Destiny of the Republic - By Candice Millard Page 0,97
window.” At the sound of footsteps, Arthur looked up in surprise, and the reporter could see with startling clarity “the impression which the calamity … had left on his countenance.” Arthur’s eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with tears, and it was clear from the streaks on his face that he had been crying. “His whole manner,” the reporter would later write, “rather than the words he uttered, showed a depth of feeling … which would astonish even many of those who think they know the man well.”
Although he soon returned to New York, anxious to allay fears that he was about to seize control of the White House, Arthur had already begun a transformation so complete that few would have believed it possible. He had, whether out of fear or force of habit, continued to help Conkling try to regain his Senate seat, but as soon as the election was over, he had begun to pull away. Conkling had “received no visit from the Vice-President since the news of the election of Mr. Lapham was received in this City,” the New York Times reported, “and this was remarked as very queer conduct for Gen. Arthur.”
Not only had Arthur begun to pull away from Conkling, but he had started taking political advice from a very different and, even to him, completely unknown source. After Garfield’s shooting, he had received a letter from a woman named Julia Sand. Although he had never met Sand and knew nothing about her, Arthur read the letter, and was surprised to find in it a reflection of his own tortured thoughts. “The hours of Garfield’s life are numbered—before this meets your eye, you may be President,” Sand had written. “The day he was shot, the thought rose in a thousand minds that you might be the instigator of the foul act. Is not that a humiliation which cuts deeper than any bullet can pierce?”
Sand, Arthur would later learn, was an unmarried, thirty-two-year-old invalid. For the past five years, she had felt “dead and buried,” but the attempt on Garfield’s life and Americans’ complete lack of faith in Arthur had inspired her to attempt to inspire him. She was as brutally honest in her assessment of the situation as she was galvanizing. “Your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him,’ ” she wrote. “But making a man President can change him! Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life. If there is a spark of true nobility in you, now is the occasion to let it shine. Faith in your better nature forces me to write to you—but not to beg you to resign. Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform!”
Arthur not only read Sand’s letters, he kept them. Over the years, he would keep twenty-three of her letters, each one urging him to be a better man than he had once believed he could be. “It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong,” Sand assured him, “but it is a proof of it … to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it.” Arthur had been given an extraordinary opportunity, and he had found in Sand perhaps the one person in the nation who believed him capable of change. “Once in awhile there comes a crisis which renders miracles feasible,” she wrote. “The great tidal wave of sorrow which has rolled over the country, has swept you loose from your old moorings, & set you on a mountaintop, alone.”
As long as Garfield’s survival lay in doubt, however, Arthur felt as though he were standing not on a mountaintop, but a precipice. So intense and apparent was his distress that it led to a rumor that the president had died and, prostrate with grief, Arthur had poisoned himself. Both men still lived, but for Arthur, the only relief from the despair that had settled over him was the occasional glimmer of hope from the White House.
“As the President gets better,” he told Blaine, “I get better, too.”
The president, however, was not getting better—a fact that his doctor, unable to change, was desperate to disguise. For nearly a month, Bliss had rarely left Garfield’s bedside, making every decision regarding his care, from what medicine he would receive, to what he could eat, to whom he could see. In a futile effort to have the decaying room “thoroughly aired and cleaned,” he insisted that all the