Destiny of the Republic

On the night of June 11, 1880, a steamship called the Stonington was crossing Long Island Sound in dense fog. Among its passengers was a man who had failed at nearly everything in life. Charles Guiteau was heading from Boston to New York, toward the Republican Party's headquarters, just after James Garfield had been nominated for president.

The fog grew thicker. Suddenly, another ship emerged from the darkness. The Narragansett slammed into the Stonington. The Narragansett burst into flames and began to sink. Passengers screamed. Boats scrambled to rescue survivors. By some twist of fate, Guiteau survived.

But he didn't see it as luck. When the Stonington limped back to port the next day, Guiteau was certain of one thing: God had spared him. Not randomly. Not accidentally. God had selected him "for a task of tremendous importance."

That task, Guiteau would soon decide, was to kill the president of the United States.

This is where Candice Millard opens her book Destiny of the Republic. But the story she tells isn't really about Guiteau's bullet. It's about everything that happened after that bullet struck its target. And that's where the detective story begins.

Here's the puzzle: James Garfield was a healthy forty-nine-year-old man. He'd survived poverty, a canal boat accident as a teenager, and years of grueling Civil War combat. The bullet that hit him on July 2, 1881, shattered two ribs and a vertebra, but it didn't pierce any vital organs. It came to rest behind his pancreas. By the standards of the day, the wound was serious but not necessarily fatal. Civil War veterans walked around with bullets lodged in their bodies for decades.

So why did Garfield die?

The answer, Millard argues, isn't what most people think. It wasn't the assassin's bullet that killed the president. It was the care he received afterward. And not just any care—the best care that nineteenth-century American medicine could offer. Which was, tragically, the worst thing possible.

The book traces the convergence of four men whose paths crossed in ways that would determine Garfield's fate: the president himself, a self-made man who rose from a log cabin to the White House; Charles Guiteau, the delusional office-seeker who believed God commanded him to kill; Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor who rushed to Washington with a device that could have found the bullet; and Joseph Lister, the British surgeon whose theories about germs and antiseptic surgery could have prevented the infection that ultimately killed Garfield.

Each of these men represents a thread in a larger story about America at a crossroads. The country had just emerged from the Civil War. It was celebrating its centennial. Science and industry were racing forward. But the old ways—in medicine, in politics, in how power was distributed—refused to die.

The book's central argument is devastating in its clarity: Garfield's death was preventable. It was caused not by a bullet but by two deeply entrenched American failures. First, the medical establishment's stubborn refusal to accept Lister's germ theory, which meant doctors probed Garfield's wound with unsterile fingers and instruments, introducing the infection that would slowly poison his body. Second, the spoils system, that corrupt web of political patronage that consumed Garfield's presidency, created the conditions for his assassination, and made Guiteau feel entitled to a government job in the first place.

Millard frames the story as a kind of historical mystery, a "what if" that haunts American history. What if American doctors had listened to Lister in 1876, when he presented his findings at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia? What if Bell had been allowed to search the president's entire body with his induction balance, instead of only the side where Dr. Bliss was certain the bullet had lodged? What if the spoils system hadn't turned Guiteau from a persistent office-seeker into a man who believed he was God's instrument?

The opening scene of the book sets this tragic machinery in motion. Guiteau steps off that damaged steamship, alive against all odds, convinced of his divine purpose. He doesn't see himself as a failed lawyer, a failed evangelist, a failed businessman, a man whose own family had tried to have him committed to an asylum. He sees himself as chosen. And from that moment forward, every step he takes leads him toward the Baltimore and Potomac train station, toward a pistol he barely knows how to use, toward the president who has no idea he's being hunted.

But here's the thing that makes this story so haunting: even after Guiteau fired his gun, Garfield might have lived. The bullet didn't kill him. The infection did. And the infection came from the very people trying to save him.

So the question at the heart of Destiny of the Republic isn't just "Who killed James Garfield?" It's "How did a nation so full of promise fail one of its most promising leaders?" And more urgently: "What could have been different?"

The answers Millard uncovers are both fascinating and deeply unsettling. They reach across more than a century to ask us something we still haven't fully answered: Why do we so often refuse to embrace new ideas until it's too late?