Weird coincidences – The Three Assassinations
C.A. Asbrey
Robert Todd Lincoln (August 1, 1843 – July 26, 1926) was the eldest son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, and the only one of their children to outlive both parents. He was a businessman, a corporate lawyer, served as Secretary of War, and was also the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom. He was president of The Pullman Company from 1897 until 1911, but served on the board until 1924, two years before his death.
He had a distant relationship with his father, who was often busy working, but it seems that the President was aware of missing out on family life, mentioning to his wife in a letter, “don’t let the blessed fellows forget Father.”
Robert was an undistinguished student, failing fifteen out of the sixteen subjects of the Harvard entrance exams, and described by the author Jan Morris as having “emerged an unsympathetic bore.” Parental strings were pulled for him at university and in his military career when the Civil War broke out, with his mother keeping him from joining up until shortly before the end of the war. President Lincoln seemed more aware of the optics, telling his wife that, “our son is not more dear to us than the sons of other people are to their mothers.” However, when Robert did join up, his father wrote to Ulysses Grant asking for his son to be placed on his staff, meaning that he still got the kind of cushy and safe position denied to almost everyone else.
He married Mary Eunice Harlan in 1868, and had three children, who themselves had children of their own, with the last of Abraham Lincoln’s acknowledged direct line dying out when Robert’s grandson Robert Todd Lincoln Beckwith, died in 1985. However, DNA studies proved that author Vicky Reany Paulson is a descendent of Abraham Lincoln’s mother’s line, Nancy Hanks, who was illegitimate and raised by her grandparents until going to live with her mother and her new husband when she was twelve. There’s currently a DNA project underway to find more people connected to this side of the family, and that proves Nancy Hanks’ parentage was different from that of her siblings, confirming the illegitimacy tales. Rumours still swirl about Lincoln’s feal father being a man named Thompson, but no research has confirmed this to date.
All these stories are commonplace to those of us who have studied our own family trees. We all have such dalliances in our genealogy, but what sets Robert Lincoln apart, aside from the extraordinary opportunities and company his fortunate birth set before him? It wasn’t even the scandal of committing his mother to an, albeit plush, mental asylum to evade negative publicity; something she ruined by sneaking a letter out to her lawyer and escaping, leaving the press negatively questioning his motives. Such treatment of inconvenient women was fairly commonplace at that time, although she garnered more public sympathy than most.
His distinction lies in his link to assassinated American presidents.
Robert was invited to the theatre the night his father was shot, but declined the invitation. However, he was present when Abraham Lincoln died, nine hours after being fatally wounded in 1865. Not only that, but he was present when Charles J. Guiteau shot President James A. Garfield at the Sixth Street Train Station in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881. Just to compound that, he was just outside when President William McKinley was shot by Leon Czolgosz, making him the only man there when three American presidents died through assassination, which makes him absolutely unique in US history.
On top of all that, he was saved from falling in front of a train in 1963 or ’64 by Edwin Booth, whose brother, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Robert’s father. Robert Lincoln wrote, “The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car. The platform was about the height of the car floor, and there was of coursea narrow space between the platform and the car body. There was some crowding, and I happened to be pressed by it against the car body while waiting my turn. In this situation the train began to move, and by the motion I was twisted off my feet, and had dropped somewhat, with feet downward, into the open space, and was personally helpless, when my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform. Upon turning to thank my rescuer I saw it was Edwin Booth, whose face was of course well known to me, and I expressed my gratitude to him, and in doing so, called him by name.”
So, Robert Lincoln was not only present when three American Presidents were assassinated, but was rescued from certain death by the brother of the man who killed his father.
My question to you is, what’s your favourite set of weird coincidences?