Lincoln’s Legacy: Historic Americana from the Life of Abraham Lincoln

One oblong sheet, 2 x 5 1/2 in. (51 x 133 mm); accomplished in manuscript; creasing from old folds.

AN EXCEEDINGLY RARE ADVANCE TICKET for Orchestra seats 42 and 43; printed at bottom recto "H. Clay Ford, Treasurer / This Certificate is good until the end of 1st Act, the right then for Special Seats is forfeited. / Show it to the Usher, he will afterwards return it to you to prevent mistakes."; circular Theatre ink stamp on verso: "Ford's Theatre / APR / 14 / 1865 / This Night Only".

Theatergoer J. Craft and his guest were seated in seats 42 and 43 in the Orchestra section of Ford's Theatre on the fateful night of April 14, 1865. Their seats were among the closest to the stage and just to the lower left of the patriotically adorned Presidential Box, where President Abraham Lincoln, his wife Mary Todd, Major Henry Rathbone, and his fiancée, Clara Harris, viewed the performance. It is possible that Craft's ticket was for special seats in a private box, as white tickets were sometimes designated by the theater for private boxes.

Upon arrival, Mr. Craft and his guest would have entered the theater through theater door number two, the same entrance Lincoln and his party entered to take their seats. During the show, Craft would have had an unobstructed view of the stage, as well as the Presidential Box, and would have witnessed that night's tragic events, which occurred during Act III, Scene 2. At that moment, actor and Southern sympathizer, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the back of Lincoln's box and fired a fatal bullet into the back of the President's head. He then jumped off the balcony and landed on the stage where he yelled “Sic semper tyrannus”, and then made his escape.

Ford's Theatre tickets from the night of Lincoln's assassination are exceedingly rare to auction. According to online records, this is only the third example of any type of ticket offered since 2002. Likewise, only a handful of extant tickets from this evening survive in institutions, including copies at the Ford's Theater Collection, the Smithsonian Institute, Harvard Library, the Lincoln Memorial University Library, the Shapell Manuscript Foundation, and the Lincoln Financial Foundation.

ONLY TWO COPIES OF THIS TICKET FORMAT ARE KNOWN TO BE EXTANT (the other in the Smithsonian Institute).

Provenance:

Louise Taper, Beverly Hills, California

Exhibition:

Blood on the Moon, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, 19 April-16 October 2005