Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard published by Doubleday (2011)
Usually I don’t dig through old books to write reviews. Most of my reviews come out a few weeks after a book appears, not fourteen years later! However, this book will get a lot of attention this Fall. A new movie on the James Garfield assassination is premiering Nov. 6, 2025 on Netflix. So it is the revived “hot property” on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era right now.
This is a real history book, even though, for some reason, Netflix says the series, Killed By Lightning, is based on “a novel” by Candice Millard. This ain’t no novel. It is an expertly crafted narrative history which provides you with enough detail about the characters like the assassinated President James Garfield, the assassin Charles Guiteau (“a disappointed office seeker”), and Garfield’s rivals like Ulysses S. Grant, Roscoe Conkling, and Chester Arthur, Garfield’s Vice President. The book also gives good insights into the medical practices of the day which were way behind Western European hospitals in treating gunshot victims.
Garfield was a college president before the war. An Abolitionist, he joined the army to help bring an end to slavery. He rose to Brigadier General and then, in 1862, he ran for Congress. In a surprise nomination, Garfield became the Republican candidate for Presidency in 1880.
Charles Guiteau was a lawyer with a possibly deranged view of his own importance. Without Garfield ever meeting him before his election, Guiteau constructed a worldview in which he was responsible for Garfield’s victory. And he felt that the president-elect owed him. This was at odds with the new president’s program.
Garfield planned to jettison the “Spoils System” and to replace it with a competitive civil service. He saw no reason to give Guiteau a job for which he had no qualifications.
The new president wanted to get his party’s backing for the transition to a civil service but he had a very important opponent, Ulysses S. Grant. Former President Ulysses S. Grant had been out of office for four years, but a sizable number of Republicans still felt that he was their leader. After having been the commander when the Confederacy surrendered and having taken back the presidency from Andrew Johnson, these Republicans were “stalwart” in their defense of Grant. In fact, their faction was called “The Stalwarts.” New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, a long-time ally of Grant, led the Stalwarts in Congress and he placed his New York machine at the service of Grant. After Garfield had won the presidency, Conkling and his allies unleashed newspaper attacks on the new president. He was aided by the new Vice President, Chester A. Arthur, a protege of Conkling.
In July of 1881, less than four months after Garfield had been inaugurated, Charles Guiteau penned a letter to General William T. Sherman, who he did not even know. It has the feel of a modern day mass killer’s note:
“To General Sherman:
I have just shot the President. I shot him several times, as I wished him to go as easily as possible. His death was a political necessity. I am a lawyer, theologian, and politician. I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts. I was with Gen Grant, and the rest of our men in New York during the canvas. I am going to the jail. Please order out your troops, and take possession of the jail at once.
Charles Guiteau”
Guiteau left the letter to Sherman in his Washington hotel room and then penned another letter that he had on his person when he assassinated Garfield:
“The President’s tragic death was a sad necessity, but it will unite the Republican party and save the Republic. Life is a fleeting dream, and it matters little when one goes,” he wrote. “I presume the President was a Christian and that he will be happier in Paradise than here.”
Garfield was going to the Washington train station to go to see his wife. Guiteau positioned himself inside the station and got to within three feet of Garfield when he shot the president in the back. As the assassin was making his escape he was captured. With panic in his eyes as a mob of porters and passengers surrounded him he said “I want to go to jail.”
As the assassin was being transported to jail, he started making plans for his rescue by General Sherman and envisioning the gratitude that Vice President Arthur would show him. Because of his statements that he was a Stalwart and his Stalwart letters, many people believed that Arthur and Conkling had been co-conspirators with him.
Millard spends the next part of the book looking at the medical care Garfield received. After the president had died, Guiteau said that he had not killed Garfield, his doctors had. Guiteau wrote later:
“General Garfield died from malpractice…According to his own physicians, he was not fatally shot. The doctors who mistreated him ought to bear the odium of his death, and not his assailant. They ought to be indicted for murdering James A. Garfield, and not me.”
Of course, in fact if you fire a gun into the back of a victim with the intent to kill, you are a murderer even though the medical care was not the best. Millard does not, as I have seen in other works on this assassination, get into relieving Guiteau of responsibility. Instead, she shows what medical ignorance of germ theory meant in treating Garfield. In Europe there was a growing awareness of germs through the work of Joseph Lister on the sources of infection, but American doctors chose to ignore it. Millard gives a great deal of fascinating descriptions of the flawed medical treatments for the president which introduced foreign objects into his body that caused his situation to worsen. She also gives quite a bit of attention to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, who tried to use his expertise to find the bullet. In July, his doctors gave Garfield a good chance of living, but after a two months, his situation deteriorated so much that he requested to go to the Jersey Shore near Long Branch where he could sit by a window and watch the waves come in as his life was draining from him.
Millard tells the story of Charles Guiteau’s trial. No one wanted to defend him, so his brother-in-law, a patent attorney, took on the case with no experience in criminal law. In court, Guiteau told the judge; “I deny the killing, if your honor please…We admit the shooting.” At other times the accused insulted his lawyer in open court. I am sure his brother-in-law must have been tearing his hair out.
While America wrung its hands over the lack of security for Garfield and Abraham Lincoln, murdered just 16 years apart, we did not learn any lessons. Just two decades later William McKinley was murdered.
At least Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy of Confederate sympathizers. Garfield and McKinley died at the hands of single assassins who appear to have been crazy.
I think that those interested in the Civil War and presidential history should read this book. Even if you have seen the Netflix series you will learn a lot.
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