The Bizarre Trial of James Garfield’s Assassin

The shocking assassination of President James Garfield began with one man’s delusion. On July 2, 1880, Charles Guiteau arrived at the YMCA in Poughkeepsie, New York, to deliver the address he was certain would make Garfield president. Nobody came to listen.

Failure had dogged Guiteau throughout his life. He flopped as a lawyer, evangelist, insurance salesman and even as a member of a free-love commune. But when he finally delivered his oration in New York later that summer, the Illinois-born drifter convinced himself it clinched the Republican presidential nominee’s eventual victory.

When Garfield spurned his request for a plum diplomatic post in Vienna or Paris as a reward for sealing the White House, Guiteau decided to seal the president’s fate. Exactly one year after traveling to Poughkeepsie to hail Garfield, Guiteau shot him twice at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, D.C.

At first, Guiteau appeared to fail yet again: Garfield survived the shooting. But he couldn’t survive the septic infection caused by doctors probing the wound with unsterilized hands and instruments. The new president died on September 19, 1881, after 80 agonizing days.

Guiteau’s ensuing trial, the first presidential murder case to go to court, became a media sensation. The spectacle gripped the Gilded Age press and forced Americans to confront emerging questions about mental illness and legal responsibility.

Although repulsed by the eccentric Guiteau, America couldn’t look away. The public ate up the morsels of information he spoon-fed to journalists. The New York Herald printed a long jailhouse statement from the assassin in which he detailed the shooting, announced his presidential aspirations and advertised for a wife, preferably “an elegant Christian lady of wealth, under thirty, belonging to a first-class family.”

Finding no matrimonial takers, the assassin also struggled to find a lawyer. Ultimately, Guiteau’s brother-in-law George Scoville, an Illinois patent attorney, took the case out of family duty. Although he had participated in just two criminal trials, he knew the 40-year-old’s family history of mental illness.

Guiteau’s mother, who died when he was seven, suffered from psychotic episodes. His brutal father beat him for stuttering or not properly reciting his prayers. Guiteau’s odd behavior turned violent, causing his wife to flee after years of physical and verbal abuse. “He is a fit subject for a lunatic asylum,” Guiteau’s father declared in 1875.

At his Washington, D.C., arraignment on October 14, 1881, Guiteau pleaded not guilty with insanity as his primary defense. The defendant described the shooting as an act of God: “The Divine pressure on me to remove the president was so enormous that it destroyed my free agency, and therefore I am not legally responsible for my act.”

When weighing an insanity defense, American courts adopted the M’Naghten rule, a British legal standard formulated in 1843 that concluded defendants bore no guilt if they could prove they were unaware of the nature of their actions or incapable of understanding right from wrong. A grieving public had little stomach for Guiteau’s insanity defense. “The feeling is quite general,” reported The New York Times, “that it would be best to execute him first and try the question of his sanity afterward.”

Prosecutors declared Guiteau fully competent to stand trial, and the case of United States v. Charles J. Guiteau began on November 14, 1881. Before the prosecution could even open its case, Guiteau disrupted the proceedings. Objecting to a court-appointed defense attorney and his team of “blunderbuss lawyers,” Guiteau announced he would act as his own counsel and traded a seat in the prisoner’s dock for one next to Scoville.

When Judge Walter Cox denied Guiteau’s attempt to deliver an opening statement, the defendant declared the magistrate had no right to muzzle him. “I intend to be heard in this case, and I will make a noise about it,” he barked.

Seeking to avoid any grounds for a mistrial, Cox indulged Guiteau’s frequent outbursts, interruptions and attempts to question witnesses and refute testimony. The defendant shouted objections—at his own lawyers’ questions—and critiqued Scoville’s competence. “Don’t spoil the matter on cross-examination,” he shouted at his brother-in-law. “You are a jackass on the question of cross-examination. I must tell you that right in public, to your face.”

Thirty-six doctors—23 for the prosecution and 13 for the defense—gave dueling assessments of Guiteau’s sanity. The trial turned macabre when Dr. Willard Bliss, the chief physician who attended to Garfield after the shooting, displayed a five-inch segment of the president’s spine to show jurors that the trajectory of the bullet—not his own incompetence—killed the president. Some jurors wept as they passed around the late president’s vertebrae.

After one court session adjourned, a drunken Maryland farmer on horseback galloped alongside the coach returning the prisoner to jail and fired his pistol at the assassin. The bullet singed a hole in Guiteau’s coat but left him unscathed. After surviving a steamship collision that claimed 80 lives, a jump from a speeding train and a gunshot fired by one of his prison guards, Guiteau once again escaped death.

Just when it appeared the trial could get no more dramatic, Guiteau took the stand. Testifying for nearly a week, the defendant told the court he had an accomplice—a divine one. “I believe that it was the will of God that he should be removed, and that I was the appointed agent to do it,” he said under cross-examination. “I did not do that act in my own personality. I united myself with the Deity.” Guiteau also admitted being the president’s assailant—but not his murderer. “I did not kill the President. The doctors did that. I merely shot him.”

Guiteau repeatedly thwarted Scoville’s insanity defense by detailing his meticulous preparations and clarifying that he was only insane at the moment of the shooting—but no longer. “I shot the president on the second of July. I wouldn’t do it again for a million dollars, with the mind I have got now,” he declared. He also hurt his case by describing his forethought in buying an ivory-handled pistol because he thought it would look better in a museum exhibit.

The defendant delivered his own closing argument during which he swayed, fixed his eyes to the heavens and sang “John Brown’s Body”—and then argued that he was as much a patriot as George Washington. He contended that God had kept Garfield alive for 80 days to ease the presidential transition. “The Deity allowed the doctors to finish my work gradually, because He wanted to prepare the people for the change,” he told the jury.

After two months of testimony, the trial ended late in the afternoon of January 26, 1882. The jury took just 65 minutes to return a verdict.

As a cold winter rain fell outside, candles flickered in the courtroom as foreman John Hamlin announced the jury’s verdict: “Guilty as indicted.”

Cox sentenced Guiteau to death by hanging. The Supreme Court and President Chester A. Arthur refused to consider appeals to spare the assassin’s life, and a visit by Guiteau’s sister to the home of Garfield’s widow proved fruitless.

An estimated 20,000 people entered the lottery to watch the president’s killer die. The 250 winners—some of whom paid $300 for a ticket—filed into the D.C. jail on June 30, 1882, eager to witness the gruesome sight. In his final moments, Guiteau recited a rambling, five-stanza poem, “I Am Going to the Lordy,” which he had penned that morning.

After a benediction, the executioner looped a noose around his neck and draped a heavy black hood over his head. Guiteau dropped his poem to the ground as a signal to his executioner to open the trapdoor.

The assassin’s body was buried in the jail’s courtyard but didn’t rest in peace for long. After an exhumation days later, doctors at the U.S. Army Medical Museum removed Guiteau’s brain and distributed sections to psychiatrists around the country to study for signs of insanity. (Modern pathologists theorize that chronic malaria and cerebral syphilis might have affected Guiteau’s brain.) Today, portions of the assassin’s brain, spleen and skeleton are stored at the National Museum of Health and Medicine along with the section of Garfield’s spine used as a trial exhibit, grisly reminders of a presidential assassination.