Key takeaways:
- Charles Guiteau, raised by an abusive father, joined and was rejected by the Oneida Community before pursuing politics and obsessing over patronage appointments.
- Netflix’s new series Death by Lightning explores how Guiteau’s delusions of grandeur and obsession with saving the Republican Party led him to assassinate President James A. Garfield.
- Guiteau’s trial became a media sensation, ending with his execution in 1882, a dramatic finale to his misguided quest for recognition and glory.
If you were only ever taught President James A. Garfield was shot “by a disappointed office seeker,” then you don’t know the half of it.
Charles Guiteau, who assassinated Garfield and whose story is told in Netflix’s new series, Death by Lightning, may not hold the same weight as John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald. But his tale traverses nearly every corner of the dark underbelly of America’s Gilded Age: political corruption, mental illness cloaked in the religious fervor of the Third Great Awakening, upstate communes with charismatic leaders and cultish sexual practices, and a yearning for glory.
“He had failed at nearly everything he had tried, and he had tried nearly everything,” is how Candace Millard introduces Guiteau in her award-winning history book Destiny of the Republic. “In his own mind, however,” Millard continues, “Guiteau was a man of great distinction and promise, and he predicted a glorious future for himself.”
Netflix’s Death By Lightning, which premieres November 6, is based on Millard’s book and explores the role Guiteau (portrayed by Matthew Macfadyen) had in Garfield’s (Michael Shannon) death.
Here’s what led Guiteau to assassinate the 20th president of the United States, and his ultimate downfall, as told in Death by Lightning.
Charles Guiteau was raised by an abusive father
Charles J. Guiteau was born on September 8, 1841, in Freeport, Illinois. Guiteau was a sickly child, with a mother described as a “chronic invalid,” who died when Charles was only 7 years old. He was left in the care of his father, Luther Wilson Guiteau, who author Allan Peskin called a disciplinarian “who beat his son in a vain effort to cure a childish speech defect.”
Though abusive, Luther was a very influential presence for Charles. “My father was a father and a mother to me,” Charles would later recollect, “and I drank in this fanaticism from him for years.” Luther was so fervent about his religious beliefs that young Charles would abandon his academic pursuits to follow the same religious philosopher his father idolized: John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community.
Guiteau was rejected from a religious cult
Founded in upstate New York in 1848, the Oneida Community was a communal society that sought perfectionism, abolishing special bonds and permitting women to work in non-domestic roles and shape commune policy. In An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President’s Murder, Susan Wels describes Noyes’ Oneida Community as having been “for more than three decades, the most successful utopian experiment in American history.”
Of course, it was likely not these practices that drew what Wels suggests was “more than fifty thousand visitors” to observe the Oneida Community, but rather, the group’s frank openness about their “free love” approach to sexual relations. “Every man was married to every woman,” Wels writes, “and sex, in the Oneida Community, was a holy practice, the key to spiritual perfection.”
But in what would lead the New York Post to describe Guiteau as “one of history’s first incels” 160 years later, the eager young zealot with an ego arrived at Oneida only to find that “not one woman at Oneida welcomed the short, excitable, redhead into her bed.”
The community was not accepting of Guiteau, and he earned the mocking moniker “Charles Gitout.” Guiteau would leave Oneida twice—the second and final time concluding with an attempt to sue Noyes for what Guiteau claimed were wages due for unpaid labor he undertook at the community.
Guiteau then moved to Chicago, where he married and earned admission to the Illinois bar, though he was not a particularly good lawyer. He preferred “the prestige that accompanied his new profession” more than actually practicing law, Millard’s book notes.
In 1872, Guiteau and his wife relocated to New York City, where he took an interest in politics. In that year’s presidential election, Guiteau favored New York Tribune founder Horace Greeley over the incumbent, President Ulysses S. Grant, and penned a speech advocating for Greeley which he likely only ever delivered once.
Greeley lost the election, but Guiteau was convinced that had Greeley won, he would have been able to point to his (barely known) speech as proof of his importance to the campaign. This mattered because, in the presidential politics of the time, appointments to various jobs were made through patronage, or what was called the “spoils system” rather than by merit. So, in Guiteau’s mind, since he wrote a speech about Greeley, he should be appointed an ambassadorship if the candidate had won.
It would be some years before Guiteau was politically active again. In the time between the start of Grant’s second term and the end of Rutherford B. Hayes’ presidency, Guiteau had gotten divorced, published a book on religion (which he had plagiarized entirely from the works of John Humphrey Noyes), preached in Washington, D.C., and Boston, and even survived a collision of ships that claimed many lives.
Guiteau believed his speech entitled him to a political career
But the election of 1880 brought Guiteau back to his ambitions of attaining an ambassadorship. The post-Reconstruction Republican party was at a crossroads, and a schism formed regarding both the future of the party as a whole and the approach to political appointments. One side, the Stalwarts, favored retaining the patronage system, and supported Grant in pursuing a third (non-consecutive) term, while a faction branded the “Half-Breeds” favored civil service reform, and supported the candidacy of James G. Blaine.
Guiteau favored Grant, and wrote a speech entitled “Grant against Hancock” (Winfield Scott Hancock was the Democratic nominee in that election), but when the feuding Republican factions settled instead on the compromise candidacy of James A. Garfield instead of Grant, Guiteau merely swapped out the name Grant for Garfield and proceeded to deliver the speech “Garfield against Hancock” instead.
He would deliver the speech only twice.
Nevertheless, when Garfield was elected president, Guiteau felt entitled to an ambassadorship in the new administration (at first he wanted Vienna, but changed his mind to Paris). He sent Garfield and his cabinet a stream of letters demanding the role, and routinely lined up with the other hopefuls in Washington, D.C. to try and make his request in person.
Guiteau obsessed over the schedules of Garfield and his cabinet, following their every move in the newspapers and around Washington, D.C. He became a particular annoyance to then-Secretary of State Blaine, who on May 14, 1881, finally snapped at Guiteau to “Never speak to me again on the Paris consulship as long as you live!”
Guiteau was convinced killing Garfield was the only way to save the Republican Party
This final rebuke caused Guiteau to snap. Already convinced he was doing the work of God and was destined for greatness, he came to believe that meant “saving” the Republican Party from the destruction President Garfield was set to bring about by abolishing the spoils system. Guiteau, declaring himself a Stalwart, felt the only way to save the party was to kill Garfield, allowing Vice President Chester A. Arthur (aligned with the Stalwart side of the party) to ascend to the presidency.
After dismissing the idea of attacking the president with a knife because, as Guiteau put it, “Garfield would have crushed the life out of me with a single blow of his fist,” the intended assassin opted for a firearm. For $15, he purchased a .442 Webley caliber British Bulldog revolver. Guiteau would insist upon the version of the pistol with ivory grips rather than wood, because he felt it would look better in the museum where it would inevitably be displayed. (Ironically, of the four firearms used to kill American presidents, Guiteau’s gun is the only one that has gone missing.)
On July 2, 1881, Guiteau waited for Garfield to arrive at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, as the newspapers had announced the president’s travel schedule, and when Garfield arrived, Guiteau opened fire, hitting Garfield twice. Guiteau was swiftly apprehended, and began shouting, “I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts ... Arthur is president now!”
Guiteau’s trial was a media sensation
Chester A. Arthur would not actually become president for 79 more days, the length of time it took Garfield to die from his injuries. Guiteau would stand trial for the assassination, and the entire proceeding became a media sensation, one he reveled in. He sold his autobiography to the New York Herald, performed poetry during the trial, and repeatedly attempted to act as his own lawyer.
Somewhere along the lines, a folk song called, “Charles Guiteau” (#444 in the Roud Folk Song Index) emerged, told from the perspective of Guiteau himself, which Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation notes has frequently been attributed to the pen of Guiteau himself, though this is untrue.
What is true is that despite Guiteau’s court-appointed attorney’s insistence he was temporarily insane, and his own insistence he was innocent because God made him shoot Garfield, the jury felt otherwise. As Stephen Sondheim would summarize in lyrics for his musical Assassins, “Charlie said, ‘Hell/If I am guilty, then God is as well!’/But God was acquitted/And Charlie committed/Until he should hang.”
Dramatic until his final moments, Guiteau penned a poem to read on his execution day. On June 30, 1882, from atop the gallows where he was soon to be hanged, Guiteau recited his final words, the poem, “I Am Going to the Lordy.”
It’s entirely possible more people bore witness to this recitation from Guiteau than heard any of the political speeches he felt entitled him to an ambassadorship, leading him to kill a president.
Watch Netflix’s Death By Lightning on November 6
The four-part miniseries Death By Lightning starts streaming on Netflix November 6. See Matthew Macfadyen as Guiteau and Michael Shannon as Garfield, along with Betty Gilpin as Garfield’s wife, Lucretia, Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur, and Bradley Whitford as James Blaine.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
![portrait of presidents who died in office including james a garfield, whose story is told in the netflix series death by lightning](https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod/images/garfield-lincoln-mckinley-assassinated-presidents-news-photo-1756662771.pjpeg?crop=0.66667xw:1xh;center,top&resize=360:* "In Memoriam. "God's will, not ours be done"")
