Garfield and Guiteau

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The Election of 1880. Republican campaign workers in 1880 were both annoyed and amused by an eccentric character named Charles Julius Guiteau. A former Chicago lawyer, more recently a self-proclaimed theologian, Guiteau, aged thirty-nine, considered himself central to the Republican campaign. He wrote a long, convoluted speech, “Garfield versus Hancock,” which he offered to the campaign. Guiteau was certain his arguments would sway the American people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield and not the Democratic nominee, Winfield S. Hancock. When Garfield was elected, no one rejoiced more than Guiteau, and no one more firmly credited himself with the victory.

The Office Seeker. In January 1881 Guiteau moved

to Washington and bombarded president-elect Garfield with applications for consulships in Vienna, Paris, and Liverpool. Guiteau explained that his impending wedding to a wealthy heiress made him a suitable candidate for such positions. After Garfield took office on 4 March, Guiteau became both more determined and desperate. He could not pay his boardinghouse bill but left a note for the landlady promising her payment when he received his consulship, which paid $6,000 a year. With no friends in Washington, his clothes tattered and worn, Guiteau wrote more frequently and at greater length to the only people he thought he knew, the president and secretary of state. He advised the president on matters of policy and politics, encouraging him to seek reelection in four years. He did not meet Garfield, but a meeting with Secretary of State James G. Blaine to 14 May could not have been encouraging: “Never bother me again about the Paris consulship as long as you live,” Blaine told him.

Guiteau’s Plans. The lack of response on the part of the administration to his advice and proposals greatly angered Guiteau. Moreover, President Garfield’s policies alienated a faction of the Republican Party that

Guiteau supported. (The Stalwarts advocated the spoils system and a punitive policy toward the former Confederate states.) Alone and friendless, Guiteau decided that President Garfield had to be “removed” from office. He prayed for four weeks to ensure that the voice telling him to remove Garfield was God, not Satan. Once convinced, Guiteau borrowed fifteen dollars from a relative on 8 June, telling him that he needed to pay his landlord; instead he bought a .45-caliber revolver. For several weeks Guiteau divided his time observing the president’s routine, practicing with his pistol, and drafting an “Address to the American People,” explaining that Garfield’s death “was a political necessity, because he proved a traitor to the men who made him, and thereby imperiled the life of the Republic.” At 9:30 on the morning of Saturday, 2 July 1881, Guiteau approached Garfield as the president prepared to board a train at the Baltimore and Potomac Station. Garfield planned to attend a college commencement and then to take a much-needed vacation on the New Jersery shore. Guiteau shot Garfield twice, wounding him in the back and arm, before trying to flee. A District of Columbia police officer apprehended the assassin at the entrance to the train station. Guiteau said mildly: “I did it. I will go to jail for it. . . and I am a Stalwart.”

Death and Arraignment. Guiteau was taken to the District of Columbia jail. President Garfield, badly wounded, was taken to the White House. He lingered for two long, hot months. His suffering was eased somewhat by a crude air conditioner — navy engineers rigged a blower to pass air over a valut of ice and into the president’s sickroom. In September he was taken by special train to his oceanside cottage at Elberon, New Jersey, where doctors hoped the sea breezes would provide greater comfort; he died on 19 September. Meanwhile, Guiteau saw the president’s death as a sign that he had indeed acted as an emissary of God. He fully expected the American people, aside from those officeholders who owed their positions to Garfield, to thank him. However, with the president dead, Guiteau was indicted for murder. The District of Columbia prosecutor called in Judge John Porter of New York, a distinguished lawyer, to help in the prosecution. Guiteau was represented by his brother-in-law, George Scoville.

Defense Strategy. Scoville knew the only way to save his brother-in-law from the gallows was to argue that he was insane, and thus not criminally responsible for his actions. Guiteau always maintained that he acted as God’s agent and had no free will in the matter. “The responsibility lies on the Deity, and not on me, and that, in law, is insanity.” This would be Scoville’s main point, though he also argued at first that the doctors treating I Garfield, not Guiteau’s bullets, had actually killed the president. In addition, Scoville noted that Garfield had died in New Jersey and claimed that the Washington court did not have jurisdiction. Eventually Scoville dropped the last two points and focused instead on the insanity plea.

Insanity and Criminal Responsibility. Scoville’s defense strategy posed two problems. First, the law on insanity was changing in the late nineteenth century, as doctors and scientists debated the causes of mental illness. The modern science of psychiatry was then called alienism and had its origins during this time. Most Americans regarded the outward signs of mental illness as evidence of sin, rather than disease. Laws to protect the innocent did so by punishing sinners, not by curing them. Most American courts followed the M’Naghten rule, developed in England in 1843. Under this rule, the jury would presume a man sane until the defense demonstrated otherwise. The defense had to prove clearly that at the time the accused committed the crime he was suffering from a mental disease that made him either not “know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know he was doing what was wrong.” American courts had modified this rule somewhat. In 1868 an Iowa judge had suggested that a man would not be criminally responsible if he were driven by an irresistible impulse rooted in some mental disorder. The “irresistible impulse” theory had many critics. Then-congressman Garfield had supposedly written in 1871: “All that a man would need to secure immunity from murder would be to tear his hair and rave a little, and then kill his man.” A New York judge remarked: “If a man has an irresistible impulse to commit murder, the law should have an irresistible impulse to hang him.” In New Hampshire, Justice Charles Doe had suggested that the accused’s mental state was a matter of fact, not law, and that it would thus be up to the jury to determine criminal responsibility.

Guiteau as Defendant and Counsel. In this case it appeared that Guiteau clearly knew what he was doing and also understood the difference between right and wrong. However, the burden of proof was only part of Scoville’s problem; more fundamental was the problem of Guiteau himself. He regarded himself as his own counsel and claimed that he was clinically, if not legally, sane. During Scoville’s opening statement, Guiteau argued with the main point his counsel tried to make. When a defense witness, a Washington editor, characterized Guiteau’s “Garfield versus Hancock” speech as incomprehensible, Guiteau objected: “Mr. Scoville had no business to put you on the stand . . . he must not put any more of this expert fool business on the stand. . . . I am not a fool. I would rather be hung as a man than acquitted as a fool.” Throughout the trial Guiteau harassed witnesses, insulted the judge, jury, and lawyers, compared himself to the apostle Paul, and signed autographs. Guiteau had become a celebrity, enjoyed receiving visitors and mail in jail, and believed that God, who had made him kill President Garfield, and the American people, who benefited from his action, would never let him be executed.

Expert Witnesses. Guiteau and the prosecution both argued for his sanity. Both the prosecution and defense called a succession of prominent doctors to examine Guiteau. The most famous was John P. Gray, superintendent of the New York Asylum for the Insane at Utica, editor of the American Journal of ‘Insanity, and a firm believer in the M’Naghten rule. Gray interviewed Guiteau for three days in November 1881 and was convinced the assassin was sane. Guiteau was depraved, Gray concluded, and intensely egotistic, swayed completely by his uncontrolled passions and self-indulgence, and his life therefore had been one of “moral degradation, moral obliquity, profound selfishness and disregard for the rights of others.” On the other hand, Charles Folsom of McLean Hospital in Boston found Guiteau to be insane. Folsom noted that Guiteau was coherent, had a quick memory in subjects that interested him, and on some matters could converse “calmly and amiably,” but Folsom was struck by Guiteau’s inability to connect his thoughts, his weak judgment, reason, and reflection and his maniacal excitement when challenged or contradicted. Gray and other traditional physicians saw a difference between true mental illness and simple immoral behavior. Others, like Folsom, and a growing number of doctors trained in Europe, were influenced by the work of Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, believing that criminal behavior and insanity were the result of heredity, that they represented a degeneration from a contemporary moral order. Edward Spitzka, a New York neuroanatomist who had trained in Europe, argued that the brains of criminals and the insane would have characteristic structural patterns, demonstrating a hereditary degeneration. Spitzka, who had severely criticized Gray in medical journals, testified that Guiteau was completely unable to evaluate the world realistically, as evidenced by Guiteau’s plan to tour Europe and America as a lecturer once he was acquitted.

Conviction and Sentence. On 5 January 1882 the jury deliberated for just over one hour before agreeing that Guiteau was guilty of first-degree murder. A month later, when the judge denied a motion for a new trial, Guiteau exploded at Scoville that his “jackass theory” had convicted him. The convicted murderer was sentenced to hang on 30 June. He remained convinced that President Chester A. Arthur, owing his position to Guiteau’s act, would pardon him. In late June a group of neurologists unsuccessfully petitioned Arthur to spare Guiteau’s life, not out of gratitude, but because they believed he was insane. Meanwhile, Guiteau published his autobiography, The Truth and the Removal, the first half a religious tract he had written earlier and the second half a collection of documents and commentaries on Garfield’s assassination and the trial. On the

appointed day Guiteau was led to the gallows. Before dying he sang a song he had written at ten o’clock that morning: “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad, I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad.”

Aftermath. Guiteau’s bizarre behavior at his execution convinced some who had thought him sane that he truly was not. His autopsy suggested, but did not conclusively demonstrate, abnormality. The gray cells of his brain had degenerated, and a modern pathologist looking at the results noted evidence of “syphilitic involvement” with the brain, as well as evidence of chronic malaria. Four months after Guiteau’s execution, his sister, Frances Scoville, was judged insane, evidence perhaps of hereditary insanity. No jury in 1882 would have acquitted the man who murdered the president. However, three years later a Student’s Guide to Medical Jurisprudence claimed that if Guiteau’s victim had been less prominent, he would not have been put on trial.

Source

Charles E. Rosenberg, The Trial of the Assassin Guiteau: Psychiatry and Law in the Gilded Age (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1968).