President James Garfield (Library of Congress)
President James Garfield, age 49, planned to begin his summer vacation on Saturday, July 2. He and his two oldest sons were to catch a train from Washington to New York where they would join his daughter and his wife, Lucretia. Lucretia had been recuperating from malaria at a New Jersey beach hotel. From New York, the family arranged to travel by train to Garfield’s class reunion at Williams College in Massachusetts before setting off on a trip through New England. The two youngest Garfield boys would stay with relatives until the family reunited at the Garfield farm in Ohio later in the summer.
On Saturday morning, Garfield roughhoused with his sons at the White House before they all departed for the train station by carriage. The president’s secretary of state had last-minute business with him, and the two men rode together. The Garfield boys followed in a second carriage.
When Garfield climbed out at the Baltimore and Potomac station (now the site of the National Gallery of Art), he had no idea of the danger awaiting him. No Secret Service agents guarded a president in 1881 or checked an area before he arrived.
No one realized that Charles Guiteau had been stalking President Garfield for weeks. Upset about being denied an appointment in Garfield’s administration, Guiteau was convinced that the president had “wrecked the once grand old Republican party, and for this he dies.” Guiteau bought a pistol and practiced using it. When he read in the newspaper that the president was leaving for his vacation on Saturday’s 9:30 train, he knew it was time to make his move.
As James Garfield and his secretary of state walked through the station waiting room, Guiteau stepped from the shadows. He shot twice at Garfield’s back before heading for an exit. The president fell to the floor.
Police officers assigned to the station immediately grabbed Guiteau and dragged him outside. Meanwhile, bystanders rushed to help the president. Garfield’s two sons, who had been on their way into the station when their father was shot, hurried to his side.
(Library of Congress)
(St. Paul , MN, Sunday Globe, July 3, 1881)
Soon, as many as ten doctors arrived at the station after hearing about the shooting. Garfield’s condition didn’t look good to them. They agreed that he should be taken back to the White House for treatment and, possibly, to die.
Somehow Garfield managed to stay alive through Saturday and Sunday. Two expert surgeons were sent for, and they arrived from New York and Philadelphia on Monday morning, July 4.
The grim news shocked the nation. Only sixteen years before, President Abraham Lincoln had been assassinated. How could this happen again? Monday’s July Fourth festivities were subdued as Americans waited to learn whether their president had survived the assassin’s bullet.
They would spend the rest of the summer of 1881 anxiously following daily reports about the president’s health. Could Garfield’s doctors save him? Had their mistakes put him in new danger?
In AMBUSHED!: The Assassination Plot Against President Garfield, I tell the story about this fiasco that changed the course of political and medical history.
(Washington Evening Star, July 2, 1881)