9UNP1175_Leslie_Bellais

- Today we are pleased to introduce Leslie Bellais as part of the Wisconsin Historical Museum's History Sandwiched In lecture series. Leslie is the Wisconsin Historical Society's curator of social history, and has been working for the society for 25 years. As the curator of social history, she oversees the society's collections of costumes, textiles and personal artifacts, which includes around 2,000 dresses, 250 men's suits and coats, children's clothing and jewelry, among many other things. Here today to share the story of how a bedspread, allegedly from Lincoln's deathbed, came to be a part of the Wisconsin Historical Society's collections, please join me in welcoming Leslie Bellais. 
(audience applauding)

- Thank you. So today I'm gonna talk about a possible relic from Lincoln's deathbed that we have in the collection and that you can view outside if you've had a chance. My main question is was this bedspread on Lincoln's deathbed? And it's not clear one way or the other. 

It might be later on this week, however. First I wanna start out with the bedspread and what it looks like. The bedspread is a hand-knitted white cotton, and it has a scalloped design right there, and you'll also note that it has fringe on three sides. This is the top of the bed where your chin would be. So that's what the bedspread looks like. There's no obvious bloodstains in this picture, but there are drops on it that look kind of blood-like. But first, before I go into the bedspread, I want to just go over how the story of why this is important. You probably know this to a certain extent, but I wanted to go over the assassination that happened the night of April 14, 1865. So, in Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., on that date, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln, who are pictured here in a print from about 1870, along with Major Henry Rathbone, who's standing up in the back there, and his fiancee Clara Harris went to see the play Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. It started around 8:15. 

The president and his entourage arrived at 8:30, which the play stopped, and there was a standing ovation as they took their seats. At 10:30, the play began again, and at 10:30, in the middle of act three, scene two, John Wilkes Booth entered from the back, entered the box from the back, and shot Lincoln with a six-inch long 44 caliber Derringer in the left side of the head. The bullet entered behind his ear and traveled about three inches into his brain. At that time, Rathbone leaped up and fought with John Wilkes Booth and was stabbed deep in the arm, severing an artery.

He did survive, but he passed out later on in the evening because he wanted the focus to be on Lincoln, and finally people realized that he was bleeding to death and were able to finally stop it and save him. At this point, Booth jumps from the box to the stage. It's about 10 feet, with the knife still in his hand. He dropped the Derringer when Rathbone attacked him, so that stayed in the box but took the bloody knife with him as he jumped from the box to the stage. There is some dispute whether he broke his ankle as he landed. He said that he did. 

I don't know if you know, but in the 12 days that he was an escapee, he kept a diary, and he mentioned that he had broke an ankle. However, none of that's been able to be verified, and he was able to continue to run out on the stage. After he lands and he gets his foot caught on the American flag, or his spur, as he's jumping to the stage, which is what you're seeing here. Once he landed on the stage, he yelled sic semper tyrannis, which is Virginia's state motto, and it means thus always to tyrants. He ran out the back stage door and escaped on a waiting horse. The audience was a bit confused at the time. They weren't sure, some of 'em recognized John Wilkes Booth as the man jumping, and they knew he was an actor and thought this was part of the play for a moment, so there was some confusion. But eventually Mary Lincoln yelled that Lincoln had been shot, and then the crowd knew what had happened and a sort of commotion at that time. Lincoln was mortally wounded, but he was not dead at that point. He was breathing. 

He had a pulse, and we know that Dr. Charles Leale, who was a 23-year-old army surgeon in the audience jumped up the box from the front and was the first doctor to get to Lincoln. When two other doctors arrived from the audience, they decided to get him out of the theater. This is a more recent painting of him being carried out of the theater. His carriage waited to take him to the White House, but the doctors believed that he would not survive the ride. At that point, Henry Safford, a boarder at the home of William and Anna Petersen, yelled out to bring him to the Petersen House. What you're seeing here is the Petersen House as it appeared in 1865 and also in a more recent image. It is open to the public.

Lincoln was placed in the room of boarder William Clark on a bed that was too short for him, so he lay on it diagonally. At this point, 20 minutes had passed since the shooting. 

So that's where we are. We're now at the deathbed, and we know that about 12 people clustered around Lincoln.

The interesting thing about this deathbed scene that happened in the Petersen House is that it was created in images about 15 to 20 different versions of it, of which four we're seeing here from people who were definitely not ever in the Petersen House or at the deathbed scene.

Dr. Leale and identified about 12 people at the bed for most of the night. We also know that Mary Todd Lincoln and her friend Mrs. Senator Dixon entered the room about three or four times. So, Mrs. Lincoln was in the room a few times. She had a hard time being in that room, so she mainly spent the night in the parlor.

Interestingly, just to show you, this picture up here has 47 people in it. 
(audience laughing)

 Tis one actually does have 12. This one I counted as 24, this is 24, and this is 20.

That would be a pretty huge room to get 47 people in it, and this was a small boarder's room. These are more accurate-- I wanted to point out that the donor of the bedspread to the Wisconsin Historical Society in his original letter mentioned that since it looked like the ones in the engravings, it must be the Lincoln deathbed. It must be from the Lincoln deathbed, and you can see at least in some places there is a white bedspread on Lincoln. However, the one at the bottom is a bit more accurate, the bottom right, is a bit more accurate of what was on his bed. So, that is not a source of information to prove if this blanket or bedspread is off his deathbed. These are actually two more accurate deathbed scenes. 

The one on the left was done by Herman Faber, an artist on the surgeon general's staff in the Union Army, a position that allowed him to make two drawings of Lincoln's deathbed scene before the room was cleared, so he may have actually been in the room while this was being drawn. The other image is by Alfred Waud, he was a Civil War illustrator for Harper's Weekly who was allowed to see the room and spoke to witnesses about who was present and where they were in the room. So, the top image is his sketch of how he's gonna lay it out, and then the bottom image is the final version of that.

However, even better than all of these, which the donor of this bedspread would not have known about at the time he donated it is that a photographic image was taken of the deathbed room shortly after Lincoln was removed from it by a boarder at the Petersen House named Jules Ulke. We know that the coverlet on the top is a blue-and-white coverlet. For a while, it did travel the United States as a Lincoln relic but has since vanished. We don't know where it is anymore. But what I really wanted to point out is there does look to be a bedspread underneath it, however, there's no fringe like on ours. For the most part, I've been in touch with the Petersen House, they are not willing to identify this bedspread as a Lincoln deathbed piece because it's obviously not in this deathbed scene.

We do know that some pieces from the deathbed survive, including the deathbed itself, which is in the top right. 

Lincoln's deathbed is at the Chicago History Museum in Chicago. It's on continuous display. This is what it looks like. It's a Jenny Lind bed. Jenny Lind was a singer at the time who was very fond of this bed. It's actually a Gothic Revival piece from the 40s or 50s, 1840s or 50s, that was named after the singer Jenny Lind. The bed that I have on display is also a Jenny Lind bed. Ours has the same footboard and headboard, while this one has just the turned spools on the footboard. Also at the Chicago Historical Society is a bolster pillow, and we believe that pillow, what they believe is that the two pillows that are at the back there are being bolstered by a larger pillow underneath it, and that this is that large pillow with a bloodstain clearly on it. The pillow below that belongs to the National Park Service. 

It was a pillow on the bed of Lincoln's deathbed. It's on display at the Ford's Theatre Museum, and you can see it also has bloodstains. The Petersen House still survives. They have recreated it to look like it did when Lincoln was shot, which you can still see and which is still open to the public. Those are the pieces related to the deathbed that we know. We do also know that when Lincoln was placed on the bed that the bed was pulled out from the walls, and Julius Ulke put it back where it belonged when he took this photograph, but you can see that there are people on all four sides of the bed in the more accurate images. That's a few things we do know about the bed.

How did the bedspread come to us? That's something I can definitely tell you. This is Richard Lloyd Jones. 

He was the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. Here he is at his desk in August 1916.

He is the donor of the bedspread to the Wisconsin Historical Society, and he donated it to us in 1919. He had been an editor for Collier's Magazine out of New York City. He wrote several articles on saving Lincoln memorabilia and was instrumental in purchasing one of the Lincoln log cabin homes and preventing it from falling into the hands of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. They had planned to purchase it and put it on a wagon and then take it around to different cities and show it off as a Lincoln relic. He felt that was disrespectful of Lincoln's memory, and so he rushed to the sale of the house and was able to round up the money to purchase it before Barnum and Bailey got there. He wrote about that in Collier's Magazine. That's why people knew about him and his interest in Lincoln.

He got the bedspread in 1907.

He then moved to Madison in 1911 when he purchased the Wisconsin State Journal and became the editor of it. He brought it with him at that time. In 1919, after World War I, where he had been very supportive of the war and very supportive of looking for traitors and spies to some people's detriment, so after the war he felt a little vilified as people now turned on him and decided he couldn't stay in Madison and moved to Oklahoma. He did not want to take the bedspread with him. He felt it was too important a piece to be in private hands. We were the local historical society at his convenience, and so he offered it to us in 1919. I'd like to read you the letter he included with the bedspread because this is basically all we know about it. "In the summer of 1907, I received a letter "from a lady, whose name I have unfortunately "forgotten, stating that her sister and she "possessed the counterpane," which is the bedspread, "under which Abraham Lincoln died, "and would like to turn that counterpane over to me "to dispose of as I saw fit. "Would I please advise her if I were "willing to accept it either as a gift or as a trust. "On the evening of that day, I called upon her. 

"She and her sister were living in one "of the 80s on the West Side of New York City "in a very fine house, though unpretentious, "in the New York sense. "They were obviously people of affluence and culture. "They showed me the counterpane "and told me that it was in their aunt's "house that Mr. Lincoln died. "That house is now occupied "by the Oldroyd Lincoln Collection." What happened to the Petersen House is in 1871, both Mr. and Mrs. Petersen died. Mr. Petersen we know died of an overdose of laudanum, which was a pain medication at that time. 

It's often said it was a suicide, but really, we don't know if he took it on purpose or not. He died in April. She died in October, and we don't know the reason of her death. In 1878, their children sold the house to Louis Shod, who lived in it till 1896, where he felt it belonged to the federal government and sold it to the federal government. At that time, the Oldroyd Lincoln Collection, Mr. Oldroyd collected all kinds of Lincoln memorabilia, was put on display in the Petersen House. So when he says it is now occupied by the Oldroyd Lincoln Collection, we know that he's talking about the Petersen House. "So when their aunt gave up that house "some years after Lincoln's death, "she gave this historic counterpane "to her two nieces. "They had kept it in their New York home, "but were planning to move to Italy "to spend the remainder of their lives "and did not wish to take such a valuable relic. "Knowing my interest in Lincoln matters, "they decided to turn it over to me, "and in doing so, they made a gift to me "personally, stating that they would be "satisfied with any disposition I might make of it. 

"At the time, the ladies wrote out a full "statement of the facts, giving their names, "address and the date of the transfer, "which paper, I am sorry to say, was mislaid "when I moved from New York to Madison. "Should it ever come to light," and it never has, "I will, of course, "turn it over to the Wisconsin Historical Society. "This counterpane, it may be stated, was "the best spread of this household, "and when Mr. Lincoln was carried "from Ford Theatre directly across the street, "the best the house could "provide was, of course, his. "The counterpane was not used "by the family after Mr. Lincoln's death." So this is the information we have about it. Keeping in mind that he has lost the piece of paper that had all the information on it, and that there's a 12 year gap between the time he received it and the time he's donating it to us, I do believe there's some errors in the memories here. The first thing I needed to do was check out the Petersens. Could this come from the Petersen House? 

Here is William Petersen. This was a illustration done at the time of Lincoln's death. About 1865 it showed up in Frank Leslie's or Harper's Weekly Magazine. We believe this is the only image that's identified online as being possibly Anna Petersen, his wife, and then here are their gravestones. They are buried in Washington, D.C.

We know that Henry Safford, who was the boarder who told the doctors to come to the Petersen House and put them in William Clark's room. His room was upstairs, and he would've loved to have Lincoln in his room, but they realized they couldn't carry him upstairs, and so they took him to Clark's room instead. He later stated that the Petersens were not at home at all during this whole incident, so they were not there when Lincoln came in. They were not there all night, and they were not there when he died. In fact, we know that William Petersen returned home shortly after Lincoln's death and was infuriated to find blood, mud and mustard plasters littering his house, and he angrily snatched a bloody pillow that had lain beneath the president's head and threw it out the window. 

So that was his original feelings, his immediate reaction to having this mess and chaos in his house. We also know from a small, undated article that I believe showed up within a year or so before his death in 1871 at least, in the newspaper, and the article notes that "It is stated that the parties "who own the house in Washington "in which President Lincoln died," which would be William and Anna Petersen, "have put in a claim in the office "of the auditor of the treasury for losses "incurred by the damaging of sheets, "pillowcases and carpets caused by the ebbing "of the lifeblood of the great American martyr." So you can tell how they feel about this action. 
(audience laughing)

 "The bill amounts to $550. "The owners kept the house open "for exhibition at 50 cents a visitor," and that would be about $7.40 today, so it's not terrible, "for some time "after the president's death." There has been research on whether they received anything, and as far as we know, there's no indication that the federal government paid this claim, which would equal about $8,000 in current money. So they're asking for $8,000 to replace sheets, carpets, pillowcases, bedspreads, which seems a little excessive and maybe why they didn't get anything. The next thing I wanted to know, okay, so this is what we know about the Petersens. We know they weren't home, so they may not have been very interested in whether the best bedspreads were used on Lincoln, and from the reaction of William Petersen, it doesn't sound like he would have actually offered them the best bedspreads in the house, but that's all we really know. 

So the next thing I wanted to do was do some genealogy work and look at Anna Petersen because they are saying that Richard Lloyd Jones, who's actually Frank Lloyd Wright's cousin, which is why I almost said that, Richard Lloyd Jones said they came from the nieces, implying it came from the nieces of Anna Petersen. So I need to find out if there are any nieces of Anna Petersen. It turns out Anna Petersen's genealogy is a little convoluted. Here's what I was able to find out. There she is right here.

Her maiden name was Klomann. She is the daughter of Felix Klomann, whose silhouette is right there, and Louise Bauer. She was born in Germany in 1819, and her parents had three children of which she was the oldest. She was born in 1819. Her brother Carl, who became known as Charles once she moved to the United States in 1820, and then there was Dorothea Elizabeth who was born in 1825 and died in 1827. 

We know right away that there's at least one sibling who lived to adulthood. However, Felix we know abandoned his first wife and children while he still lived in Germany. We're not quite sure what happened. There's no written record exactly, but he ended up marrying another woman and immigrating with her and their oldest child in 1838 to Baltimore, Maryland.

The children who grew up from this, and you can see it's William, Wilhelmina and Edward Felix, ended up moving to Virginia, and both William and Edward fought for the Confederacy, so that's kind of interesting that this is what happened with her half siblings. Their history is very well documented. There is a book on the Klomanns of Virginia, and when I checked it out, they do mention Anna, Carl and Dorothea, but the writer had no idea that Anna was Mrs. Petersen of Petersen House fame. I actually contacted him and let him know, and he was a bit shocked to find out that his Confederate ancestors were actually related to the people in the house where Lincoln died. That was kind of fun to do as part of this genealogy research. 

From what I can tell, and looking over records from this time period, Anna and Charles had very little if any interaction with their half siblings. Their half siblings went off to Virginia, lived their own lives. They stayed in Washington, D.C., and lived their lives, both Charles and Anna lived in D.C. We believe that they came here around the early 1840s. They did not come with Felix. We know this because we can see Felix's shipboard records, and we know that he traveled with his second wife and his oldest child from his second wife, and no other Klomanns were with him.

We do know that Anna and Charles are probably in D.C. by about the early 1840s, definitely Anna is. She gets married in 1843 to Fredrick Wilhelm, who went by William Petersen, and their first child was born in D.C. in 1844. That clearly puts her in D.C. by that time period. Charles, we know, married around 1851 and had four sons and four daughters. Here, there's Charles. 

There's his wife, and here are his children. He has four daughters. Those are the ones we're interested in. The oldest daughter died in 1878 in her 20s after getting married, and my supposition is she probably died in childbirth. She is not one of the sisters we're considering. However, there are three other sisters, Louise, Anna and Hortense, so those are the ones I focused on. What I found out is that Louise and Hortense, Hortense never married. Louise married George Plant. Hortense lived with Louise and George her whole adult life, and after George passed away, she continued to live with Louise, and later on in life, Anna moved in with them when her husband passed away. They lived in Washington, D.C., their whole life, not New York City, and in their old age, they moved to Baltimore, Maryland. 

They also did not retire to Italy, so we have a problem here. What we do know, I went and looked up their travel records, the New York passenger list records, and we do know they traveled to Europe four times and Mexico once, all leaving out of New York City. I do think there's a possibility that Richard Lloyd Jones was a little confused, possibly, that they weren't living in New York City, but they were in New York City in preparation to go on a trip. We also know, he said they were cultured and obviously well-to-do. We do know that Charles in 1870 had real estate worth $80,000, which would have been tremendous at that time, and $2,000 in personal estate, which would be bank accounts and other items like that. So he is a well-to-do person. I'm not sure how he got his money. He's usually listed as not having an occupation. 
(audience laughing)

 I do know that William Petersen was a tailor, traveled in tailor circles. 

He had his shop in the basement of the Petersen House, but they also boarded to make extra money.

That's what we know of the five travels I've been able to find of these two sisters traveling together all the time. They seem to be connected at the hip, which makes me think they are the two nieces he met. I could not find the travel record for 1907. The first time I can find the travel record is 1912. Doesn't mean it's not out there. It's just probably not online yet. I hope.

So that's what we know. What I think, so far, is that this piece did come from the Petersen House. 

It did come through two nieces of Mrs. Anna Klomann Petersen, and that it made it into the hands of Richard Lloyd Jones, but I'm not sure that it was on his bed. That is the next question. In preparation for this exhibit and for this talk, on March 31 of last week, on Tuesday, the Wisconsin Crime Lab ended up taking 10 to 12 swab samples of the dark stains found on the bedspread, mainly near the top of the piece, which is where his head would have been. These are all reddish brown stains, and they're identifying them for blood. We want to know if these reddish brown stains, which you can see very evidently on this piece, are blood. Now, we were told by Richard Lloyd Jones that this was never used again by the Petersens. I read somewhere else, and it's not in the original letter, however, that someone else stated later on that it was never washed. That we believe is not true. When you look at these reddish brown stains, it looks like it's been washed, but these stains have settled into the crevices of the knitting that occurred here, and they're rather sporadic, but they all seem to be in those crevices where they may have got stuck.

If we do find blood, the next step I should also say we've been working I wasn't able to call the crime lab and just say would you do this for us. I had to do it through connections, and I called Professor Majid Sarmadi, who's a textile scientist at the University of Wisconsin, just to ask him if we could spray luminol on this piece to see if there's blood. I needed to find out if anyone's tested luminol for its long-term effects because we hope to have this around for hundreds of years, and I don't want to spray luminol and then watch it rot away, so I called him, and that's all I asked was can we spray luminol on it.

He emailed me, and then he called me back to say he was so excited about this, and you're gonna see that in just a moment. He is beside himself with just excitement. He told me the day before the scientific testing he couldn't sleep, so he's excited. Just to make sure we know that, and he decided he was going to track down someone who could take care of this. First thing he said is that we should bring it over to his lab and look at it under a stereoptic microscope, which is a microscope that shines light onto the piece, so you don't have to have a slide and look through it. That's what I thought I was doing. Then I called to change the time, and we couldn't change the time because he invited the Wisconsin Crime Lab to come, and they were very tight in their timeframe that they could be there. 

All of a sudden, now I know the Wisconsin Crime Lab's gonna be there, and the gentleman who showed up was Dan Campbell. I just thought they'll send their lacky over. He is the head of the DNA division of the Wisconsin Crime Lab. We had a reporter there, and actually David Erikson, whose in the audience, filmed it for us, and it turned out to be quite an event. If we find blood, the next stage is the Wisconsin Crime Lab will test it to see if it's animal or human blood. That's the next step. If it shows up to be human blood, we can then check it for nucleic DNA at the Wisconsin Crime Lab. Nucleic DNA tells you more about the person than any other kind of DNA. However, as Dan Campbell pointed out, he has never tested blood over, well, the oldest blood he had tested was 1959. So, 150 years old, and it's 150 years old next week, he's never done blood that old. 

And we're not sure we're gonna be able to find a surviving nucleic DNA if this is blood. If we cannot find nucleic DNA, we will send it off to the University of North Texas, which can check for mitochondrial DNA, which stays longer in stains like this. It just shows the maternal line, so it'll only be half kind of the DNA picture. The next problem is, is there any Lincoln DNA out there to compare it to? There is no tested Lincoln DNA, I should put it that way. There are hair and blood samples. You saw the bloody pillows from Chicago History Center and the one from the National Park Service. The Chicago History Museum also owns the coat he was wearing that night.

Dr. Charles Leale, while he was still in the box, had the left sleeve cut off because he saw the knife. 

He wasn't as aware of the gun, so he was looking for a knife stab in the shoulder area, so he had the sleeve cut off and eventually started looking around the head area since that was also bloody, and that's when he found the hole. That coat survives at the Chicago History Center. His top hat he was wearing that night is at the Smithsonian. Chicago History Center also owns the cloak or cape or the outerwear that Mary Todd Lincoln wore that night, which is also spattered with Lincoln's blood from the gunshot wound. So there is blood out there. There's also hair samples. What used to be known as the Walter Reed Hospital has a lock of hair. As those 12 gentlemen were in the room after he passed away, a handful of them went and cut off a lock of hair, which was a typical 19th century thing to do at someone's death as a memento. Some of those hair samples have made it into museums, however, they're not the root, so that's, they didn't pluck the hair out, which would've been a little obnoxious, so they have just the hair itself. So it's out there. 

These museums have been approached several times to get DNA samples. There was a program done by, a documentary done about 10 or 15 years ago when the Chicago History Center brought people from all over the country together to talk about whether they should do DNA samples. At that time, the scientists were very clear they would need a one-inch sample of the blood stain, and no museum was willing to cut up any of their textiles for that purpose. We're now at a point where we can actually swab it. Swabbing is not perfect because, as you'll see in a moment, blood is not water soluble, and it's a little harder to get it up. They also have been reluctant to take DNA samples because the main group that is pushing for DNA samples is the Marfan Syndrome Society. They believe that Lincoln had Marfan Syndrome. Marfan Syndrome leaves you kind of tall and gaunt and kind of emaciated looking, and to have Lincoln associated with that would really help their cause. So far no museum has been willing to take a DNA sample for that purpose. So we have that problem. 

I do wanna show you some of the clips from the scene that David Erikson took for us. The first one up is of Dr. Sarmadi. He is very excited, and I hope you can understand what he's saying.- I find a very good piece of blood in here that has not been disturbed that is about

- Wow! I'm sorry, were you rolling on that?

- Yeah, that's very small.

- Look at this. That's wonderful.

Oh boy, I'm so excited. 
(laughing)

 I can't. 
(muffled voice says something unclear)

 But it is a possibility.

- [Leslie] So Dan Campbell's saying maybe. He knows it's a possibility.

- [Majid] The bad thing about blood is,

- [Leslie] It's about luminol.

- [Majid] It's not water soluble after it has been dried up for a long time, so in this one we are not gonna use luminol because we have a spray that we can spray on this one, and it glows, and we can see the cells and we can see the blood. But the problem with that one is, this is too important of a piece to expose it to something that we do not know the long-term effect of the luminol on the material. Therefore, that's the whole problem. Otherwise, it was little bit easier. 

So now...
(speaking very quietly as working)

- And then moments later, well, this is actually a different swab, but just to show you what it looked like.
(speaking quietly while working)

- There were some places that had spots on them.

You can sort of see up here, the fringe has turned brownish red up there, and I did give 'em permission to cut a piece of that fringe off for testing so they'd have a larger sample. That's basically what we did. That's where we are right now. I hope you'll go out and take a look at the bedspread itself. We have to keep the light relatively dim to protect the piece from being destroyed by light. 

I also hope you'll take a look at the rest of the exhibit, which focuses on Wisconsin connections including three Wisconsinites who were in the theater that night and saw Lincoln be shot and tell the story of the Lincoln assassination in their words. Thank you very much for coming. Keep your eyes out in the press. There'll probably be an announcement. They're aiming for Monday. 
(audience applauding)