PropertyValue
?:author
?:datePublished
  • 2022-12-24 (xsd:date)
?:headline
  • Did John Wilkes Booth’s Brother Save the Life of Abraham Lincoln’s Son? (en)
?:inLanguage
?:itemReviewed
?:mentions
?:reviewBody
  • A major historic tragedy came with an odd and unsettling coincidence attached to it. Few know that the brother of the assassin of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was responsible for saving the president's son, Robert Todd Lincoln, from a near-death experience. Robert's rescuer was Edwin Booth, the brother of John Wilkes Booth. The latter would go on to kill the president in 1865. Edwin Booth was himself a renowned stage actor who would be overshadowed by the infamy of his younger actor brother. According to the Library of Congress, Edwin Booth saved Lincoln's son from being run over by a train car. The event is detailed in a Cleveland Morning Leader news story in April 1865, written after the death of the president, and praising Edwin Booth for his support of the Union cause during the Civil War: (Screenshot/Library of Congress/Cleveland Morning Leader (1865)) Many other accounts place the incident as occurring at Jersey City, and not Trenton. In April 1937, The New York Times published an account of the incident as told by persons close to the Lincoln family who asked that their identity not be disclosed. (Screenshot/The New York Times (1937)) The date of Edwin Booth's rescue vary in numerous reports; the Cleveland Morning Leader writes about it as occurring right after Lincoln's death, with the words not a month since. The Library of Congress places it in April 1865, the same month Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. However, the historian Jason Emerson writes in Giant in the Shadows: The Life of Robert T. Lincoln that the rescue occurred in either 1863 or 1864. That date range is echoed in this U.S. National Archives blog post written by the Archives' Office of Strategy and Communications staff writer Rob Crotty: According to Emerson's book, Robert Lincoln was on vacation from Harvard University when it happened: Emerson pointed out that there was no record of Robert Lincoln ever telling his parents about the incident, probably because he thought they had enough worries on their mind, and after the death of his younger brother Willie Lincoln in 1862, he was concerned about his mother's reaction. According to the book Robert Todd Lincoln: A Man In His Own Right by John S. Goff, Robert Lincoln detailed the full incident in a 1909 letter to Richard Watson Gilder, a poet and editor of The Century Magazine. The book also states that Robert Lincoln himself dated the rescue as happening in 1863 or 1864. He wrote: Robert Lincoln did write later that although he never met Edwin again in person, he had a most grateful recollection of his prompt action on my behalf. Edwin Booth was driven into temporary retirement after his brother assassinated the president, but returned to the stage in 1866, and opened his own theater in New York. While the timing and location appeared to vary, the story itself has been widely documented and verified by Robert Lincoln himself. We thus rate this claim as True. (en)
?:reviewRating
rdf:type
?:url