The Curse of the Lincoln Assassination
From HistoryBuff.com
Edwin Booth, John Wilkes Booth's brother, died
on June 7, 1893. Two days later, at the very moment Edwin's casket was being
carried from the Little Church Around the Corner in New York City, all 3 floors
of Ford's Theatre collapsed killing 22 people and injuring 68 others. At the
time Ford's was being used as a storehouse for War Department records.
Boston Corbett, the soldier who shot John Wilkes
Booth, went berserk during an 1887 meeting of the Kansas State Legislature. He
was arrested, declared insane, and sent to the Topeka Asylum for the Insane. He
escaped the next year.
The young couple (Henry Rathbone and Clara
Harris) who attended Our American Cousin with the Lincolns got married on July
11, 1867. The couple had three children. Rathbone suffered from
"dyspepsia" or indigestion and severe mood swings. He was probably taking
an opiate that could be purchased over the counter in the 19th century. In 1882
Rathbone was appointed to the post of U.S. Consul General to Germany. On
December 23, 1883, Rathbone went berserk. He tried to kill the children, then
shot and stabbed his wife to death, and finally stabbed himself. When the
police arrived, Rathbone mumbled, "Who could have done this to my darling
wife?" and went on about people "hiding behind the pictures on the
wall." He spent the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally
insane in Hildesheim, Germany. (The children were sent to live with Clara’s
brother, William Harris and his family). While in the asylum Rathbone
maintained that the walls were hollow and contained a spray apparatus which
blew dust and gas on him causing headaches and chest pain. He died on August
14th, 1911, at the age of 73. He was buried in Germany in the city cemetery at
Hannover/Engeohde. As time passed, the cemetery management checked out lots
with no recent burials and no correspondence indicating family interest. It was
decided that Rathbone's remains could be dug up and the bones disposed of.
In May, 1875, an insanity trial for Mary Todd
Lincoln was held in Chicago. The jury found Mrs. Lincoln "insane and a fit
person to be in a state hospital for the insane." Mary spent the next
several months in an asylum in Batavia, Illinois.
William A. Petersen, the German tailor in whose
house the President died, committed suicide. His body, filled with laudanum (a
mixture of alcohol and opium derivatives), was found on the grounds of the
Smithsonian Institution on June 18, 1871.
On November 7, 1876, a gang of ghouls tried to
steal Abraham Lincoln's body from the Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield. Their
goal was to hold the body in exchange for the release from prison of a
counterfeiter named Ben Boyd. The thieves had Lincoln's casket partly out of
the sarcophagus when detectives, who had heard of the plot, rushed forward to
stop the larceny in progress.
Robert Lincoln, the President's son, was in the
White House when his father was shot. On July 2, 1881, Robert was with
President James A. Garfield at Washington's Baltimore and Potomac Railroad
Station when the President was shot by assassin Charles J. Guiteau. In his own
words, Robert reached the stricken Garfield within 15 seconds of the shooting.
Finally, on September 6, 1901, when President William McKinley was shot by Leon
F. Czolgosz at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, Robert was on a train
just arriving in Buffalo.
In February, 1869, President Andrew Johnson
released John Wilkes Booth's remains to the Booth family. On February 15th the
pine coffin was opened and the body identified. Booth's head was found to be
entirely detached from his body. The remains were sent to Baltimore, and there
the detached head was passed around and looked upon by those present for the
identification. Booth's third, fourth, and fifth cervical vertebrae, which were
removed during his autopsy, are currently displayed along with several mementos
from Abraham Lincoln's autopsy (including the bullet that killed the President,
the probe used to remove the bullet, fragments of the President's skull, hair
from the President, and the blood-stained cuffs of the lab coat worn by Dr.
Edward Curtis at the autopsy) at the National Museum of Health and Medicine at
the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. (Additional hair samples from Lincoln's
autopsy are in the Lincoln Room Museum in the Wills House in Gettysburg, the
Lincoln Museum in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and the Weldon Petz Abraham Lincoln
Collection, at the Plymouth Historical Society & Museum which is located in
Plymouth, Michigan. ** An additional fragment from Booth's autopsy is in a
bottle in the Mutter Medical Museum at the College of Physicians of
Philadelphia). In October, 1994, a petition was filed in the Circuit Court for
Baltimore City to exhume Booth’s remains from Green Mount Cemetery. The
petitioners were people who identified themselves as Booth’s relatives. The
cemetery argued that its solemn duty was to protect the sanctity of those
interred unless there was overwhelming evidence that the body buried there was
not Booth’s. Judge Joseph H.H. Kaplan ruled that the evidence for exhumation
was insufficient. His 1996 decision was upheld by the Court of Special Appeals
in Annapolis.
In 1869 Lewis Powell's (Paine's) remains were
unclaimed by his family, and the body was buried in Graceland Cemetery near
Georgetown. In 1871 Lewis's remains were claimed by his family and taken from Washington.
Unbeknown to the Powells, Lewis's skull had been removed by an undertaker when
the body was first moved in 1869. The skull was given to the Army Medical
Museum which later sent it to the Smithsonian. Not until January of 1992 was it
re-discovered. It was positively identified and sent to Geneva, Florida, where
it was reunited with the rest of Powell's remains in the Geneva Cemetery during
a graveside service in November of 1994.
Anna Surratt, Mary Surratt's daughter, and her
lawyers had tried to see President Andrew Johnson to plea for clemency prior to
her mother's hanging. Two men were instrumental in preventing them from seeing
the President. One was ex-Senator Preston King. On November 13, 1865, King tied
a bag of bullets around his neck and committed suicide by jumping off a ferry
boat on the Hudson River. The other man who prevented the meeting with the
President was Senator James H. Lane. On July 11, 1866, Senator Lane shot
himself to death at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
During the weeks after the assassination, Mary
Todd Lincoln received a great deal of comfort in the White House from Dr. Anson
G. Henry, an old and trusted family friend. Dr. Henry accompanied Mrs. Lincoln
back to Illinois when she left Washington in May of 1865. A few months later,
on July 30, 1865, Dr. Henry drowned when the steamer Brother Jonathan, on which
he was a passenger, sank off the coast of northern California.