Transcript: All Things Lincoln

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.