Lincoln’s Collar, Booth’s Knife, Mary Todd’s Chamber Pot

We researchers often forget that tons of historic relics are not found in museums, but locked in the drawers of private collectors like Dr. John Lattimer of Columbia University. According to the New York Times , Lattimer’s daughter Evan has taken on the task of cataloguing the collection. She is selling some of it at Heritage Auctions in Dallas, TX this week to pay the 53% inheritance tax. Highlights of the Lattimer Collection not yet for sale include

Hermann Göring’s boxer shorts and cyanide capsule, a dinosaur egg, WC Field’s top hat, Lee Harvey Oswald’s letters to his mother, Charles Lindbergh’s goggles, Custer’s bearskin coat, and Napoleon’s aforementioned privates that rest in a small box in NJ.

It’s no secret that I too am a bit of a collector – a very little bit compared to Lattimer. I once spent $100 on a 19^th century tobacco sign featuring a hand-painted portrait of John Paul Jones, but that is my upper limit. It’s also no secret that I am working on a novel that hovers around the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. I am far from the first to take on this topic. But, trust me, I’ve got an approach that has never been seen before. I have been studying up for months and, thanks to the hundreds of books available on the topic, could keep reading for years. I have 5% of my book written with 95% left to go.

So imagine my surprise to see an eBay auction offering the actual blood-spattered collar worn by President Abraham Lincoln during the assassination at Ford’s Theatre. I assumed it was an eBay hoax. Next up was a knife owned by assassin John Wilkes Booth. The weapon Booth carried is still on display in Ford’s Theater. The one on sale is a stage knife, the kind with a retractable blade used in the theatrical assassination of literary tyrants like Julius Caesar. The knife may have belonged to JWB’s father Junius Brutus Booth, the most famous thespian of his era and a key character in my book-in-progress. The auction also includes a full-length tunic worn by Booth, a piece of the chair Lincoln was killed in, a bloody bit of bandage and splint from the assassins leg, Mrs. Lincoln’s chamber pot, the inkwell Abe used when writing the Emancipation Proclamation, his glasses, Mary’s mourning veil, fabric worn by the conspirators at their public hanging, and more macabre mementos.

It is unlikely I can afford a single item in the November 20 Lattimer auction. But I am already a winner. I spent a full day pouring over the online catalog that featured magnified hi-res images of the auction items. I was able to zoom-in on the very fibers of Booth’s tunic and the Lincoln collar. I learned details scribbled on the backs of photos and read from documents that, in a million years, I could not unearth. Some items, like a grade school letter from John Wilkes Booth (signed "Billy Bowlegs") have become part of the official scholarship. But the Lattimer auction allowed me to zoom in on the original – to see Booth’s chilhood handwriting and to almost touch the fabric of the paper – all without leaving my office in New Hampshire.

To tell you the truth, I don’t want this stuff. Owning Lincoln’s last bloody shirt collar would freak me out. I would be afraid to touch it, afraid of it getting stolen, unable to cover the insurance fees. Owning it would make me feel unworthy, unclean, greedy, obsessive, perverse.

As bizarre as we history collectors can get, Dr. Lattimer takes the prize. According to his daughter, he became so obsessed by the Kennedy Assassination, that he carried out his own independent experiments. He asked his teenaged kids to shoot at a cadaver from the barn roof to test his theories. Neither of Lattimer’s two sons wanted to be interviewed by the New York Times. I can’t imagine why.

The value for the rest of us is simply being bugs on the wall as the collection pops into the online marketplace. We get to take a peek and take notes. By the end of the week, these costly items, once drawn together into Dr. Lattimer’s grasp, will again be dispersed into the obsessed arms of other wealthy collectors – to be worshipped, ogled and temporarily owned. But nobody owns the past for long. Eventually it absorbs us and our collections and our books and hurtles on down the hill.

© 2008 by J. Dennis Robinson at SeacaostNH.com. All rights reserved.