Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,26

him to join Oneida, but after he left the commune, she had tried to help him when no one else would. As well as giving Charles money, she and her husband allowed him to live with their family on several occasions, even after he was released from the Tombs.

Finally, though, even Frances had to admit that her brother was deeply disturbed, and likely dangerous. This painful realization came in the summer of 1875, when Charles was living with her family in Wisconsin. One hot afternoon, as he lay on his back on her sofa, she called out to him from the kitchen, asking if he would “cut up a little wood for us.” He “immediately said, ‘Yes,’ ” Frances remembered, “and got up and went out and did it willingly.” After he cut the wood, however, instead of taking it to the shed, he dumped it on a walkway leading to the house. Since his arrival, Charles had been sullen and easily angered, so when Frances saw the wood, rather than chastising him, she quietly bent down to pick it up herself. “As quick as I did that he raised the ax, without any provocation or words,” she would recall years later, still shaken by the memory. “It was not so much the raising of the ax as it was the look of his face that frightened me. He looked to me like a wild animal.” Terrified, she dropped the wood and ran into the house.

Fearing as much for her own safety as for Charles’s sanity, Frances reluctantly admitted that her brother needed to be institutionalized. Before taking such a drastic step, however, she asked her family physician to examine him. After one conversation with Guiteau, the doctor, deeply concerned about the young man’s “explosions of emotional feeling,” strongly advised Frances to place him in an asylum without delay. Frances planned to travel with Charles to Chicago, where he would be tried by a jury and, she was certain, found insane. “I had no doubt then of his insanity,” she said. “He was losing his mind.” Before the trip could even be arranged, however, Charles made his escape.

For the next five years, Guiteau continued his peripatetic life, moving from city to city and scheme to scheme until, in 1880, he drifted to Boston, where he developed a new, all-consuming obsession: politics. A voracious reader, he followed the political machinations of men like Ulysses S. Grant and Roscoe Conkling with intense interest and growing admiration. It did not take long for him to decide that he was a Republican Stalwart, and that the best way to enter politics was through the spoils system.

The upcoming presidential election was irresistible to Guiteau. By forcibly inserting himself into the Republican campaign, he believed, he would win not only the gratitude of high-ranking men in the party, but, ultimately, an important political appointment. In the weeks leading up to the national conventions, Guiteau spent every day in a Boston library, feverishly working on a campaign speech. Believing, as did most of the country, that the Republicans would nominate Grant, and knowing that Winfield Scott Hancock, a highly decorated Union general, was heavily favored among the Democrats, he titled his speech “Grant against Hancock.” After Garfield’s surprise nomination—and Hancock’s predictable one, on the second ballot—he changed the title, and virtually nothing else, to “Garfield against Hancock.”

Three days later, clutching his speech and a small, frayed bag, Guiteau had boarded the Stonington, his sights set on the Republican campaign headquarters in New York. “I remember distinctly,” he would later say, “that I felt that I was on my way to the White House.” Garfield’s sudden rise to prominence, he was certain, only foreshadowed his own.

• CHAPTER 5 •

BLEAK MOUNTAIN

This honor comes to me unsought. I have never had the Presidential fever; not even for a day.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

That night, as Guiteau’s steamship collided with the Narragansett, the object of his ambitions, James Garfield, slept in the farmhouse he shared with his wife and five children in Mentor, Ohio, far removed from the tempestuous workings of his presidential campaign. The house, which the reporters who stretched out on its wide lawn that summer christened Lawnfield, sat on 160 acres of land about twenty miles from the log cabin Garfield’s father had built half a century before. Mentor, as one reporter described it, was less a “regular town [than] a thickly settled neighborhood.” A few houses and small farms, encircled by orchards and gardens in heavy bloom, were scattered