Destiny of the Republic Part 27

Although he allowed almost no one to visit the president, Bliss regularly issued medical bulletins, which were posted at telegraph offices and on wooden billboards outside newspaper buildings. "Everywhere people go about with lengthened faces," one reporter wrote, "anxiously inquiring as to the latest reported condition of the president." (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.6) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.6)

As soon as he learned of the shooting, Alexander Graham Bell (left), who had a laboratory in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., began to think of ways the bullet might be found. Sickened by the thought of Garfield's doctors blindly "search[ing] with knife and probe," he reasoned that "science should be able to discover some less barbarous method." Bell quickly decided that what he needed was a metal detector. Four years earlier, he had invented a device to get rid of the static in telephone lines, and he now recalled that, when a piece of metal came near the invention, it caused the sound to return. Bell was confident that the invention, which he called an induction balance (right), could be modified to "announce the presence of the bullet." (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.7 (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.7 and and Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.8) Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.8)

Bell (at right, with his ear to the telephone receiver) twice attempted to find the bullet in Garfield using the induction balance. Bliss, however (leaning over Garfield with the induction balance), allowed Bell to search only the president's right side, where Bliss believed, and had publicly stated, the bullet was lodged. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.9) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.9)

After spending two months in his sickroom in the White House, Garfield finally insisted that he be moved. A wealthy New Yorker offered his summer home in Elberon, New Jersey, and a train was carefully renovated for the wounded president. Wire gauze was wrapped around the outside to protect him from smoke, and the seats inside were removed, thick carpeting laid on the floors, and a false ceiling inserted to help cool the car. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.10) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.10)

When the train reached Elberon, it switched to a track that would take it directly to the door of Franklyn Cottage. Two thousand people had worked until dawn to lay the track, but the engine was not strong enough to breach the hill on which the house sat. "Instantly hundreds of strong arms caught the cars," Bliss wrote, "and silently...rolled the three heavy coaches" up the hill. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.11) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.11)

At ten o'clock on the night of September 19, Garfield suddenly cried out in pain. Bliss rushed to the room, but the president was already dying. As Garfield slipped away, "a faint, fluttering pulsation of the heart, gradually fading to indistinctness," he was surrounded by his wife and daughter, and his young secretary, Joseph Stanley Brown-"the witnesses," Bliss would later write, "of the last sad scene in this sorrowful history." (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.12) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.12)

Garfield's body was returned to Was.h.i.+ngton on the same train that had brought him to Elberon just two weeks earlier. Thousands of people lined the tracks as the train, now swathed in black, pa.s.sed by. The White House was also draped in mourning, as were the buildings through which a procession of some one hundred thousand mourners wound, waiting to see the president's body as it lay in state in the Capitol rotunda. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.13) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.13)

(Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.14)

When news of Garfield's death reached New York, reporters rushed to Arthur's house, but his doorkeeper refused to disturb him. The vice president was "sitting alone in his room," he said, "sobbing like a child." A few hours later, at 2:15 a.m., Arthur was quietly sworn into office by a state judge in his own parlor. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.15) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.15)

After a trial that lasted more than two months, Guiteau was found guilty and sentenced to death. Twenty thousand people requested tickets to the execution. Two hundred and fifty invitations were issued. Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882, two days before the anniversary of Garfield's shooting. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.16) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.16)

Had it not been for her children, "life would have meant very little" to Lucretia after her husband's death. When this photograph was taken of the former first lady with her grandchildren in 1906, she had already been a widow for a quarter of a century. Lucretia would live another twelve years, thirty-seven years longer than James. (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.17) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.17)

In the years following Garfield's death, Bell continued to invent, helped to found the National Geographic Society, established a foundation for the deaf, and did what he could for those who needed him most. In 1887, he met Helen Keller and soon after helped her find her teacher, Annie Sullivan. Keller would remember her meeting with Bell as the "door through which I should pa.s.s from darkness into light." (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.18) (Ill.u.s.tration credit 2.18)