If Abraham Lincoln died for our nation’s sins, then James Abram Garfield died for our nation’s pettiness.  Such is the story told in Candice Millard’s 2011 best-seller, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President.  An intertwined narrative of four men intersecting at the crossroads of delusion, invention, medicine, and diplomacy, Destiny of the Republic elevates the twelve weeks of President Garfield’s lingering demise into the high drama normally reserved for the chase and capture of Lincoln’s assassin.

From the prologue set at sea on the doomed steamship Stonington transporting Charles Guiteau, the gentleman grifter who would later shoot Garfield, to the opening chapter slamming the reader in the middle of the steam-powered cacophony of the Machinery Hall of the 1876 Centennial Fair in muggy Philadelphia alongside then-Congressman Garfield and inventor A.G. Bell, the steam aesthetic marks the era’s spirit of reaching for modernity.  The book spends a leisurely amount of time on self-made-man Garfield and his reluctant ascendance atop the brokered 1880 Republican ticket and subsequent election, including his Good-Will-Hunting-like academic career from serving as the college’s janitor to becoming President of Eclectic Institute (now Hiram College) at age 26.  Millard accentuates Garfield’s historical stature by highlighting quotes on his progressive views about racial equality, his even temperament as compared to other office-seekers, and his belief in science being a transformative power for America and the world.

The work of governing in the rat-infested Executive Mansion was made even more difficult by the protocol of the time which allowed much greater access to the public inside the building.  The Garfield cabinet consistently turned away diplomatic post-seeker Charles Guiteau during the Spring of 1881.  While decidedly delusional for thinking that he was entitled to a consulate appointment, Guiteau was afforded the same regard as all other persons who considered themselves as party loyalists seeking employment under the Spoils System.  The doggedly persistent Guiteau even earned a rebuke from Secretary of State James Blaine to never speak of the desired consulate post ever again.  However, Guiteau chose to shoot Garfield at the decrepit B&O station in Washington, D. C. on July 2, 1881, even though Blaine was standing next to Garfield at the time of the shooting.

The rest of the summer of 1881 has been documented and debated in history books since Garfield’s death.  However, Millard takes the time to weave the story of Garfield’s treatment in the context of the opposing forces of the age of invention.  Taking the role of Medicinal Legacy is Dr. D.W. Bliss, who supersedes all other practitioners as the primary caregiver for President Garfield and forgoes the recent findings of Dr. Joseph Lister who uses carbolic acid to reduce sepsis in wounds.  Bliss is given little charity by Millard as she notes the common Civil War era practice of leaving bullets wounds to become encased in the body’s own encasement of cysts, and Bliss is portrayed as belligerently protective of Garfield even among other doctors.  Alexander Graham Bell is the near-hero of the story representing Medicinal Future by hurriedly inventing a device that enhances his telephone to become a rudimentary metal detector.  While Bliss allows Bell to use the new device in a limited fashion on the suffering Garfield, the medical care provided by Bliss dooms Garfield to death as unsterilized fingers, leaden probes, and dirty rubber tubes are used to search for the bullet in his lower thorax and to remove the accumulation of pus and infection that slowly destroys President Garfield from the inside out. 

Millard uses the chapters after Garfield’s death mostly to see Guiteau’s story to its end; but, also to highlight the inherited goodwill placed on Garfield’s successor, Chester Alan Arthur, a man whose role on the ticket was seen as an emollient to the New York faction of the Republican Party.  But, she does not extend the story to cover the change in Arthur as a champion of Garfield’s reforms, as Arthur would sign the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883 to place office holders according to merit, not patronage.  Charles Guiteau would not see this law passed as he spent the last year of his life mounting a vociferous insanity defense and dodging assassination attempts on his own life while incarcerated before his death at the gallows.

Destiny of the Republic provides a fine contextual counterpoint to Del Quentin Weber’s 2011 book Rawhide Down, about the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.  From the easy accessibility to President Garfield in a public railway station to the unhygienic concern paid to his recovery, in contrast the Chief Executive of the United States in 1981 traveled in a near tunnel of isolation from the public, yet President Reagan suffered a near-fatal gunshot wound from a deranged man and was saved only by the medical redundancies put in place after fatal attacks on Presidents McKinley and Kennedy, and attempts on the life of President Ford.  Yet, as Millard gives Garfield a hero’s convalescence and death by dutifully quoting his final noble words and noting his endurance for pain, Weber regards Reagan as the hero of his own story by walking into the hospital in public view before collapsing in the hospital from blood loss, an act that concealed the serious nature of the attack and likely kept economic and socio-political chaos at bay.

As a jumping off point into the world of alternative histories, Millard presents a sturdy backstory from which theoreticians may leap.  How would leaving the bullet in Garfield so he may live have changed America, the Gilded Age, Jim Crow, and the debates of science and religion?  As a guide for future retro-explorers, Destiny of the Republic is a pleasant non-fiction spur for the imagination.

Teodore Birchard is the unexpected drummer for The Extraordinary Contraptions. He reads non-fiction. A lot.