Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [63]
After returning to his boardinghouse that day, Guiteau wrote a letter to the American people. He had, he explained, “intended to remove the President this morning at the depot,” but after seeing Garfield with Lucretia, he decided it would be best to “take him alone.” Although he wanted to spare the first lady the horror of witnessing her husband’s fatal shooting, Guiteau argued that, when he did kill the president, his death would not be any more painful to Lucretia because it was the result of assassination. “It will be no worse for Mrs. Garfield, to part with her husband this way, than by natural death,” Guiteau reasoned. “He is liable to go at any time any way.”
Garfield arrived back in Washington on June 27, in the midst of a heavy storm. He had been reluctant to leave Lucretia, worrying that the “sea air is too strong for her,” but he was thrilled by the progress she had made. He also knew that he would see her again soon. In less than a week, while his two youngest boys headed to Ohio for the summer, he would leave for New England with his older sons. The plan was to meet up with Lucretia and Mollie and then go on to Massachusetts, where they would attend his twenty-fifth class reunion at Williams College and help Harry and Jim settle in for the upcoming academic year.
Before Garfield could leave, however, he needed to meet with his cabinet. With Conkling out of the way, he had finally been able to establish a strong, if at times contentious, cabinet, which, as he had always intended, included Stalwarts as well as Half-Breeds. The most prominent of the Stalwarts was Robert Todd Lincoln, Garfield’s secretary of war and Abraham Lincoln’s oldest and only surviving son.
On June 30, as the cabinet was about to adjourn for the last time before the president’s trip, Garfield suddenly turned to Lincoln with an unusual question. He had heard, he said, that his father had had a prophetic dream shortly before his assassination, and he wondered if Robert would describe it. Although a private and reserved man, Lincoln agreed to tell the story.
After he had fallen asleep late one night, Abraham Lincoln had had a dream in which, he later told his wife and an old friend, there was a “death-like stillness about me.” Within the stillness, however, he could hear “subdued sobs.” Leaving his room, he searched the White House for the source of the weeping, but every room he entered was empty. Finally, stepping into the East Room, he saw a coffin that was guarded by soldiers. “Who is dead in the White House?” he asked. “Why, don’t you know?” one of the soldiers replied. “The President has been assassinated.”
Lincoln had believed deeply in dreams, seeing in them omens that he dared not ignore. After having “an ugly dream” about their son Tad, he had advised his wife to put Tad’s pistol away. Another time, while in Richmond, Virginia, he had asked her to return to Washington after he dreamed that the White House was on fire. When questioned about his belief in dreams, Lincoln had often cited the Bible as support. He pointed to Jacob’s dream in Genesis 28, as well as several other chapters in the Old and New Testaments. These passages, he said, “reveal God’s meaning in dreams.”
Although Garfield did not share Lincoln’s reverence for dreams, he had had a few that seemed strange or powerful enough to record. In late January, little more than a month before his inauguration, he had written down a dream he had had in which Chester Arthur drowned. He and a close friend, General David Swaim, had escaped a sinking ship, only to watch Arthur, who was lying on a couch, very pale and obviously ill, disappear under the surface of the water. “I started