Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,114
do is to let me go.” Then, suddenly switching tracks from dire threat to friendly advice, he offered what seemed to him a reasonable compromise. “But I appreciate your delicate position,” he wrote, “and I am willing to stay here until January, if necessary.”
Besides Guiteau himself, the only people who believed that his life might yet be spared were his brother and sister. John Guiteau, although he had long been deeply ashamed of his younger brother, and had often been bitterly angry with him, could not bear to see him die. “Whatever your impressions may be,” he had written to Charles after the trial ended, “I want you to know that I feel towards you as a brother and a friend, and shall, in the short time remaining, do all I can to save your life.” He was convinced that Charles was insane, and that if the American people could only be made to understand that fact, they would want to see him locked away in an asylum, not hanged. “The public have never had the facts, nor the Court,” he wrote to Charles. “And they know not what they are about to do.”
Finally, John also wrote to the president, seeking not a pardon, but simply a stay of execution. In his letter to Arthur, he asked only for enough time to present further evidence of his brother’s insanity. He hoped that the president would give him “an audience before a decision is reached, that I may make a brief statement of my brother’s unfortunate life, which will explain much of what now appears to his disadvantage.”
Arthur refused to see John, knowing that, if he gave Guiteau’s brother even a few moments of his time, there would be a public outcry. He did, however, agree to meet with the psychiatrist George Beard, and with Miss A. A. Chevaillier, an advocate for the insane. After listening to them for twenty minutes, Arthur forwarded their appeal to his attorney general, Benjamin Harris Brewster. Brewster replied almost immediately, advising Arthur to reject the appeal. Two days later, the newspapers reported that, after careful consideration, the president and his cabinet had come to the conclusion that there were “no grounds to justify Executive interference with the verdict of the jury and the action of the courts.”
Frances Scoville, who had for most of her life been more of a mother to Charles than a sister, also tried desperately to stay the hand of the court. She directed her appeal, however, not to Garfield’s successor, but to his widow. In a letter to Lucretia just two weeks after the verdict was read, she openly begged for her brother’s life.
Dear Madam:
Humbly I address you, trusting you will not turn a deaf ear even upon despised Guiteau’s sister.
All these weary months I have patiently waited until the time should come for me to speak: when, after the verdict, which I believed would be “Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I could say without shamefacedness, “My heart bleeds for you and the sainted dead.”…
I have counted the hours for the time when I could boldly say to you, as I have said from the moment when the terrible news was brought me on that dark day in July: “He was brain sick, deluded, crazy; forgive him, even as Christ shall forgive us all.…”
In Heaven we know, as we are known. The sainted Garfield knows now that he “had to do it,” and I feel sure if he could speak he would say, “Forgive that deluded man, even as I forgive him; safely keep him from doing any more harm, but forgive.”
Lucretia never replied. When she could wait no longer, Frances packed a bag, took a train from Chicago to Cleveland, Ohio, walked up to the home where Garfield’s widow was living, and knocked on the door. Lucretia and Mollie were down the street, and so Frances, who had traveled under the name of Mrs. Smith, was asked to wait in the library. When Lucretia returned home to find that Charles Guiteau’s sister was waiting for her, she went up to her room and sent down word that she would not see her.
Mollie was sitting on the front steps when Frances left. When she later learned who the strange visitor had been, she felt nothing but fury and outrage that she had “dared to come.” For her father’s assassin, Mollie would write bitterly in her diary, “nothing could be too awful… & my heart is like stone toward him.”