Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [67]
His affairs in order, Guiteau was finally ready to leave. He was wearing a dark suit with a “nice, clean shirt,” and he looked, he was confident, “like a gentleman.” Before stepping out the door, he picked up his revolver, carefully wrapped it in paper, and slid it into his hip pocket.
Although he had taken his time that morning, Guiteau arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac station at Sixth and B Streets half an hour before Garfield. He decided to use the time to complete a few last tasks. Aware that he would soon be the focus of great attention, and concerned that his shoes looked a little dusty, he had them brushed and blacked. Then he approached a line of hack drivers outside the station. Thinking it best to arrange for a ride to the jail ahead of time, in case there was any danger to him personally, he asked one driver what he would charge to take him to the Congressional Cemetery, which was near the prison. “Well, I will take you out there for $2,” the driver answered. Guiteau, who did not have two dollars but did not plan to pay for the ride anyway, told the driver he would let him know in a few minutes if he “wanted his services.”
Once inside the station, Guiteau turned his attention to the items he had carried with him from the Riggs House. Approaching a newsstand, he asked the young man behind the counter, James Denny, if he could leave some packages with him for a few minutes. “Certainly,” Denny replied, and, taking the packages from Guiteau, placed them on top of a pile of papers stacked against a wall. Satisfied that his letters and book were in good hands and would be found by the authorities when the time came, Guiteau walked to the bathroom to examine his revolver one last time. He unwrapped it from the paper he had used to protect the powder from his perspiration, tested the trigger, and looked it over carefully “to see that it was alright.” Five minutes after he stepped back into the waiting room, Garfield and Blaine arrived.
When the State Department carriage rounded the corner onto B Street, Garfield was seated nearest the sidewalk and so had an unimpeded view of the station. Although eager to begin his trip, the president did not relish the sight of the three-story redbrick building with its imposing Gothic design, nor had he ever.
So strongly did Garfield object to the station that, while in Congress, he had argued that it should be torn down. Nine years earlier, the government had given the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad fourteen acres of the National Mall, and the company had quickly built the station and laid tracks across the broad greensward. To the Mall, which Pierre-Charles L’Enfant had designed as a place for quiet contemplation, the station brought soot, smoke, noise, and even danger. Trains frequently killed and maimed people as they walked or rode in carriages along the Mall. People “will wonder,” one senator railed, “why an American Congress should permit so foul a blotch to besmirch the face of so grand a picture.”
Garfield, who referred to the Baltimore and Potomac as a “nuisance which ought long since to have been abated,” also had personal reasons for disliking the station. In his mind, it would always be inextricably linked with one of the most painful experiences of his life—the death of his youngest son, Neddie. Just five years earlier, Garfield and Crete had watched as their little boy’s body was carried through the station so that he might be buried in Mentor, next to his sister Trot, whom they had lost thirteen years earlier. “I did not know, since that great sorrow,” Garfield had written in his diary after burying Neddie, “that my heart could be so wrung again by a similar loss.”
As the carriage carrying Garfield came to a stop in front of