WILMINGTON - On a late night in New Jersey in 1864, Robert Todd Lincoln stood on a platform awaiting his turn to purchase his sleeping car ticket from the conductor.
He was on vacation from Harvard at the time and on his way south to visit his parents (including his father, who, among other things, was most well known for his ridiculous stovepipe top hat)
The process was slow and the platform became crowded with more and more people anxious to secure their spot on the train.
Robert, ever aware of himself and his family’s image (as well as how it might look in the papers for his father if his son refused to make room for the public) politely tried to allow more space for folks to shuffle into.
In doing so, Robert was pressed up against the train car itself and precariously perched over the small gap between the car and the platform.
At that moment, the car began to move and, off balance, Robert fell down into the space between the platform and train.
According to a 1910 letter written by Robert to the editor of Century Magazine, he was “personally helpless” to get out until “my coat collar was vigorously seized and I was quickly pulled up and out to a secure footing on the platform.”
Robert recognized his rescuer immediately as one Edwin Booth, widely considered one of the finest Shakespearean actors of the 19th century.
Most well known for his portrayal of Hamlet, a role he performed more than any other actor before or since (including a consecutive stretch of 100 nights), Edwin was considerably famous in his time.
More so even than Robert himself, despite Robert’s rather well known family name, as Robert instantly knew who Edwin was, but Edwin did not know whom he had rescued until a few months later when a friend told him of the significance.
Edwin’s younger brother, however, would soon leap frog both in terms of notoriety, after a performance of his own at a theater in Washington, D.C.
As fate would have it, on April 14th, 1865, less than a year after Edwin Booth rescued Robert Todd Lincoln from harm on a train platform in New Jersey, Edwin’s younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, would go on to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln while he attended a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater.
Perhaps history would have been significantly different if, as Robert reportedly told friends after the incident, he had been in attendance and Booth would have had to deal with him before he could have gotten off a shot. Robert could have possibly saved the president just as John Wilke’s brother, Edwin, had saved Robert only a few months before.
