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[Western Union telegraph reporting the shooting of President Garfield.]

Boston, 21 July 1881. Manuscript in ink on printed form, 8” x 5.125”. CONDITION: Good, torn in two across top half of sheet and rejoined with document repair tape.

A telegraph announcing the assassination attempt on President Garfield, sent the day of the attack by a businessman in Boston’s India Wharf to his wife at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

This telegraph, sent the day that President Garfield was shot in the back by his former supporter Charles Guiteau, reads in full: “President Garfield wounded today by assassin but probably not mortally.” Guiteau’s first bullet only grazed the President, but the second, though not immediately fatal, proved impossible for doctors to retrieve from his body, and the President succumbed to sepsis after two painful and feverish months of unsterilized treatment. Just sixteen years after the death of Abraham Lincoln, Garfield became the second U.S. president to be assassinated, and was succeeded by Chester Arthur. Guiteau, about forty when he committed the murder, had led a life of sad failures, first in and out of the Oneida Community, and then as a newspaper editor, a lawyer, and a political hanger-on in the 1880 presidential race, during which he came to believe that his own minor speech had been essential to Garfield’s election and entitled him to a government position. Disappointed and deluded, Guiteau trailed Garfield off and on over the spring of 1881, finally pulling the trigger at the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station on July 2nd. He was apprehended before he could turn himself in and hanged on June 30th, 1882, his own sensational story taking on a life of its own: soon after the burial, his body was disinterred and preserved in order to forestall rumored plans to sell bits of the corpse as souvenirs.

News of the assassination attempt spread rapidly, thanks to some fifteen years of expanding telegraph infrastructure. The message offered here, sent by Boston businessman Charles Francis Wyman to his wife Helen at their home on 744 Main Street in Cambridgeport, is evidence of the private communications filling out the nation’s burgeoning information network. Wyman was born in Boston in 1836, and at sixteen entered the counting house of prominent Boston businessman and Russian consul Robert Boyd Storer (1795–1870). Wyman succeeded Storer as Russian vice-consul to New England, and in the mid-1890s became the proprietor of the firm, which imported wax and hemp from Russia. He lost his first wife, Margaret Eaton, in 1874, and two years later married Helen Knight Bullard (1845–1907), an active church and community member until ill health confined her at home. The Wymans had four children, only one of whom—Florence, an assistant in the Harvard College Library—lived to old age. Wyman died on Thanksgiving Day in 1906.

An unusual piece of Garfieldiana, telegraphed the day of the assassination attempt to a housewife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

REFERENCES: Greenough’s Cambridge Directory, for 1881, p. 275; “Charles Francis Wyman” at Wyman Genealogy online; “Charles F. Wyman Dead,” The Boston Globe, November 6, 1906, p. 16; “Widow of Ex-Russian Consul,” Boston Evening Transcript, February 23, 1907, p. 17.

Item #10261

Price: $550.00

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