There’s More to First Lady Crete Garfield Than What Appears in Death by Lightning

In Death by Lightning, Betty Gilpin gives a knockout performance as First Lady Lucretia “Crete” Garfield. But Crete had an exciting life beyond the events that appear in the four-episode Netflix miniseries. Crete was only first lady from her husband James Garfield’s inauguration in March of 1881 to September of that year, when he died after being shot 80 days earlier. She became devoted to maintaining her husband’s legacy for the rest of her life.

Here’s what you need to know about First Lady Crete Garfield.

She met her husband in school.

When Crete was 15, she began attending Geauga Seminary, where Garfield was a classmate. They both continued on to the boarding school Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, where Crete was an enthusiastic student. Garfield wrote her letters during a period of traveling and when he returned to school, they began dating. They married five years later.

She was very bright, which Garfield appreciated.

Crete was very thoughtful and enjoyed reading and the theater. She worked as a teacher for a period and spoke Greek and Latin. She was seen as an intellectual peer to her husband, giving him political advice and helping him with his speeches.

They had a difficult relationship.

Their dating relationship was so rocky that Crete sent Garfield an invitation to their own wedding. Crete struggled during her husband’s frequent periods of absence. He often traveled while serving as an Ohio state senator, before he enlisted in the army during the Civil War. In their first five years as husband and wife, they spent only 20 weeks together. Both Crete and Garfield called this period the “dark years.”

Garfield was unfaithful.

After the tragic loss of their oldest daughter Eliza Arabella, who was called “Little Trot,” when she was 3 and a half, Garfield admitted to his wife that he had an affair. The woman, Lucia, was a writer who lived in New York. The couple reconciled, and as indicated by their letters, grew closer. “It is nearly ten o’clock Sunday night, and I will not lie down to sleep till I have told you again that I love you. … We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do. The tyranny of our love is sweet. We waited long for his coming, but he has come to stay,” Crete wrote in one.

Crete was not excited about being a first lady.

Crete was nervous about what would be expected of her in her new role. She called it a “terrible responsibility,” and she looked to the wife of her husband’s secretary of state for advice on the social elements of her position. One of her decisions was to bring back alcohol to the White House after it was banned in the previous administration.

She contracted malaria.

Months after becoming first lady, Crete became ill with malaria. Because she recuperated outside of Washington, her time in the White House was even briefer than her husband’s. She was away when she learned her husband had been shot. She returned and was with him until he died.

While she survived malaria, Crete passed away 37 years after her husband, on March 13, 1918. They are buried beside each other in Cleveland, Ohio.