A detachment of troops captured Booth on April 26 at a farm near Bowling Green, Va.; he received a bullet wound and died a few hours later. At a trial in June, a military tribunal sentenced four of Booth’s associates to death and four others to terms of imprisonment.[A7-14]
Lincoln’s assassination revealed the total inadequacy of Presidential protection. A congressional committee conducted an extensive investigation of the assassination, but with traditional reluctance, called for no action to provide better protection for the President in the future. Nor did requests for protective measures come from the President or from Government departments. This lack of concern for the protection of the President may have derived also from the tendency of the time to regard Lincoln’s assassination as part of a unique crisis that was not likely to happen to a future Chief Executive.[A7-15]
THE NEED FOR PROTECTION FURTHER DEMONSTRATED
For a short time after the war, soldiers assigned by the War Department continued to protect the White House and its grounds. Metropolitan Washington policemen assisted on special occasions to maintain order and prevent the congregation of crowds. The permanent Metropolitan Police guard was reduced to three and assigned entirely to protection at the White House. There was no special group of trained officers to protect the person of the President. Presidents after Lincoln continued to move about in Washington virtually unattended, as their predecessors had done before the Civil War, and, as before, such protection as they got at the White House came from the doormen, who were not especially trained for guard duty.[A7-16]
This lack of personal protection for the President came again tragically to the attention of the country with the shooting of President James A. Garfield in 1881. The President’s assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, was a self-styled “lawyer, theologian, and politician” who had convinced himself that his unsolicited efforts to help elect Garfield in 1880 entitled him to appointment as a consul in Europe. Bitterly disappointed that the President ignored his repeated written requests for appointment to office and obsessed with a kind of megalomania, he resolved to kill Garfield.
At that time Guiteau was 38 years old and had an unusually checkered career behind him. He had been an itinerant and generally unsuccessful lecturer and evangelist, a lawyer, and a would-be politician. While it is true he resented Garfield’s failure to appoint him consul in Paris as a reward for his wholly illusory contribution to the Garfield campaign, and he verbally attacked Garfield for his lack of support for the so-called Stalwart wing of the Republican Party, these may not have supplied the total motivation for his crime. At his trial he testified that the “Deity” had commanded him to remove the President. There is no evidence that he confided his assassination plans to anyone or that he had any close friends or confidants. He made his attack on the President under circumstances where escape after the shooting was inconceivable. There were some hereditary mental problems in his family and Guiteau apparently believed in divine inspiration.[A7-17]
Guiteau later testified that he had had three opportunities to attack the President prior to the actual shooting. On all of these occasions, within a brief period of 3 weeks, the President was unguarded. Guiteau finally realized his intent on the morning of July 2, 1881. As Garfield was walking to a train in the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington, Guiteau stepped up and shot him in the back. Garfield did not die from the effects of the wound until September 19, 1881. Although there was evidence of serious abnormality in Guiteau, he was found guilty of murder and sentenced to be hanged. The execution took place on June 30, 1882.[A7-18]
At least one newspaper, the New York Tribune, predicted that the assault on Garfield would lead to the President becoming “the slave of his office, the prisoner of forms and restrictions,” in sharp and unwelcome contrast to the splendidly simple life he had been able to live before.
The bullet of the assassin who lurked in the Washington railway station to take the life of President Garfield shattered the simple Republican manner of life which the custom of nearly a century has prescribed for the Chief Magistrate of the United States. Our Presidents have been the first citizens of the Republic—nothing more. With a measure of power in their hands far greater than is wielded by the ruler of any limited monarchy in Europe, they have never surrounded themselves with the forms and safeguards of courts. The White House has been a business office to everybody. Its occupant has always been more accessible than the heads of great commercial establishments. When the passions of the war were at fever heat, Mr. Lincoln used to have a small guard of cavalry when he rode out to his summer residence at the Soldier’s Home; but at no other time in our history has it been thought needful for a President to have any special protection against violence when inside or outside the White House. Presidents have driven about Washington like other people and travelled over the country as unguarded and unconstrained as any private citizen.[A7-19]
The prediction of the Tribune did not come to pass. Although the Nation was shocked by this deed, its representatives took no steps to provide the President with personal protection. The President continued to move about Washington, sometimes completely alone, and to travel without special protection. There is a story that President Chester A. Arthur, Garfield’s successor, once went to a ceremony at the Washington Navy Yard on a public conveyance that he hailed in front of the White House.[A7-20]