Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [64]
It was his own death, however, that was often on Garfield’s mind. Although he was by nature a cheerful and optimistic man, like Lincoln, he had long felt that he would die an early death. When his friends tried to talk him out of this grim conviction, his only answer was that the thought seemed to him “as foolish as it does to you.” Nonetheless, he could not shake it. “I do not know why it haunts me,” he said. “Indeed, it is a thing that is wholly involuntary on my part, and when I try the hardest not to think of it it haunts me most.” The feeling, he said, came to him most often at night, “when all is quiet.” It was then that his mind would turn to his father, who died “in the strength of his manhood,” when his wife and children needed him most. At those times, Garfield said, “I feel it so strong upon me that the vision is in the form of a warning that I cannot treat lightly.”
The night after his cabinet meeting, July 1, Garfield had dinner with Captain Charles E. Henry, the marshal of the District of Columbia, and invited his guest to join him in the library afterward. As the conversation drifted, Henry would later recall, Garfield began to talk about the times in his life, particularly his boyhood, when he had miraculously escaped death. Just days before, he had received word that his uncle Thomas Garfield had been killed when his carriage was struck by a train, and the tragedy had brought back not just memories of his own near-drowning years before on the canal, but the deaths of his father and children, and Lucretia’s recent, nearly fatal illness. As Henry sat in the candle-lit library, listening to Garfield, he realized that he “had never heard him speak … in the way he did that night.” Garfield was, Henry said, “undoubtedly dwelling upon the uncertainty of life.”
After Henry left, Garfield, wishing to talk to Blaine, decided to walk to the secretary of state’s house, just a few blocks away. As the president stepped out of the White House, Charles Guiteau, sitting on a park bench across the street in Lafayette Park, looked up. When he saw Garfield, he stood and began to follow him, staying on the opposite side of the street. He had been sitting in the same park two nights earlier and had watched as Garfield left the White House by carriage. After half an hour had passed and the president had not returned, Guiteau had decided to “let the matter drop for the night.” Now, as he shadowed Garfield, he removed the loaded revolver from his pocket, carrying it stiffly at his side.
When Garfield reached Blaine’s house, Guiteau stepped back into the shadows of a hotel alley. Happening to glance out a window, Harriet Blaine caught sight of the president and ran to open the door. As he waited for Blaine, Garfield gave Harriet a present—a bound and signed copy of his inaugural address—and talked to her about the trip he would be making the following day.
When Blaine finally appeared, he and Garfield stepped out together for a walk. From the alley, Guiteau, who had passed the time examining his gun and wiping it down, watched as the two men walked down the street arm in arm, their heads close together as they spoke. Garfield’s camaraderie with his secretary of state enraged Guiteau, proving, he said, that “Mr. Garfield had sold himself body and soul to Blaine.”
Guiteau followed Blaine and Garfield all the way to the White House, his gun at his side. He could have easily killed either man at any moment, but he never raised the revolver. After watching the president disappear inside the White House, he walked back to his boardinghouse through the dark streets of Washington. The image of Garfield and Blaine “engaged in the most earnest conversation” haunted him, and the hesitancy he had shown for weeks hardened into resolve. He would not let another opportunity to kill the president pass without taking it. “My mind,” he would later say, “was perfectly clear.”
• CHAPTER 11 •