Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,43
have been very lonesome.”
As much as Garfield had come to rely on Brown, when it was time to fill the position of private secretary to the president, the young man who had served him so well was not even a candidate. The position, which was one of great influence and proximity to power, traditionally went to men of considerable political skill and experience. Thomas Jefferson’s private secretary had been Meriwether Lewis, whom he soon after entrusted with exploring and charting the Pacific Northwest. Garfield wanted for his private secretary John Hay, who had been Lincoln’s assistant private secretary twenty years earlier, and would, in another twenty years, be Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. He felt strongly that Hay was the right man for the job, but Hay, who had greater ambitions, delicately declined. “He is very bright and able,” Garfield wrote in discouragement. “I more and more regret that I cannot have him for my private secretary.”
When Garfield finally offered the job to Brown, it came as a surprise to no one but Garfield. One night, as the family sat before a fire in the farmhouse in Mentor, he ruminated aloud on his options for private secretary after the disappointment of Hay’s refusal. Suddenly, he turned to Brown and said, “Well, my boy, I may have to give it to you.” The young man replied drily, “Well that is complimentary, to say the least, when all these other fellows have been first considered.” Everyone in the room burst into laughter.
As prestigious as it was to be the president’s private secretary, Brown had no illusions about what the job would entail. Immediately following Garfield’s nomination, more than five thousand letters had poured into Mentor from all parts of the country, and Brown had been forced to quickly devise a system to deal with them. On the morning of Garfield’s inauguration, when the president-elect had collapsed into bed after finally finishing his speech, Brown had stayed up to make a clean copy of it, leaving him too tired to attend any of the day’s events until the ball that night. Since then, he had been opening, sorting, and responding to as many as three hundred letters every day, and there was no one to help him. “There was no organized staff … with expert stenographers and typists,” he later recalled. “Only one pair of hands.”
Although Brown insisted that everyone who called on the president at the White House be treated with courtesy and respect, regardless of influence or station, he became very adept at shielding Garfield from office seekers. His first official act as private secretary was to issue an order that anyone who wished to see the president had to go through him first. This rule applied to even high-ranking politicians and old friends, many of whom exploded in rage when asked to wait in an anteroom filled from wall to wall with office seekers. “How the President and his Private Secretary stand the pressure of the many callers seems a mystery,” one reporter marveled. “They must have nerves of steel, muscles of iron, and brains with more extent of cell and surface than fall to the lot of most mortals.”
In a small room across town, Garfield’s most persistent office seeker grew more determined and delusional with each passing day. The day after Garfield’s inauguration, Charles Guiteau had taken a train from New York to Washington, D.C. With only a few dollars in his pocket and no intention of looking for a job outside the White House, he quickly resumed his habit of moving from boardinghouse to boardinghouse when the rent came due. While he was forced to flee some rooms after just a day or two, he was able to keep others for several weeks by assuring his landlady that he was about to be given an important political appointment.
Guiteau had begun laying the groundwork for his appointment as soon as Garfield was elected. In November, he had sent a note of congratulations that sounded as though he and Garfield were the oldest of friends. “We have cleaned them out just as I expected. Thank God!” A few days later he had written to then secretary of state William Evarts, asking if he was correct in assuming that President Hayes’s foreign ministers would step aside to make way for Garfield’s appointments. “Please answer me at the Fifth Ave. Hotel at your earliest convenience,” he instructed one of the highest-ranking men in the country. “I am solid for General Garfield and