THE EXECUTION OF CHARLES JULIUS GUITEAU, THE ASSASINT OF PRESIDENT GARFIELD...

 

At 12.40 p.m. on the 30th of June 1882 Charles Guiteau was hanged before a large number of witnesses in the yard of the District of Columbia jail for shooting President James Garfield, but not before he had recited fourteen verses of the Gospel of Saint Matthew and a poem, he had written entitled “I am Going to the Lordy. I am so glad”. 

 Somehow one imagines the springing of the trap was a relief to all present, except possibly Guiteau.  The neck was brocken by the drop and it took 16 minutes for heart action to cease.  It was reported that when the body was lowered, the black hood was removed and the face exposed, the features were pallid and composed. About the mouth there was considerable moisture in the form of froth.  The body was later buried in the gaol yard, near the gallows.


Guiteau was a strange character and a failure at almost everything he tried.  It is probable that he really was insane as brain defects were discovered at his autopsy.  In early June of 1881, Guiteau borrowed $15 for the purchase of a revolver.  On the 16th of that month, he published his “Address to the American People” which set out his intention of assassinating Garfield on the basis that he was “a traitor to the men who made him.”

Guiteau knew President Garfield planned to leave Washington DC for Massachusetts at around 9:30 on the morning of the 2nd of July 1881 and went to the Baltimore & Potomac train station in search of him.  It seems that Guiteau found Garfield in the waiting room and here he fired two shots from his 45 caliber revolver into the President.

  One merely grazed him and the other entered his back close to the spine.  This was not a fatal wound by any means and the bullet lodged in a cyst.  However, the President’s doctors tried to remove the bullet and in doing so caused far more harm than Guiteau had done.  Garfield languished and died two months later from sepsis on the 19th of September 1881.  Guiteau was formally indicted for the murder the 14th of October 1881. 

Guiteau would use this information as part of his defence, blaming the doctors for Garfield’s death rather than himself.  His trial opened on the 14th of November 1881 before Judge Walter Cox.  The defendant constantly interrupted the proceedings with idiotic outbursts and verbal attacks on the witnesses.  There was much discussion of his sanity.  Dr. John Gray, the superintendent of the Utica Asylum, appeared as an expert witness for the prosecution and testified that Guiteau was legally sane.  For the defence Dr. Edward C. Spitzka testified that Guiteau was probably insane at the time of the crime. 

 The jury took an hour to return a guilty verdict and Guiteau was sentenced to death on the 30th of January 1882.  He appealed his case, to the U.S. Supreme Court, who rejected it.  He also tried a direct appeal for clemency to the new President, whom he had in effect put into office.  As it was a Federal case the President had and still has the power to commute the death sentence. President Chester A. Arthur declined to do so.

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