Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,45

than his own. “Senators Blaine, Logan, and Conkling are friendly to me, and I presume my appointment will be promptly confirmed. There is nothing against me. I claim to be a gentleman and Christian.”

Guiteau also made the case to Garfield that he had been instrumental in his election. He argued that the speech he had delivered in New York, and had handed to every man of influence in the Republican Party to whom he had access, including Garfield’s own vice president, had not only won votes, but had been the source of an idea that was central to the campaign’s success. “The inclosed [sic] speech was sent to our leading editors and orators in August,” he argued. “Soon thereafter they opened on the rebel war-claim idea, and it was this idea that resulted in your election.”

Not long after Guiteau began visiting the White House, he met Garfield face-to-face. One day, after entering the anteroom as usual and handing the doorman his card, he was led upstairs to Brown’s office, which connected directly to the president’s office. A moment later, he found himself standing before Garfield, watching silently as he spoke with Levi Morton, one of the men Conkling had forced to resign from the cabinet. Guiteau waited for the two men to finish their conversation, and then, introducing himself as an applicant for the Paris consulship, handed Garfield the campaign speech he had been carrying in his pocket for the past year. On the first page of the speech, he had written “Paris Consulship” and drawn a line between those words and his name, “so that the President would remember what I wanted.” “Of course, [Garfield] recognized me at once,” Guiteau would later say. He watched with satisfaction as the president glanced down at the speech, and then left, confident that his appointment was now only a matter of time.

After that day, Guiteau quickly became a familiar face at the White House. “His visits were repeated … quite regularly,” Brown would remember. “I saw Mr. Guiteau probably fifteen times altogether at various places, about on the street and about in the Executive Mansion and on the grounds.” When he wasn’t waiting in the president’s anteroom, Guiteau was sending notes into him by the doorman, or simply sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square, staring at the White House.

Before the end of March, Guiteau found another opportunity to insert himself into Garfield’s life, this time even more intimately. The White House held an afternoon reception that was open to anyone who wished to attend, and there was, Garfield would write in his diary that night, a “very large attendance.” Guiteau quietly joined the immense crowd, watching as, for two hours, the president and first lady smiled and shook hands with what Lucretia later referred to as “the great roaring world.”

Suddenly, Lucretia heard someone say, “How do you do, Mrs. Garfield?” Looking up, she saw a small, thin man in a threadbare suit who, although he had spoken to her with a strange urgency, did not meet her eyes. Guiteau had a strikingly quiet walk, so quiet that people who knew him often complained that he seemed to appear out of nowhere. Now, standing close enough to the first lady to touch her, he told her that he had recently moved to Washington from New York, where he had been “one of the men that made Mr. Garfield President.” Although Lucretia, a very private woman who dreaded receptions, was “aching in every joint,” and “nearly paralyzed” with fatigue, Guiteau would remember her as “chatty and companionable,” clearly “quite pleased” to see him. Before giving way to the crush of callers impatiently waiting to meet the first lady, Guiteau leaned in closely to Lucretia, handed her his card, and carefully pronounced his name, determined that she would not forget him.

• CHAPTER 9 •

CASUS BELLI

I would rather be beaten in Right than succeed in Wrong.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

On the morning of May 3, Lucretia woke with a fever. “She is not well … almost a chill,” Garfield wrote in his diary that night. When she was not better the next day, he fretted over her, blaming the pressures of his presidency. “Crete,” as he called her, “has been too hard worked during the past two months.” As the week progressed and Lucretia’s fever rose, Garfield’s concern turned to alarm. He sent for four different doctors, sat at her bedside late into the night every night, and then stumbled through the day, trying with little success