Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,70
was inside.
With his staff watching from the windows, Brown raced down the stairs and out the door to where the wagon had rolled to a stop. As he stood there, still trying to understand what was happening, a group of men reached into the wagon and carefully carried the president out. When he saw his young secretary, Garfield waved weakly and tried to smile. Looking at the president, drained of color, his handsome gray suit torn and soaked with blood, Brown could not believe this was the same man who, just an hour before, had left the White House “abounding in health and the joy of living.”
A dozen men lifted above their heads the mattress on which the president lay, carrying him into the White House, through the Blue Room, up the broad, central staircase, and to the room that Brown had had prepared for him. As his son Jim, no longer able to contain his fear and grief, began to cry, Garfield grasped his hand tightly. “The upper story is alright,” he promised. “It is only the hull that was damaged.”
Just eighteen miles outside of Washington, Lucretia, terrified that she was already too late, suddenly heard a deafening, high-pitched squeal and saw sparks flying outside her window. The twelve-foot-long parallel bar connecting the wheels of the special train that had been arranged for her, thundering along at 250 revolutions per minute, had suddenly snapped. Unable to stop, the engine dragged the broken rod for two miles, ripping up railroad ties and gouging the side of the train. The railroad men who would later arrive on the scene pronounced it a miracle that the engine had not jumped the tracks. Had that happened, “the Pullman car would have been splintered into kindling-wood,” the New York Times reported, “and all on board would have been killed.”
More frustrated than frightened, Lucretia was forced to wait until a second engine could arrive to take her the rest of the way into Washington. By the time she finally reached the White House, it was nearly 7:00 p.m. Garfield had waited for her for hours without complaint, but he knew the moment she arrived. Hearing the crunch of her carriage wheels over the gravel driveway, he broke into a broad smile and, turning to his doctors, said, “That’s my wife!”
Lucretia’s face was streaked with tears when she stepped out of the carriage, but she quickly wiped them away, determined to show only strength and confidence to James. “Mrs. Garfield came, frail, fatigued, desperate,” Harriet Blaine wrote to her daughter the next day. “But firm and quiet and full of purpose to save.” Until that moment, Secretary Blaine, although very pale and “evidently … making a strong effort to keep up his strength,” had managed to stave off grief, allowing himself to think only of what could be done to save his friend. When he saw Lucretia and Mollie, however, he “broke completely,” a reporter who had been waiting outside the White House gates wrote, and “wept for several minutes.”
Lucretia went straight to Garfield’s room, escorted up the stairs by her son Jim, his arm wrapped protectively around her as he whispered in her ear, trying to reassure her as his father had reassured him. Although she was surrounded by people desperate to protect her, to soften the blow, few of them believed her husband would live. Colonel Abel Corbin, President Grant’s brother-in-law, had seen Garfield lying on the train station floor and told a reporter that he had watched “too many men die on the battlefield not to know death’s mark.” “In my opinion,” Corbin said, Garfield was “virtually a dead man from the moment he was shot.” Even the man who had assumed control of the president’s medical care admitted that he held out little if any hope. Garfield “will not probably live three hours,” Bliss said, “and may die in half an hour.”
Lucretia, as she had done throughout her life, insisted on the truth, no matter how painful, but she was not about to abandon hope. Resolutely opening the door to the room where her husband lay, she left her children and friends behind and stepped inside with dry eyes and a warm smile. She would admit fear, but not despair. When Garfield, the memory of his own fatherless childhood weighing heavily on his mind, tried to talk to her about plans for their children if he were to die, she stopped him.