Mary Lincoln's engraved opera glasses?

[Dave Taylor]

As intriguing as the opera glasses are, like Roger, my biggest hang up is the lack of any provenance for the piece aside from the inscription. If the glasses had been found in the hands of a Kent descendant who swore to the inscription as a family story, that could help somewhat, but all we know is that it turned up in a random estate sale in England.

The fact that Kent never mentions the glasses is also hard to rectify. Kent testified at the conspiracy trial and two years later at the trial of John Surratt. The only object he mentions finding in the box during those two court appearances is the derringer. But, as you note, this omission doesn’t necessarily exclude the possibility that he might have also found Mary Lincoln’s opera glasses. The courts were both more focused on the derringer, and, at that time, Kent may not have wanted to advertise that he took the first lady’s glasses.

But the issue I have is the fact that Kent went on to live the rest of his life in D.C. and often talked about the assassination, lending his pocket knife, and finding the pistol, but never mentioned anything about opera glasses. In a quick newspaper archive search, I found three different accounts of the assassination that William Kent gave in 1891, 1909, and 1916. Each story is pretty much the same. In one of the accounts, it mentions how Kent keeps the penknife he loaned to the doctors to cut open Lincoln’s shirt as a treasured possession. The lack of any mention of opera glasses is telling to me. By the turn of the century, Kent had nothing to fear about revealing he had picked up and kept Mary Lincoln’s opera glasses. The government wasn’t going to try and confiscate them. And if he had given them away, as the inscription on the glasses implies, he surely would have included this nugget of a detail in his retellings of that tragic night.

An interesting piece, but I still don't feel it's legitimate.

Here are links to the different accounts I found from William Kent if you feel like reading them.
1891
1909 Part 1
1909 Part 2
1916
The 1909 Article had this nice picture of William Kent. I have been to his grave in Glenwood Cemetery in D.C. but had never seen a picture of the man before.