Death by Lightning, out on Netflix Nov. 6, traces the assassination of President James Garfield, who was shot on July 2, 1881—four months into his term—and died from his injuries a few months later at the age of 49.
The four-episode series starts at the contentious 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, where U.S. Senator John Sherman (Alistair Petrie) tapped the Ohio congressman and farmer James Garfield (Michael Shannon) to speak on behalf of his presidential candidacy because he knew Garfield was a charismatic speaker. But delegates were torn between Sherman, Maine’s U.S. Senator James Blaine (Bradley Whitford) and the 18th U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant (Wayne Brett), so 36 ballots later, they chose to nominate Garfield instead because his speech was so inspiring. Garfield was sworn in on Mar. 4, 1881, along with his vice president Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman), becoming the 20th President of the United States.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]
One man who became obsessed with Garfield after his 1880 speech was the eccentric Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), and the series follows his attempts to get a job in the administration.
Here’s what to know about the short-lived Garfield presidency and how Guiteau went from adoring Garfield to killing him.
What is James Garfield known for?
In many ways, Garfield’s rise to the presidency embodies the American dream.
His father died when he was an infant, and he was raised by an impoverished single mother on a farm outside of Cleveland. While studying at the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, Ohio, he worked as a school janitor and then transferred to Williams College as a junior.
By the age of 27, he was a college president, preacher, and state senator, as C.W. Goodyear, author of President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier, wrote. Garfield’s career highlights include: becoming president of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (1857-1861), rising to the rank of youngest Union Army general in the American Civil War (1861-1863), and serving eight terms in the U.S. House of Representatives (1863-1881). As the second-youngest Congressman, he started the federal Department of Education, won cases before the Supreme Court as an attorney, and helped pass the civil-rights-related 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. He was a staunch abolitionist, a proponent of Black suffrage and the Freedmen’s Bureau that assisted newly freed enslaved people, and even wrote a Pythagorean theorem proof while in Congress.
His presidency tragically ended before he could make his mark on history in terms of any kind of policy achievement. At the time Garfield was assassinated, he had made some appointments and started work on the Pendleton Act, a civil-service reform act that established a testing requirement for certain offices to ensure better-qualified officeholders. His successor Arthur signed it into law in 1883.
“In all honesty, at the point in time that he died, the thing that got him into the history books, more than anything else, starts with the fact that he was the 36th ballot nominee at the convention,” says Tim Garfield, the president’s great-great-grandson who runs the Garfield Trail, made of up of Ohio historic sites related to Garfield. “Got lucky enough to get elected, and then, tragically enough, got shot and ended up dying. He never got a chance to do a whole lot in his term as president…You have to go backwards in his life and really study his writings and his work to understand what an honestly brilliant man he was.”
Why Guiteau shot Garfield
Tim Garfield describes Guiteau as a “disappointed office seeker” who didn’t get the job he wanted in the administration, a position he believed he deserved because of his support for Garfield. While he tried to reach out to people around Garfield to get a job, he did not go out on a bender with Arthur, as the show depicts. He did meet Garfield at an open house for constituents, but it’s not clear what they talked about.
Given his French surname, Guiteau believed he could serve as a U.S. ambassador to France (he had no connection to the country). “His particular brand of madness was delusion,” argues Candice Millard, who wrote the book that inspired the Netflix series, Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine & the Murder of a President. For example, he fell out with members of a free-love commune in upstate New York because he thought he was too good to do manual labor.
Guiteau grew to delusionally believe that if he killed Garfield, he would have a better shot at getting a job in the Arthur administration. “At every conceivable turn, he was rebuffed by the Garfield administration, and ultimately, something in him snapped,” says Death by Lightning creator Mike Makowsky. “He essentially resolved that in order to ensure his greatness and his mark upon our history, he would have to kill his former hero.”
Death by Lightning shows Guiteau carefully picking out an ivory .44 British Bulldog because it looks “museum-quality.” While Garfield is walking through Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac train station with his two sons and Blaine (then Secretary of State), Guiteau shoots the President in the back. Right outside the entrance to the train station, Blaine directs authorities to Guiteau, and Guiteau readily submits, exclaiming, “I did it! Take me to jail! Now Chester Arthur will be President! The Republic is saved!”
In real life, Garfield was with his sons planning to take the train to his alma mater Williams College to show his sons the school. Six months after the shooting, a jury found Guiteau guilty and he was executed on June 30, 1882.
Makowsky says Guiteau’s story remains relevant. “There’s an alienation, a feeling of displacement in society that he feels, that leads him to commit the most heinous atrocity imaginable,” he says. “The show helps try and understand the root causes of political violence. It’s a difficult conversation, but a vital one for us to be having today.”