2015/04/07

Journal Sentinel April 2, 2015: Bedspread said to be from Lincoln's deathbed tested for bloodstains

In the frantic, desperate minutes after John Wilkes Booth fired a fatal shot into the president's head 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln's unconscious body was carried across the street from Ford's Theatre to a rooming house.

Down a narrow hallway and into a tiny room, the stricken Lincoln was carried on April 14, 1865, and placed diagonally on a bed too small for his lanky frame. When he died the following morning a photographer took a photo of the blood-spattered bed, sheets, blanket and pillow.

The beige cotton bedspread carefully stored in acid-free white tissue paper in a temperature- and humidity-monitored room at the Wisconsin Historical Society may have been on Lincoln's deathbed. Or it might not have been. No one knows for sure.

But just how the bedspread came to be in Wisconsin is an interesting story, nonetheless.

And almost a century after it became part of the historical society's collection, the bedspread was tested this week by a University of Wisconsin-Madison textile scientist and Wisconsin Crime Lab official to see if the faint stains on the blanket are blood. Results are due next week.

"There are spots on it. They could be iron rust spots, but blood has iron in it," said Leslie Bellais, Wisconsin Historical Society curator of social history. more