Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation Owes Big $$$

[Gene C]

Fido and I agree with you Roger, that is farfetched.
Some interesting comments on the gloves in the threads " Lincoln's Embalmment" and "Assassination Relics"

[Steve]

About the bloody gloves:

Look at Dr. Leale's account of trying to find the wound from his April 1865 report:

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jala/262986...w=fulltext

and Capt. Edwin Bedee's account of trying to find the wound with Dr. Leale ("the doctor"):

https://archive.org/details/historyoftwe...6/mode/2up

Both Leale and Bedee describe removing the coat while looking for the wound and Bedee's account mentioned that Lincoln's papers fell out of his coat while they were looking for the wound. If the gloves were in Lincoln's pocket, they could've fallen to the ground and gotten blood on them when Leale removed the clot from the wound to make Lincoln's breathing more regular. I suppose the gloves could've also have belonged to one of the men treating Lincoln and wrongly assumed to have come from Lincoln by the person who found them.

What's the provennance for the gloves? Who originally had them/found them?

[RJNorton]

Steve, I believe all that has been posted regarding the provenance of the gloves is in Dave Grimm's post here:

https://rogerjnorton.com/LincolnDiscussi...l#pid75065

[RJNorton]

Here is the most complete story of the museum's hat (by far) that I have ever read:

https://www.antiquesandthearts.com/when-...ally-cost/

[ReignetteC]

For the People (Abraham Lincoln Association) has some pertinent information in its recent newsletter about the Lincoln hat in the ALPLM collection. Here is a summary:

The new chair of the Board of Trustees of the ALPLM "aims to bring to finality the story behind the Lincoln stovepipe hat by determining that 1) "The hat was worn and belonged to the president." 2) "The hat was not worn and did not belong to the president." 3) "There is no definitive answer regarding the provenance of the hat."

The article states that "the findings will be noted in all future exhibits of the hat."

Source: For the People, Spring 2020

[davg2000]

This is a good, thorough article, full of information which is not generally known. However, the author makes one enormous mistake. In discussing ALPLM's original relative scarcity of three-dimensional Lincoln artifacts, Smith states:

"In lieu of [ALPLM's] owning major artifacts relating to the life of Lincoln, and not content with a show of paper signatures, Dr. Schwartz secured two of Taper’s most prized possessions for loan as the museum opened: Lincoln’s stovepipe hat and a copy of Lincoln’s handwritten Gettysburg Address."

He is correct about the hat, which was indeed on loan for some time before the purchase of the Taper Collection. But unless the author is referring to a heretofore unknown sixth handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address, Illinois has owned one of the five known copies--the Everett copy--since 1944, when Illinois school children, and Marshall Fields, famously purchased it for the state. It goes on display usually twice a year at ALPM.