In the immediate aftermath of the shooting of James A. Garfield on July 2, 1881, the president’s longtime friend Almon F. Rockwell penned an impassioned line about the tragedy in his diary: “Let this pernicious day stand aye accursed in the calendar!”
Rockwell was at Garfield’s side when the president died 79 days later, on September 19, 1881. It was an experience the Army lieutenant colonel had endured once before: Sixteen years earlier, on April 15, 1865, he was among the roughly 25 people in the room when President Abraham Lincoln died. “It was the most dramatic and historic scene that I have ever witnessed,” wrote Rockwell, who was called to the president’s deathbed to assist Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s secretary of war, in his diary that morning. He later added in the margin “Except this Sept. 24, 1881!”—a reference to the day Garfield’s funeral train arrived in Cleveland, Ohio (his home state).
“[A]nd hence, by a singular coincidence, I am the only person in the world who saw the last struggles of these two celebrated Americans,” Rockwell told the Saint Paul Daily Globe in 1888.
A prodigious diarist and conscientious writer, Rockwell’s contributions to American history have largely been overlooked. Most of his personal papers are housed at the Library of Congress (LOC) in Washington, D.C., but two crucial record books covering the years 1863 to 1867 are missing from the collection. Held in private hands for decades, these diaries and other heirlooms recently came into the author’s possession via a Rockwell family friend who, in turn, received them from Rockwell’s grandson. The journals, which will eventually be donated to the Library, could help separate truth from myth in the story of Lincoln’s final moments. They also shed more light on Rockwell’s 30-year friendship with Garfield.
“In his diary, Rockwell recorded valuable observations of the scene … during Abraham Lincoln’s final hours. His account adds to the contemporary evidence of who was present in the room, and what was, or was not, said at the time of Lincoln’s death,” says Michelle A. Krowl, the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the LOC’s Manuscript Division, in an email. “That Rockwell returned to the 1865 entries to add marginalia relating to the assassination of his friend, President James A. Garfield, is a testament to the lingering personal impact of being present at the deathbeds of two assassinated presidents.”