It was supposed to be a relaxing vacation, but Henry Rathbone was anything but relaxed. He and his family—his wife Clara Harris and their three young children—were visiting Germany in December 1883.
Friends and family would later say that Rathbone couldn’t shake the fear that disaster would soon befall him, just as it had all those years ago: In 1865, Rathbone and Harris were sitting in the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
Rathbone had been unable to save Lincoln that fateful night, a fact that still haunted him. For Rathbone and Harris, however, the violence of that night was just the beginning.
Befriending the Lincolns
Before they were witnesses to one of the nation’s greatest tragedies, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were stepsiblings, each of whom hailed from Albany’s most prominent families. In adulthood, their relationship blossomed into love, and the young couple became engaged.
By 1865, they were both living in Washington, D.C. Rathbone, who had served as an officer in the U.S. Army during some of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles, had an office job for the Army, while Harris had moved to the city after her father, Ira Harris, became a New York senator in 1861.
As a senator’s daughter, Harris was enmeshed in Washington high society and counted Mary Todd Lincoln as a friend. As Harris wrote in April 1865, she and the first lady “have been constantly in the habit of driving and going to the opera and theater together.”
(Tracing the route of Lincoln’s funeral train—while reflecting on his legacy.)
It thus wasn’t unusual when the Lincolns invited Harris and her fiancé to see a play, Our American Cousin, on April 14.
The young couple had not been the Lincolns’ first choice of guests that night, however. Initially, they had planned on Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia accompanying them. But after the Grants pulled out, the Lincolns scrambled to find replacements.
Eventually, they landed on Harris and Rathbone, who gladly accepted the invitation. The cheerful party of four arrived at Ford’s Theatre at 8:30 p.m.
A night at the theater
Mary Todd Lincoln leaned against her husband and let him hold her hand—even though they weren’t alone in the presidential box.
Mrs. Lincoln asked her husband, “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on to you so?”
“She won’t think anything of it,” he assured her.
Those may have been Abraham Lincoln’s last words.
At approximately 10:30 p.m., John Wilkes Booth slipped into the presidential box and fired a bullet into Lincoln’s head.
Henry Rathbone reacted quickly. He tried to apprehend Booth, but the assassin pulled out a knife and sliced Rathbone’s arm, severing an artery. Rathbone’s blood sprayed his fiancée as Booth escaped.
(The surprising history behind the Lincoln Memorial.)
Rathbone and Harris turned their attention to Lincoln. They shouted that the president had been shot. Pandemonium broke out, and doctors eventually moved Lincoln to the boardinghouse across the street.
As chaos reigned around her, Harris tried to comfort Mary Todd Lincoln. Yet whenever Harris, stained with Rathbone’s blood, approached her, she cried, “Oh! My husband’s blood, my dear husband’s blood!”
Meanwhile, Rathbone’s blood loss weakened him. Harris created a makeshift torniquet for him before he collapsed. He was rushed to the Harris household, where a surgeon, with Harris’s help, treated his near-fatal wound and saved his life.
Nearly two weeks later, Harris shared some of these images in a letter to a friend. They still haunted her. “I really cannot fix my mind on anything else,” she wrote.
Trying to move on
After the assassination, Rathbone and Harris attempted to pick up the pieces of their lives. They married on July 11, 1867.
Nonetheless, the horror of what they had witnessed—and what he had been unable to do for Lincoln—weighed on Rathbone’s soul. He developed breathing problems and heart palpitations with no known physical cause.
As the young family grew to include three children, Rathbone’s anguish became increasingly pronounced. He lived in fear that his wife and children were at risk.
By 1883, Rathbone’s state had deteriorated. As the Elmira Daily Advertiser would later report, Rathbone had become “morose, melancholy, irritable, and insanely jealous of his wife,” believing she would leave him. He would soon take a violent turn.
A final murder
The Rathbones were in Germany when Henry Rathbone became unsettled on December 23, 1883. Reportedly fearing that his children would be taken, he attempted to enter their room with a loaded gun.
Alarmed, Harris had the door to the children’s room locked. They went into their bedroom, and Rathbone attacked. He shot his wife and stabbed her before stabbing himself. She died on their bed.
He survived, though reportedly in a confused state. As the Sunday Morning Tidings of Elmira, New York, reported days after the murder, Rathbone “believes his children have been abducted, and that he was wounded in a fight with their abductor.” He did not recall killing his wife.
Rathbone stood trial in Germany, where he was found guilty and incarcerated at Hanover’s Hildesheim Asylum. He died there on August 14, 1911, 46 years after that traumatic night at Ford’s Theatre.
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