The President Shot, 1881

Guiteau assassinates James Garfield as James Blaine looks on in horror.

(Bettmann/Corbis)

On July 2, 1881—125 years ago this weekend—President James A. Garfield was shot at the Baltimore & Potomac station in Washington by a failed lawyer named Charles Guiteau. The President took two months to die, and the trial of his assassin raised issues of criminal responsibility and the insanity defense that American jurisprudence struggles with to this day.

Garfield had been in office just under four months, but it had been an exhausting time. The Civil War hero and longtime congressman had wrestled with members of his own deeply divided Republican Party over cabinet appointments and other patronage issues. He had been the compromise candidate of the so-called Stalwart and Half-Breed factions at a deadlocked Republican convention. Since assuming the Presidency he had been working for civil-service reform to combat the entrenched spoils system in Washington. On that hot July morning he entered the train station, accompanied by his secretary of state, James G. Blaine, to catch a train to give a speech at his alma mater, Williams College, in Massachusetts. Afterward he planned to go on vacation with his family in his home state of Ohio.

Just inside the door, Charles Guiteau was waiting for him. Chronically unemployed, Guiteau nursed grandiose ideas of himself. He had attempted careers as a lawyer, evangelical preacher, and writer, but he had failed at them all, thanks in large part to the erratic, paranoid, and wildly unpredictable behavior of someone profoundly mentally ill. As a lawyer he cheated his clients out of relatively small sums while fleeing bill collectors himself; as a preacher he rambled bizarrely and incoherently; as a writer he was an untalented plagiarist. Before he became infamous for murdering the President, his own father wrote that he was “capable of any folly, stupidity, or rascality. The only possible excuse I can render for him is that he is absolutely insane and hardly responsible for his acts.”

His susceptibility to delusions became most apparent when he grew fixated on the presidential race of 1880. He moved to New York from Boston to be near the Republican campaign headquarters. There he persistently pestered party officials, including the vice-presidential candidate, Chester A. Arthur, pleading for speaking engagements and waving an odd pro-Garfield speech he had composed. He was ignored by Arthur and most everyone else, who pegged him as a crank. But when Garfield was elected President, Guiteau sincerely believed his speech had played a key role. As a reward, he felt he deserved nothing less than the consulship in Paris.

After Garfield’s inauguration, he haunted State Department offices and even the anterooms of the White House—from which he was soon banned by annoyed secretaries. Secretary of State Blaine grew so exasperated with Guiteau’s nonstop pleas that he told him: “Never bother me again about the Paris consulship so long as you live.”

Shortly thereafter, while lying in bed, Guiteau came to the conclusion that President Garfield had to be “removed,” and that he, Guiteau, had been chosen by God to do the job. In early June 1881 he borrowed money from a relative to buy the best-looking revolver he could find, believing that it would someday be preserved as a museum piece. He wrote a note in advance explaining his act: “This is not murder,” he wrote. “It is a political necessity. It will make my friend Arthur President, and save the Republic.”

He saw Garfield on the street a few times in next few weeks, unprotected—the Secret Service wouldn’t be charged to defend the President full-time until 1902, after the assassination of William McKinley. But Guiteau held his fire, finally deciding to act when he read a newspaper article that listed the President’s departure time from the Baltimore & Potomac station on July 2, 1881.

President Garfield entered the station at about 9:30 a.m. with Secretary Blaine, along with a servant carrying his bags. As they passed Guiteau, the assassin turned and shot the President in the back. “My God! What is this?” Garfield cried. Guiteau took a few steps toward the President and fired again. The President fell. The assassin tried to flee but was quickly stopped by a policeman, a ticket taker, and the station’s watchman. As he was led away from a quickly gathering crowd, he said, “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President.” Back at the train station, a doctor examined Garfield’s wounds and assured him that they were not serious. “I thank you, doctor,” said the President, lying in a pool of his own blood and vomit, “but I am a dead man.”

Garfield lingered for more than two months, until September 19, when he died in New Jersey, where he had been brought to the cooler shore over specially laid railroad tracks. The cause of death may have been an infection caused by doctors who had examined him without sterilizing their hands or instruments, medical precautions that were not yet universal.

Guiteau’s lawyers, among them his own brother-in-law, decided to pursue an insanity defense. But the idea that the assassin was legally insane put many Americans in a quandary. Surely he was highly eccentric, and he must have been mad to shoot the President of the United States in cold blood; but if he was found legally insane, he would avoid the death penalty, which many felt was the only fitting punishment for his crime. The prevailing legal standard for criminal responsibility at the time was called the M’Naughten Rule: If a defendant was aware of the consequences of his act, and knew it to be unlawful, then he was, in the eyes of the law, criminally responsible.

Expert witnesses were brought in to determine Guiteau’s state of mind, but their opinions differed greatly—despite the fact that he clearly suffered from delusions. At the trial, John Gray, of the Utica, New York, insane asylum, said that Guiteau was simply a wicked man: “A man may become profoundly depraved and degraded by mental habit and yet not be insane,” he testified. On the other hand Edward C. Spitzka, a neuroanatomist, was convinced that Guiteau had had a lifelong “tendency to misinterpret the real affairs of life” and should unquestionably be put in an insane asylum.

Guiteau himself, meanwhile, continually interrupted the trial with ranting outbursts, at one point singing a verse of “John Brown’s Body” in open court. He seemed convinced that he would go free. “No one wants to shoot or hang me now save a few cranks, who are so ignorant they can hardly read or write,” he said. But he was wrong. On January 5, 1882, he was found guilty—to deafening applause in the courtroom—and on June 30 he was hanged, though not before reciting a weird poem from the scaffold, containing the refrain “I am going to the Lordy.”

The train station where Garfield was assassinated no longer exists, and there is not even a plaque to mark the location. But the questions of criminal responsibility raised at Guiteau’s trial have continued to generate controversy. A century later a landmark trial involving the insanity defense also involved the shooting of a President. In the case of John Hinckley, Jr., who shot and nearly killed President Ronald Reagan in 1981, the defendant was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Then, too, many felt that that claim of insanity was outrageous, despite the fact that Hinckley, like Guiteau, was obviously mentally ill. There have been incalculable advances in the field of psychology since 1881, but the controversies that surround the insanity defense remain largely the same today.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.