"I made the rope to hang that monster, that devil, Guiteau.... I took great pleasure in making that one..... There are over fourteen other rope-makers in the United States who made ropes for him, and I don't know positively whose was used. I am pretty sure it was mine, though, for the papers afterwards said that there were 124 strands in the rope, and I don't think there were that many strands in any but mine."
~ "Hemp for the Hangman," The Weekly Courier (Connellsville, Pennsylvania), 30 July 1886, page 3
*This blog post is one in a series of blogs on my famous ancestor, Jacob Bupp, the Hangman's Ropemaker- click the page tab above labeled "The Hangman's Ropemaker" for more information and the blog series*
On 2 July 1881, the United States was rocked by a foul deed as the country's leader was felled by two bullets from an assassin's pistol while waiting to board the 9:30 am limited from the Potomac Station in Washington, D.C. While the leader lingered for nearly eighty days after the assassination attempt, he ultimately succumbed to his injuries and the assassin's name became quite notorious across the country and even the world.
The leader was President James Abram Garfield. The assassin was Charles Julius Guiteau.
The Descent into Madness
Charles Julius Guiteau was born in Freeport, Illinois in 1841 as the fourth of six children born to Luther Wilson and Jane Howe Guiteau. His mother suffered from mental illness, and died when Guiteau was seven years old. His father, who was reported to be rigidly and fanatically religious, remarried, and Guiteau was brought up by his stepmother. According to various sources, Guiteau's childhood was abusive and harsh, and several members of his family had at one point or another been in mental institutions.
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Charles Julius Guiteau
Source: Wikipedia Commons
Photo in the Public Domain, and taken by an unknown photographer
cropped by Connormah |
Despite a rough childhood, Guiteau set out to educate himself, and was able to study for a time at the University of Michigan due to an inheritance from a grandmother. However, though ambitiously audacious, he seemed to fail at everything that he did.
Guiteau tried to establish the first theocratic newspaper in the United States called the
Daily Theocrat, but it failed. He had a failed lawsuit against the utopian Oneida Community (claiming he paid into the community and didn't get anything in return). He even failed at marriage, having married a woman by the name of Annie Bunn, only to be divorced five years later. He worked as a debt collector, but ended up pocketing funds he should have used to pay clients. He later billed himself as a lawyer, though he spent a great deal of his time in incoherent ramblings. He lived a very peripatetic life, moving around the country as funds and his own audacity allowed. He created friendships with people in his mind, having based them on just mere passing acquaintances, and stalked those he thought of as his "close friends", many of whom barely even knew him. Those who did know him well throughout his life often deemed him worthy of being an inmate at a lunatic asylum. Contemporary sources wonder if he was suffering from schizophrenia or paranoid delusions.
Enter Garfield
Guiteau's obsession with President Garfield began when Garfield was running for President and was endorsed finally as the Republican candidate at the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Guiteau's passion at that time was politics, particularly the reactionary Stalwart section of the Republican party. Since Garfield was the Republican nomination, even though he wasn't a Stalwart but rather a more progressive Half-Breed, Guiteau had tried to campaign hard for Garfield. However, due to his erratic ways, he was only allowed to speak at one engagement in New York to a handful of black voters. When Garfield won the 1880 Presidential Election against the Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock, Guiteau concluded that his ideas and his campaigning for the presidential-elect helped Garfield win the office.
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President James A. Garfield
Source: Library Of Congress, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection
Photo in the Public Domain, digital id number cwpbh 03744 |
After the conclusion of the election, Guiteau wrote to Garfield congratulating him on his victory and asking for an appointment to a diplomatic post, deciding he wanted the post to Vienna. After the inauguration, he campaigned hard for the post he decided he so deserved, writing letter after letter to anyone he could think of. Many of these letters were full of ramblings insisting that the President owed him such a diplomatic appointment because Garfield wouldn't have won the presidential election without Guiteau's ideas. He later settled particularly on the Parisian consulate for one reason or another (after giving up on the Austrian post), and visited the White House a number of times trying to gain an audience with the President to gain his desire. It was a fruitless and frustrating campaign.
The political nature in Washington D. C. was as volatile as ever, and it appeared that the Republican Party seemed to be splintering due to political dramatics between the Stalwarts and Half-Breed factions. Fearing the loss of his party and becoming almost paranoid about the perceived schism, Guiteau became increasingly convinced he needed to do away with Garfield for the sake of the nation and for the sake of the Republican Party. This paranoia was influenced also by the fact that he was barred from the White House and other key areas in Washington D.C. due to his own increasing belligerence. As a result, Guiteau felt that he was mandated by God to kill Garfield.
As these delusions became increasingly stronger, he intentionally went about choosing the perfect weapon for the crime. He contrived to buy a gun that would be displayed as a beautiful tribute to him after his deed was carried out, because after all, God told him to kill Garfield and he would be a hero. Thus, he settled on a .44-caliber British Bulldog snub nosed revolver that he bought at a local shop and had just learned to shoot.
Sometime in mid-June of 1881, Guiteau had his first chance at assassination. Due to a recent bout with malaria that nearly killed her, Lucretia Rudolph Garfield was still pale and sickly, and the President decided to take his wife to New Jersey for the fresh air (as it was considerably less swampy than Washington D. C.). When the couple stepped from their carriage at the train station, Mrs. Garfield clung to her husband so tenderly that Guiteau lost his resolve to shoot at the President. He stated in later interviews that he couldn't take the life of her husband with her wan appearance tugging at his heartstrings, so he waited for another opportunity.
He soon had another chance. On the morning of 2 July 1881, President Garfield was at the Potomac Station, intending to partake in a reunion at his alma mater at Williams College in Massachusetts and then on to visit Lucretia in New Jersey, where she was still recovering. While he waited for the train with his two eldest sons, Harry and Jim, and Secretary of State James G. Blaine, Guiteau approached and shot twice. The first bullet grazed the President's arm, while the second one entered his back and traveled through his abdomen. Guiteau, when arrested by Washington D.C. policemen, was found to have a note on his self that stated he was not acting out of ill will, but rather that the Garfield's impending death was a political necessity.
Fun fact: While the Secret Service had been an institution since just after Lincoln's assassination in 1865, they were mostly an anti-counterfeiting force at the time of Garfield's death and worked as body guards on a part-time basis. Some sources suggest that Garfield felt he didn't need any. It wasn't until McKinley was assassinated in 1901 that the Secret Service finally was given the job of protecting the President of the United States full time.... they still are in charge of anti-counterfeiting on top of protecting the First Family.
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| Heading from the front page The Sun (New York, New York), 3 July 1881; Source: Chronicling America |
The President was probed by several doctors at the White House, all of who did not sterilize their hands nor their instruments, all of whom tried to find the bullet that had entered his back. Alexander Graham Bell used his new invention, called an induction balance machine (which was essentially the first metal detector) to help to try to find the bullet, but because doctors thought it was in his pelvis, when it was actually lodged next to the vertebrae it had shattered when it entered his body.
James A. Garfield died on 19 September 1881 as a result of Guiteau's shooting, as the injury (and others that resulted from the doctors trying to find the bullet) had become septic. He suffered in agony for eighty days before finally dying in the New Jersey seashore home of a friend. An autopsy revealed that poor medical application ultimately killed the President, but Guiteau was still formally charged with his murder.
The Trial
On 8 October 1881, George Corkhill, the district attorney for Washington D.C., filed the indictment charging Guiteau with murder. Guiteau's brother-in-law, George Scoville, who became Guiteau's main defense lawyer, asked the court for a continuance to gather witness for the defense, as he intended to argue that Guiteau was insane and that the president's death was due to malpractice instead of Guiteau. This motion was granted, but Guiteau insisted on representing himself in trial.
Guiteau by the time of his trial had become a notorious celebrity, and because Gilded Age reporting had a flair for the romantic, newspaper writers seemed to feed upon the delusional craziness of his statements and wrote extensively about him, often times vilifying him in the press. If interested in reading a number of free accounts of Guiteau's trial and hanging, one merely needs to go to
Elephind.com.
The trial began 14 November of 1881 and lasted the better part of the next two months. In those months, at least two attempts were made on Guiteau's life, and he was kept in near isolation at the prison in D.C. to protect him. Guiteau rejected any talk of pleading insanity, as he knew it was wrong to kill the president. However, he insisted that God mandated him to be the assassin and shoot Garfield. He also argued that it was actually the fault of the physicians that were in charge of Garfield's care when he was shot that Garfield had died, as they had caused the president to succumb to septicemia.
It took only an hour of deliberation for the jury (which included one African American) to render a verdict of guilty.
Scoville motioned for a retrial, and according to a number of papers, he asked publicly for funds to be raised in order to better defend his client, for he still lobbied hard to have Guiteau found insane. However, it appears the general consensus of opinion was that Guiteau was guilty and deserved to hang.
The Hanging
Guiteau appeared to be confident that he would be pardoned by the former Vice-President Chester A. Arthur, who was sworn in as President of the United States when Garfield died. In Guiteau's mind, Arthur owed his presidency to the assassin, and since "I happen to know him well," the new president would see the goodness in Guiteau's deed and grant him a full pardon. (Unfortunately for Guiteau, while President Arthur admitted to having met Guiteau, he denied anything more than a passing acquaintance with the man, and decided to not intervene in the hanging.)
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| Clipping from the front page of Daily Globe (St. Paul, Minnesota), 1 July 1882; source: Chronicling America |
While originally he planned to appear at his hanging dressed only in his underwear, he was persuaded not to because it would only give further fuel to the notion he was really insane.
Just before he was hanged, he claimed "I saved my party and my land, glory hallelujah!" This line was part of a much longer poem which he wrote in honor of his death, which was published in various newspapers across the nation. He died almost instantly, and his death was witnessed by many people, including his brother John and sister Frances (the wife of his defense attorney).
He was immediately autopsied after his demise, and while he was deemed healthy of body, his brain had a number of lesions on it that were deemed unhealthy. It was later surmised that he likely had syphilis as well as any number of mental disorders.
Many still argue to present times whether or not Guiteau was insane, and there has been much discussion on whether or not he should have been executed.
Who made the rope?
Much discussion appeared in newspapers after the hanging of Guiteau as to who actually made the rope, and of course Jacob Bupp was one of the ropemakers who was named in those discussions. According to a later interview Jacob gave Pittsburgh reporters:
“When Guiteau was executed, Mr. Bupp was one of about a score of persons who made ropes and sent them to the officials at the national capital to be used at the execution of President Garfield's assassin. Mr. Bupp has every reason to believe his rope was the one used. The ordinary rope is made of 64 strands, but the one he sent to Washington contained 110 strands. The description of the rope, given in Harper's Weekly after the hanging, tallied with Mr. Bupp’s rope.” ("Making Nine Ropes," Pittsburgh Dispatch (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 31 March 1890, page 2)
Some newspaper accounts of Bupp's death give this romantic line: "Bupp was asked to make a silk rope for Guiteau, but he refused, claiming that silk was too good for such an assassin."
However, another interview he gave for a newspaper stated this:
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| Clipped from the article "Ropes for the Hangmen: The Art of Making Them Explained by an Expert," Passaic Daily Herald (Passaic, New Jersey), 4 February 1892, page 1; source: Newspapers.com |
However, news accounts suggest anywhere from six to fourteen ropemakers sent in ropes for the event, and at least two other men publicly claimed their rope was indeed the one with which Guiteau met his fate. One was a man from St. Louis, Missouri by the name of Robert H. Humphreys. When Humphreys passed in 1891 and his death reported across national newspapers, Bupp refuted the man's statement, saying "he wanted to enter a protest against giving that honor to anyone except himself"
( "Hanging's The Way," Pittsburgh Dispatch, 26 December 1891, page 3).
A second man in Baltimore also claimed the honor, and his death was also widely reported when he died in 1912:
My own family lore (as well as Bupp's testimony in several papers) maintain that Bupp was the maker of the rope. My grandmother, who was his great-granddaughter, stated matter-of-factly that she had once seen and touched a piece of the rope Bupp kept from that hanging as a child , although such evidence is lost to history. While there is no doubt that Jacob did in fact make a rope and send it to Washington D.C. hoping that he would have been the maker of the instrument of demise, it will forever remain a mystery whether or not his rope was the one used to launch Guiteau into eternity.
Sources Used or Referenced
"Bupp's Ropes Famous," The Saint Paul Globe (Saint Paul, Minnesota), 7 May 1899, page 7; online images, Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/ : accessed 21 September 2017).
"Échos Et Nouvelles," Le Petit Parisien (Paris, France), 8 June 1899, page 2; online images, Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/ : accessed 21 September 2017).
"Famous Rope Maker Dead," Altoona Mirror (Altoona, Pennsylvania), 24 February 1899, page 2; online images, Newspapers.com (www.newspapers.com : accessed 21 September 2017).
Hayes, H. G. and Hayes, C. G. A Complete History of the Life and Trial of Charles Julius Guiteau, Assassin of President Garfield (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1882), ; online images, Internet Archive (archive.org : accessed 7 June 2019).
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Linder, Douglas O. Famous Trials (https://famous-trials.com/ : accessed 7 June 2019), "The Trial of Charles Guiteau: An Account".
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Mara, Wil. Presidents and Their Times: James Garfield (Tarrytown, New York: Marshall Cavendish, 2012), 72-80.
Millard, Candice. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (New York: Doubleday, 2011).
Moore, Kathyrn. "James Garfield" in The American President: A Complete History (New York, New York: Fall River Press, 2007), 245.
"Oral interview with Elizabeth J. (Pfeiffer) Wood," 1999-2018 by granddaughter Kelley Wood-Davis, owned by Kelley Wood-Davis, Norwalk, Iowa, no notes taken; oral information on family history until Elizabeth Wood's death in 2018.
Paulson, George, "Death of a President and his Assassin: Errors in their Diagnosis and Autopsies," Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 15, no 2 (June 2006), 77-91. Advanced Placement Source, EBSCOhost (accessed 7 June 2019).
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"Random Comment," sydicated news column, Cleveland Leader (Cleveland, Ohio), 4 April 1899, page 4; online images, Genealogy Bank (www.genealogybank.com : accessed 21 September 2017), Newspaper Archive.
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"Un Cordier Yankee," La Presse (Paris, France), 10 June 1899, p 2; online images, Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr/accueil/ : accessed 21 September 2017).
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"Wants that Honor," The Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita, Kansas), 1 October 1887, page 5; online images, Newspapers.com (www.newspapers.com : accessed 14 September 2017).
