On May 30, 1922, 78-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln, son of President Abraham Lincoln, slowly ascended the grand marble steps of the newly completed Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., his frail frame steadied by a supportive arm.
This poignant moment marked his final public appearance, during the memorial's dedication ceremony presided over by President Warren G. Harding, who, in a tragic irony, would die suddenly of a heart attack just over a year later on August 2, 1923.
Robert, born on August 1, 1843, in Springfield, Illinois, and educated at Harvard College and later Harvard Law School, had lived a life uniquely intertwined with some of America's most somber historical events.
Shadowed by an almost uncanny proximity to tragedy, Robert was present at or near the assassinations of three U.S. presidents: his father Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901—a coincidence that earned him the grim nickname "the presidential death magnet" in later lore.
On the fateful night of April 14, 1865, when actor John Wilkes Booth shot his father at Ford's Theatre, the 21-year-old Robert was nearby at the White House. He was summoned to the nearby Peterson House, where the dying president had been carried, and remained at his father's bedside until Abraham Lincoln passed away the next morning.
Sixteen years later, in July 1881, Robert—then serving as Secretary of War under President Garfield—stood on the platform at Washington, D.C.'s Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Depot when anarchist Charles Guiteau fired two bullets into Garfield's back. Robert, shaken but composed, knelt beside the wounded president to offer aid amid the ensuing chaos; Garfield lingered for over two months before succumbing to infection.
Two decades after that, in September 1901, Robert had just arrived in Buffalo, New York, for the Pan-American Exposition at the invitation of President McKinley when news broke that anarchist Leon Czolgosz had shot the president twice in the abdomen at the Temple of Music pavilion. Though not directly at the scene, Robert was mere minutes away, and the violence echoed hauntingly close once more; McKinley died eight days later.
Reflecting on these events in later years, Robert reportedly remarked, "There is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present."
Adding to the eerie threads of his life, Robert, as a young man during the Civil War era, narrowly escaped disaster on a crowded train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey. He slipped and began falling into the gap between the platform and a departing train car when a stranger grabbed his coat collar and pulled him to safety. That rescuer was none other than Edwin Booth, the renowned Shakespearean actor and elder brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would assassinate Abraham Lincoln just months later.
Beyond these haunting encounters, Robert forged a distinguished path of his own. After briefly serving as a captain on General Ulysses S. Grant's staff during the final months of the Civil War, he pursued a successful career as a lawyer in Chicago.
As Secretary of War from 1881 to 1885 under Presidents Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, he oversaw military reforms, including modernization efforts and the handling of post-Civil War issues like Native American affairs and army reorganization.
From 1889 to 1893, he served as U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom under President Benjamin Harrison, strengthening transatlantic diplomatic ties during a period of economic tensions.
Later, he became a prominent businessman, serving as president of the Pullman Palace Car Company from 1897 to 1911, where he navigated labor disputes (including the infamous 1894 Pullman Strike) and expanded the company's operations, before retiring as chairman of the board.
Robert Todd Lincoln passed away on July 26, 1926, at his summer home in Manchester, Vermont, just days shy of his 83rd birthday, leaving behind a legacy as both a reluctant witness to history's gravest moments and a capable steward of his own era.
0 Comments