Witness to the Lincoln Assassination Appeared on TV
Samuel J. Seymour appeared on the game show “I’ve Got a Secret”
On 9 February 1956, Samuel J. Seymour, the last living witness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, appeared on the TV show “I’ve Got a Secret.” As part of the sponsorship of the show by a tobacco company,
they offered him a carton of cigarettes, but he requested pipe tobacco….
The show’s producers knew of Mr. Seymour because of an article that had appeared in The American Weekly, a Sunday supplement published in Hearst Papers across the United States (see Sources below). In the “as told to” story, Mr. Seymour says that he was in Washington with his father, who was was an overseer, and had to go with the plantation owner to the capital on business, seeing about the legal status of his 150 slaves.
Hurry, hurry, let’s go help the poor man who fell down.
Maryland, as a state that had not rebelled in the Civil War, was not subject to the Emancipation Proclamation. However, the state’s third constitution, approved by a plebiscite on 13 October 1864, finally freed the slaves in Maryland. The new constitution of Maryland was in effect from November 1, but there were still details being worked out. It’s also possible that the five-year-old Samuel J. Seymour simply didn’t understand why the adults were going to Washington.
In any case, most everything about Washington, including the size of the hotels, seemed to startle the young Mr. Seymour. And while he did understand that Lincoln had been shot, even killed, he was also concerned for the fate of the man who he thought had fallen from the balcony onto the stage, John Wilkes Booth, and remembers himself saying, “Hurry, hurry, let’s go help the poor man who fell down.”
It is startling to see a man who was alive so long ago — before television, radio, manned flight, before the transcontinental railroad — appearing on television. When Mr. Seymour was a boy, Abraham Lincoln was president and steam locomotives and tintype photographs were relatively new technologies. Additionally, it’s interesting to hear a young boy’s perspective on the events, to hear that the injury of John Wilkes Booth also concerned him (though he didn’t appear to understand at that time that Booth was the murderer).
We tend to look at events from the perspective of “great men,” the people (men and women) who appear to change the course of history. While that is illustrative, it can have the impact of missing the ostensibly less important, less influential people, who also have a point-of-view that can help us understand complex events.
Stories in this publication, Microhistories, will focus on stories of these people who might not be great, or famous, but whose lives and experience can shed light in their times if we view history at ground level.
Sources:
- Ed Papenfuse, “Emancipation? Maryland The ‘Free’ State: November 1, 1864, Why Then?, and Why is it Worth Remembering? Reflections on a Celebratory Evening at the Maryland Historical Society,” Reflections by a Maryland Archivist, 5 November 2015 : http://marylandarchivist.blogspot.com/2014/11/maryland-free-state-november-1-1864.html) accessed 12 July 2019.
- Samuel J. Seymour, as told to Frances Spatz Leighton, “I Saw Lincoln Shot,” (Milwaukee: The Milwaukee Sentinel, 7 February 1954), p. 11. Google News.
Originally published in shorter form at http://www.genealogymedia.com on April 13, 2013.
