Assassination of James A. Garfield - Aftermath

Aftermath

Part of Charles Guiteau's preserved brain is on display at the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Guiteau's bones and more of his brain, along with Garfield's backbone and a couple of ribs, are kept at the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Washington, D.C. on the grounds of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Garfield's assassination was instrumental to the passage of the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act on January 16, 1883. Garfield himself had called for civil service reform in his inaugural address and supported it as President in the belief that it would make government more efficient. It was passed as something of a memorial to the fallen President. Arthur lost the Republican Party nomination in 1884 to Blaine, who went on to lose a close election to Democrat Grover Cleveland.

The Sixth Street rail station was later demolished. The site is now occupied by the West Building of the National Gallery of Art. No plaque or memorial marks the spot where Garfield was shot, but a few blocks away, a Garfield memorial statue stands on the southwest corner of the Capitol grounds.

The question of Presidential disability was not addressed. Article II, section 1, clause 6 of the Constitution says that in case of the "Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the same shall devolve on the Vice President", but gives no further instruction on what constitutes inability or how the President's inability should be determined. Garfield had lain on his sickbed for 80 days without performing any of the duties of his office except for the signing of an extradition paper, but this did not prove to be a difficulty because in the 19th century the federal government effectively shut down for the summer regardless. During Garfield's ordeal, the Congress was not in session and there was little for a President to do. Blaine suggested the Cabinet declare Arthur acting President, but this option was rejected by all, including Arthur, who did not wish to be perceived as grasping for power.

Congress did not deal with the problem of what to do if a President was alive but incapacitated as Garfield was. Nor did the Congress take up the question 38 years later, when Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke that put him in a coma for days and left him partially paralyzed and blind in one eye for the last year and a half of his Presidency. It was not until the ratification of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1967 that United States law provided a procedure for what to do if the President were incapacitated.

Only sixteen years had passed between the first and second Presidential assassinations. Nevertheless, whereas Lincoln's assassination had taken place in the closing stages of the Civil War, both the public and the country's political leaders were keen to consider Garfield's murder to be an isolated act unlikely to be repeated in peacetime. Perhaps because the outrage as expressed in newspaper editorials focused specifically on the failure to adequately deal with the rejected office-seeker Guiteau as opposed to the inadequate security protecting the President, the Congress failed to take any measure to provide for Presidential protection. It was not until after the assassination of William McKinley twenty years after Garfield's assassination, that the Congress charged the United States Secret Service, originally founded to prevent counterfeiting, with Presidential security.

The Garfield Tea House, built by the citizens of Long Branch, New Jersey with the railroad ties that had been laid down specifically to give Garfield's train access to their town, still stands today near the location where Garfield died.