Did Rathbone get blamed?

[Linda Anderson]

Thomas Mallon wrote In Fact: Essays on Writers and Writing in which he discusses writing Henry and Clara.

"As I go about reconstructing this story, school records once again prove helpful. Both Henry and his guardian--who was also his future father-in-law--Ira Harris, attended Union College in Schenectady. The school's archives show that Senator Harris was graduated first in the class of 1824, whereas Henry, three decades later, was, to be generous about it, a mediocre student. He was sometimes fined for failing to attend prayers and recitations, and in the summer of 1854 was charged thirteen cents for breaking some glass. My sense of Henry was that he was a bad job from the beginning-not just unhinged by his bloody service with the Twelfth Infantry and whispers about his incompetence about his failure to save Lincoln. This broken piece of glass, still present and accounted for in a ledger that has survived for 138 years, has given me the idea for a scene in which he will display, early in the story, a little fit of temper."

http://books.google.com/books?id=692KShj...20&f=false