James Garfield was the 20th president of the United States, and his story is short, intense, and marked by a sharp turn of fate. He rose from extreme poverty in rural Ohio, worked his way through school by doing whatever jobs kept him alive, and ended up as a Civil War general known for a mix of courage and improvisation.

In Death by Lightning, a 2025 four-part Netflix historical drama, the story of President James A. Garfield (played by Michael Shannon) and his assassin Charles J. Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) is brought vividly to life. Based on Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic, the series traces Garfield’s meteoric rise from humble origins, his principled fight against political corruption, and his surprising nomination as president—while Guiteau, delusional and obsessed, becomes convinced he is indispensable to the administration. The show dramatizes Guiteau’s mounting fixation, his failed attempts to secure a government job, and his eventual decision to shoot Garfield at a train station.

Historical background

He never chased the presidency directly; the party pulled him in during a deadlocked convention because he looked like the only person who wouldn’t split the Republicans even further.

He entered office with a clear sense of what he wanted to fight: corruption, factional power brokers, and the chaos of the spoils system that kept government jobs tied to personal favors. He moved faster than most expected. He challenged entrenched party bosses, especially Roscoe Conkling, who hated that Garfield wouldn’t play along with backroom deals.

Then everything collapsed in a way that felt almost absurd. A delusional office-seeker, Charles Guiteau, convinced himself that killing Garfield would “save the country” and elevate him to importance. The bullet didn’t kill Garfield. Medical incompetence did. Doctors kept prodding the wound with unsterilized hands and instruments, and infection slowly crushed him over months. The country watched him suffer through a drawn-out decline that could have been avoided with the medical standards that existed in Europe at the time but hadn’t been accepted in the United States yet.

Garfield’s death pushed the government into a reform wave he had already set in motion. The Pendleton Civil Service Act, which professionalized federal employment, followed soon after. He didn’t live to see it, but it grew directly out of the conflict he triggered with the old party machinery.

If you want, I can go deeper into his psychology, his leadership style, the political battlefield he walked into, or the strange archetypal shape of his rise and fall.

Garfield’s psychology

Garfield’s psychology becomes clearer when you look at how he handled conflict and how he carried ambition. He grew up with an internal mix of insecurity and defiance. Losing his father early left him with a chronic sense that he had to earn his place in the world through sheer will. Poverty sharpened that instinct. He didn’t posture as a self-made man the way later politicians did; he lived it down to the bone. This gave him a certain restlessness that never fully quieted. People around him often noticed that he carried two forces inside him at once: a need for harmony and a need to prove he could fight through any barrier in front of him.

He learned early that intellect could become a weapon as much as a refuge. He absorbed languages, mathematics, and classical philosophy with the same hunger he brought to manual labor. That blend created a personality that didn’t fit the stereotypes of his era. He had the emotional sensitivity of someone who grew up watching hardship crush people and the assertiveness of a man who saw knowledge as a way to expand his world. His charisma didn’t come from theatrics. It came from the sense that he was thinking several layers deeper than the room while still caring about the human texture of whoever stood in front of him.

In leadership, he relied heavily on persuasion rather than force. He handled disagreement by engaging rather than attacking. His speeches often reflected a man who saw politics as an arena where ideas collided before bodies did. That idealism made him vulnerable, because he walked into Washington believing that logic and integrity could tame factionalism. He underestimated the brutality of party machines that thrived on loyalty, reward, and punishment. When he confronted the Conkling faction, he wasn’t just fighting a political rival. He was challenging an entire system that treated government jobs as personal currency. That choice reveals the core of his leadership style: he preferred to expose tensions rather than pretend they didn’t exist.

His tragic decline reveals another piece of his psychological landscape. As he lay bedridden, drifting in and out of infection-induced delirium, letters and reports from those around him show a man who remained emotionally connected to the people who cared for him. He didn’t collapse into bitterness. He drifted between alertness and exhaustion, but when his mind cleared, he tried to reassure those around him. That tells you something about his internal compass: he stayed relational even while dying.

Archetypically, his story follows the shape of a reluctant hero who gets pulled into a throne he didn’t seek, confronts a deeply entrenched shadow structure, and falls to a figure who embodies distorted ambition. Guiteau wasn’t just an assassin; he represented the pathological side of the patronage system Garfield wanted to dismantle. The system bred entitlement, delusion, and dependency, and its ugliest manifestation walked up and shot him.

In the end, Garfield became a turning point not because he ruled long or accomplished a long list of reforms, but because he cracked open the old order with his refusal to bow to it. His short presidency forced the nation to confront how dangerously corrupt its institutional habits had become, and his death pushed reform forward in a way his life alone probably wouldn’t have.