The new four-episode miniseries Death by Lightning, now streaming, stars Michael Shannon as Garfield and Matthew Macfadyen as his assassin, Charles Guiteau, a failed lawyer who believed God himself had chosen him for greatness. Created by Mike Makowsky and produced by Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the series brings to life one of America’s strangest and most tragic political stories — one that mixed delusion, ambition and botched medicine.
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Once in office, Garfield pushed for civil service reform and worked to clean up the political patronage system. But his presidency was cut short when Guiteau, an unhinged political hanger-on who had been rejected for a government post, shot him on July 2, 1881.
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Charles Guiteau’s Delusional Path to Murder
When the administration ignored him, Guiteau’s obsession turned dangerous. Convinced that God commanded him to “remove” Garfield for the good of the nation, he purchased an ivory-handled .44 British Bulldog revolver because he thought it looked “museum-quality," according to UVA's Miller Center. On that July morning, he approached the president at the Baltimore & Potomac train station and fired twice, shouting, “Now Chester Arthur will be president! The Republic is saved!”
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According to historians and author Candice Millard, whose book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President inspired the Netflix series, the president likely would have survived if not for infection and blood poisoning. He lingered for 80 painful days before dying on September 19, 1881, at just 49 years of age.
Garfield's Legacy
Haunted by the assassination and the fact that Guiteau invoked his name, President Chester Arthur ultimately championed Garfield’s cause. In 1883, he signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, which replaced the old “spoils system” — a network where government jobs were handed out as political rewards — with a new merit-based process.
More than 140 years later, Death by Lightning brings the Garfield assassination back into focus, revealing how a delusional office seeker — and a chain of preventable mistakes — altered American history.
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