told the driver he would let him know in a few minutes if he “wanted his services.”
Once inside the station, Guiteau turned his attention to the items he had carried with him from the Riggs House. Approaching a newsstand, he asked the young man behind the counter, James Denny, if he could leave some packages with him for a few minutes. “Certainly,” Denny replied, and, taking the packages from Guiteau, placed them on top of a pile of papers stacked against a wall. Satisfied that his letters and book were in good hands and would be found by the authorities when the time came, Guiteau walked to the bathroom to examine his revolver one last time. He unwrapped it from the paper he had used to protect the powder from his perspiration, tested the trigger, and looked it over carefully “to see that it was alright.” Five minutes after he stepped back into the waiting room, Garfield and Blaine arrived.
When the State Department carriage rounded the corner onto B Street, Garfield was seated nearest the sidewalk and so had an unimpeded view of the station. Although eager to begin his trip, the president did not relish the sight of the three-story redbrick building with its imposing Gothic design, nor had he ever.
So strongly did Garfield object to the station that, while in Congress, he had argued that it should be torn down. Nine years earlier, the government had given the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad fourteen acres of the National Mall, and the company had quickly built the station and laid tracks across the broad greensward. To the Mall, which Pierre-Charles L’Enfant had designed as a place for quiet contemplation, the station brought soot, smoke, noise, and even danger. Trains frequently killed and maimed people as they walked or rode in carriages along the Mall. People “will wonder,” one senator railed, “why an American Congress should permit so foul a blotch to besmirch the face of so grand a picture.”
Garfield, who referred to the Baltimore and Potomac as a “nuisance which ought long since to have been abated,” also had personal reasons for disliking the station. In his mind, it would always be inextricably linked with one of the most painful experiences of his life—the death of his youngest son, Neddie. Just five years earlier, Garfield and Crete had watched as their little boy’s body was carried through the station so that he might be buried in Mentor, next to his sister Trot, whom they had lost thirteen years earlier. “I did not know, since that great sorrow,” Garfield had written in his diary after burying Neddie, “that my heart could be so wrung again by a similar loss.”
As the carriage carrying Garfield came to a stop in front of the station entrance, Patrick Kearney, an officer with the Metropolitan Police, quickly walked in front of it to see if he could be of assistance. The president and his secretary of state, however, remained seated while they finished their conversation, Garfield’s hand resting on Blaine’s shoulder. Finally, Garfield called out the window to Kearney, asking him how much time he had before his train departed. Kearney, who had been leaning against a lamppost while he waited for the president, walked over to Garfield and showed him his watch: ten minutes.
Before stepping out of the carriage, Garfield turned to say goodbye to Blaine, who would not be traveling with him. The secretary of state, however, insisted on escorting him to the train. “I did not think it was proper for a president to go entirely unattended,” he would later explain. As the two men ascended the steps into the station, arm in arm, Garfield suddenly stopped and turned back to Kearney, who had lifted his hat and saluted. Responding with a warm smile and tip of his hat, the president disappeared inside the door.
As Garfield entered the station, Sarah White, the matron for the ladies’ waiting room, looked up from her position next to the room’s heater. She watched as the president and secretary of state strode by, Blaine slightly ahead of Garfield, Harry and Jim trailing behind them. Garfield walked with an easy, natural confidence—“absolutely free from any affectation whatever.”
He must have made a striking contrast to Guiteau, whom White had also been watching that morning. Not only was Guiteau nearly half a foot shorter than the president and seventy-five pounds lighter, but he seemed as uncomfortable and nervous as Garfield was at ease. As he shuffled soundlessly between the gentlemen’s