Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,105

“No, no,” he said. “I don’t want any more delay.”

At two o’clock the next morning, a specially equipped train pulled into the Baltimore and Ohio depot. It had been prepared weeks earlier so that it would be ready to take the president wherever he wished to go, whenever he was ready. Finally, the time had come. That day, Garfield was to be taken to Elberon, New Jersey, “in the hope,” a member of the White House staff wrote, “that the air and the sight of the sea might do for him what the doctors could not.”

The train, which pulled four cars—three passenger and one baggage—had been thoroughly renovated for the sick president. One of the principal concerns was dust, both from the tracks and from the train itself. To protect Garfield, the train had been outfitted with an engine that used only clean-burning anthracite coal. Wire gauze had been wrapped around the outside of his car, and heavy curtains had been hung inside.

The president’s car, number 33, bore almost no resemblance to a normal train car. The seats had been removed, and thick Brussels carpet laid on the floors. Taking up most of the space was a new bed with strong springs to try to soften the tracks’ jolts and bumps. In an attempt to keep Garfield cool, ice had been placed in the car, and a false ceiling had been installed a few inches from the actual ceiling to encourage air circulation.

Before he would allow the president to be moved, Bliss insisted that everything be tested. The train was driven nearly twenty miles in a trial trip, to “determine,” Bliss explained, “the amount and nature of the motion of the bed.” The attendants who had been chosen to carry Garfield—among them, Swaim and Rockwell, his closest friends—were drilled over and over again, so “as to make a mistake almost impossible.” Bliss even considered having tracks laid from the White House door. He finally decided, however, that the “perfectly even surface of Pennsylvania Avenue really rendered such an expenditure needless.”

Finally, at 6:00 a.m., Bliss walked into Garfield’s room and said, “Mr. President, we are ready to go.” Garfield replied, “I am ready.” Edson, who had spent that night watching over the president, vividly recalled the scene in his room that morning. It was, she would later write, “the saddest I have ever witnessed. The patient, while he spoke cheerfully, had a sad expression of countenance which was so unusual for him, but which I do not think indicated that he had given up hope, but rather that he had realized the danger of the situation.”

Garfield was carried, Bliss wrote, “by no strange hands.” Standing on either side of his bed, Rockwell and Swaim grasped the sheet on which he lay, lifted it, and gently placed him on a stretcher, which they then carried down the stairs and out the door. Members of the White House staff filled the windows with tear-streaked faces, watching the solemn procession to the express wagon that waited on the gravel drive. As they looked down, Garfield looked up, caught sight of them, and lifted his hand in a feeble but warm wave. “A last token of amity,” one of the staff wrote, “from a man who loved the world and the people in it.”

The train ride to Elberon had been planned as carefully as Garfield’s transfer from the White House to the station. Every conductor and engineer in the region stood ready, waiting for word that the president’s train had left the Baltimore and Ohio. As soon as they heard that Garfield was on his way, they switched off their engines and waited for him to pass so that their trains would not disturb him in any way. “No sound of bell or whistle was heard,” Bliss wrote. The doctor had also arranged to have private homes available for his patient all along the route, so that, if Garfield needed to stop, he would have a safe, clean place to stay. “I must now say,” Bliss would later write, “that this whole journey was a marvel even to myself.”

The American people were acutely aware that their president was being moved from the White House. “At every station crowds of men and women appeared,” Bliss would later recall, “the former uncovered, with bowed heads, the latter often weeping.” Thousands of people stood in silence along the train tracks. “It was indeed a strange and affecting journey,” a doctor traveling with Garfield would write, “as we silently