Abraham Lincoln’s blood-stained gloves are now on display in Philly

The white leather gloves are stained with blood from the night Abraham Lincoln wore them to the theater. Even on a celebratory night marking an end to war, Lincoln disliked donning the flashy bit of formalwear. The former rail-splitter’s large hands ripped the stitching. Bowing to social custom, and the insistence of his wife, Lincoln stuffed a pair into his coat pocket that fateful night at Ford’s Theatre.

The blood relics represent the most striking highlight of "Lincoln’s Legacy: Historic Americana from the Life of Abraham Lincoln," a landmark public auction of Lincoln materials now on preview at the Freeman’s | Hindman gallery and auction house in Center City.

Founded in Philadelphia in 1805, and the nation’s oldest auction house, Freeman’s | Hindman is selling a trove of 144 Lincoln manuscripts, letters, campaign ephemera, keepsakes, and personal items on behalf of the Lincoln Presidential Foundation. The national nonprofit is parting with 10% of its extensive collection of Lincoln-related historic materials to fund continued scholarly research, programming, and exhibitions.

While the odd Lincoln treasure may come up for public auction once or twice a year, the May 21 event — presented live and online at Freeman’s | Hindman headquarters in Lincoln’s home state of Illinois — is believed to represent the largest sale of quality Lincoln artifacts in decades.

On display through April 26 as part of a five-city national tour, the event is expected to net more than $4 million.

“Everyone knows the story of Lincoln,” said Darren Winston, senior vice president of books and manuscripts at the auction house. “So we’re telling that story through objects that either he created, handled, or touched.”

Spanning the years from Lincoln’s log cabin boyhood to his frontier lawyer days, to his White House years and killing, items were selected that offered a glimpse into Lincoln the person, and not just the face on the five dollar bill, Winston said.

Like a scrap of paper from a childhood sum book said to contain the earliest example of Lincoln’s handwriting. The 15-year-old self-taught boy — and future wordsmith — had been practicing his long division in the Indiana firelight when he jotted off a silly poem.

“Abraham Lincoln is my name,” it reads. “And with my pen I wrote the same. I wrote in both haste and speed and left it here for fools to read.”

Among the many elegantly-signed legal documents and autographed presidential papers is a rare first printing of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, perhaps the most celebrated of his presidential writings, in which Lincoln used biblical allusions to damn the ills of slavery but offered an olive branch “with malice toward none and charity for all.”

“That’s the famous quote,” said Winston, reading aloud from the document. “Now it’s carved into granite.”

But there are also less official family notes Lincoln dashed off during the height of the war and was said to stow away in his top hat.

Like a note the president scribbled just weeks after he named Ulysses S. Grant as general-in-chief of the Union Army, requesting someone reshod the shoes of his 11-year-old son Tad’s pony. And a similar missive signed by Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, on Executive Mansion stationery, asking for a “board and some plank” that the boy could use as toys.

“The world is falling down around him and Abraham Lincoln, the dad, is writing a note to make sure that his son has something to play with,” Winston said.

There are other treasures that bring Lincoln to life. An old wallet from his hardscrabble days as a circuit lawyer. A set of elegant glassware used by the Lincolns in the White House. A generously cut lock of his hair.

But it is the blood relics that transfix the imagination and transport a visitor back to a time of national despair when a president preserved a nation through a bitter war but did not survive the peace.

Like an advance ticket for the April 14, 1865, performance of Our American Cousin, where John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln from behind, as he enjoyed the comedy with his wife and friends. The orchestra seat provided the nameless spectator a perfect view of the president’s box.

“This was someone who just wanted to see the play, but became an eyewitness to history,” Winston said.

There’s a single cuff button bearing the initial “L” torn off by a surgeon who examined the dying Lincoln in the theater. And a piece of the president’s blood-soaked jacket.

And the gloves, long considered a grail of the Lincoln assassination. They carry not only the tragedy of the night, but also the misery that followed Mary Todd Lincoln, who eventually lost three of her four sons to death and sold her husband’s gloves to a family friend to pay debt.

Now expected to sell for as much as $1.2 million, time has flaked and cracked the white kid leather gloves. The blood has faded to a pale rust-brown. But they still show mending from when the president’s palms had previously split them. It brings goose bumps, Winston said.

“He wore these gloves that night when it all came to an end — this war, this amazing man, it ended, and what we’ve got left is these relics of those last moments,” he said.