Publication information

Source:
Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop
Source type: book
Document type: book chapter
Document title: “Chapter II”
Author(s): Ford, James L.
Publisher: E. P. Dutton and Company
Place of publication: New York, New York
Year of publication: 1921
Pagination: 19-31 (excerpt below includes only pages 20-21)

 
Citation
Ford, James L. “Chapter II.” Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1921: pp. 19-31.
 
Transcription
excerpt of chapter
 
Keywords
Robert Todd Lincoln; presidential assassinations (comparison); McKinley assassination (personal response).
 
Named persons
James A. Garfield; Abraham Lincoln; Robert Todd Lincoln.
 
Notes
From title page: By James L. Ford, Author of “The Literary Shop,” “Bohemia Invaded,” etc.
 
Document


Chapter II
[excerpt]

     I shall never forget the excitement caused by the killing of Lincoln, nor the great wave of popular indignation that swept over the country and for a time seemed to obliterate all party feeling. New York and Brooklyn were hung with black and for days nothing else was talked of. Years afterward I met Robert T. Lincoln, who said that he had been almost on the spot at every Presidential assassination. “I had just returned from [20][21] the army the night that my father was killed and, feeling too tired to go with him to the theatre, as he wished, I went to bed and was sleeping soundly when I was awakened and told of the crime. I went at once to the house where he lay and was present when he died. One morning, when I was a member of Garfield’s cabinet, I was summoned to meet him at the Pennsylvania Railroad Station as he intended to take a trip to New York. It was while waiting in a side room that I heard a pistol shot and, filled with a terrible foreboding, I exclaimed, ‘The President is shot!’ and rushed out to find my words true. Many years later I was on my way east from my home in Chicago, and as the train stopped before entering Buffalo, the local superintendent of the Pullman Company, of which I was an official, came into my car to speak to me. His first words were, ‘I have sad news for you’ and without waiting to hear more I cried out, ‘Have they killed the President?’”