James Wormley’s hotel, and the night Guiteau waited outside it, July 1, 1881

The night before President James A. Garfield was shot, the man who would shoot him sat on the front steps of a Black-owned hotel in Washington, waiting for the president to come out of a house across the street. The hotel belonged to James Wormley, and this first of two parts of an article written for the Garfield Observer uses that evening to introduce a man whose hospitality business served much of the capital's elite. It was written by Donet D. Graves, a volunteer contributor at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, in May 2014.

July 1, 1881

On the evening of Friday, July 1, 1881, Charles Guiteau was watching the White House from Lafayette Square, looking for his best chance at the president. By his own statement, he thought he had a splendid one when Garfield walked out alone, went north along the east side of the square and turned east on H Street to the house of Secretary of State James G. Blaine at 15th and H. Guiteau checked his gun and sat on the front stoop of Wormley's Hotel across the street, the flagship of Wormley's hospitality enterprises. According to the New York Herald, he waited half an hour. Garfield then came out arm in arm with Blaine, who walked on the side facing the assassin, and the two returned toward the White House. Guiteau carried out the attack the next day, July 2, at the Baltimore and Ohio railroad depot.

A nurse, caterer and hotelier

The article says this was not the first time Garfield's life and Wormley's had crossed. Wormley, the son of a free Black couple who arrived in Washington in 1814, was widely known at home and abroad in the 1850s as a nurse, caterer and hotelier. From Buchanan's administration he ran a row of boarding houses and a restaurant on I Street NW between 15th and 16th Streets, one block north of Lafayette Square, and he also served as steward of the Washington Club on the square. Its members included Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Charles Sumner and William Corcoran, powerful men from both North and South.

Where the powerful dined

Wormley's became a favorite of the capital's leading citizens for its accommodations and food. The article gives examples:

• General Winfield Scott made the houses his Washington residence before the war.
• In May 1860 Wormley catered for the first Japanese Commission to visit the United States, from the steamer trip to Washington and then on to Philadelphia.
• Senator Wigfall of Alabama set up his household there in the winter of 1860. His daughter's book called the boarding house "a synonym for delightful living" and, in those days, "the acme of comfort."
• General George B. McClellan, while head of the Union Army, ate there regularly. A letter of August 23, 1861 says he and his staff took their meals at Wormley's. On November 20 that year, Col. John H. Forney gave a dinner there for about 50 men, among them the Secretary of War and John Hay and John Nicholay, President Lincoln's private secretaries.

Robert Todd Lincoln, Secretary of War under Garfield. Credit: Library of Congress.

Members of the Cabinet, Supreme Court justices, foreign delegations, artists, financiers and congressmen came to live, eat, hold private political meetings and be seen. In September 1868 Wormley and his staff catered the wedding of Robert Todd Lincoln, Garfield's future Secretary of War, and the wedding train to New York the next day.

Garfield's neighbors

In 1869, after six years in Washington as a representative from Ohio, Garfield and his wife built a house two blocks east of Wormley's, at I and 13th Streets. Two Ohio colleagues, Americus V. Rice and Frank H. Hurd, lived at the hotel, which led the author to conjecture that Garfield visited it too. Wormley also catered for Cabinet members such as Gideon Welles, William H. Seward and Edward Bates, and was fond of the anti-slavery activist Salmon P. Chase, whose portrait, commissioned by Jay Cooke, he bought in 1872.

Sources

• Donet D. Graves (volunteer contributor, James A. Garfield National Historic Site), "James A. Garfield and a Black Washingtonian, Part I", written in May 2014 for the Garfield Observer and carried by the National Park Service (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/james-a-garfield-and-a-black-washingtonian-part-i.htm); the author's own map and annotated hotel image and a History.com painting of Jefferson Davis are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.