James Garfield

James Garfield was shot at a Washington railroad station on July 2, 1881 — 79 days into his presidency — by Charles Guiteau, a delusional office-seeker who believed the president owed him a consulship. The bullet lodged harmlessly near Garfield's spine. Alexander Graham Bell rushed to the White House with a newly invented metal detector to find it, but couldn't — Garfield was lying on a metal-spring mattress, and Bell couldn't distinguish signal from noise. Garfield lingered for 79 more days before dying: not from the wound, but from the infections introduced by a parade of physicians who probed it with unwashed fingers and instruments.

Garfield's pre-presidential life was improbable enough to seem invented. Born in a log cabin in Ohio — the last president born in one — he had worked as a canal boy, become a college president, risen faster to major general than almost anyone in the Civil War, and served 18 years in Congress. He was the only sitting member of the House ever elected directly to the presidency. A classicist who amused himself by writing the same sentence simultaneously in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other, speaking six languages total, he was 49 years old when he died.

Garfield's assassination, coming so soon after Lincoln's, forced a national reckoning with the spoils system that had produced his killer. Guiteau's motive was a rejected patronage demand. The political pressure generated by Garfield's slow, agonizing death across a Washington summer created the conditions for the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 — signed by his successor Chester Arthur, who had himself spent his career as a beneficiary of the very system Garfield's murder dismantled. Garfield died; the system that killed him died with him.