Arthur takes the oath before dawn, in his own parlor
For eleven weeks Americans had watched Garfield lie dying and wondered who would replace him. James A. Garfield, shot by Charles Guiteau on July 2, finally succumbed to his wounds on the night of September 19, 1881. Just after 2 a.m., Chester A. Arthur took the oath of office in his New York City home, administered by a state supreme court justice. He left for Washington later that day to repeat the oath before the Chief Justice, becoming the 21st president, a member of a party faction many Americans distrusted on sight.
Arthur was the Stalwart machine politician nobody wanted as a heartbeat from the presidency, a former Customs House boss removed by his own party's president as part of a broader patronage reform effort. He answered that suspicion by signing the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act in 1883, dismantling the patronage system that had built his own career. Few successions did more to reshape how Washington hires.
QWho actually administered Arthur's first oath of office, and why not a federal judge?
John R. Brady, a justice of the New York State Supreme Court, administered Arthur's first oath in his own Manhattan parlor in the early hours of September 20, 1881. There was no constitutional requirement that a federal officer perform the ceremony, and no time to summon one from Washington in the middle of the night. Arthur repeated the oath before Chief Justice Morrison Waite in Washington the same day, giving him two sworn inaugurations within about twelve hours, no other president has done that.
QWhat turned Charles Guiteau, Garfield's assassin, against the president in the first place?
Guiteau was a disappointed office-seeker who believed he was owed a diplomatic post, either the consulship in Paris or Vienna, as reward for a pamphlet he claimed helped elect Garfield. After being repeatedly turned away by administration officials, he decided Garfield's death would unite the fractured Republican Party and stalked him for weeks before shooting him at a Washington train station. The episode became a favorite talking point for civil-service reformers arguing patronage politics had turned deadly.
QHow long did Garfield actually survive after being shot, and what killed him?
Garfield lingered for eleven weeks after Guiteau shot him on July 2, 1881, dying on September 19. He did not die of the bullet wound itself but of infections, likely from his doctors' repeated unsterilized probing for the bullet, worsened by summer heat so severe that engineers built a crude air-conditioning system to cool his sickroom. Guiteau's own defense argued, with some justification, that the doctors had killed Garfield, not him.
