Assassination and the Spoils System [pp. 145-170]

ASSASSINA TION AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM.
and partisan passions at a fever heat and familiarized the coun try with scenes of blood, at last so worked upon the intense and
morbid nature of J. Wilkes Booth that, in April, I865, he had
come to regard himself as an avenging patriot, and President Lin coln as a bloody tyrant whose life was forfeited, is fresh in the
memories of all. Booth was but a little more crazy and savage
than tens of thousands whose spirit he carried into action and
who openly or with ill-concealed joy approved his work of death.
"It was no one man who killed Abraham Lincoln: it was the
spirit of treason and slavery, inspired with despairing hate, that
struck him down," said President Garfield, in the House of
Representatives, the day after the assassination-applying a logic
now strikingly applicable to his own case.
In the case of Guiteau, it needs neither logic nor the lessons
of history to connect the bloody deed with its cause. It was
not left to reformers or pessimists to discover it. The assassin
himself has declared it. A whole people has recognized it.
Every civilized nation has taken notice of it. A morbid, impul sive, unrestrained nature; an intense, unscrupulous partisan; a
disappointed, impecunious, desperate office-seeker; one of the
thousands of needy or scheming men and women whom a
vicious administrative system first invites to the capital, and
to the siege of every office where places go by influence and
favor, and then makes them half mad by its cruel and inevitable procrastinations and repulses. Guiteau was just the man
through whom the vindictive passions.of a fierce faction fight
should naturally find their full expression. He, and all those
like him, could see that a single bullet might seat one of the
leaders of the hostile faction in the Presidential chair and cause
a new deal of offices, in which he and they might win prizes.
This required no imore reason than his target-firing in the early
morning hours and his shrewd calculation of all the opportunities and the chances for the fatal deed. Never before in our
history had the spirit of faction sprung from causes so ignoble
or manifested passions so desperate, and revolutionary. Never
before had a Vice-President left the side of his chief to become
the subordinate of a Senator in a faction fight. Only once
before, and then to prepare for deeds of blood, had Senators
abandoned their posts of duty to feed the flames of angry pas
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