Although by this point Maynard could not have had any hope of being repaid, he was, as Guiteau knew, “a good fellow.” Three minutes after he had walked in the door, Guiteau left with enough money to buy a gun.
That same day, Guiteau returned to John O’Meara’s shop, as he had promised he would. The last time he was there, he had seen two revolvers that interested him—one with a wooden handle that he could have for nine dollars, and another that cost a dollar more but had an ivory handle. He was drawn toward the more expensive gun, picturing it on display in the State Department’s library. Cradling the revolver in his hands, he asked O’Meara about its force. It was, the shop owner said, a self-cocking .44 caliber British Bulldog. “One of the strongest pistols made.”
After striking a deal with O’Meara—ten dollars for the revolver, a box of cartridges, and a two-bladed, pearl-handled penknife that had caught his eye—Guiteau asked him where he could take the gun to test it. O’Meara warned Guiteau that he would need to leave the city limits, and suggested he try the river’s edge. Taking his advice, Guiteau went to the Potomac one evening and shot ten cartridges with his new gun, sometimes aiming for the river, other times trying to hit a sapling growing nearby. Everything about the gun, from the feel of it in his hand to the damage it wrought, was utterly new and unfamiliar to him. “I knew nothing about it,” he would later say, “no more than a child.”
In his letters and, he would later insist, his thoughts, Guiteau never referred to what he was about to do as murder, or even assassination. He was simply removing the president—in his mind, an act not of violence or cruelty but practicality. Garfield was a danger to his party and his country, and God had asked Guiteau to correct the situation. “The Lord inspired me to attempt to remove the President in preference to some one else, because I had the brains and the nerve to do the work,” he would explain. “The Lord always employs the best material to do His work.”
Guiteau had no illusions about what would happen to him after he assassinated the president. He had been twenty-three years old when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln, and he could not have forgotten the manhunt that had led to Booth’s death. Prepared to kill for God but not to die, his only other option, he suspected, was imprisonment. As he had spent a month in the Tombs, he knew how bad jail could be. He felt, therefore, that it would be wise to make a trip to the District Jail. “I wanted to see what kind of a jail it was,” he would later say. “I knew nothing about where it was, nor the character of the building, nor anything.”
One Saturday morning, Guiteau took a streetcar from the Riggs Hotel as far as he could and then walked another three-quarters of a mile before reaching the prison. Walking “leisurely” to the warden’s office, he rang the doorbell and waited calmly. When a guard arrived, he asked for a tour. Although the jail did not allow tours on Saturdays, Guiteau felt that he had gotten a good enough look at the building. “I thought it was a very excellent jail,” he said. “It is the best jail in America, I understand.”
Satisfied that the prison where he would be taken was far superior to the Tombs, Guiteau had nothing left to do but track down his prey. All the time and energy he had once spent trying to secure an appointment, he now devoted to following Garfield. Guiteau knew that the president, who had no Secret Service agents and was in frequent contact with the public, was an easy target, especially outside the White House. “It would not do to go to the White House and attempt it, because there were too many of his employés about,” Guiteau wrote. “I looked around for several days to try and get a good chance at him.”
Finally, Guiteau chose the one place in Washington where Garfield had always felt safe and at peace: his church. Killing the president in church was not sacrilegious, Guiteau argued. On the contrary, “there could not possibly be a better place to remove a man than at his devotions.”
Garfield, moreover, could be counted on to attend church. A member of the Disciples of Christ since childhood, and himself