Assassination!: The Brick Chronicle of Attempts on the Lives of Twelve US Presidents (9 page)

In his late teens, he decided to be known by his first name Charles, claiming that Julius “had too much of the Negro about it.” He used some inheritance money to enroll at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

At age eighteen, at the insistence of his father who disapproved of secular education, Guiteau left the University of Michigan to join the Oneida Religious Commune in Upstate New York.

Among the community’s beliefs was that multiple sex partners was morally superior to monogamy and that to avoid “the horrors and the fear of involuntary propagation,” males should master the technique of having sex without ejaculating.

Though the practice of free love had attracted Guiteau to the community, he consistently found his amorous advances rebuffed by the women at Oneida, who did not share his grandiose opinion of himself and who nicknamed him “Charles Git-Out.”

Believing himself chosen by God for a greater purpose, Guiteau left Oneida at age twenty-three and moved to New York City with confidence that he would soon achieve riches and fame as the publisher of a new major newspaper called the Daily Theocrat.

Over the next few months, Guiteau arranged numerous meetings with potential backers and advertisers, who scoffed at him and found his religious views that he had adopted from Oneida peculiar, such as the belief that the Second Coming of Christ had occurred in AD 70.

Giving up on the newspaper business, Guiteau next set out to practice law. Passing a lax bar exam, he set up a practice in Chicago, where during trials he would reportedly “talk and act like a crazy man” with long digressions concerning theology and divinity.

After fourteen financially unrewarding years as a lawyer, continuously borrowing money from friends and relatives, and incurring mountains of unpaid debts, Guiteau was inspired to write a book about his own religious revelations called The Truth: A Companion to The Bible.

Unable to convince a publisher to give his work an audience, Guiteau set out with great enthusiasm on an evangelical lecture tour. Traveling from city to city, he would rent out church halls and charge people 25 cents to hear him speak. His audiences were rarely more than a handful, and he was often ridiculed.

While traveling, Guiteau habitually rode trains without paying any fare and would sneak out of hotels and boarding houses before paying the bill. This behavior eventually caught up with him, and he spent a short amount of time in jail in New York City.

Guiteau next became intensely interested in politics, and during the election of 1880, he wrote a speech in support of the Civil War hero and respected congressman, James A. Garfield, which he managed to deliver only once, in truncated form, at a small political rally.