Major Henry Rathbone’s Tragic Descent into Madness

DBF

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April 14, 1865
(Public Domain)
It was a cruel twist of fate that she was at Ford’s theater that night. She wasn’t suppose to be there. After the Grant’s turned down the invitation to journey to the theater with the Lincolns and after when as many as fourteen had refused, Clara a friend of Mary’s agreed to attend and with that decision thirty-year old Clara along with her fiancee Major Henry R. Rathbone walked into history.

The Albany New York born Clara was the daughter of Ira Harris (1802-1875) and Louisa Tubbs (1809-1845). When Clara was close to her eleventh birthday her mother died and in 1846 her father married Pauline Pinney Rathbone (1810-1894) a widow with two sons, nine year old Henry and his two year old brother Jared. The Rathbone family joined the Harris family which included Clara and her younger siblings; her brother William and sisters Amanda and Louise. Together Ira and Pauline would have a daughter born in 1850. As time went on for this the blended family Pauline’s son (Henry) and Ira’s daughter (Clara) fell in love and became engaged.

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Ira Harris and Pauline Rathbone were quickly married after each had lost their mates. It was a marriage built on each partner mourning the loss of their respective spouses. However they were a family and the children were encouraged to treat each other as siblings. Pauline instructed Clara to “think of Henry as your cousin,”. {4}

Clara and Henry as children were described as being smart somewhat sarcastic and rebellious. Clara was reportedly smitten with Henry from the moment she saw him. It was also noted that even at a young age Henry had a dark side to his personality. He was not particularly happy with his mother’s marriage to Harris and this sentiment would show itself in broodiness and emotional volatility. Henry’s father, Jared L. Rathbone (1791-1845), was a successful merchant and businessman in Albany and before his death served as the mayor of Albany. At the time of his father’s death he left $200,000 (approximately $6 million in today’s dollars) to his wife Pauline.

Henry had a difficult relationship with his step-father which was strained throughout the years. When the Civil War came to his doorstep, Clara hoped that the military and battle experience would "purge him of all that aggression he has inside". {4} Henry saw some of the bloodiest and fiercest battles in the Civil War from Antietam, Fredericksburg and the “Crater” at Petersburg where he received a serious gun shot. His war experiences did not help in his “aggression he has inside” as Clara had naively believed instead it only intensified his emotions.

Ira Harris was elected to fill the Senate seat that had been vacated when former Senator William Seward moved to Washington to serve as President Lincoln’s Secretary of State. Through this association, Clara got to know the First Family and a genuine friendship formed between Mary and Clara.

And now the stage had been set for the first act in the tragic life that would be the Rathbone’s destiny - April 14, 1865 when John Wilkes Booth altered the course of history.

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We sometimes forget that after Booth shot the president he turned to Rathbone. Booth had pulled a dagger on Rathbone and a struggle followed. Rathbone sustained an injury when the dagger found its’ way into his elbow cutting to the shoulder the action cutting an artery, nerves and veins. As Clara described in a letter:

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(Public Domain)

“He bled so profusely as to make him very weak. My whole clothing as I sat in the box was saturated literally with blood, (as were) my hands & face. Poor Mrs. Lincoln all through that dreadful night would look at me in horror & scream, Oh! my husband's blood - which it was not, though I did not know it at the time. The president's wound did not bleed externally at all-The brain was instantly suffused.” {4}

President Lincoln died and Henry Rathbone lived. He was known as the soldier that could not stop Lincoln’s killer. It was another traumatic incident that added to the growing instability that was brewing in the mind of Henry Rathbone.

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Clara and Henry were married on July 11, 1867. Rathbone was still in the military at the time and filled with guilt and grief over the events of April 14. Instead of the beginning of a happily married life it would be a constant struggle for Clara as she dealt with her husband’s fall into mental illness.

The couple learned there was no escaping the public as it seemed that on the anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination the press discovered where Henry Rathbone was living and bombard him with questions regarding that night. Consequently, Rathbone never sought treatment or help for his growing instability. It’s been suggested that around this time he may have suffered from “dyspepsia” or indigestion and was on opiates which would not have helped with his emotional disorders. As his precarious emotional status devolved into instability with every question asked, every article written, Henry saw guilt and blame for his lack of action that night. He would never move on for he believed he wasn’t allowed to. In 1870 Rathbone resigned from the Army. He left at the rank of a brevet colonel.

As the years went on they became the parents of three children and even with what should have been a celebration turned into a bittersweet reminder when their first born son Henry Riggs was born on February 12, 1870 sixty-one years to the date as Abraham Lincoln birth.

The family discovered that life was not going to be easy. Due to his mental instability he was unable to hold down any kind of job. They moved frequently thinking each move would give them a fresh start. To make matters worse he sunk further into his volatile behavior. He began to drink and gamble and most painful for Clara he was unfaithful by attending establishments where he visited women of ill-repute. He also raised an issue with his step-father concerning what he saw as meddling when he paid attention to his daughter and grandchildren. He was fearful and paranoid Ira was helping Clara in an effort to persuade his daughter to leave Rathbone and take his children away from him. This fear and paranoia led Rathbone to declare to Clara that would take the children away from her if she ever sought divorce. Once again the social culture in the 19th century frowned upon the concept of divorce and sadly Clara did not want to be a “divorcee”. Clara lost her father and the one person she leaned on in 1875. Clara was truly alone in her struggles on how to handle her husband’s mental illness. In 1875 she was a mother raising two sons and daughter all under the age of five.

The family relocated to Germany in 1882 when President Chester Arthur appointed Rathbone as the US Consul to the Province of Hanover. The change of location did nothing to improve his health status. In December of 1883 Clara is now the mother of children aged thirteen, twelve and eleven. Henry at this point was on the precipice of a dark tunnel of madness. He was in a “world of delusion and insanity, passing the days reading recondite history, reenacting the Civil War and obsessively reliving that night at Ford's Theatre”. {4}

It all came to a tragic end on December 23 when Henry Rathbone in what was described as a “fit of madness” attacked his children. As any loving mother would do, Clara stepped in to protect her beloved children and managed to lead him away from the children’s bedroom and take him into their bedroom and close the door. There the forty-nine year old, as she thought protect her children from witnessing their father’s lunacy, was shot and stabbed until she was dead. He then stabbed himself five times in the chest in an attempt to take his own life but was not successful. When authorities arrived he was mumbling “Who could have done this to my darling wife?" {*} He was declared criminally insane and spent the rest of his life in a criminal insane asylum in Hildersheim, Germany.

As his physician said:

“He never was thoroughly himself after that night…I have no hesitation in affirming that the dreaded tragedy, which preyed upon his nervous and impressionable temperament for many years, laid the seeds of that homicidal mania.” {5}

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The Rathbone children were sent to live with Clara’s younger brother William Harris (1838-1895). There along with his wife and children this West Point graduate (Class of June - 1861 graduating eighth) raised his sister’s children whom she saved from the wrath of their father. Despite losing their mother and father their eldest son that shared Abraham Lincoln’s birthday graduated from Yale University in 1892 became an attorney and served in the United States House of Representatives as an at-large representative from Illinois. He served from 1923 until his death in 1928. Their other son died in 1936 at sixty-five and daughter Clara died in 1918 at forty-five years of age. She gave the Rathbone’s their only grandchild.

Major Henry Rathbone spent twenty-eight years in the insane asylum, spending the rest of his days in fear and paranoia believing the walls contained a spray which blew dust and gas on him giving him headaches and chest pains. For twenty-eight years he was a sad portrait of an insane man, receiving no treatment, until he died in 1911 at seventy-three years of age. The final resting place of the Rathbone’s in Germany is no longer their’s. As is common in Germany when the grave goes unattended after a period of time the bodies are removed and disposed and the grave spot is given to another. {*}

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Major Charles Rathbone never got the help he needed and as a result he lost his wife and his family. During the mid-to-late 1800’s, Dorothea Dix had begun her crusade in addressing mental health care in the United States. She was a leading reformer as she worked through various state legislatures and with the United States Congress for change. Due to her work the first mental asylums were created. Despite her efforts asylums of that day were often filthy, offered very little treatment, most were overcrowded and often kept people for decades. Treatment was limited and primitive. One of the most popular “cures” was placing the afflicted in baths of ice water. Most of the patients that entered never left which eventually meant no one would ever be “helped or cured”. {6}

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"I come to present the strong claims of suffering humanity.
I come to place before the Legislature of Massachusetts the condition of
the miserable, the desolate, the outcast.
I come as the advocate of helpless, forgotten, insane men and women;
of beings sunk to a condition from which

the unconcerned world would start with real horror.”

Doretha Dix
(1802–1887)



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Sources
1. http://blog.nyhistory.org/attending...gic-lives-of-clara-harris-and-henry-rathbone/
2. https://medium.com/@mlrendek/major-...ims-of-the-lincoln-assassination-85727619bc76
3.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/13980435/clara-hamilton-rathbone
4. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1994-08-21-9408210103-story.html
5. https://emergingcivilwar.com/2014/0...henry-rathbone-and-the-lincoln-assassination/
6.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/wsu-sandbox/chapter/mental-health-treatment-past-and-present/
7. https://www.americanheritage.com/haunted-major#2
8. https://www.geni.com/people/Jared-Rathbone/6000000012772725510
9. https://www.thoughtco.com/dorothea-dix-quotes-3530064
Wikipedia Photos - United States Public Domain
{*} - There is several sources that say the Rathbone’s remained were destroyed in a World War II bombing raid, and another claiming that recent research states their remains are still there.

https://rogerjnorton.com/Lincoln41.html
 
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Great Thread and VERY Interesting read. Thanks for a well written and researched thread.
 
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I suspect in todays world, he’d be diagnosed with PTSD as well as Depression. Poor fellow. I do admire the way that Clara handled the situation, protecting her kids to the end.

Thanks for the information, it was a good article.
 
Thank you DBF.

As a little aside, I have heard it suggested that Henry Rathbone made a grab for Booth as he was jumping from the Presidential box to the stage. This unbalanced Booth, and caused him to fall awkwardly, causing the fractures to his leg which I guess we all know about.

This is a pic of the Magdalenenhof, the asylum at Hildesheim, 20 miles south of Hanover, where Henry was incarcerated for the final 28 years of his life.

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Unfortunately the old building was flattened, along with most of the historic old town of Hildesheim, by the Royal Air Force on the night of 22 March 1945. There is now a Senior Citizens home at the site.
 
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