The Haunted Major (February/March 1994 | Volume: 45, Issue: 1)

The Haunted Major

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Authors: Gene Smith

Historic Era: Era 5: Civil War and Reconstruction (1850-1877)

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February/March 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 1

It was a legend of myth and fear, this bloodied gown visited by ghosts. It had formed the subject of a short book. It had witnessed supreme tragedy and brought new tragedy—madness, murder, they said; and, finally, the bricked-in closet where it had hung unworn for decades was broken into, and it was taken off its clothes hanger and burned to ashes. The son of its long-dead owner said he destroyed it to end a bloody curse. Such was the disposition of the dress that Clara Harris wore on the night of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.

 

Not until late on the afternoon of April 14, 1865 was it determined that Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, would accompany President and Mrs. Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre to see Our American Cousin. Speaker of the House of Representatives Schuyler Colfax had earlier been invited, but he was leaving on a trip to the West Coast. The reporter Noah Brooks was asked; he begged off by explaining that he was turning in early to fight off a heavy cold. The Lincolns' oldest son, Robert Todd, j,ust back from service as a staff officer with General Grant, told his parents that he wanted to luxuriate in a good bed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The French Marquis de Chambrun wrote his wife that he had declined to go along, “with some hesitation,” not wishing “even at the risk of offending White House etiquette, to attend a theatrical performance on Good Friday.”

So, Miss Harris and Major Rathbone were applied to. Besides being a future husband and wife, they were stepbrother and stepsister. The 28-year-old Rathbone’s father, a merchant and banker and mayor of Albany, New York, had died when his son was 17, leaving the young man a fortune of $200,000. Henry’s widowed mother then married Judge Ira Harris of Albany, who, upon William Henry Seward’s acceptance of the post of Secretary of State, was named to replace him as a United States senator. His daughter Clara was 20 in 1865.

When Secretary Seward’s daughter met the new Mrs. Harris, together with the wife of Senator John Crittenden, she called the pair “two very fat bundles of hair, feathers, lace and jewelry.” But Mrs. Lincoln was fond of the woman. The president had gotten up during his March inaugural ball to give Mrs. Harris his seat, and she sat with Mrs. Lincoln. Clara had been to the White House to be with her mother’s friend on Tuesday, April 11, two days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, as Lincoln delivered a speech from an opened window. In the listening crowd outside, glowering and cursing, stood John Wilkes Booth.

The theater visit came three days later. “What will Miss Harris think of my hanging on you so?” Mary Todd Lincoln whispered to her husband. “She won’t think anything about it,” he answered. A moment later, as bluish smoke from the weapon that sent a nickel-sized ball