Assassination Vacation (14 page)

Can any colored man, or any white man friendly to the freedom of all men, ever forget the night which followed the first day of January, 1863, when the world was to see if Abraham Lincoln would prove to be as good as his word? I shall never forget that memorable night, when in a distant city I waited and watched at a public meeting, with three thousand others not less anxious than myself, for the word of deliverance which we have heard read today. Nor shall I ever forget the outburst of joy and thanksgiving that rent the air when the lightning brought to us the Emancipation Proclamation. In that happy hour we forgot all delay, and forgot all tardiness.

Douglass was there, a few blocks across Capitol Hill from here, when Lincoln delivered the Second Inaugural Address. And Douglass’s speech echoes Lincoln’s the way it charts the president’s progress through the war, quoting Lincoln in 1864 saying that “if slavery is wrong, nothing is wrong,” then citing that threat in the Second Inaugural that he would continue the war “until each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword.”

This is all very specific. That is the most impressive thing about it. Douglass is actually trying to remember Lincoln, what he did, what he said, how he changed. The problem with the fog of history, with the way the taboo against speaking ill of the dead tends to edit memorials down to saying nothing much more than the deceased subject’s name, is that all the specifics get washed away, leaving behind some universal nobody. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last speech, in which he correctly prophesied that he “might not get there with you” to the Promised Land is all that’s remembered of what he said. And that is astonishing. But that speech also contains clear-cut political suggestions for the very present moment, including a plea to those assembled to boycott the Coca-Cola Company “because they haven’t been fair in their hiring policies.”

Frederick Douglass, by calling forth Lincoln the man, by mapping how time and circumstance and experience changed him and deepened him and emboldened him to not just say the right thing and not just personally do the right thing, but make right the law, is the most meaningful of all possible tributes. Douglass, a former slave, marvels that the “infinite wisdom has seldom sent any man into the world better fitted for his mission than Abraham Lincoln.”

I brought Douglass’s speech with me to the Freedmen’s Memorial and I reread it, occasionally glancing up at the statue. As I’m scrutinizing the plaque about Charlotte Scott, a black woman with white hair walks past, staring at me. Smiling, she yells, “Emancipation Proclamation!” She turns away with a wave, calling out over her shoulder, “Freed the slaves, amen!”

President James A. Garfield in Long Branch, New Jersey (based on an engraving on the cover of
Harper’s Weekly,
September 24, 1881). Seven presidents, Garfield included, vacationed in Long Branch, the Hamptons of the Gilded Age. Shot on July
2
in a Washington train station, Garfield was expected to survive. However, summertime in the nation’s capital — a former swamp — saps even the healthiest citizens’ will to live. Thus Garfield and his doctors believed the sea air at the Jersey shore would restore the president’s health. They were wrong. Garfield died there on September
19
,
1881.

Chapter Two

T
he most famous thing ever said about President James A. Garfield is about how nobody has any idea who the hell he was. A citizen doing even the most halfhearted research about the man comes across, again and again, mention of Thomas Wolfe’s 1934 story “The Four Lost Men”:

Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and Hayes, time of my father’s time, blood of his blood, life of his life,…were the lost Americans: their gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together in the sea depths of a past intangible, immeasurable, and unknowable as the buried city of Persepolis. And they were lost. For who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had seen him in the streets of life? Who could believe that his footfalls ever sounded on a lonely pavement? Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? Where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides: Which was which? Were they not lost?

To Wolfe, as to most of us, James A. Garfield is the deadest of dead men, so faceless that even a third grader who just got a gold star on her Garfield report would be hard-pressed to pick him out of a lineup. Wolfe doubts if his four lost men took corporeal form at all, wondering if they ever had “trembling lips, numb entrails, pounding hearts.”

In the sweaty summer of 1881, to the American people, that’s all Garfield was — a body. In the two and a half months separating his July 2 shooting and his death on September 19, the people were obsessed, transfixed, following the daily, sometimes hourly, dispatches on the dying president’s condition as if the progression of his blood poisoning was the fourth quarter of the NBA Finals, as if a movie star in a tuxedo were slowly opening the Best Picture envelope at the Academy Awards. The citizenry not only scoured their newspapers for word of every rise and fall of Garfield’s temperature, his blood pressure, pulse, swelling, each “free discharge of healthy-looking pus.” People regularly stopped by newspapers offices so as to check on the latest telegraphed update from the president’s surgeons. On July 29, for example, a wire issued at 8:30
A.M.
notes that Garfield “has had quite a nap since the noon bulletin was issued.” On August 8, the surgeons reported that it had “become necessary to make another opening to facilitate the escape of pus.” On August 11, at 12:30
P.M.
, “his skin is moist, but without undue perspiration.”

To our forebears, Garfield had eyes that opened and closed, sweat glands and pus, the pus getting an awful lot of play. He had skin and it was moist. Americans knew more details about Garfield’s breath and blood than they did about their own lungs, their personal hearts. How intimate. How embarrassing.

An excerpt from the diary of the president’s daughter, Mollie, is displayed in the museum at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio. On September 29, 1881, ten days after her father’s death, Mollie wrote, “It is something really beautiful to see how much the people had gotten to love Papa through all his sickness.”

Hanging underneath Mollie’s words is Garfield’s death mask, a shock. Cast in bronze by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the dead man’s face bears little resemblance to the photographs of the healthy roundness of Garfield’s prime. The mask is gaunt and long. Garfield wasted away after the shooting. He lost eighty pounds. Thanks to the death mask, the visitor can see what Garfield’s family saw — a big man shrunk small.

Witnessing the physical evidence of what Garfield went through, what his wife and children endured day after day, the fact that this man shriveled to the grave all because American voters picked him to be president, well, it seems tacky that we forgot him.

Thankfully, the story of Garfield’s death is more interesting than the story of his life. His pre-presidential bio can be crammed into the following respectable sentence: The last president born in a log cabin, Garfield grew up with his widowed mother in Ohio, eked his way through college, became a college professor who moonlighted as a preacher, married his wife, Lucretia, in 1858, fathered five children, was a Union general in the Civil War, and served the people of Ohio in the House of Representatives from 1863 to 1880.

But back to his death. It is the story of this self-made man’s collision course with two of the most self-serving, self-centered, self-absorbed egomaniacs of the late nineteenth century — Garfield’s nemesis, Senator Roscoe Conkling, and the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The Garfield assassination is an opera of arrogance, a spectacle of greed, a galling, appalling epic of egomania dramatizing the lust for pure power, shameless and raw. And where else can a story like that start but in New York?

On Wall Street stands the building that got Garfield killed. A solid gray edifice festooned with columns, it has been recently abandoned. A few months ago, it was the Regent Wall Street, a luxury hotel that opened its doors to relief workers when the nearby World Trade Center fell down, a luxury hotel that hosted the reception for Liza Minnelli’s wedding, a wedding in which the “co-best men” were Michael Jackson and his brother, Tito. But like the marriage, the hotel went belly-up. The doors are locked. Paper is taped over the windows.

This district, unwittingly responsible for Garfield’s end, is where Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
begins. Ishmael, taking a walk downtown before shipping out, says of the island of Manhattan, “Commerce surrounds it with her surf.” And throughout the nineteenth century, all of the U.S. government’s plunder from said commerce, the taxes and tariffs squeezed out of all the ships at port, would be tallied up (and more often than not, pocketed by the customs employees) here, at the New York Custom House.

While we’re on the subject of Melville, it’s worth pointing out that he worked in this building as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise — four dollars a day, six days a week. He was by then a washed-up writer, forgotten and poor. I used to find this subject heartbreaking, a waste: the greatest living American author was forced to spend his days writing tariff reports instead of novels. But now, knowing what I know about the sleaze of the New York Custom House, and the honorable if bitter decency with which Melville did his job, I have come to regard literature’s loss as the republic’s gain. Great writers are a dime a dozen in New York. But an honest customs inspector in the Gilded Age? Unheard of.

Before the institution of an income tax in 1913, the New York Custom House collected an astounding two-thirds of the federal government’s revenue. The New York customs collector was allowed, even encouraged, to wet his beak in the oceans of cash. Thus was the position the most lucrative job in American government, a post with bottomless potential for embezzlement and fraud. For example, an 1865 commission investigating the rampant graft by the employees of the New York Custom House estimated that the government might be losing as much as $25 million a year.

The customs collector was a political appointee. And despite the position’s bearing on the federal coffers, in the 1870s the New York State Republican Party machine controlled the job. Senator Roscoe Conkling, a flamboyant, grandiose hothead, ruled the party. Chester Alan Arthur, Conkling’s best friend, ran the Custom House. In 1878, in a bold power grab, President Rutherford B. Hayes stood up to his fellow Republican, the all-powerful Conkling, fired “Chet” Arthur in the name of civil service reform, and waited to install a replacement until Conkling and his fellow senators were in recess.

Momentary Hayes detour: Hayes was no stranger to power plays. In 1876, Hayes wasn’t so much elected president as installed in the presidency thanks to a congressional electoral commission. It came to be called the Compromise of 1877. What happened was Democrat Samuel Tilden received more popular votes than Hayes, though four states were too close to call. In January 1877, the electoral commission, comprised of an equal number of Democrats and Republicans, was at an impasse. The Republicans persuaded the Democrats to “elect” Hayes by agreeing to end Reconstruction. (Hard to believe that the candidate who lost the popular vote could actually become the president of the United States. Luckily, that kind of travesty never happened again.) In the compromise, the Republicans promised to withdraw federal troops from the South. Why was the U.S. Army still occupying the South twelve years after the Civil War? To safeguard the civil rights of black citizens. By pulling the troops out of Dixie, the Republicans were selling out the freed slaves. Which makes the Compromise of 1877 one of the tourist attractions on the road to watching the party of Lincoln morph into the Republican Party we all know and love today.

Returning to President Hayes versus Senator Conkling with regards to the New York Custom House: Conkling would retaliate against Hayes for firing Chester Arthur by delivering a spiteful speech at the next New York Republican convention, pooh-poohing self-proclaimed reformers like Hayes as hypocrites whose sole purpose was to “lament the sins of other people.” Thanks to Conkling, President Hayes would be out of a job come 1880, when his own party would dump him.

Nowadays, the national nominating conventions are foregone conclusions in which the party zealots spend a few days and a few million dollars applauding themselves while balloons bounce off their shellacked hairdos on TV. But the 1880 Republican National Convention in summertime Chicago was unpredictable, a hissy fit on the verge of riot.

Two factions within the Republican Party were engaged in a civil war about the Civil War. Their bickering can be boiled down to how each faction felt about one man, former president Ulysses S. Grant. Grant’s backers, led by Senator Conkling, called themselves the Stalwarts. The Stalwarts arrived in Chicago bent on nominating Grant for an unprecedented third term. They favored equating the rise of southern Democrats with the threat of igniting the War Between the States all over again, a tactic known as “waving the bloody shirt,” the shirt being a blue Union uniform stained red with its dead wearer’s blood. For example, here is one whopper of a bloody-shirt speech the ex–Union colonel Robert Ingersoll once delivered for the Hayes campaign:

Every man that shot Union soldiers was a Democrat. Every man that denied Union prisoners even the worm-eaten crust of famine, and when some poor, emaciated Union patriot, driven to insanity by famine, saw in an insane dream the face of his mother, and she beckoned him and he followed, hoping to press her lips once again against his fevered face, and when he stepped one step beyond the dead line the wretch that put the bullet through his loving, throbbing heart was and is a Democrat. Every man that loved slavery better than liberty was a Democrat. The man that assassinated Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat…. Every man that wanted the privilege of whipping another man to make him work for him for nothing and pay him with lashes on his naked back, was a Democrat. Every man that raised bloodhounds to pursue human beings was a Democrat. Every man that clutched from shrieking, shuddering, crouching mothers, babes from their breasts, and sold them into slavery, was a Democrat…. Soldiers, every scar you have on your heroic bodies was given you by a Democrat. Every scar, every arm that is lacking, every limb that is gone, is a souvenir of a Democrat. I want you to recollect it.

So who, argued the bloody-shirt, Stalwart Grant fans in 1880, could better stand down the Democrats and lead the country than the hero of Appomattox, the man who won the war and thus the peace?

Problem was, Grant had already served two clunky terms preceding Hayes. Republicans calling themselves the Half-Breeds, led by Maine senator James G. Blaine, were dead set against the return of Grant, seeing the old general’s administrative corruption and abandonment of civil service reform as an embarrassment. Conkling and Blaine had been sworn enemies for years, ever since Blaine had made fun of Conkling’s “turkey gobbler strut” on the Senate floor. Thus was the convention deadlocked.

With a century and change between the 1880 convention and now, I’ll admit I rolled my eyes at the ideological hairsplitting, wondering how a group of people who more or less agreed with one another about most issues could summon forth such stark animosity. Thankfully, we Americans have evolved, our hearts made larger, our minds more open, welcoming the negligible differences among our fellows with compassion and respect. As a Democrat who voted for Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, an election suspiciously tipped to tragic Republican victory because of a handful of contested ballots in the state of Florida, I, for one, would never dream of complaining about the votes siphoned in that state by my fellow liberal Ralph Nader, who convinced citizens whose hopes for the country differ little from my own to vote for him, even though had those votes gone to Gore, perhaps those citizens might have spent their free time in the years to come more pleasurably pursuing leisure activities, such as researching the sacrifice of Family Garfield, instead of attending rallies and protests against wars they find objectionable, not to mention the money saved on aspirin alone considering they’ll have to pop a couple every time they read the newspaper, wondering if the tap water with which they wash down the pills is safe enough to drink considering the corporate polluter lobbyists now employed at the EPA.

But meanwhile, back at the 1880 Republican convention in Chicago, enter James Abram Garfield of Ohio. He was attractive as a candidate for the precise reason he’s a nondescript president — his bland composure. Congressman Garfield had come to Chicago in support of a third, hopeless candidate, Treasury Secretary John Sherman, brother of the Georgia-torching General William T. Taking the podium just after Conkling had almost incited a riot while giving a speech for Grant, Garfield said:

This assemblage seems to be a human ocean in tempest. I have seen the sea lashed into fury and tossed into spray, and its grandeur moves the soul of the dullest man; but I remember that it is not the billows, but the calm level of the sea, from which all heights and depths are measured.