The Booth brother who saved Lincoln’s son
Months before President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, his eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, narrowly escaped a fall at a crowded train station in Jersey City, New Jersey. As a train began to move, Robert was pressed toward the platform edge and slipped into the narrow space beside the carriage.
An actor nearby grabbed him by the collar and pulled him to safety. The rescuer was Edwin Booth—one of the country’s leading Shakespearean actors and the older brother of John Wilkes Booth, who would later kill the president.
A family connection neither man could have anticipated
Edwin did not realize whom he had rescued at the time. Robert later identified him and thanked him, making clear that the young man he had pulled from danger was the president’s son. The encounter became especially striking in retrospect: one Booth had saved a Lincoln, while another would take Lincoln’s life.
The rescue was an ordinary act of quick reflexes, not a premonition or a planned meeting. Its significance comes from what happened afterward. In April 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, turning a brief station-platform emergency into an eerie footnote to the tragedy.
