A Brief History
On June 30, 1882, the assassin of President Garfield, Charles J. Guiteau, was executed by hanging in Washington, D.C. Guiteau had surrendered at the scene of the crime. Today, we look at what happened to the assassins that killed four US Presidents.
Digging Deeper
John Wilkes Booth, Confederate sympathizer and assassin of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, was hunted down 12 days later and killed by a US Army soldier when Booth refused to surrender.
Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist opposed to William Mckinley’s interventionist policies, shot McKinley in 1901. Czolgosz was swarmed and beaten by bystanders after the shooting, despite McKinley saying, “Go easy on him, boys.” Czolgosz was electrocuted 45 days after McKinley died of an infection from the bullet wound.
After Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed John F. Kennedy in 1963, he was tracked down and arrested after killing a police officer. Oswald was shot and killed while in police custody two days later.
Note: Former President Teddy Roosevelt was shot while giving a campaign speech in 1912, though he survived and even finished the speech! His attempted assassin, John Schrank, was immediately grabbed by bystanders and might have been killed on the spot if Roosevelt had not yelled to not harm the man. Schrank was ruled insane and sent to a mental institution until his death. President Reagan was severely wounded by a gunshot from John Hinckley in
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Goodyear, CW. President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier. Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Smith, Jeffrey. The Presidential Assassins: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Julius Guiteau, Leon Frank Czolgosz, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Kindle, 2013.
The featured image in this article, Scene of the assassination of Gen. James A. Garfield, President of the United States, is in the public domain in the United States because it was published (or registered with the U.S. Copyright Office) before January 1, 1929.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
