Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [92]
For freed slaves, an impoverished and, until recently, almost entirely powerless segment of the population, Garfield represented freedom and progress, but also, and perhaps more importantly, dignity. As president, he demanded for black men nothing less than what they wanted most desperately for themselves—complete and unconditional equality, born not of regret but respect. “You were not made free merely to be allowed to vote, but in order to enjoy an equality of opportunity in the race of life,” Garfield had told a delegation of 250 black men just before he was elected president. “Permit no man to praise you because you are black, nor wrong you because you are black. Let it be known that you are ready and willing to work out your own material salvation by your own energy, your own worth, your own labor.”
Even in the South, where he had once been hated and feared as an abolitionist and Union general, there was a surprising pride in Garfield’s presidency. Although he had made it clear from the moment he took office, even in his inaugural address, that he would not tolerate the discrimination he knew was taking place in the South, what he promised was not judgment and vengeance but help. The root of the problem, he believed, was ignorance, and it was the responsibility, indeed “the high privilege and sacred duty,” of the entire nation, North and South, to educate its people.
Garfield’s plan was to “give the South, as rapidly as possible, the blessings of general education and business enterprise and trust to time and these forces.” The South had taken him at his word, and, for the first time in decades, had accepted the president of the North as its president as well. With Garfield in the White House, the New York Times wrote, Southerners “felt, as they had not felt before for years, that the Government … was their Government, and that the chief magistrate of the country had an equal claim upon the loyal affection of the whole people.”
Although each of these disparate groups trusted Garfield, it was not until they were plunged into a common grief and fear that they began to trust one another. Suddenly, a contemporary of Garfield’s wrote, the nation was “united, as if by magic.” Even Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy and a man whom Garfield had voted to indict as a war criminal, admitted that the assassination attempt had made “the whole Nation kin.”
Together, Americans waited for news of the president’s condition, helpless to prevent what they feared most. Although Garfield had not died in the attack, neither had he yet been saved. He was in an agonizing place in between, and as he suffered, so did his countrymen. Unable to rejoice or mourn, they waited in silence, and prayed as if they were at the sickbed not of a president but a brother.
What made the suffering even harder to bear was that, despite the fury directed at men like Conkling and Arthur, it was devastatingly clear that there was nothing and no one to blame. In no man’s mind save the assassin’s had the shooting achieved anything. It had not been carried out in the name of personal or political freedom, national unity, or even war. It had addressed no wrong, been the consequence of no injustice.
Garfield’s shooting had also revealed to the American people how vulnerable they were. In the little more than a century since its inception, the United States had become a powerful and respected country. Yet Americans suddenly realized that they still had no real control over their own fate. Not only could they not prevent a tragedy of such magnitude,