Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,23

the commune, he was “practically a Shaker.”

Guiteau also frequently found himself the object of “criticisms,” a method Noyes had designed to help his followers identify and overcome their faults so that they could reach perfection. During a criticism, Guiteau was forced to sit in a room, encircled by the men and women with whom he worked and lived most closely, and listen in silence as they described his faults. Again and again, he was accused of “egotism and conceit.”

In Guiteau’s case at least, the criticisms apparently had little effect. When, in 1865, he finally left the commune, after having lived there for nearly six years, he announced that his departure was necessary because he was “destined to accomplish some very important mission.” “God and my own conscience,” he proclaimed, “drive me to the battle and I dare not draw back.”

Guiteau’s plan was to start a religious newspaper called The Theocrat, which he said would be a “warm friend of the Bible, though it may develop many new and strange biblical theories, differing widely from the teachings of popular theologians.” His brother-in-law, George Scoville, recalling Guiteau’s outsized enthusiasm and confidence, said that he “labored there for weeks and months to start that project, supposing that he was going right into the matter with entire success, and that this newspaper was going to take its place every morning at every breakfast table in the land.” After just four months, Guiteau gave up and begged Noyes to allow him to return to the commune. A year later, however, he left again, sneaking out at night so as to avoid another criticism.

Although Guiteau would never again return to Oneida, his life outside the commune was far from what he had envisioned. Rather than achieving success on a grand scale, he suffered a series of disappointments, rejections, and disasters. Even his brief marriage, which took place soon after he left Oneida, ended in divorce.

Guiteau spent nearly an entire year doing nothing at all, living on a small inheritance while he struggled to free himself from his fear that, by leaving the commune, he had “lost [his] eternal salvation.” “The idea that I was to be eternally damned haunted me and haunted me and haunted me every day, and day and night,” he said. “So I was unable to do any business.”

Finally, desperate for money, Guiteau decided to take up a profession, choosing one that he thought would be lucrative—the law. In a time when law school was encouraged but not required he read a handful of books, served as a clerk for a few months, and then stood for the bar. His examiner was a prosecuting attorney named Charles Reed, who, according to Guiteau’s brother-in-law, himself a lawyer, was a “good-hearted fellow,” if not particularly discerning. Reed “asked him three questions and he answered two and missed one,” Scoville recalled, “and that was the way he got to be a lawyer.”

In the courtroom, Guiteau was as unpredictable and egotistical as he had been at Oneida. “The style and plea of his conduct,” reported a psychiatrist who would later study his life, “were such as to convince all the lawyers who were present that he was a monomaniac.” Arguing on behalf of a client in a criminal case, Guiteau “talked and acted like a crazy man.” After he leapt over the bar that separated him from the jury and put his fist directly in the face of one of the jurists, prompting an explosion of laughter in the courtroom, “his client was convicted, without the jury leaving their seats.” In another case, Reed, Guiteau’s bar examiner, recalled that, instead of addressing the petty larceny of which his client was accused, Guiteau “talked about theology, about the divinity, and about the rights of man.… It was a very wandering speech, full of vagaries and peculiarities.”

Much more than the work itself, Guiteau enjoyed the prestige that accompanied his new profession. He would frequently take out his business cards simply to admire them. There were eight lines of text on the front of the cards alone, including a proud note that his office building had an elevator. The back had fourteen lines, which made up a reference list, separated by city, of businessmen Guiteau had met only briefly, if at all.

Over the next fourteen years, Guiteau opened, and then quickly abandoned, a succession of law practices in Chicago and New York. In between, he tried his hand at more exciting lines of work. Among his most ambitious endeavors was