Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,21

grabbed their state banners and joyfully marched them through the hall. Faintly, through the tall windows, they could hear the battery of guns on the shore of Lake Michigan that announced the news to the crowds waiting in suspense outside.

The Ohio delegation was immediately engulfed by a sea of grinning men, eager to shake the candidate’s hand or pound his back. Garfield, shocked and sickened, turned in desperation to a friend and asked if it would be inappropriate for him to leave. Told in no uncertain terms that he must stay, he did, sitting quietly in his seat, looking at the floor and responding with a simple “Thank you” to the hearty congratulations showered upon him from every direction. “Only once,” a reporter recalled, “did he express anything like emotion, and that was when Frye of Maine came up and said: ‘General, we congratulate you.’ Garfield replied: ‘I am very sorry that this has become necessary.’ ” Across the hall, in the New York delegation, another man sat in stony silence. As the celebration whirled around him, Senator Conkling was “an unmoved spectator of the scene.”

Finally, as the crowd threatened to crush Garfield, his friends decided that it was time for him to make his escape. Simply getting out the door, however, was much more difficult than they had anticipated. As crowded as the hall was, the sidewalk outside was even worse. They managed to find a carriage and step inside, but the throng was not about to let Garfield go that easily. “As Garfield entered the carriage in company with [Ohio] Gov. Foster,” a reporter wrote, “the crowd surged around in a state of intense enthusiasm, and shouted: ‘Take off the horses; we will pull the carriage.’ The driver, who at the time was not aware whom he was carrying, whipped up to get away from the men, who had already commenced to unfasten the harness. He cleared the space several feet, but was overhauled again, and the dazed driver, now thoroughly frightened, applied his whip with renewed energy, and, clear[ed] the crowd.”

Violently bounced along the brick streets by the nervous horses and terrified driver, Garfield sat in silence, a “grave and thoughtful expression” on his face. He would not talk about the nomination, or even respond to the congratulations offered by the men seated next to him. “He has not recovered from his surprise yet,” one man said. When the carriage pulled into the Grand Pacific Hotel, where Garfield and most of the Republicans had been staying, everyone in the carriage could see the new york solid for grant banner still waving from its roof.

Garfield quickly made his way to his room, although he knew that if it had offered no refuge in the past, it certainly would not now. The small room in which, just the night before, he had struggled to sleep as he shared his three-quarter-size bed with a stranger, was already filled with six hundred telegrams and seemingly as many people. As men talked excitedly all around him, Garfield, “pale as death,” sat down in a chair and stared at the wall, absentmindedly holding a GARFIELD FOR PRESIDENT badge that someone had thrust into his hands.

• CHAPTER 4 •

GOD’S MINUTE MAN

Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

Four days after the Republican convention, and a day after he had stepped aboard the ill-fated Stonington, Charles Guiteau arrived in New York. While the other survivors of the deadly steamship collision in Long Island Sound huddled with family and friends, wondering at the twist of fate that had spared their lives, Guiteau walked through the city alone, unburdened by guilt or doubt. To his mind, which had long ago descended into delusion and madness, the tragedy was simply further proof that he was one of God’s chosen few.

From an early age, Guiteau had been confident of his importance in the eyes of God. Motherless by the time he was seven years old, he had been raised by a zealously religious father, a man so certain of his relationship with God that he believed he would never die. “My mother was dead and my father was a father and a mother to me,” Guiteau said, “and I drank in this fanaticism from him for years. He used to talk it day after