James A. Garfield - 20th President, Assassination, Civil War | Britannica (2025)

By the time of his election, Garfield had begun to see education rather than the ballot box as the best hope for improving the lives of African Americans. In his inaugural speech he said, “The elevation of the Negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. No thoughtful man can fail to appreciate its beneficent effect upon our institutions and people.…It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.”

Garfield tried to put together a cabinet that would appease all factions of the Republican Party, but, prompted by his secretary of state, Blaine, he eventually challenged Conkling’s patronage machine in New York. Instead of appointing one of Conkling’s friends as collector of the Port of New York, Garfield chose a Blaine protégé, prompting the resignation of an outraged Conkling and strengthening the independence and power of the presidency. So demanding were the office seekers and the pressures of the patronage system that at one point Garfield wondered why anyone would want to seek the presidency. “My God,” he exclaimed, “what is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it!” The other significant development of Garfield’s short term of office, the Star Route scandal, involved the fraudulent dispersal of postal route contracts. “Go ahead regardless of where or whom you hit,” Garfield told investigators. “I direct you not only to probe this ulcer to the bottom, but to cut it out.” Despite such strong talk, Grant accused Garfield of having “the backbone of an angleworm.”

Assassination

On July 2, 1881, after only four months in office, while on his way to a family vacation in New England, Garfield was shot twice in the railroad station in Washington, D.C., by Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker with messianic visions. The first shot only grazed Garfield’s arm, but the second bullet pierced his back and lodged behind his pancreas. (In a letter dated November 1880, Garfield had written, “Assassination can be no more guarded against than death by lightning and it is not best to worry about either.”) Guiteau peaceably surrendered to police, calmly announcing, “I am a Stalwart. [Chester A.] Arthur is now president of the United States.”

Read about assassination and attempts involving U.S. presidents and presidential candidates.

In an era when the practice of medicine was largely oblivious of the role played by germs in illness and disease, a parade of doctors, both at the site of the shooting and in the hospital, poked and prodded Garfield’s wound in search of the bullet, heedless of the need for sterility and the danger of sepsis. The medical wisdom of the day dictated that the highest priority was the removal of the bullet, and a new invention by Alexander Graham Bell, the metal detector, was even brought in to aid in the search. In the process, Garfield’s body became ridden with an infection that would eventually take his life.

For 80 days the president lay ill and performed only one official act—the signing of an extradition paper. It was generally agreed that, in such cases, the vice president was empowered by the Constitution to assume the powers and duties of the office of president. But should he serve merely as acting president until Garfield recovered, or would he receive the office itself and thus displace his predecessor? Because of an ambiguity in the Constitution, opinion was divided, and, because Congress was not in session, the problem could not be debated there. On September 2, 1881, the matter came before a cabinet meeting, where it was finally agreed that no action would be taken without first consulting Garfield. But in the opinion of the doctors this was impossible, and no further action was taken before the death of the president on September 19, which was attributed to a fatal heart attack, massive hemorrhaging, and slow blood poisoning.

The public and the media were obsessed with this drawn-out passing of the president, leading historians to see in the brief Garfield administration the seeds of an important aspect of the modern president: the chief executive as celebrity and symbol of the nation. It is said that public mourning for Garfield was more extravagant than the grief displayed in the wake of Pres. Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which is startling in light of the relative roles these men played in American history. Garfield was buried beneath a quarter-million-dollar 165-foot (50-metre) monument in Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland.