Who Killed President Garfield? Motive, Trial, and Execution

President James A. Garfield was killed by Charles Julius Guiteau, a delusional failed lawyer and rejected office seeker who shot the president on July 2, 1881, at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C. Garfield lingered for nearly 80 days before dying on September 19, 1881, largely from infections introduced by his own doctors. Guiteau was convicted of murder, and hanged on June 30, 1882.¹

Who Charles Guiteau Was

Guiteau was born on September 8, 1841, in Freeport, Illinois.² His father Luther held unusual religious convictions, including a belief that he would never die, and beat his son for odd behavior and speech impediments.¹

At 18, Guiteau joined the Oneida Community, a utopian religious commune in upstate New York that practiced communal property and “complex marriage.” He spent six miserable years there. He had expected sexual access to the community’s women, but members found him so repellent that one account described him as “practically a Shaker.” Fellow members nicknamed him “Charles Gitout.” Community leader John Humphrey Noyes called him “moody, self-conceited, unmanageable,” and later told Guiteau’s father plainly that his son was a “lunatic.”³¹

Guiteau sneaked away from Oneida at night in 1866, sued the community for $9,000 in back wages, and, when that failed, tried to blackmail them.³ He drifted through careers as a lawyer, insurance salesman, newspaper publisher, and traveling preacher, failing at each. He married Anne Bunn in 1869; they divorced five years later.²

Why He Shot the President

The motive grew out of the poisonous factional politics of the Republican Party. The Stalwart wing, led by New York Senator Roscoe Conkling, defended the spoils system, under which government jobs went to political allies who were then assessed roughly five percent of their salaries to fund the party. The Half-Breeds, led by James G. Blaine, pushed for civil service reform.⁴⁵

By 1880, Guiteau was consumed with grandiose delusions. He obsessed over prestige, called himself “high-toned,” and believed his own speeches had swung the election for Garfield.¹ He demanded an ambassadorship as personal payment, first Vienna, then Paris.² Secretary of State Blaine eventually told him never to return.⁶

The rejection curdled into a conviction that killing Garfield was a divine command. Guiteau reasoned that removing the president would reunite the Republican Party, save the patronage system, put fellow Stalwart Vice President Chester A. Arthur in the White House, and earn him a grateful appointment.⁵

The Shooting at the Train Station

On the morning of July 2, 1881, Garfield arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station to board a train. He had no bodyguards. Blaine was walking beside him. Shortly after 9:00 a.m., Guiteau stepped forward and fired two shots from a .44 caliber British Bulldog revolver, a weapon he had picked because he thought it would look impressive in a museum.⁷

One bullet grazed Garfield’s right arm. The second tore into his back, passed through the spinal column in front of the spinal cord, fractured the first lumbar vertebra, and lodged deep in his torso.⁴⁸ Garfield collapsed. Guiteau was arrested on the spot. He had stalked the president for weeks, following him to church and to the station on earlier occasions. He told the arresting officer: “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”

Why Garfield Took 80 Days to Die

The bullet itself was probably not fatal. What killed Garfield over the next 80 days was the medical care he received. Many American physicians of the era had not yet accepted germ theory, and English surgeon Joseph Lister’s antiseptic techniques were dismissed by the doctors treating the president.⁹

Dr. Willard Bliss, a Civil War surgeon and boyhood acquaintance of Garfield’s, took charge.¹⁰ Bliss and his colleagues repeatedly probed the wound with unwashed fingers and unsterilized instruments, hunting for the bullet. They widened what had been a three-inch-deep wound into a 20-inch channel running from ribs to groin.¹¹

Bliss was convinced the bullet lay on the right side of the president’s torso and refused to consider alternatives. When Alexander Graham Bell was brought in with a rudimentary metal detector he called an “induction balance,” Bliss insisted on August 1, 1881, that Bell scan only the right side. The device found nothing, in part because the bullet was actually on the left side.¹²⁹

Garfield developed overwhelming sepsis. He dropped from 210 pounds to 130, racked by fever and chills and increasing confusion. On September 6, 1881, he was moved by train to Long Branch, New Jersey, in the hope that sea air might help. At 10:35 p.m. on September 19, he clutched his chest, cried out “This pain, this pain,” and died moments later. Bliss announced: “It is over.”¹¹

The autopsy the next day showed the full scale of the doctors’ failure. The bullet had lodged two and a half inches to the left of the spine, behind the peritoneum, and the body had walled it off harmlessly with connective tissue. The long channel the doctors had been probing was not the bullet’s track at all. The suppurating wound they had created produced abscesses near the gallbladder and on the left kidney, along with bronchitis and bronchopneumonia in both lungs. The immediate cause of death was a hemorrhage from a mesenteric artery that released nearly a pint of blood into the abdominal cavity.⁸ Author Candice Millard later concluded that Garfield could have survived the gunshot wound had it simply been left alone.¹³

The Trial and Insanity Defense

Guiteau’s murder trial began on November 14, 1881, before the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, prosecuted under a 1790 federal statute governing murder in areas of exclusive federal jurisdiction.¹

His brother-in-law, George Scoville, led the defense and pleaded insanity, arguing that mental illness ran in the family and pointing to the father’s extreme religious beliefs. Defense medical experts testified that a person could be insane without obvious delusions or hallucinations. The defense also argued that Garfield had been killed by the grossly negligent treatment of his physicians, not by the bullet, a point Guiteau himself articulated.¹⁴¹

The prosecution, led by U.S. District Attorney George Corkhill with Walter Davidge and John K. Porter, rejected the insanity claim. Corkhill said publicly that Guiteau was “no more insane than I am.” Prosecution medical experts argued there was no such disease as “hereditary insanity” and emphasized that Guiteau consistently admitted his actions and articulated clear intent.¹⁴

Guiteau made the courtroom a spectacle. He acted as his own co-counsel, interrupted proceedings constantly, made announcements about press coverage, and insisted he was “a man of destiny” carrying out “God’s will.”¹⁴ Justice Cox allowed the outbursts so the jury could evaluate his sanity firsthand.¹

The jury deliberated for one hour and returned a guilty verdict on January 25, 1882. Guiteau was sentenced to death. His appeals were denied by a panel of justices on the same court, Justice Joseph Bradley of the U.S. Supreme Court denied a petition for habeas corpus, and President Arthur denied clemency.¹

Execution

Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882, in the courtyard of the District of Columbia jail, two days before the first anniversary of his attack. He had planned at one point to appear in his underwear as a symbolic echo of Christ’s execution, but dropped the idea.¹⁵ On the scaffold he recited fourteen verses from the Book of Matthew and read aloud a poem he had written, “I am Going to the Lordy,” which ended, “Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! I am with the Lord!” He signaled the executioner by dropping the paper from his hand.¹⁶ Roughly a thousand spectators outside the jail cheered when his death was announced.

Portions of Guiteau’s brain were preserved after execution and remain at the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in a jar of alcohol and water. An autopsy found the dura mater around the brain thicker than normal, a characteristic associated with neurosyphilis, along with damage to blood vessels in several areas. Some medical observers who had testified for the prosecution reversed themselves and suggested he had been insane after all. Modern experts remain divided. George Paulson, a former chair of neurology at Ohio State University, reviewed the autopsy records in 2006 and called the evidence for neurosyphilis “inconclusive,” noting that third-stage syphilis typically involves dramatic cognitive decline while Guiteau’s erratic behavior had persisted for decades. Current thinking favors a combination of schizophrenia and grandiose narcissism.¹⁷

What the Assassination Changed

Guiteau’s crime achieved the opposite of everything he had planned. Chester A. Arthur was sworn in as the 21st president on September 20, 1881, the day after Garfield died.¹⁸ Arthur had been a Stalwart, a Conkling protégé, and a former Collector of the Port of New York who ran the very patronage system Guiteau had killed to protect.¹⁹

The assassination changed him. Under enormous public pressure, Arthur broke from his old allies. On January 16, 1883, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law. The act established the Civil Service Commission, required that certain federal jobs be filled through open, competitive examinations, and prohibited firing or demoting covered employees for political reasons.²⁰ It initially covered about 10 percent of the 132,000 federal employees; by 1980, more than 90 percent were protected under its framework.²¹

Presidential security did not change immediately. Garfield had been the second American president to be assassinated, after Abraham Lincoln 16 years earlier, and he still had no security detail at the train station that morning. The Secret Service, established in 1865 to combat counterfeiting, was not formally assigned to protect the president until after the 1901 assassination of William McKinley. It created its first full-time White House detail in 1902.²²²³

1
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2
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3
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4
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5
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21
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22
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