re: #78 bmoak

Secretary of State Seward was actually attacked by an assassin who came to his house and wounded him, but Seward and household members fought the assassin off and he fled. His home in Auburn, NY is now a museum and has both the bloody shirt and the attempted murder weapon

I read somewhere that Seward had escaped death by the “lucky break” of having been in a bad carriage accident a few days previously, and had had his neck in some sort of brace because of it. When the assassin (the thuggish Lewis Powell) broke into Seward’s bedroom, he tried to cut the Secretary’s throat, but was foiled by the brace just long enough to allow Seward’s bodyguard time to intervene. Luck….