James Garfield: Killed by a Man Who Wanted a Government Job

James Garfield was shot twice at a Washington train station on July 2, 1881, and didn’t die from either bullet. He died eleven weeks later from the infections his own doctors caused while probing a wound that had missed every vital organ. Charles Guiteau pulled the trigger, but American medicine finished the job.

James A. Garfield had been president for exactly 120 days when Charles J. Guiteau shot him twice at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station in Washington, D.C., on the morning of July 2, 1881. One bullet grazed his arm. The other entered his back, to the right of his spine, and lodged somewhere in his torso. Garfield did not die from the shot. He died from what happened next — eleven weeks of American medicine doing its worst.

Guiteau Believed His Campaign Speech Had Swung the Election

Charles J. Guiteau was 39 years old, a self-described lawyer, evangelist, and political operative who had attached himself to the Republican Party during the 1880 presidential campaign. His contribution was a speech he’d written and delivered a handful of times in Illinois, which he believed had been decisive in swinging the election to Garfield. He was wrong about this. The speech was not decisive. But Guiteau believed it, and belief was what drove him.

Starting in January 1881, Guiteau visited the State Department repeatedly to request an appointment as consul to Paris or Vienna. Secretary of State James Blaine personally told him, in May, to stop coming. Guiteau kept coming anyway. He began carrying a .44 British Bulldog revolver. In his journal, he described the assassination as a “divine necessity” — a political act, not a personal grievance, meant to elevate Vice President Chester Arthur to the presidency because Arthur was aligned with the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party and Garfield was not. Guiteau wanted to be seen as a political actor, not a lunatic. The distinction mattered deeply to him.

On the morning of July 2, Garfield was heading to Williams College, his alma mater, to give a speech. Guiteau shot him from behind in a women’s waiting room of the depot. Two police officers arrested him immediately. He did not resist.^1^

Eleven Weeks of Medical Malpractice

Garfield was conscious after the shooting. Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss — his actual first name was Doctor — took charge of the president’s care and proceeded to make things significantly worse over the next eleven weeks. Bliss probed the wound repeatedly with unwashed fingers and unsterilized instruments, searching for the bullet. He was looking in the wrong place. The bullet had traveled a path different from what he assumed.

Joseph Lister had published his germ theory of infection in 1867, fourteen years earlier. American medicine had largely not adopted it. Alexander Graham Bell was summoned to try a primitive metal detector he’d hastily adapted from a laboratory device. Bell’s device detected metal — but Garfield was lying on a metal-spring mattress, and the detector picked up the springs throughout the bed rather than the bullet.

By September, Garfield had lost roughly 80 pounds, dropping from about 210 pounds to around 130. He developed blood poisoning, abscesses throughout his body, and a wound that had been probed from a 3-inch entry to a 20-inch infected channel. On September 19, 1881, 79 days after the shooting, Garfield died at Elberon, New Jersey, where he’d been transported in hopes the sea air would help. The cause of death was sepsis — caused not by Guiteau’s bullet, but by his doctors.^2^^3^

The Bullet Had Missed Every Vital Organ — Garfield Probably Should Have Lived

The autopsy performed by Dr. Bliss confirmed that the bullet had lodged harmlessly, nowhere near any vital organ. Garfield could almost certainly have survived if the wound had been left alone, kept clean, and monitored. The 19th century had documented cases of patients living with bullets embedded in their torsos for years. Some doctors argued at the time that expectant management — doing less — was the right approach. They were overruled.

Guiteau picked up on this at trial. His defense included the argument that Garfield died not from the shooting but from medical malpractice, and that Guiteau should therefore not be held responsible for murder. The argument had medical logic behind it, but it failed legally. Guiteau was convicted on January 25, 1882, and hanged on June 30, 1882, exactly one year after the shooting. He recited a poem he’d written himself as he stood on the gallows. He expected to be admired for it.

Did Garfield’s Assassination Actually Accomplish What Guiteau Wanted?

The answer is a specific kind of no. Garfield’s death accelerated the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, signed into law by Chester Arthur — the same Chester Arthur Guiteau had wanted elevated. The act established competitive examinations for federal employment and created the Civil Service Commission, directly targeting the patronage spoils system that Guiteau had tried to exploit when he expected his campaign speech to earn him a diplomatic appointment.

The irony is structural: the man who killed Garfield because he couldn’t get a government job helped create the system that made government jobs merit-based. Guiteau’s crime made the cause he thought he was defending — patronage politics — dramatically harder to sustain.^4^

Garfield himself had a career worth noting before all this: he was the last president born in a log cabin, in Orange Township, Ohio, in 1831. He had been a professor, a Civil War general (rising to major general of volunteers), and a congressman for seventeen years before his election. He was in office 120 days. His widow, Lucretia Garfield, survived him by nearly 37 years, dying in 1918.

Garfield’s death is harder to metabolize than Lincoln’s because there’s no clean enemy, no clean cause. A delusional man with a misguided grievance, killed by doctors who wouldn’t stop touching the wound — the death feels less like history and more like farce. But the Pendleton Act is real. The civil service system that still governs federal hiring today runs in a direct line from a frustrated office-seeker on a train platform in July 1881. That’s the actual legacy: not the shooting, but the reform it forced. The same dynamic played out eighteen years later when an anarchist’s bullet elevated Theodore Roosevelt and reshaped American progressivism.

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Sources:

1. Ackerman, Kenneth D. Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield. Carroll & Graf, 2003.
2. Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Doubleday, 2011.
3. Rutkow, Ira. James A. Garfield. Times Books / Henry Holt, 2006.
4. Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920. Cambridge University Press, 1982.