great big baby boohooing because he can’t have all the cake.”
When he was told of Conkling’s resignation, Garfield simply shrugged. It was, he wrote in his diary, “a very weak attempt at the heroic.… I go on without disturbance.” His first concern was for Lucretia. Any time and energy he had left were put toward creating a balanced administration and freeing himself from office seekers so he would have time to do his job. A few days later, he announced that he was limiting his calling hours to one hour a day, from 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m. Conkling, he knew, was still capable of doing tremendous damage, but Garfield was no longer interested in compromise. “Having done all I fairly could to avoid a fight,” he wrote, “I now fight to the end.”
As the final, fatal blow had been self-inflicted, Conkling’s long political career came to a shockingly swift end. Immediately following their dramatic resignations, Conkling and Platt left for New York. After years of controlling every aspect of New York politics, and every man involved in it, Conkling was confident that the legislature at Albany would reelect them both. However, on the last day of May, the same day that Lucretia’s doctors finally pronounced her well—telling Garfield, “with emphasis, it is ended”—both men were soundly defeated. Conkling received just a third of the Republican votes, and Platt six fewer than Conkling. “Stung with mortification at his inability to control the President, and believing that the people of this State shared his disappointment,” wrote the New York Times, Conkling “has thrown away his power, destroyed his own influence.”
For the first time since his nomination nearly a year earlier, Garfield was hopeful. Lucretia, who, just days earlier, had been so close to death, was every day gaining in health and strength. No longer forced to surrender half his day to the demands of office seekers, he suddenly had time to think and plan. And, in a turn of events that no one could have predicted, the legendary senator who had declared himself Garfield’s enemy, and whose iron grip on his administration had threatened to destroy it before it had even begun, was alone and powerless in Albany. Three months after his inauguration, Garfield was finally free to begin his presidency.
“A deep strong current of happy peace,” he wrote that night, “flows through every heart in the household.”
• CHAPTER 10 •
THE DARK DREAMS OF PRESIDENTS
History is but the unrolled scroll of Prophecy.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
The idea came to Guiteau suddenly, “like a flash,” he would later say. On May 18, two days after Conkling’s dramatic resignation, Guiteau, “depressed and perplexed … wearied in mind and body,” had climbed into bed at 8:00 p.m., much earlier than usual. He had been lying on his cot in his small, rented room for an hour, unable to sleep, his mind churning, when he was struck by a single, pulsing thought: “If the President was out of the way every thing would go better.”
Guiteau was certain the idea had not come from his own, feverish mind. It was a divine inspiration, a message from God. He was, he believed, in a unique position to recognize divine inspiration when it occurred because it had happened to him