a scene of destruction that, in the words of one reporter, “beggar[ed] description.” The ship’s bow had been smashed in, the timber and planking ripped away nearly to the waterline. Three passengers of the Narragansett who had been rescued from the sound had already died on board. Twenty-seven more had burned to death or drowned. Those who had survived collapsed on the pier, hysterical, nearly naked, their skin left in shreds by the fire. Parents searched frantically for children as crew members solemnly wrapped two bodies, that of a man and a child, in sailcloth and laid them upon rocks near the shore. Two weeks later another body would wash up on Fishers Island.
As dawn revealed the scale of the carnage, the survivors, even in the midst of their shock and despair, considered themselves extraordinarily fortunate to be alive. Guiteau, however, believed that luck had nothing to do with his survival. As he stepped off a steamship that had come to the Stonington’s rescue, Guiteau felt certain that he had not been spared, but rather selected—chosen by God for a task of tremendous importance. Disappearing into the crowd, he dedicated himself to what he now saw clearly as the divine mission before him.
PART ONE
PROMISE
• CHAPTER 1 •
THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT
The life and light of a nation are inseparable.
JAMES A. GARFIELD
Even severed as it was from the rest of the body, the hand was majestic. Sixteen feet tall, with long, tapered fingers holding aloft a twenty-nine-foot torch, it sat on the banks of a small lake in Philadelphia in the summer of 1876. It was all that existed of the Statue of Liberty, and it had been shipped in pieces from France for the United States’ Centennial Exhibition, a world’s fair celebrating the country’s first one hundred years. Ten years later, the complete figure, rising more than a hundred and fifty feet from its pedestal and with a bright skin of copper, would be installed in New York Harbor to the awe and admiration of the world. But in 1876, the Statue of Liberty, like the young country to which it would be given, was still a work in progress. A symbol of promise, perhaps, but not yet of triumph.
Across the lake from the statue, James Abram Garfield walked with his wife and six children under a flawless sky, the scent of a recent rain still hanging in the air. A tall man with broad shoulders and a warm smile, Garfield was, in many ways, the embodiment of the Centennial Exhibition’s highest ideals. At just forty-four years of age, he had already defied all odds. Born into extreme poverty in a log cabin in rural Ohio, and fatherless before his second birthday, he had risen quickly through the layers of society, not with aggression or even overt ambition, but with a passionate love of learning that would define his life. That love had brought him to Philadelphia, for the opening day of the centennial fair.
Although he was a congressman, Garfield traveled through the exhibition unaided by guards or guides of any kind. Except for his statuesque height and soldier’s posture, he was indistinguishable from the hundreds of thousands of other fairgoers who swarmed the rain-soaked grounds and the eighty miles of asphalt walkways. In just a few weeks, these walkways would be transformed by the summer sun into hot, sticky, lava-like rivers, trapping shoes and small animals. But on that day they felt smooth and solid as the crowd surged through the fairgrounds, headed toward one destination above all others—Machinery Hall.
With fourteen acres of exhibits, Machinery Hall shivered with life. It pulsed and throbbed so irresistibly that the wooden plank floors vibrated underfoot. Conversations were either muffled by a heavy humming or forced to an early and violent end by a sharp, sudden clack. Exhibits included everything from a machine that could weave a customer’s name into a pair of suspenders while he waited, to an internal combustion engine that William Ford, Henry Ford’s father, had traveled all the way from his farm in Dearborn, Michigan, to see.
These exhibits were finely calibrated to appeal to no man more than James Garfield. A former professor of ancient languages, literature, and mathematics who had paid for his first year of college by working as a carpenter, Garfield’s interests and abilities were as deep as they were broad. In fact, so detailed was his interest in mathematics, and so acute his understanding, that he had recently written an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem during