Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

HERE IS WHERE
it all began: the Exchange Place PATH station in Jersey City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. This is the spot that sparked my almost compulsive desire to seek out unmarked history sites throughout the country. It’s been fifteen years since I first read about what happened here a century and a half ago, and while in New York visiting family I thought I’d subway over from Manhattan and finally see the place for myself.

During the Civil War, the New Jersey Railroad Company ran trains through here, and one night in 1863 or ’64 (the exact date isn’t known)
a young man fell between the loading platform and a Washington, D.C.–bound train. Just as the steam-powered locomotive began to lurch forward, potentially crushing the man to death under its massive wheels, a bystander rushed over and pulled him to safety. The man in peril was Robert Todd Lincoln, the president’s eldest son. His quick-thinking rescuer was the prominent Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth, brother of John Wilkes Booth. Robert and Edwin had never met, and there’s no indication that they ever saw or communicated with each other again. Nor does it seem that the story made its way to President Lincoln himself. He and Mary had already buried two other sons: three-year-old Eddie, who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1850, and eleven-year-old Willie, who died in the White House on February 20, 1862, from typhoid fever. The couple was still grief-stricken from Willie’s death, and a third loss might have proved emotionally incapacitating. Mary had all but physically barred Robert Todd from fighting in the war and, after he enlisted, made certain he landed a desk job on General Ulysses S. Grant’s staff.

I don’t remember exactly where I first heard about the Exchange Place story, but I do recall thinking, initially, that it must have been apocryphal. Perhaps the two men had bumped into each other on the train platform and exchanged a few cordial words, and then over the years this brief encounter blossomed into the sensationally ironic tale of how a Booth had saved the life of a Lincoln not long before Edwin’s younger brother assassinated Robert’s father. Or maybe Robert had indeed fallen onto some railroad tracks and Edwin was at the station but only as a witness while another man swiftly came to Robert’s aid. The possibility that their lives had intersected in the dramatic manner I’d read about seemed far-fetched.

Except that the story turned out to be true. Robert Todd Lincoln himself described the episode in a February 1909 letter to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of
The Century Magazine
. “The incident occurred while a group of passengers were late at night purchasing their sleeping car places from the conductor who stood on the station platform at the entrance of the car,” Lincoln explained.

What especially intrigued me when I first read this was the possibility that, if the station were still active, each day thousands of commuters, tourists, and other travelers would wait for their trains near the very spot where this extraordinary encounter had occurred—and would probably be unaware of it. I started to wonder what other great unmarked sites are all around us that we pass by or walk over every day.

Stories began to accumulate. Whenever a newspaper, magazine, book, radio program, documentary, lecture, or cocktail conversation alluded to a relatively unknown incident, I jotted it down and slipped the note into a manila file titled “Forgotten History.” That slim folder grew fatter and has since multiplied into twenty-four bulging cabinets full of articles, clippings, and hastily scrawled reminders of places to research. I’ve also discovered that while I’m digging about for smaller nuggets, my eye often catches the glint of something bigger and more striking. This happened when I delved into the Lincoln/Booth story.

Obviously I’d heard of John Wilkes Booth, but I knew nothing about his brother. Did he harbor the same pro-Confederacy views? Was he complicit in the assassination? Or was their relationship antagonistic?

No on all counts. Edwin was close to his younger brother, and apparently there was tension only if they discussed politics. The last time the two had met, John Wilkes stormed out of the room after Edwin told him he’d voted for Lincoln.

When Edwin saw the April 15, 1865, newspaper article naming his brother as the president’s assassin, he immediately wrote to a colleague that he felt as if he “had been struck on the head with a hammer.” The manager of the playhouse where Edwin was performing notified him by messenger that, in light of his relationship to the killer, “out of respect for the anguish which will fill the public mind as soon as the appalling fact shall be fully revealed, I have concluded to close the Boston Theatre until further notice.” Edwin agreed and confided privately to his very close friend Adam Badeau: “The news of the morning has made me wretched indeed, not only because I received the unhappy tidings of the suspicion of a brother’s crime, but because a good man, and a most justly honored and patriotic ruler, has fallen by the hand of an assassin.”

In his next letter to Badeau, Edwin, his anger clearly growing, referred to John as an outright “villain.”

One of the final meetings between Edwin and John—and this was the larger gem that sparkled into view as I poked around the Exchange Place story—occurred in New York City on November 25, 1864, known back then as Evacuation Day. (The anniversary commemorates both the departure of British troops from the colonies in 1783 and the last shot of the war; as His Majesty’s ships sailed out of New York Harbor past jeering mobs on Staten Island, a British gunner petulantly fired a cannonball toward the crowd. He missed.) On this same night, Confederate officers led by Lieutenant Colonel Robert M. Martin scattered throughout lower Manhattan glass bottles containing a highly flammable phosphorous liquid known as “Greek fire.” Their mission was to burn the city to the ground in what would be the first major domestic terrorist strike on New York.