Charles Guiteau Collection

Charles Julius Guiteau was born on September 8, 1841, in Freeport, Illinois, the fourth of six children of Luther Wilson Guiteau and Jane Howe. His mother died on September 25, 1848, and his father later remarried. As a youth Charles worked for his father who was a business man, later elected county clerk, and then employed as a cashier in Freeport's Second National Bank. Luther Guiteau was very much against sending his son to college; however, in 1859, an inheritance from his maternal grandfather, provided Charles with the means to attend the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There he turned to the religious doctrines of John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community in New York, who promulgated a kind of "Bible communism." In fact, his father Luther was already a follower of Noyes' teachings.

In 1860 Charles joined the Oneida Community but left on April 3, 1865, when he started believing that he had been chosen by God to spread Noyes' self-named "millennial communism" by founding a daily newspaper. Guiteau settled in Hoboken, New Jersey, and attempted to start a paper entitled the "Daily Theocrat." This effort was short lived, for on July 20, 1865, he applied to reenter the Oneida Community. Then, just over a year later, on November 1, 1866, he quit once more and departed with some money that he had originally consigned to the community. By August 1867 Charles had run out of money and he called upon his brother-in-law, George Scoville, who had married his sister Frances. Scoville offered Charles a job in his law office in Chicago, as well as a place to live. However, after a few months, Charles quit his position and returned to New York, ostensibly to work for Henry Ward Beecher's newspaper "The Independent."

Guiteau was soon disappointed to find that there were no editorial jobs available at the paper and he ended up selling subscriptions and advertisements on commission. With no prospects, Charles conceived of the idea to sue the Oneida Community for witholding compensation for the work he professed to have performed under its auspices. For a few months Guiteau sent threatening letters to Noyes but eventually desisted when Oneida's own lawyers threatened to prosecute him for extortion. In 1868, Guiteau left New York and returned to Chicago where he obtained a job as a clerk in the law offices of General J. S. Reynolds, Sr. and Phelps. He passed the Illinois bar and set up a small private law office on his own. In 1869 he married Annie Bunn, a librarian at the local Y.M.C.A. that he frequented. The marriage lasted until Annie divorced him in 1874, in part due to Charles' abuse, shortly after the couple had moved to New York in the wake of the Chicago fire.

The following year, after failing to obtain the collateral to purchase another newspaper called "The Chicago Inter-Ocean," Guiteau again moved into the Scoville house for some months.

One day, his sister Frances reported that Charles had gone out to chop wood. On passing nearby to him, he suddenly raised the axe at her. Frightened, she ran for the local doctor, who, after examining her brother, declared that she should have him institutionalized. After this incident, Charles Guiteau fled from his sister's house and disappeared. In 1876 he resurfaced, a regular attendant of Dwight Moody's revivalist meetings. From 1877 to 1880, Guiteau himself became an itinerant preacher, writing and disseminating his own sermons. In 1880, his father died.

Since childhood, Guiteau had been interested in politics; having been an avid reader of Horace Greeley's "New York Tribune," he was an early convert to Republicanism. Later, Guiteau became fired by the Republicans' intraparty conflict between the "Stalwart" faction (led by Roscoe Conkling) and the "Half-Breeds" led by James G. Blaine, who supported then president-elect James Abram Garfield. Initially, Guiteau favored the Stalwarts and their attempt to nominate Ulysses S. Grant for a third term. When Garfield was nominated, however, Guiteau changed sides. He soon became a familiar figure stationed outside Republican headquarters on Fifth Avenue in New York City where, on August 6, 1880, he delivered his speech "Garfield vs. Hancock" (see folder 11). After Garfield's election in 1881, Guiteau moved to Washington, D.C., in the hope of obtaining an appointment. He bombarded Secretary of State James G. Blaine with letters and, finally, after receiving either rebuff or no response at all, Guiteau again changed sides to the Stalwart cause. In mid-May 1881, he then conceived the idea to "remove" the president.

On June 16, 1881, he delivered the first of several "explanations" for his action--"Address to the American People" (see folder 7). He also wrote a letter to the White House and a similar one to be sent to General William T. Sherman, stating, "I have just shot the President ... His death was a political necessity. I am a lawyer, theologian and politician. I am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts ..." (see folder 3). On July 2, 1881, Guiteau shot President Garfield, once in the arm and once, fatally, in the back, as the president was about to depart for a vacation from the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station. The shooting occurred in the presence of a small entourage of Garfield's aides, including Secretary Blaine. Guiteau was promptly arrested and remanded to the District of Columbia jail near the Anacostia River. His trial began on November 14, 1881, and did not end until May 22, 1882. A plea of insanity by neurologists, as well as members of the Guiteau family, to President Chester A. Arthur was rejected and a writ of execution was issued. On June 30, 1882, Charles Guiteau was hanged at the District of Columbia jail.