Clara Harris's Bloody Dress

[Linda Anderson]

The story of the dress that Clara Harris wore on the night of the assassination is related in Things That Go Bump in the Night, a New York State Book by Louis C. Jones. The book is about the "stories of ghosts kept alive by the telling and retelling of our people." Mr. Jones "had been interested in folklore since the time I heard Carl Sandburg sing and talk at Hamilton College in 1929..."

"There was a legend current in Albany during my youth which Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews made into a very successful short story called "The White Satin Dress..."

After the assassination, Clara returned to Albany "after she became Major Rathbone's bride. There was one memento, however, that could bring the whole evening back to her on bitter wings; that was the satin dress she had had made for the occasion. Never again could she bring herself to wear it, not to dispose of it. It hung by itself in her closet, spotted with the blood of the nation's beloved President and of her own beloved husband. Eventually the Rathbones decided to move from the home where the dress had long hung. There was considerable discussion about it: should Clara destroy it, or take it with her? For reasons of her own she did not want to see it moved from its place. A solution was hit upon; the lady moved out of her old home satisfied that she had made the best possible disposal of the gown. This much of the story I [Jones] knew as a boy.

"Miss Andrews's story deals with descendants of the family which next occupied the house. They were related to a Governor of Massachusetts, who, on one occasion, came to visit. The Governor was faced with a difficult decision: a bill had been passed by his legislature which he believed important for his state's welfare, but it had provoked a major political storm. It seemed unlikely that he could be re-elected if he signed it and he could rationalize a veto easy enough. It was the old question of whether to act like a politician or a statesman." The Governor had an uneasy night in the guest bedroom trying to resolve his problem. "At length he slept, only to awaken with a start. There was someone in the room with him; he raised himself on his elbow to see standing in the moonlight the figure of Lincoln, calm, patient and with an understanding smile upon his lips. Then the presence was gone, and the Governor was alone with the moonlight. He was wide awake now and he moved to turn on the light, during which he knocked over on the floor a volume of Lincoln's speeches which had been on the stand by his bed. As he picked it up he saw the words, 'Hew honestly to the line; let the Lord take care of the chips.' Then he knew he would sign the controversial bill, and he did sign it. To his surprise he was re-elected that fall to serve his state even more ably than he had before." The end of the story has the owners doing some remodeling in the guest bedroom and finding in the closet "the gown with the stain of Lincoln's blood upon it."

Clara's dress has been the subject of "numerous ghost stories."

"In the summer Clara Harris went to her family's little summer house just outside Albany, taking her dress along. It was inconceivable for her to have it cleaned up for use, yet she could not bring herself to burn it or throw it away. She put it in a closet. It was hanging there one year to the day from the assassination when she awoke in the night, she told her family, to the sound of low laughter. She said it had been Lincoln, enjoying the play he was watching when Booth's bullet struck. Only a dream, people told her. But a year later, it was said, a guest sleeping in the room came to breakfast with the same story... In 1910, a year before his mad father's death, Representative Rathbone [Clara and Henry's son], so Albany papers said, broke down the bricks walling in his mother's dress last worn forty-five years earlier and burned it, saying it had cursed his family. (SMITH, "The Haunted Major")

http://www.chicagohistory.org/wetwithblo...ments2.htm