Letters From The Time Traveler: The Boy at Ford’s Theatre

Dearest,

There are historical events that seem so far back in time, that they don’t seem to relate to today.

Lincoln’s assassination is one of these historical events. Locked up in dusty old history books, the event at Ford’s theatre no longer seems real. Or relevant.

But in 1954, a man named Samuel Seymour shared his account of the assassination with the journalist Frances Spatz Leighton.

The amazing part about this is he waited 94 years to tell his tale.

When he was five years old, Sarah Cook, his nurse, along with his godmother Mrs. Goldsborough, who was the wife of his father’s employer, took him to see Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.

They sat in the balcony across the theater from the presidential box. He said he saw Lincoln come into the box, waving and smiling.

As he told it, All of a sudden a shot rang out … and someone in the President’s box screamed. I saw Lincoln slumped forward in his seat.”

Five-year-old Seymour watched John Wilkes Booth jump from the box to the stage. He remembered that not understanding what had happened to Lincoln, he was very concerned for Booth, who broke his leg, disputedly, in the jump.