10 Amazing Coincidences From History

Robert Todd Lincoln was the son of President Abraham Lincoln. His life was riddled with coincidence. In the history of America there have been four presidential assassinations. Robert happened to be there for three of them.

Robert wasn’t at Ford’s Theatre during his father’s shooting, but he was rushed to his bedside and was present when the President succumbed to his injuries.

16 years later in 1881, Robert was working as Secretary of War for President James Garfield. A few months after he started the job, Robert was accompanying President Garfield to the train station in Washington. A man named Charles Guiteau jumped out with a pistol and shot the president twice.

In 1901, President William McKinley invited Robert Lincoln to join the President's entourage at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. An anarchist named Leon Czolgosz ambushed the chief. Leon shook President Garfield’s hand, pulled out a gun, and shot him twice.

After this event Robert Lincoln refused any invites to events involving Presidents. After one such invite he said, “No, I’m not going, and they’d better not ask me, because there is a certain fatality about Presidential functions when I am present.”

There is one more coincidence in Robert Lincoln’s life that is worth mentioning. When he was still a student at Harvard, he fell onto the tracks at a train station between the carriage and the platform. A man reached down and grabbed him by the collar, pulling him to safety and saving his life. That man was Edwin Booth, one of the most famous actors of the 19th century and the brother of John Wilkes Booth - the man who would one day assassinate Robert’s father.