Source: Looking for Lincoln
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Download and ShareWhen Abraham Lincoln succumbed on the morning of April 15, 1865 to the gunshot wound inflicted by John Wilkes Booth the previous night at Ford's Theatre, he became the first American president to be assassinated. Coming only five days after the end of the Civil War, Lincoln’s death made him a martyr for national unity and equality, far more beloved and widely respected than he had ever been in life. The extraordinary and unprecedented manner in which the newly-reunited country mourned him shaped the way the nation has reacted to tragedy ever since.
In a scene which would have been familiar to anyone who witnessed the funeral procession of President John F. Kennedy almost a century later, over 100,000 hushed onlookers lined the streets as a horse-drawn hearse carried Lincoln’s body from the White House to the Capitol. From there, the casket began a two-week-long funeral procession to Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, reversing the train journey he had taken to Washington as president-elect, and allowing over one million Americans to pay their respects to "the savior of the Union." The body of Robert F. Kennedy made a similar cross-country pilgrimage following his 1968 assassination.
No sooner had Lincoln’s funeral train passed than a deep and ongoing fascination with “Lincolniana”—artifacts from his life—began. From the iconic “stove pipe” hat to the presidential chamberpot, no object once possessed by America’s greatest secular saint has been too mundane to attract collectors’ eyes. Perhaps the most famous and grisly of these artifacts are those connected to the assassination itself; the bloodstained rocking chair Lincoln was sitting in at Ford Theater, for example, has long been an iconic attraction at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
This veneration of Lincoln’s physical trappings can be seen as a variation of the ages-old Catholic reverence for “relics” left by (and often of) various saints—the most famous of which being the Shroud of Turin, which is said to have wrapped the body of Jesus Christ. It might be more accurately described, however, as one of the earliest manifestations of what we have come to know as “celebrity culture.” The massive outpouring of grief that followed Lincoln’s death, and the painstaking attention paid to the smallest details of his life, is evidence of a deep and widespread emotional attachment to the person and persona of the dead president not unlike that which we now bestow on our most beloved popular icons ranging from Elvis Presley to John Lennon to Princess Diana.
Narrator: The urge to connect with Lincoln has made nearly everything he actually touched, wore, or wrote, into a kind of holy relic. In the basement of the Lincoln museum, under high security, I got a private tour of some of the rarest and most prized Lincoln treasures. Gates: Man look at this.
I feel really special being able to see this…
Schwartz: You can't talk about the Lincoln story without bringing out the bloody relics.
This is the piece of Laura Keene's dress containing Lincoln's blood from the night of the assassination.
Gates: Do we know for sure this is Lincoln’s blood?
Schwartz: There has been no DNA testing. We think it is.
Gates: That’s his hat? Oh my god.
Schwartz: You can see the fingerprints. And there’s also one under the brim where he would grab it and doff it.
Gates: There was something magical about the objects that Lincoln actually touched, That’s fantastic, these things. And it is a feeling shared by many Lincoln collectors. I traveled to Los Angeles to visit Louise Taper, the woman who has become the most prolific collector of Lincoln relics in the entire world.
I went to her home in Beverly Hills… to see for myself what drives her fascination for all things Lincoln.
Taper: Hi, Louise Taper
Gates: Nice to meet you. You have a lovely home . . .
Taper: Thank you
Gates: How many pieces do you have?
Taper: Thousands, I lost count
Gates: I wondered where Lincoln went when he died . . .
Taper: He came to California
Gates: He came to your house
Taper: This is the presidential chamber pot, out of the presidential china.
Gates: My god, this is amazing!
Taper: Here’s a life mask
Gates: How would they do one of these?
Taper: I think they would prepare his face, and put the plaster on, and stick straws where his nose is, and then they do the cast.
Gates: Where did this compulsion come from?
Taper: I just wanted to learn about history and about this man and the more I learned and the more I saw, it just became fascinating.
Gates: Can you control this compulsion? I mean...
Taper: No. No.
Gates: Taper has developed her own interpretation of the personal lives of Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd, whose relationship has intrigued, and vexed, many scholars. Through even their most mundane personal objects, taper believes that she can reconstruct how they felt about each other.
Taper: This is his handkerchief, where Mary monogrammed the “A”
She sewed this. This is her needle safe out of scraps of fabric, and then she put in a campaign silk of her husband . .
Gates: That’s a pretty romantic thing.
Taper: You can just see how much she cared, just by learning about her from her things, the personal touches. You can’t find these things in biographies or history books.
Gates: So each one of these artifacts is a story for you.
Taper: Yes.
Gates: It’s a little piece of uh, the larger narrative of Abraham Lincoln.
Taper: Right.
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