Assassination Vacation

President James A. Garfield is an obscure US president, whom Vowell describes as “faceless” (123). Still, given the toll the shooting took on Garfield, Vowell remarks, “it seems tacky that we forgot him” (125). 

Vowell describes the abandoned building, Regent Wall Street, a disused hotel. It used to be the New York Custom House, which at the time “collected an astounding two-thirds of the federal government’s revenue,” with the customs collector “allowed” and “even encouraged” (127) to embezzle profits for himself. This led to a scandal when President Rutherford B. Hayes defied Senator Roscoe Conkling, the head of New York’s Republican political machine, and fired future president Chester “Chet” Arthur for corruption.

In retaliation, Conkling played a key role in the Republican Party not accepting Hayes’s bid to run for reelection in 1880. By then, the Republican Party was split between two factions: Conkling’s faction, the Stalwarts, who supported running former president and Civil War hero Ulysses S. Grant for “an unprecedented third term” (129), and the Half-Breeds, who were represented by Conkling’s political rival James G. Blaine and opposed Grant’s nomination due to the “administrative corruption and abandonment of civil service reform” (130) that took place during his two terms. James Abram Garfield, a Congressman from Ohio, was chosen as a compromise candidate for the Republicans precisely because of “his bland composure” (131).

Vowell reflects on how Garfield was a frequent reader to the point that his “book fever was a sickness” (134), which Vowell finds “endearing” (135). Visiting the historic site of Garfield’s home in Mentor, Ohio, Vowell sees a portrait of John Brown in Garfield’s study. Ironically, Garfield’s diaries note that he once sang the song “John Brown’s Body” with a friend, the same song that was a favorite of Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau.

Vowell describes Charles Guiteau as “James A. Garfield’s cracked mirror image” (136). Both were Republicans, Christians who “dabbled in preaching” (136), raised by single parents, and were from the Midwest. Guiteau had joined the Oneida Community, a religious group based in upstate New York founded by John Humphrey Noyes. They believed that the second coming of Jesus Christ happened in 70 AD, at the same time as the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.

At the historic site of the Oneida Community, Vowell learns that upstate New York was known as the “Burned-over District” (140) because it was where religious groups and utopian movements like the Oneida Community, the Shakers, and the Mormons became located. The Oneidas became famous for their practice of everything, even sex. This practice was used to justify Noyes’s sexual abuse of adolescent girls. When Giteau failed to have any sexual relationships with the women of the community, he sued the Oneida Community, alleging that Noyes’s relationships with young women “was stunting their growth, producing a generation of sexual dwarves” (147).

Giteau had “delusions of grandeur” (148) that led him to write a book titled The Truth. He believed that Garfield should appoint him as the ambassador to France. Vowell believes that, despite his egotism, Guiteau “shared” with the Oneida Community “a yearning to be part of a group, to commune” (149), which led Guiteau to see his act of shooting Garfield as being on behalf of the Republican Stalwart faction.

Joe Valesky, a volunteer guide at the Oneida Community’s historic house, notes that the appeal of utopian Christian communities might be explained by the famous 1741 sermon, Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God. Groups like Oneida may have been attractive because it offered a more positive view of God and human nature. Vowell reflects that women like herself might have found the Oneida Community to be an alternative to having to be a wife or nun and “the claustrophobia of American culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (150).

Vowell takes two more trips related to Garfield. One is to the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the site of the Fifth Avenue Summit where Garfield talked with the Stalwarts, who expected Garfield to “let them control the Treasury appointment in the cabinet (and thus the almighty New York Custom House)” (152). The second trip is Vowell’s own tour of Garfield-related sites in Washington, DC. The first site is an equestrian statue representing the Democratic candidate in the 1880 presidential election against Garfield, Winfield Scott Hancock, a popular general who fought for the Union in the Civil War but was lenient toward Democrats who had supported the Confederacy. Republicans successfully countered by suggesting that voting for Hancock was equivalent to voting against the Union, winning Garfield the presidency.

Vowell stops by the site where Garfield’s inauguration ball was held, the Arts and Industries building of the Smithsonian. The “back entrance of the National Gallery of Art” (158) is where Garfield was shot, yet no “plague marks the spot where Guiteau gunned down Garfield” (159).

Garfield was shot twice at a train station by Guiteau. He “might have survived the shooting” (160), but his physicians caused the infection that would kill Garfield by trying to dig out the bullet using their fingers without wearing gloves or sterilizing their hands. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, there are displays dedicated to presidential assassinations. Garfield’s exhibit includes a tile from the floor, his desk calendar stopped at the day of the assassination, and “a railroad spike from the special spur built to transport the ailing president” (162).

Vowell next goes to an equestrian statue of General Sherman, which a child mistakenly claims is the statue of Paul Revere. Guiteau had written a note to Sherman, saying that he had shot Garfield on behalf of Ulysses S. Grant and the Stalwarts, and asking Sherman to send troops to free him from prison. Then Vowell stops to copy down a historic plaque that stands near where Guiteau bought the gun he used to kill Garfield. Although the plaque only mentions various historical sites that were also at the spot, families of tourists converge on where Vowell is standing, leading her to remark, “This is a new development in Garfield pilgrimage—other pilgrims” (166).

Guiteau was just one of many “office seekers” (167) who pestered the president for civil service offices with the federal government. Garfield bemoaned having to deal with them in his diary. Garfield chose William H. Robertson for the office of collector of the New York Custom house, instead of New York senator Roscoe Conkling’s preferred candidate. It was a popular move among the public, but it “humiliated the Stalwart faction” (169). It was the fact that Garfield was a “traitor to the men who made him” (169-170), in Guiteau’s own words, that inspired Guiteau to murder Garfield.

At Logan Circle in Washington, DC, there is the only statue in DC of President Chester Alan Arthur, Garfield’s successor, who “never wanted to be president” (171) but eventually helped pass into law a civil service reform bill, made in response to Guiteau’s assassination of Arthur. Guiteau’s trial was held at the District of Columbia Court Building and was extensively covered by the media at the time. Guiteau “constantly interrupted his own attorneys” and “repeatedly pointed out that in shooting Garfield he was only carrying out the command of God” (173).

Vowell disputes the traditional historical narrative that Garfield was shot by a “disappointed office seeker.” Instead, she emphasizes “Guiteau’s unwarranted self-love and sugary outlook” (174). Guiteau was convicted and sentenced to death despite the fact that his defense attorney “mounted a convincing insanity defense” (175). Before he was hanged, he recited a poem about going to Heaven to be with God.

There is a Garfield Monument in Washington, DC. Next to it is a statue of Grant, who in life “did only the bare minimum” (179) to help Garfield’s campaign because Grant blamed Garfield for cheating him out of a third presidential nomination. Still, Grant had personally comforted Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, when she had heard news of Garfield’s assassination.

Vowell goes to a beachside community, Long Branch, New Jersey, where Garfield was taken after he was shot and where he died. A statue of Garfield stands on the beach at a site called Presidential Park. The cottage where Garfield died is gone, so instead Vowell goes to St. James Chapel, where Garfield attended church services and which has become a museum. A representative of the local historical society, Joan Schnorbus, tells Vowell that the residents helped Garfield’s train reach its destination by laying additional track for the railway and helping push the train toward Garfield’s cottage. One resident built a “little house” (185) out of the wood used to make the additional track.