The fraternity of presidential assassins is thankfully a small one, numbering only four. The most infamous members are John Wilkes Booth (who killed President Lincoln) and Lee Harvey Oswald (President Kennedy’s assassin, although some people don’t buy it).
And then you have the two lesser-known assassins, both of whom have Michigan roots.
Leon Czolgosz was born in 1873 in Detroit and spent his childhood moving around the state, to Alpena at the age of 7 and then to Posen, a tiny town just north of there. Czolgosz grew up to hate the government and became an anarchist and shot President William McKinley at a train station in Washington, D.C., in 1901.
McKinley died eight days later, and Czolgosz was tried, convicted, and got the electric chair a month after that. They didn’t mess around back then.
And then there’s the presidential assassin from Ann Arbor.
Charles J. Guiteau went to Ann Arbor High School (which later became Ann Arbor Pioneer), the same high school Jim Harbaugh, Ken Burns, and Bob Seger attended. Guiteau enrolled in 1859 and left in 1860 (there’s some uncertainty as to whether he actually graduated), and then 21 years later, in the summer of 1881, he shot President James A. Garfield, who had only been in office for about four months.
Garfield held on for 11 weeks after being shot, but after receiving some terrible medical care, he died on Sept. 19, 1881. That made Ann Arbor High School alum Charles Guiteau a presidential assassin, and less than a year later, he was hanged.
Guiteau’s story begins in 1841, when he was born in Freeport, Illinois. His mother died when he was 7, and the family moved to Wisconsin and then back to Illinois. He was a nervous little boy, constantly on the move, and it aggravated his father to the point where he offered little Charles a dime if he could keep his hands and feet still for five minutes. Dad never had to pay up.
Guiteau grew up with big goals for his life, though, and knew he needed an education to realize them. At age 18, he told his sister that his aim was to work hard and educate himself “physically, intellectually, and morally.”
That’s how he came to Ann Arbor.
In 1859, Charles’ grandfather died and left his grandson a $1,000 inheritance. He decided to use the money to attend the University of Michigan. When he got to Ann Arbor and tried to enroll, though, the people at U-M told him that his skills weren’t up to par.
It was customary back then for prospective U-M students who needed more preparation to enroll first at Ann Arbor High School, so that’s what Guiteau did. He started school in the fall of 1859 and spent the year there, but it wasn’t a pleasant time for him. He didn’t make any friends, and mostly spent his time reading the theological writings of John Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, a religious cult in upstate New York.
Guiteau gave up his dreams of attending the University of Michigan and, after leaving Ann Arbor, decided to move to New York to join the Oneida Community, which believed in communalism, group marriage, and “free love” sexual behavior.
He eventually grew disillusioned with the cult and became a lawyer, a bad one it would seem—he lost the only case he tried, got married (he was an abusive husband), and took an interest in politics.
Guiteau was also becoming increasingly unhinged. By the late 1870s, he fancied himself as an extremely important figure in theology and politics, and started giving speeches all over the country to crowds of almost no people. The speeches were mostly incoherent ramblings on the imminent end of the world.
Then came the presidential election of 1880. The Republicans at the time were split between two factions: the old-school Stalwarts and the reform-minded Half-Breeds. Guiteau was a Stalwart, and the man who eventually secured the GOP nomination, Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield, was supported by the Half-Breeds.
When Garfield won the nomination, he chose a Stalwart, Chester Alan Arthur, as his running mate. Guiteau decided to back Garfield and spent much of 1880 giving speeches to empty rooms in support of him. Still, when Garfield won the presidency, Guiteau was adamant that it was his brilliant orations which had clinched the election.
So in late 1880, with Garfield ready to take office, Guiteau wrote the president-elect a letter, asking to be named the consul to either Austria or France. After all, he reminded Garfield, he owed it all to Charles J. Guiteau. The incoming president ignored him, of course, so he started badgering other people in the administration.
Guiteau was directing most of his letters and visits to Secretary of State James Blaine. He told Blaine that he deserved a consulship as a “personal tribute.” The Secretary of State got so fed up that he fired off a letter to Guiteau that read, “Never bother me again about the Paris consulship so long as you live.”
Garfield took office in March, and by June, Guiteau had convinced himself that for the good of the country, he needed to kill the president. After all, that would allow a Stalwart to assume the office.
Guiteau was penniless at this point, but he was somehow able to borrow $15 from a relative to purchase a snub-nosed British Bulldog revolver. He then wrote a rambling screed that was discovered later, titled “Address to the American People,” in which he explained why he needed to assassinate the president. “It is not murder, it is a political necessity,” he wrote. “I leave my justification to God and the American people.”
He started stalking the new president via newspaper reports, discovering that Garfield would be taking a train out of Washington on July 2, right before Independence Day. He wrote a second paper justifying the murder by saying, “The president will be happier in paradise than here.”
Guiteau knew that the president was scheduled to take the 9:30 a.m. train, so he arrived at the Baltimore and Potomac train station an hour before. Garfield entered the train station with no security detail, and when he walked by Guiteau, the Ann Arbor High School alum fired at his back. The first shot grazed the president’s arm but the second one hit him square in the back, just above his waist.
The lone police officer on the scene grabbed Guiteau and subdued him. As he surrendered, Guiteau shouted out, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! Arthur is president now!”
Ah, but Arthur was not the president now. The bullet had indeed done a lot of damage to President Garfield, but it didn’t kill him. His doctors pretty much did that later.
Most medical professionals who look at the case now say that in today’s world, Garfield would have been in the hospital maybe two or three days and would have recovered quickly. But the doctors who were tending to the president made it that much worse by constantly sticking their unsterilized hands into Garfield’s wounds, poking and probing to see if they could help speed the healing along.
The president held on as long as he could, but eventually, the infections killed him on Sept. 19, a full 11 weeks after being shot. That made Chester A. Arthur the president, and it made Charles J. Guiteau an assassin.
When Guiteau’s trial started just two months later, he wanted to defend himself, but the judge wouldn’t allow it. The judge instead decided to let Guiteau’s brother-in-law, George Scoville, defend him. His main line of defense was temporary insanity, though everyone who knew him would say that Guiteau had permanent insanity.
During the trial, Guiteau’s time in Ann Arbor came up. According to newspaper accounts of the trial, his sister testified that: “She went to Ann Arbor to see him, as she had been informed he was going on worse than her father had ever done. She found he had abandoned his studies and was giving his whole time and attention to studying the bureau of publications of the Oneida Community.”
Guiteau decided to take matters into his own hands by writing a letter to President Arthur during the trial. He told the new president that he should pardon him because, after all, he made him president.
It didn’t work. The jury found him guilty, and six months later, he was hanged at the Washington, D.C., jail, dead at age 40.
The gun used by Guiteau to shoot Garfield was given to the Smithsonian Museum but somehow got lost over the years.
Assassination buffs in Michigan have plenty of artifacts to see in our home state, though. The chair that Lincoln was sitting in when he got shot and the limousine that Kennedy was riding in when he got shot are both at the Henry Ford in Dearborn. At the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum in Grand Rapids, meanwhile, you can see the revolver that Sara Jane Moore used when she tried to assassinate President Ford in 1975.
And the next time you’re in Ann Arbor, you can stop by the North Quad dormitory at the corner of Huron and State streets. That’s where Ann Arbor High School once stood, and where a future presidential assassin once roamed the halls.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
