Lincoln’s Son Was At or Near 3 Presidential Assassinations

On May 30, 1922, an older man in a black coat stood at the base of the marble steps of the new Lincoln Memorial.

His hair was white, his posture unsteady, and two officers flanked him as he gathered the strength to climb. He was seventy eight, and every step seemed to carry the weight of a lifetime.

This was Robert Todd Lincoln. The last surviving son of Abraham Lincoln. And on that day, at the memorial built in his father’s honor, he made his final public appearance.

President Warren G. Harding presided over the dedication ceremony, unaware that he himself would be gone little more than a year later.

The eyes of the crowd kept returning to Robert. He was an aging figure who had spent his life brushing against some of the darkest chapters in America’s story.

Robert was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1843. He studied at Harvard and later at its law school. He grew up under the influence of his father who would become one of the most revered leaders in American history. Yet Robert’s own story carried an unsettling thread of tragedy.

By pure circumstance he found himself present at, or near, the assassinations of three presidents.

The first was his father.

On April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth fired the shot that ended Abraham Lincoln’s life, Robert was in Washington.

He hurried to the Peterson House and sat at his father’s bedside through the night. He watched as life slipped away from a man the nation would mourn forever.

Sixteen years later, in 1881, Robert was Secretary of War. He stood on the platform at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Depot when Charles Guiteau shot President James Garfield. He rushed to Garfield’s side in the confusion that followed. Garfield lingered for months before dying.

Twenty years after that, in 1901, Robert arrived in Buffalo for the Pan American Exposition just as word spread that President William McKinley had been shot. He was only minutes away. McKinley survived for a few days before infection claimed him.

Reflecting on these bleak coincidences, Robert once said quietly, “There is a certain fatality about presidential functions when I am present.”

His life held one more strange twist. As a young man, during the Civil War, he slipped at a train station in New Jersey and fell between a moving car and the platform. A stranger caught his collar and hauled him back to safety. That stranger was Edwin Booth, brother of the man who would later kill Abraham Lincoln.

But Robert’s story is not only a tale of shadows.

He served briefly on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff near the end of the Civil War. He built a respected legal career in Chicago.

As Secretary of War he helped guide the post war army toward modernization.

Later, as Ambassador to the United Kingdom, he worked to steady relations between two nations in a period of economic strain.

In the business world he led the Pullman Palace Car Company for more than a decade, guiding it through labor unrest and rebuilding after the infamous 1894 strike.

He eventually stepped back from public life, preferring privacy too often forced on him.

Robert Todd Lincoln died in Vermont in 1926, just days before his eighty third birthday. His life had been marked by privilege, accomplishment, and a strange nearness to national tragedy.