A pair of blood-stained gloves that were in Abraham Lincoln’s pocket the night he was assassinated have been sold at auction for $1.52 million, while a handkerchief he had that night went for $826,000. The grim artifacts were part of an auction held Wednesday at Freeman’s/Hindman in Chicago to pay off debts incurred nearly 20 years ago by the Lincoln Presidential Foundation in Springfield, Illinois. The foundation had taken out a loan to buy 1,540 items from a California collector back in 2007, but later struggled to raise the funds to pay it back. Wednesday’s auction featured 144 items, of which 136 sold for a total of $7.9 million. Lincoln was famously shot on the night of April 14, 1865, during a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., and died of his injuries the following morning. At Wednesday’s auction, a “Wanted” poster featuring photos of three suspects in the assassination conspiracy, led by John Wilkes Booth, sold for $762,500, far exceeding the expected price of $120,000. The earliest known sample of Lincoln’s handwriting, from a notebook in 1824, went for $521,200. The buyers’ identities were not immediately revealed.
