The cloak allegedly worn by Mary Todd Lincoln the night that President Lincoln was assassinated.

On April 15, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C. He and his wife Mary, along with the young couple Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, were enjoying the play Our American Cousin. It was a comedy; Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, was an actor and familiar enough with the play to time his shot so that it would coincide with the audience’s laughter. As the popular writer Sarah Vowell observes: “It is a comfort of sorts to know that the bullet hit Lincoln mid-guffaw. Considering how the war had weighed on him, at least his last conscious moment was a hoot.”

But that was the last humorous moment of the night.

The person most personally affected by the tragedy was certainly Mary Todd Lincoln. It is Mary from whom one of the most intriguing pieces of our collection comes: the cloak she allegedly wore the night of the assassination. The cloak is black silk velvet, with black and white cord trim and tassels, with a black lace appliqué. It’s very nice, and very simple—almost unremarkable in its appearance. Or at least, it would be unremarkable but for the shadowy stains on its surface.

In 1999 the Chicago History Museum partnered with a number of different universities and laboratories to determine the authenticity of our Lincoln collection. The committee’s findings and process can be found on the Wet With Blood website. Their hope was to be able to authenticate the cloak using DNA from the blood staining the cape—which is thought to be both Henry Rathbone’s as well as the president’s—but since it would have been necessary to destroy a portion of the material in order to test it, the committee decided to wait until the technology advanced a bit further.

So, while the authenticity of the cloak remains something of a mystery, it still represents our collective fascination with tangible relics of historical events. Lincoln’s assassination, in particular, generated an enormous amount of material remembrances. Some are real, some are fake—but they all tell us something about our history and ourselves.

> Learn more at the Wet With Blood lecture on April 21

> Visit the Wet With Blood website

> Lincoln Bicentennial exhibitions and events

> Lincoln Bicentennial books and gifts

Tags: assassination, Bicentennial, cloak, Collections, DNA, Lincoln, Meghan Smith, Wet with Blood

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Collections, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.