Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,77

personal inconvenience,” Williams did everything he could to help Bell, giving him laboratory space, equipment, and his best men.

Bell, however, still wanted his own man. Tainter, who had continued to work in the Volta Laboratory since the shooting, “received an urgent request from A. G. Bell … to join him.” The next day, he was on a train bound for Boston. Both men knew that, if they were to have any hope of helping the president, they had to work quickly. Although still little more than an idea in Bell’s mind, their invention would be Garfield’s only hope of avoiding death at his doctor’s hands.

• CHAPTER 15 •

BLOOD-GUILTY

We should do nothing for revenge.… Nothing for the past.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

From his cell deep in the District Jail, Guiteau was gratified to learn that, as he had predicted, General William Tecumseh Sherman had sent out his troops. The heavily armed company of artillery that flanked the somber stone building, however, was there not to free the president’s would-be assassin, but to make sure he wasn’t dragged outside and lynched. So great was the fear that a mob would overwhelm the prison that its guards had at first denied that Guiteau was even there. “Information had reached them,” the New York Times reported, “that, should the fact be made known that he was there, the building would be attacked.”

After the initial shock of the president’s shooting, the prevailing feeling throughout the country was one of unfettered rage. The fact that Guiteau had been captured and was in jail, awaiting trial, did little to satisfy most Americans’ desire for immediate revenge. “There were many who felt intensely dissatisfied that the indignant crowd in Washington was not permitted to wreak summary vengeance on the assassin of the President,” one reporter wrote. “Many declared that the proper disposition of him would have been to have held him under the grinding wheels of the railroad train which was to have carried President Garfield away.”

Although Guiteau was widely assumed to be insane, the thought that he was alive while the president lay dying was unbearable. “While it seems incredible that a sane man could have done so desperate and utterly inexcusable a deed,” a newspaper reported, “the feeling is quite general that it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.” In Brooklyn, as a “roar of indignation went up that echoed from end to end of the town,” the mayor declared that “the wretch ought to be hanged whether he was insane or not.” Rumors spread that a group of six hundred black men had already formed a lynching party, determined to settle the matter themselves.

Aside from occasional interviews with reporters in the warden’s office, Guiteau rarely left his cell, which was even more difficult to reach than Garfield’s sickroom in the White House. On the top floor of the prison’s south wing, Cell Two belonged to a grim block of seventeen cells known as Murderers’ Row. Guiteau’s door was sunk three feet into a brick wall and barred with an L-shaped bar, a steel catch, and a lock that held five tumblers. In fact, so famously escape-proof was Guiteau’s cell that fifteen years later the renowned magician Harry Houdini would thrill onlookers by escaping from it after allowing himself to be stripped, searched, and locked in.

Although prison officials went to elaborate lengths to make sure their most famous prisoner could not escape, their efforts were unneeded. Guiteau was not going anywhere. He was perfectly content to be in the prison—safe, comfortable, and well fed—while he waited for his friends to free him. In an interview on July 4 with the district attorney and his own lawyer, Guiteau said that Chester Arthur was “a particular friend of mine.” At the very least, the vice president would make certain that he would not be punished for his crime. Soon after settling into his cell, Guiteau wrote Arthur a lighthearted letter, giving some advice on the selection of his cabinet and offering a friendly reminder that, without his help, Arthur would not be about to assume the presidency.

While Guiteau planned Arthur’s first term, Arthur, unaware of what had happened, was concerned about the political career of only one man—Roscoe Conkling. Since the New York legislature had refused to reinstate Conkling after his dramatic resignation from the Senate, he had embarked on a desperate campaign to regain his seat. Although Conkling was widely known to be the president’s fiercest detractor, Arthur had made