Destiny of the Republic (8 page)

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CHAPTER 4
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G
OD’S
M
INUTE
M
AN

Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.

JAMES A. GARFIELD

F
our days after the Republican convention, and a day after he had stepped aboard the ill-fated
Stonington
, Charles Guiteau arrived in New York. While the other survivors of the deadly steamship collision in Long Island Sound huddled with family and friends, wondering at the twist of fate that had spared their lives, Guiteau walked through the city alone, unburdened by guilt or doubt. To his mind, which had long ago descended into delusion and madness, the tragedy was simply further proof that he was one of God’s chosen few.

From an early age, Guiteau had been confident of his importance in the eyes of God. Motherless by the time he was seven years old, he had been raised by a zealously religious father, a man so certain of his relationship with God that he believed he would never die. “My mother was dead and my father was a father and a mother to me,” Guiteau said, “and I drank in this fanaticism from him for years. He used to talk it day after day, and dream over it, and sleep over it.” Charles’s own fanaticism grew until, when he was eighteen years old, he left the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor to join a commune in upstate New York founded by his father’s religious mentor, John Humphrey Noyes.

The central tenet of Noyes’s doctrine—and the idea that appealed most to men like Guiteau’s father—was perfectionism. Noyes believed that, through prayer and the right kind of education, a person could become intellectually, morally, and spiritually perfect, and so would be free from sin. Noyes believed that he had reached perfection and was anointed by God to help others shed their own sins. With this goal in mind, he had founded his commune, the Oneida Community, named for the town in which it was established in 1848. Oneida would last more than thirty years, becoming the most successful utopian socialist community in the United States.

Like most of Noyes’s followers, Guiteau moved into the “Mansion House,” a sprawling brick Victorian Gothic building that, over time, would grow to ninety-three thousand square feet. It held thirty-five apartments for the nearly three hundred members of the commune. Although the private rooms were small and unadorned, the property had a wide variety of fairly elaborate communal amenities—from theaters to a photographic studio to a Turkish bath.

Guiteau’s father dreamed of living in the Mansion House, but his second wife refused to follow him, perhaps in part because of the community’s practice of “complex marriage,” or free love—a concept that Noyes had developed himself, and practiced liberally. According to Noyes, monogamous love was not only selfish but “unhealthy and pernicious,” and the commune’s members were encouraged to have a wide variety of sexual partners in the hope that they would not fall in love with any one person.

In an effort to avoid too many pregnancies, Noyes preached what he called “male continence.” Intercourse, “up to the very moment of emission,” he insisted, “is
voluntary
, entirely under the control of the moral faculty, and
can be stopped at any point
. In other words, the
presence
and the
motions
can be continued or stopped at will, and it is only the final
crisis
of emission that is automatic or uncontrollable.… If you say that this is impossible, I answer that I
know
it is possible—nay, that it is easy.” It was like rowing a boat, Noyes said. If you stay near the shore, you’ll be fine. It’s only when you row too near a waterfall that you find yourself in danger.

Guiteau was enthusiastic about complex marriage, and was willing to try male continence, but he quickly found that life at Oneida required far more humility than he could tolerate. Members of the commune were not only expected to help anywhere they were needed—from the kitchen to the fields—doing work that Guiteau found tiresome and demeaning, but to accept the work gratefully and humbly. Guiteau felt that Noyes and his followers should be grateful to him, rather than the other way around. In a letter to Noyes he wrote, “You prayed God … to send you help, and he has sent me.
Had he not sent me, you may depend upon it, I never should have come
.” Believing that he should be shown special deference, and offended by the disapproval and, at times, disdain with which he was treated in the community, he said, “I ask no one to respect me
personally
, but I do ask them to respect me as an envoy of the true God.” He was, he believed, “God’s minute man.”

Although Guiteau claimed to work directly for God—to be “in the employ of Jesus Christ & Co., the very ablest and strongest firm in the universe”—he expected more than heavenly rewards. He wanted all the pleasures the world had to offer, chief among them fame. On one occasion, a member of the commune picked up a slip of paper he had seen Guiteau drop. On it Guiteau, uneducated, isolated, and friendless, had written a strangely grandiose, utterly delusional announcement: “Chas. J. Guiteau of England, Premier of the British Lion will lecture this evening at seven o’clock.”

Guiteau’s extravagant dreams and delusions persisted in the face of consistent and complete failure. Although the commune promised the pleasures of complex marriage, to Guiteau’s frustration, “the Community women,” one of Oneida’s members would later admit, “did not extend love and confidence toward him.” In fact, so thorough was his rejection among the women that they nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.” He bitterly complained that, while at the commune, he was “practically a Shaker.”

Guiteau also frequently found himself the object of “criticisms,” a method Noyes had designed to help his followers identify and overcome their faults so that they could reach perfection. During a criticism, Guiteau was forced to sit in a room, encircled by the men and women with whom he worked and lived most closely, and listen in silence as they described his faults. Again and again, he was accused of “egotism and conceit.”

In Guiteau’s case at least, the criticisms apparently had little effect. When, in 1865, he finally left the commune, after having lived there for nearly six years, he announced that his departure was necessary because he was “destined to accomplish some very important mission.” “God and my own conscience,” he proclaimed, “drive me to the battle and I dare not draw back.”

Guiteau’s plan was to start a religious newspaper called
The Theocrat
, which he said would be a “
warm friend of the Bible
, though it may develop many new and strange biblical theories, differing widely from the teachings of popular theologians.” His brother-in-law, George Scoville, recalling Guiteau’s outsized enthusiasm and confidence, said that he “labored there for weeks and months to start that project, supposing that he was going right into the matter with entire success, and that this newspaper was going to take its place every morning at every breakfast table in the land.” After just four months, Guiteau gave up and begged Noyes to allow him to return to the commune. A year later, however, he left again, sneaking out at night so as to avoid another criticism.

Although Guiteau would never again return to Oneida, his life outside the commune was far from what he had envisioned. Rather than achieving success on a grand scale, he suffered a series of disappointments, rejections, and disasters. Even his brief marriage, which took place soon after he left Oneida, ended in divorce.

Guiteau spent nearly an entire year doing nothing at all, living on a small inheritance while he struggled to free himself from his fear that, by leaving the commune, he had “lost [his] eternal salvation.” “The idea that I was to be eternally damned haunted me and haunted me and haunted me every day, and day and night,” he said. “So I was unable to do any business.”

Finally, desperate for money, Guiteau decided to take up a profession, choosing one that he thought would be lucrative—the law. In a time when law school was encouraged but not required he read a handful of books, served as a clerk for a few months, and then stood for the bar. His examiner was a prosecuting attorney named Charles Reed, who, according to Guiteau’s brother-in-law, himself a lawyer, was a “good-hearted fellow,” if not particularly discerning. Reed “asked him three questions and he answered two and missed one,” Scoville recalled, “and that was the way he got to be a lawyer.”

In the courtroom, Guiteau was as unpredictable and egotistical as he had been at Oneida. “The style and plea of his conduct,” reported a psychiatrist who would later study his life, “were such as to convince all the lawyers who were present that he was a monomaniac.” Arguing on behalf of a client in a criminal case, Guiteau “talked and acted like a crazy man.” After he leapt over the bar that separated him from the jury and put his fist directly in the face of one of the jurists, prompting an explosion of laughter in the courtroom, “his client was convicted, without the jury leaving their seats.” In another case, Reed, Guiteau’s bar examiner, recalled that, instead of addressing the petty larceny of which his client was accused, Guiteau “talked about theology, about the divinity, and about the rights of man.… It was a very wandering speech, full of vagaries and peculiarities.”

Much more than the work itself, Guiteau enjoyed the prestige that accompanied his new profession. He would frequently take out his business cards simply to admire them. There were eight lines of text on the front of the cards alone, including a proud note that his office building had an elevator. The back had fourteen lines, which made up a reference list, separated by city, of businessmen Guiteau had met only briefly, if at all.

Over the next fourteen years, Guiteau opened, and then quickly abandoned, a succession of law practices in Chicago and New York. In between, he tried his hand at more exciting lines of work. Among his most ambitious endeavors was a plan to purchase one of Chicago’s largest newspapers—the
Inter Ocean
. He hoped to convince some of the city’s wealthiest citizens to give him $75,000 to fund the project. In exchange for their investment, he promised to use the paper to win for them any statewide political office they desired. “I asked Mr. John H. Adams to put money into it,” Guiteau openly admitted. “He was the president of the Second National Bank … worth about half a million dollars. I offered to make him governor of Illinois [but] he didn’t have any political aspirations. I wanted to get hold of these men that had money and political aspirations. They were the kind of men to help me in that scheme.”

After two months of fruitless searching for a financier, Guiteau decided it was time to return to religion, this time as a traveling evangelist. As he did with each new venture, he threw himself into evangelism with astonishing passion and complete confidence. For nearly a year, he traveled to dozens of cities across several states, from Buffalo, New York, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Adopting as his own Noyes’s theory that the second coming of Christ had already occurred, in AD 70, he gave lectures to anyone who was willing to listen—and pay a small fee.

People “have been in the habit of looking way off into the indefinite future for the second coming,” Guiteau would explain. “ ‘Hold!’ I say, ‘it occurred eighteen hundred years ago.’ ”

Guiteau would later admit that his attempt at evangelism was a “failure all the way through,” but, he said, “I stuck to it like a hero.” After arriving in a town, he would find the business district and walk through it, scattering handbills announcing his lecture and trying to sell printed copies for twenty-five cents. On most nights, only a handful of people showed up, and after Guiteau began to speak they either heckled him or simply left. After he gave a lecture titled “Is There a Hell?” to an unusually large crowd at the Newark Opera House, the
Newark Daily Journal
ran a jeering review with the headline “Is there a hell? Fifty deceived people are of the opinion that there ought to be.”