steady, and resilient. Slowly, he began to fall in love with his wife.
As the years passed, Garfield’s love for Lucretia grew until it eclipsed any doubts he had ever had. His letters, which once alternated between terse, cold replies and painfully honest confessions, were now filled with passionate declarations of love. Lucretia was finally the object of James’s “gushing affection.” “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” he wrote to her one night from Washington. “The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming, but he has come to stay.” A few months later, he again poured out his heart to her. “I here record the most deliberate conviction of my soul,” he wrote. “Were every tie that binds me to the men and women of the world severed, and I free to choose out of all the world the sharer of my heart and home and life, I would fly to you and ask you to be mine as you are.”
During the Republican convention, Garfield missed Lucretia desperately. “You can never know how much I need you during these days of storm,” he wrote to her just days before his nomination. “Every hour I want to go and state some case to your quick intuition. But I feel the presence of your spirit.” When he won the nomination, the first thing he did after making his escape from the convention hall was to send Lucretia a telegram. It said simply: “Dear wife, if the result meets your approval, I shall be content.”
By the time Garfield became president, Lucretia was completely confident of his love for her. For years, she had waited at home for him, asking when he would return, wondering if he missed her, questioning his devotion. Now she knew that her husband felt her absence as strongly as she did his. “It is almost painful for me to feel that so much of my life and happiness have come to depend upon another than myself,” he had written to her. “I want to hear from you so often, and I shall wait and watch with a hungry heart until your dear words reach me.”
For Garfield, Lucretia had become the “life of my life,” and as he now sat by her bed in the White House, watching as her temperature steadily climbed, he realized with a helpless desperation that he could do nothing to save her. She was “the continent, the solid land on which I build all my happiness,” he had once told her. “When you are sick, I am like the inhabitants of countries visited by earthquakes. They lose all faith in the eternal order and fixedness of things.”
On the night of May 10, after Lucretia had been moved to a room on the north side of the house, “to get her further from the river air,” Garfield sat with her until 4:00 a.m. A few hours later, news of her illness appeared in the newspapers, stirring dark memories of President John Tyler’s wife, Letitia, who had died in the White House less than forty years earlier. “I am sorry to say that I have grave fears about Mrs. Garfield,” James Blaine’s wife, Harriet, wrote to her daughter. “She is very sick, and after hearing exactly how she is, I confess I am very uneasy.”
Garfield could think of nothing but Lucretia. “I refused to see people on business,” he wrote in his diary on May 11. “All my thoughts center in her, in comparison with whom all else fades into insignificance.” Having buried two children, he knew far too well the devastation of losing someone he loved. After Trot’s death, he had been so paralyzed with grief that he had nearly left Congress. “I try to be cheerful, and plunge into the whirlpool of work which opens before me,” he had confided to a friend, “but it seems to me I shall never cease to grieve.”
Every day, Garfield consulted with the group of doctors he had gathered around Lucretia. They had come to the conclusion that she was suffering from a combination of exhaustion and malaria. Sixteen years before malaria was finally traced to mosquitoes, Lucretia’s doctors did not know what caused the disease, but they did have ways to fight it. They gave her “fever powders,” presumably quinine, which had been used to treat malaria in the West since the early 1600s, and bathed her with alcohol and ice water. As Lucretia’s fever worsened, rising ominously