A tragedy in the theater
Major Henry Rathbone was laughing at a scene on the stage when
an armed man entered the theater box and fired a shot into his
host’s head.
A tragedy in the theater
Major Henry Rathbone was laughing at a scene on the stage when an armed man entered the theater box and fired a shot into his host’s head.
As Abraham Lincoln slumped forward, Rathbone leaped up to grapple with the intruder and John Wilkes Booth slashed his left arm with a knife, laying it open to the bone from shoulder to elbow. Rathbone still attempted to stop him but Booth leaped to the stage below and fled while the audience screamed.
The dying president was carried to a house across the street. Mary Lincoln and Rathbone’s fiancee, Clara Harris, pushed inside while help was summoned. Rathbone tried to comfort the women until he fainted from loss of blood. Miss Harris then realized his condition and turned her attention to him, soaking her new dress in blood.
Mrs. Lincoln had invited Miss Harris, daughter of a New York senator, to Ford’s Theater with her fiance, who was also her stepbrother. Rathbone was an attorney in civilian life who had left his Albany practice to serve in the Union army.
The assassination on April 14, 1865 marked the end of any happiness for him. He constantly reproached himself for not somehow preventing the tragedy. Miss Harris tried valiantly – but vainly – to help him. She could never bring herself to destroy the dress she had worn that evening and finally had the closet holding it bricked in.
She and Rathbone were married in 1867 but the assassination haunted them. They had three children and he sank deeper into melancholia. They sought a cure everywhere, including Germany, where he had been appointed a U.S. consul.
Before dawn on Dec. 23, 1883, Rathbone came into her bedroom and asked to see the children. When she replied that it was too early for them to be up, he took out a revolver and shot her to death. A nurse rushed into the room to find him crying and stabbing himself in the same arm Booth had slashed years earlier.
Rathbone spent the rest of his life in an asylum for the criminally insane in Hildesheim, Germany, incessantly tortured by the demons of his mind. He was buried next to his wife after his death in 1911.
In the meantime, her brother had raised their children. The oldest, Henry Riggs Rathbone, was elected to the House of Representatives and was instrumental in having Ford’s Theater restored to the way it looked the night Lincoln was killed.
One day in 1910 he went to his family’s summer home outside Albany and had the bricks covering the closet removed. He took his mother’s dress, stiff from his father’s blood 45 years earlier, outside and burned it.
In 1952, long after all the principals in the tragedy had died, the German cemetery’s officials reviewed the records. In accordance with policy, they listed graves not visited for years to make room for more. Consequently, the remains of Henry and Clara Rathbone were disinterred and disposed of.
