To New York Sheriff E.P. Higgins, replying to his request “to be present to witness the Execution of Guiteau the Assassin, I regret to inform you the Statute in regard to executions in this District so limits the number to be admitted that it will not be possible for me to comply with your request. If the law permitted, I would have been glad to request your presence.” On July 2, 1881, Charles Guiteau, a disappointed federal job-seeker from Chicago, shot President James Garfield in the back at a railroad station. While the President was rushed to a hospital, where he lingered for 11 weeks, Guiteau was imprisoned at the US District Jail in Washington, a large brownstone building on the eastern edge of the District of Columbia. He would remain there for a year, while charged, after Garfield’s death, with murder; convicted, after a two month trial which focused on the question of his sanity; and sentenced to death by hanging. After his appeals of the verdict were denied, Guiteau’s execution was set for the end of June. Throughout that year, while the assassin’s bizarre behavior remained a national media sensation, Guiteau’s imprisonment was calmly overseen by the Jail Warden, General John S. Crocker (1820-1890), a New York lawyer and state legislator who, during the Civil War, had commanded a Rifle Regiment, spent time in Confederate prison camps and been wounded four times before being discharged from the Army as a Brigadier General. When General Grant became President, he appointed Crocker Warden of the US District Jail, a post he held until his death twenty years later. It was not a high-profile job – until Guiteau became the Jail’s most prominent prisoner. Crocker had charge of all the complex arrangements for Guiteau’s one-year imprisonment, and, finally, for his execution. After noon on June 30, 1882, it was Crocker, with the death warrant in his hand, who led the condemned prisoner to the scaffold, which was surrounded by the 200 jostling spectators –not including the hopeful recipient of this letter - who had been admitted to the prison yard to witness the assassin’s body falling through the trap to the team of Doctors waiting to pronounce him dead. General Crocker’s letters are uncommon. Of the small group held by the Library of Congress, none relate to Guiteau’s imprisonment or execution.