his neck and carefully adjusted, and a heavy black hood placed over his head. He stood with his shoulders pulled back, his head held high.
“Glory, glory, glory,” he called out, and then, opening his hand, he let the prayer fall.
• EPILOGUE •
FOREVER AND FOREVER MORE
There is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the Dead.
They are past our help and past our praise. We can add to them no
glory, we can give to them no immortality. They do not need us,
but forever and forever more we need them.
JAMES A. GARFIELD, AUGUST 1880
The death of Charles Guiteau, which was greeted by a triumphant shout that echoed through the courtyard and was picked up and carried by the crowd pressed against the prison walls, accomplished nothing. It did not prevent future assassinations, brought no solace to a heartbroken nation, no comfort to Lucretia or her children, nor even lasting satisfaction to those who had screamed for vengeance.
After the doors were opened and the throng was allowed to parade past Guiteau’s body, while his brother silently fanned flies from his face, he was buried in the prison courtyard. As the casket was being covered with dirt, John Guiteau did not say a word or shed a tear. Before he left, however, he bent over the grave and placed a small clutch of white flowers at its head.
A few days later, Guiteau’s body was quietly exhumed and taken to the Army Medical Museum, where Dr. Lamb, the same man who had performed Garfield’s autopsy, studied it for signs of insanity. Guiteau’s brain was removed, divided into small sections, and sent to psychiatrists across the country. Besides a malaria-infected spleen that was twice the normal size, however, the scientists found nothing notable in the remains of Charles Guiteau.
Today, two sections of Guiteau’s spleen, parts of his skeleton—including his ribs, left hand, and left foot—and a glass jar containing the pieces of his brain, which were eventually returned to Washington, remain in the Army Medical Museum, now known as the National Museum of Health and Medicine. These specimens are kept in a large metal cabinet with long, deep drawers. The drawer just below Guiteau’s holds the vertebrae of another presidential assassin—John Wilkes Booth—as well as a six-inch section of Garfield’s spine, which had served as an exhibit at Guiteau’s trial. A red, plastic rod rests in a hole in the knobby, yellowed bone, indicating the path of the bullet.
Even as they mourned the death of their president, Americans understood that, as time passed, Garfield would begin to fade from memory. “His ultimate place in history will be far less exalted than that which he now holds in popular estimation,” the New York Times warned its readers. More painful even than the realization that his brief presidency would be forgotten was the thought that future generations would never know the man he had been. A few years after Garfield’s death, a reporter, gazing at a formal portrait of him that hung in the White House, wrote, “I fear coming generations of visitors who pass through this grand corridor will see nothing in the stern, sad face of Garfield to remind them that here was a man who loved to play croquet and romp with his boys upon his lawn at Mentor, who read Tennyson and Longfellow at fifty with as much enthusiastic pleasure as at twenty, who walked at evening with his arm around the neck of a friend in affectionate conversation, and whose sweet, sunny, loving nature not even twenty years of political strife could warp.”
What has survived of Garfield, however, is far more powerful than a portrait, a statue, or even the fragment of his spine that tells the tragic story of his assassination. The horror and senselessness of his death, and the wasted promise of his life, brought tremendous change to the country he loved—change that, had it come earlier, almost certainly would have spared his life.
Garfield’s long illness and painful death brought the country together in a way that, even the day before the assassination attempt, had seemed to most Americans impossible. “Garfield does not belong to the North alone,” read a letter that was written by a southerner to Lucretia soon after the shooting, and printed in papers across the country. “From this common vigil and prayer and sympathy in the travail of this hour there shall be a new birth of the Nation.” That prediction was realized the day Garfield’s death was announced, when his countrymen