This Day in Presidential History (Garfield’s Assassination and the Insanity Defense)

July 2, 1881—The nation’s capital, already warm because of its southern location, had turned even hotter over the last several months for James Abram Garfield (pictured left), the result of a fight within his own Republican Party over political appointees. Now, on this Saturday morning, the President had only five minutes to wait between the time his carriage left him off at DC’s Baltimore and Potomac Station and the train that would take him to his beloved alma mater, Williams College, for its commencement, and thence to a much-needed vacation.

Garfield, conversing with his good friend, Secretary of State James Blaine, never had a chance to enjoy either. As the two men proceeded toward the train, a dark-bearded man—an attorney who had unsuccessfully sought office from his administration—materialized in the largely empty building and shot Garfield twice with his revolver. More than 2 ½ months later, when the President died, his passing might have been just as much the result of the ignorant medical care he received as from the bullet at the hand of assassin Charles Guiteau.

In the 19th century, the Garfield assassination was regarded as an echo of an earlier tragedy--Abraham Lincoln’s murder only 16 years before at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Garfield, if he is recalled at all nowadays by most high-school students, is as one in a series of hirsute, mediocre 19th-century Presidents.

In the 20th century, however, the death could be seen as a precursor of sorts: of one Presidential tragedy that involved Presidential intervention in a nasty intra-party state struggle (JFK); and of another assassination attempt in which attorneys pleaded for the defendant on grounds of insanity (Reagan’s would-be killer, John Hinckley).

In Assassination Vacation, Sarah Vowell has some fun with this impression, noting that, “Thankfully, the story of Garfield’s death is more interesting than the story of his life.” So, what makes the death so fascinating? “It is the story of this self-made man’s [Garfield] collision course with two of the most self-centered, self-serving, self-absorbed egomaniacs of the late twentieth 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.”

Garfield had emerged as a compromise candidate for an 1880 GOP convention deadlocked between the Stalwarts, the party conservatives, who backed Ulysses S. Grant for a third term for President, and the Half-Breeds, a somewhat more moderate faction who backed either Blaine or Sen. John Sherman for leader of the ticket. As a sop to Conkling and the Stalwarts, Chester A. Arthur of New York was nominated for Vice-President, and Conkling--an extremely powerful political boss--expected that deference would be paid to him in appointments.

But the first four months of the Garfield administration were consumed by warfare between Conkling and Garfield. The Senator, already annoyed when Blaine was picked Secretary of State, decided not just to stall over this appointment but to have it out with the President over a patronage position: collector of the Port of New York, which Garfield had filled by naming a Conkling opponent for the position.

When Garfield refused to blink, Conkling and fellow New York Senator Thomas Platt resigned in protest. They expected that the state legislature, which then controlled Senate nominations, would renominate them, delivering a stinging rebuke to the President.

But the legislature never nominated Conkling, fatally wounding his career. (The political boss never again held political office.)

It is often forgotten now, because of the endless swirl of conspiracy theories, but an intra-party squabble played a role in another Presidential assassination more than eight decades after Garfield’s. Again, that quarrel took place in the home state of the Vice-President who succeeded the murdered chief executive.

John F. Kennedy flew down to Texas in November 1963 to heal the breach between the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, led by Lyndon Johnson’s ally Governor John Connally, and the liberal wing, led by Senator Ralph Yarborough. Ironically, he rode to his destiny to get in the middle of this squabble; Garfield took his fatal trip to the train station for relief from this struggle, even for just a few days.

All the internecine rancor between Conkling and Garfield may have done was influence a diseased mind: Guiteau’s.

Just how diseased that mind was became a major bone of contention when Guiteau went on trial for the assassination. Then, as now, jurors had to contend with psychologists for the prosecution claiming that Guiteau was sane according to the legal definition of it versus other psychologists claiming that he very clearly was insane. Guiteau was found guilty and executed almost a year to the day from the shooting.

As the years turned into decades, Garfield--and, even more so, his murderer--receded far from the nation’s consciousness. But European criminologists and psychologists of the fin de siecle period returned to the case repeatedly, in much the same way that commentators of the last generation have discussed the O.J. Simpson case.

The Guiteau case would reverberate a century later, when John Hinckley was tried for the shooting of Ronald Reagan. The verdict--not guilty, by reason of insanity--might, in one sense, be regarded as an advance from the Guiteau case. But the Hinckley verdict outraged so much of the public that it sparked legislation limiting the use of the insanity plea in several states.

Toward the start of this post, I alluded to the period between the shooting and Garfield’s eventual death. During Guiteau’s trial, the assassin claimed that he hadn’t killed Garfield, but the President’s doctors had.

The public ridiculed the madman for this statement, but we now know he was correct
in ways that nobody could have anticipated at the time. From the moment Garfield was brought back to the White House, he was poked and prodded by a host of physicians who hoped thereby to locate the bullet believed to imperil his life. (Even Alexander Graham Bell got into the act, using a telephone-like receiver as a metal-detecting device. It didn’t work.)

When the doctors finally located the bullet during the autopsy, it was lodged in a back muscle. This position was far less problematic than they feared, but by then the damage had been done: All that poking with nonsterile instruments introduced new bacteria into his system that complicated all efforts to save the President.