July 2, 1881: President James Garfield Is Assassinated

July 2, 1881: President James Garfield is shot at the Baltimore & Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, while waiting for the train that would take him to a vacation on the Jersey Shore.

James Abram Garfield was elected President in 1880, after being nominated by the Republican Party. A Representative from Ohio since the 1862 election, he was a compromise candidate, after the the Convention couldn't come to agreement. The "Stalwarts" wanted former President Ulysses S. Grant -- more than Grant wanted it himself. The "Half-Breeds" wanted James G. Blaine, Senator from Maine and former Speaker of the House.

Each group rejected the other's choice, due to corruption. In Blaine's case, it was personal: He had been involved in Crédit Mobilier, a scandal over a railroad contract. In Grant's case, it wasn't personal: He was considered completely honest, but a lot of his friends were not, involved in one scandal or another, including the far-ranging Crédit Mobilier.

Garfield, as far as anyone knew at the time, was clean. Indeed, when the Crédit Mobilier scandal unfolded in 1872, Garfield testified before his Congressional colleagues that he had been offered a bribe in connection with it, but he refused it. As far as journalists then and historians since have been able to determine, he was not otherwise involved.

The Stalwarts managed to get one of their own into the Vice Presidential nomination: Chester Alan Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York. This was a position where it was easy to make a lot of dirty money, so some people presumed Arthur had. But he hadn't, and it was widely known that he hadn't, and that was part of his appeal.

Garfield won a very close election, over the Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero General of the Union Army in the Civil War. He was named for Winfield Scott, another great General who had been nominated for President, but lost, to Franklin Pierce in 1852. If Garfield hadn't been from Ohio, he might have lost that State, and lost the national popular vote, although he still would have won the Electoral Vote. But he won it, getting 51.7 percent of the vote there.

On the other hand, New York was also very close, and Arthur being on the ticket may well have made the difference in the election, even though he was one of the least qualified candidates any major-party national ticket has ever had. Garfield won the State with 50.3 percent.

Overall, with 185 Electoral Votes being necessary, Garfield won 214, to Hancock's 155; and got 48.32 percent of the popular vote, to Hancock's 48.21 percent. Not that the popular vote mattered, but Garfield won it by 10,364 votes, and by 0.11 percent, in each case the closest ever.

He was inaugurated as the 20th President of the United States on March 4, 1881, and one of his pet projects was civil service reform. That upset the Stalwarts, who, thinking they were responsible for Garfield's election, wanted the "spoils system" maintained.

And one of the Stalwarts who expected to be rewarded for his role in getting Garfield elected was Charles Julius Guiteau. He actually had nothing to do with it, but he thought he was instrumental in it. This was because he was insane. His family had committed him to a psychiatric asylum in 1875, but he escaped.

Does this look like a sane man to you?

It sure doesn't look like a sane man to me.

He kept visiting the White House, hoping to see Garfield, or at least Blaine, who, as a bone thrown to the Half-Breeds, had been appointed Secretary of State. Guiteau wanted to be named Consul to Vienna (the Austro-Hungarian Empire), but was willing to "settle" for Paris (the French Third Republic).

On May 13, having bothered the people at the White House too many times, he was banned from the building. The next day, he waited for Blaine to leave his office, and confronted him. Blaine told him, "Never again speak to me on the Paris consulship, as long as you live."

So Guiteau bought a .442 Webley British Bulldog revolver, with an ivory handle. He chose it because he thought that, after the assassination, he would be hailed as a hero for getting rid of the corrupt Garfield, and that that particular gun would look great in a museum. Did I mention that he was nuts?

Guiteau gave Garfield one last chance: He wrote a letter saying Garfield should fire Blaine, or "you and the Republican Party will come to grief." Like everything else he sent to the White House, this letter was thrown away without being opened.

And, unintentionally, Guiteau gave Garfield one more "last chance": Knowing that Garfield liked to vacation in Long Branch, Monmouth County, New Jersey, one of America's earliest shore resorts, he followed Garfield to the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, on the southwest corner of 6th Street and B Street Northwest, intending to shoot him there.

But the First Lady, Lucretia Garfield, was with him, and Guiteau didn't want her to see her husband shot dead in broad daylight. Perhaps he remembered how Abraham Lincoln had been shot in the presence of his wife (albeit indoors and at night). John Wilkes Booth didn't care. Nor did Lee Harvey Oswald, decades later, care that Jacqueline Kennedy was with her husband. (That is, if you believe that Oswald did it. Ida McKinley was a few miles away from her husband William when he was shot.)

Washington can get very hot in the Summer. On July 2, the newspapers reported that Garfield was heading off to Long Branch again -- and, this time, Lucretia would not be with him as he left: She had contracted malaria, and had been sent to Long Branch without him to recover.

Who was with him at the Station? His sons, James Rudolph Garfield and Harry Augustus Garfield. And Blaine. Also there, but not going with him like the others, his Secretary of War -- Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the only President who had been assassinated to that point. There was no bodyguard or security detail, and, up to that point in Presidential history, that was not unusual.

At 9:20 AM, Guiteau saw Garfield and Blaine walk in. He waited until they were about 6 feet in front of him, and fired. The shot only grazed Garfield's shoulder. A General in the Union Army, he knew gunfire when he heard it, and called out, "My God, what is that?" No one saw the shot, giving Guiteau the chance to fire again. This bullet lodged in Garfield's back, and he went down.

Artist's depiction of the shooting.

Blaine is the bearded man in the top hat.

Guiteau, unusually for him, was calm throughout the event. He turned to walk out and head for the hansom cab that was waiting for him. But he bumped into a policeman, Patrick Kearney, who had gone into the station after hearing the first shot. As he was carried off to jail, Guiteau yelled out, "I am a Stalwart, and now, Arthur is President!"

Garfield did not die quickly. He would have been better off if he had. The doctors who treated him couldn't find the bullet -- no X-ray machines available at the time -- and subjected him to treatments that led to an infection. In other words, for all of Guiteau's planning, it could be argued that he didn't kill Garfield: Garfield's doctors did.

Mrs. Garfield received a telegram about the shooting in Long Branch, and, with some irony, she got on a train to see him, weak but determined. The President lingered on for weeks -- and, until the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1967, there was no mechanism for replacing a President who was alive but incapacitated -- and the First Lady decided to get him out of the hot capital, and put him on a train for Long Branch, with a specially cushioned bed to protect him from the bumpy ride.

Lucretia Garfield

On September 6, he arrived at Francklyn Cottage, in the Elberon section of Long Branch, at the city's southern end. It didn't work: On September 19, 1881, at 10:35 PM, he reached up for a pain in his chest, and called out for his Chief of Staff, David Swaim: "Oh, Swaim, this terrible pain. Press your hand on it." When he did, Garfield's hands went up, and he yelled, "Oh, Swaim? Can't you stop this? Oh, oh, Swaim!" And he died.

He was only 49 years old, 2 months short of turning 50. To this day, only 1 President has had a shorter lifespan: John F. Kennedy was 46 when he was assassinated. (The shortest-lived President who died of natural causes? James Polk was 53.)

It was after midnight by the time Vice President Arthur received the telegram about Garfield's death at his townhouse, at 123 Lexington Avenue, in the Gramercy Park neighborhood of Manhattan. John R. Brady, a Judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, came, and administered the Oath of Office to Arthur as the 21st President of the United States, by candlelight, at 2:15 AM on September 20, 1881.

Arthur took a train to Long Branch to pay his respects to the Garfields, and accompanied them on the funeral train to Washington. On September 22, just to make everything official, he was sworn in again at the Capitol Building, by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, Morrison Waite.

In spite of his lack of experience, Arthur is generally regarded to have run a good Administration. He, too, pursued civil service reform, getting the Pendleton Act passed in 1883. In other words, he governed very little like a Stalwart.

Had Garfield lived, and done as well, he would have had less affection than he got from being martyred, but he might have had more respect from history. But Garfield was beloved for his courage in the face of impending death. And Arthur was admired for not running a Stalwart-style corrupt Administration. And, of course, had Garfield had smarter doctors, he might have recovered. In other words, by shooting Garfield, Guiteau accomplished nothing.

Guiteau was formally indicted for murder on October 14, 1881. A psychiatrist testified that Guiteau was a "morbid egotist" with "a tendency to misinterpret the real affairs of life." The District Attorney for the District of Columbia argued, "There's nothing of the mad about Guiteau: He's a cool, calculating blackguard, a polished ruffian."

He was convicted and sentenced to death on January 25, 1882; and hanged on June 30. He was 40 years old. All through the trial, and up until the moment the black hood was placed over his head for his execution, he lashed out and remained proud of what he had done, believing it to be the will of God, his last words a poem he had written for the occasion: "I am Going to the Lordy."

The gun that Guiteau thought would look so good in a museum? It's not on display in one. In fact, no one knows where it is, or what happened to it. The Smithsonian Institution did have it on display for a while, but it has since been lost.

The pistol that John Wilkes Booth used to assassinate Lincoln -- an event for which it is a little too far back in history to do a "Scores On This Historic Day" entry -- is on display in the basement of Ford's Theatre in Washington, where the assassination happened.

The pistol that Leon Czolgosz used to kill McKinley is in the Buffalo History Museum. And the rifle that Oswald -- as the official story goes -- used to kill Kennedy is in a National Archives Building in College Park, Maryland, just outside D.C., and is not available for public viewing. The one on display in the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas is a replica.

Arthur did not run for a term of his own in 1884: He had Bright's disease, a kidney disorder that is still not curable, but is treatable now, but not then. (That same year, it killed Alice Roosevelt, first wife of future President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1914, it killed Ellen Wilson, the first wife of President Woodrow Wilson. She remains the last First Lady to die "in office.") Arthur died in 1886.

Robert Todd Lincoln had been tired from his Civil War service, and declined to accompany his parents to Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, but he was in Washington and the time of his father's assassination. He had been with Garfield when he was shot. And he was a guest at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6, 1901, standing just outside the Temple of Music when William McKinley was shot. He didn't see the shooting, but he heard it.

When the Lincoln Memorial was to be dedicated in 1922, the current President, Warren G. Harding, was one of the listed speakers. Also in attendance was the Chief Justice of the United States, former President William Howard Taft. As the only surviving child of Honest Abe, Robert was invited. He refused to come. He was afraid Harding would be assassinated, too. (If he was concerned for Taft's safety, he didn't say so.)

Finally, he was talked into attending the ceremony. Harding was not assassinated, but he was already in poor health (not that the public knew this at the time), and he died in office the next year. Robert was more sure than ever that he was a jinx. He died in 1926, without ever meeting another President.

The Baltimore and Potomac Station was demolished after the opening of Union Station in 1907. In 1931, B Street was renamed Constitution Avenue, and was made part of U.S. Route 50, which it remains today. In 1941, the National Gallery of Art opened on the site of the station. It took until 2019 for the National Park Service to erect interpretive plaques about the assassination on the site.

Francklyn Cottage has long since been demolished. However, in the middle of Long Branch's boardwalk, Seven Presidents Park pays tribute to the 7 Presidents who vacationed there, and there is a statue of Garfield.

Like fellow Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Abram Garfield has an official memorial in Washington, D.C. -- but not at the site of the assassination. The James A. Garfield Monument, dedicated on May 12, 1887, is in front of the U.S. Capitol Building, in a traffic circle at First Street and Maryland Avenue Southwest.

*

July 2, 1881 was a Saturday. Baseball was the only sport then that was openly professional, and the National League was the only league. These 4 games were played in it that day:

* The Buffalo Bisons beat the Boston Red Stockings, 7-4 at Riverside Park in Buffalo. The Bisons went out of business after the 1885 season. The Red Stockings were the forerunners of the Atlanta Braves, and bear no relation besides name to the American League's Boston Red Sox.

* The Cleveland Blues beat the Worcester Ruby Legs, 4-0 at Kennard Street Park in Cleveland. The Blues went out of business after the 1884 season. The Ruby Legs went out of business after the 1882 season. In 1883, their place in the NL was taken by the Philadelphia Phillies. (They are not, as I believed before doing research for this post, a continuous franchise.)

* The Providence Grays beat the Detroit Wolverines, 7-5 at Recreation Park in Detroit. In spite of the Grays winning a Pennant in 1884, and the Wolverines doing so in 1887, each would end up lasting just 1 more season.

* And the Chicago White Stockings beat the Troy Trojans, 10-5 at Lakefront Park in Chicago. The White Stockings were the forerunners of the Chicago Cubs, and bear no relation besides name to the American League's Chicago White Sox.

The Trojans, who played across the Hudson River from Albany, New York, folded after the 1882 season. In 1883, their place in the NL was taken by the New York Gothams, who became the Giants in 1886, and the San Francisco Giants in 1958. (As with Worcester and the Phillies, the Trojans and the Giants are not, as I previously believed, a continuous franchise. Unlike Worcester and the Phillies, however, there were players who went from the Trojans to the Giants, 4 of them.)