On July 2, 1881, two shots were fired into the back of President Garfield as he walked through the waiting room of the Baltimore and Potomac depot in Washington. The president lingered for seventy-nine days, succumbing finally on September 29. The assassin, a megalomaniac politician named Charles Julius Guiteau, had been disappointed at not getting the consulship he expected as the reward for a speech written during Garfield's campaign. GuOn July 2, 1881, two shots were fired into the back …showed first 75 words of 896 total…

…showed last 75 words of 896 total…motives from the Rodgers piece. Writers unfamiliar with the goodnight conventions have suggested that Guiteau himself wrote the ballad bearing his name. It happens that Guiteau did write verses in prison, but they were more religiose and belligerent than the ballad that keeps his notoriety alive. No broadside copy of "Charles Guiteau" survives, though such a sheet may well have been the ancestor of the versions collected from oral tradition in the South and Midwest.