Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,106

sped along.”

When the train finally reached Elberon, it switched to a line of railroad track that had been laid just the night before. Two thousand people had worked until dawn to lay 3,200 feet of track so that the president’s train could take him to the door of Franklyn Cottage, the twenty-two-room summer home a wealthy New Yorker had offered for as long as it was needed. While determining where the track would have to go, a surveyor had realized that he would need to cut through a neighboring garden, and he apologized to the owner. “I am willing that you should ruin my house,” she replied, “all I have—if it would help to save him.”

Before the train could reach its final destination, however, it stopped short. The cottage sat at the top of a hill, and the engine was not strong enough to breach it. No sooner had the problem become apparent than, out of the crowd of people who had waited all day in the tremendous heat for Garfield’s arrival, two hundred men ran forward to help. “Instantly hundreds of strong arms caught the cars,” Bliss wrote, “and silently … rolled the three heavy coaches” up the hill.

When he was carried into his room, the first thing Garfield noticed was that the bed was turned away from the window. He asked to have it moved, so that he could look out at the sea. A few days later, when he was lifted into a chair so that he could better see the wide expanse of ocean just beyond the cottage walls, he was thrilled. “This is delightful,” he said. “It is such a change.”

Despite the relentless suffering Garfield had endured for more than two months, he had maintained not only the strength of his mind, but the essence of his personality. “Throughout his long illness,” Rockwell would later recall, “I was most forcibly impressed with the manner in which those traits of his character which were most winning in health became intensified.” Even as he lay dying, Garfield was kind, patient, cheerful, and deeply grateful.

When Bliss told him that a fund was being raised for Lucretia, Garfield was overcome with gratitude. “What?” he said in surprise. Then, turning his face to his pillow to hide his emotion, he continued, “How kind and thoughtful! What a generous people!” Garfield was then “silent and absorbed for a long time,” Bliss remembered, “as if overwhelmed with the thought.”

Garfield was also deeply grateful to the people who had cared for him for so long, and with such devotion. One day, he placed his hand on the head of one of his attendants and said, “You have been always faithful and forebearing.” For Bliss, who was visibly weakened by exhaustion and worry, he tried to provide a measure of comfort. “Doctor, you plainly show the effect of all this care and unrest,” he said. “Your anxious watching will soon be over.”

Bliss still refused to admit that he could not save the president’s life. A few days after they arrived in Elberon, he issued a bulletin announcing that the last of the attending physicians had been dismissed, leaving him with only occasional assistance from the surgeons Agnew and Hamilton. Garfield was doing so well, Bliss explained in his bulletin, that he wished to relieve the doctors “from a labor and responsibility which in his improved condition he could no longer impose upon them.” To a reporter from the Washington Post, Bliss said that Garfield had a “clearer road to recovery now than he ever has had.” There was “no abscess, no pus cavity, no pyemia,” he insisted. “The trouble has now passed its crisis, and is going away.”

Bliss’s assurances, however, no longer went unquestioned. “Despite the announcements that the condition of the President is hopeful and that he is making slight gains daily,” a reporter for the Medical Record wrote, “it is quite evident that his chances for ultimate recovery are very poor indeed.” Even Agnew admitted to a friend that he thought the president had very few days left to live. He “may live the day out,” he said, “and possibly tomorrow, but he cannot live a week.”

Garfield was “perfectly calm, sentient,” Bliss wrote, content to live out his last days in this borrowed cottage, gazing at the sea. The president could not help but wonder, however, if, after such a brief presidency, he would leave behind any lasting legacy. “Do you think my name will have a place in human history?” he