Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [74]
As Lucretia’s train sped south toward Washington, another train, traveling west, carried her youngest sons to Mentor, Ohio, where they were to spend the summer. By telegraph and telephone, news of their father’s shooting had raced ahead of them, stirring fear and confusion throughout the country. “All along the route … crowds collected at the stations we passed, and begged for news,” one conductor would later say. “The country seemed to become more feverish as the day advanced.”
Thanks to an extraordinary, spontaneous act of sympathy that united passengers and rail workers all along their journey, however, ten-year-old Irvin and eight-year-old Abe remained completely unaware of what had happened to their father. Even as citizens throughout the country struggled with their own reactions to the news of Guiteau’s crime, the president’s children became a focus of national concern. No one could bear the thought of them alone on the train, learning that their father had been shot.
While the boys gazed out the railcar window, watching trees and towns flash by, stationmasters and railroad officials passed ahead instructions not to discuss the assassination attempt. Passengers and even newsboys showed astonishing restraint. “Conductors passed quietly through the train that carried the boys westward, requesting silence as they whispered the news,” Garfield’s granddaughter would write years later. “The children reached Mentor unaware of the dark cloud that was enveloping their family.”
When the boys finally arrived it was noon, more than an hour after news of the assassination attempt had reached the little town. They were quickly bundled into a carriage and brought to their family farm. While neighbors and friends slipped in and out of the farmhouse, hoping to be told that the rumors were untrue, a reporter spoke to Lucretia’s father. “We have not said a word to the [boys],” Zeb Rudolph admitted. “We hoped that it may not be true, and now that it is true we almost fear to tell them.” Struggling to keep his composure in the presence of a stranger, he watched as his grandsons played “in happy ignorance” on the wide, sun-soaked lawn.
In the second-story room above the Baltimore and Potomac station, Garfield asked only one thing of the more than a dozen men who hovered over him—that they take him home. After enduring Bliss’s excruciating examinations and listening to ten different doctors discuss his fate, Garfield finally convinced the shell-shocked members of his cabinet that, although the White House, with its rotting wood and leaking pipes, was no place for a sick man, anything was better than this room. As gently as they could, eight men lifted the president and carried him back down the steep stairs while he lay on the train car mattress, now stained with vomit and blood.
When they reached the waiting room, the men could hardly believe their eyes. In the brief time they had spent upstairs, trying to understand the extent of the president’s injuries, the once orderly station below them had transformed into a madhouse. “The crowd about the depot,” one man would recall, “had become a swaying multitude, with people running from every direction in frantic haste.” Within ten minutes of the shooting, a mob had gathered on Sixth and B Streets. An attempt to storm the building, in the hope of finding the assassin and lynching him, had been prevented only by a desperate telephone call to the police.
As soon as Garfield appeared, however, the character of the crowd immediately changed. Men and women who had been screaming with fear and fury just moments before suddenly recovered their reason, quietly urging each other to make room for the president as he was carried out of the station and carefully put into a makeshift ambulance. “I think I can see now,” one of Garfield’s doctors