“Oh That Mournful Night”
Ford's Theatre playbill from the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated
On April 14, 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln went to Ford's Theatre with Clara Harris and her fiancé Henry Rathbone to see Laura Keene in Our American Cousin.
At 10:15, as the audience roared at the climactic line ("You sockdologizing old mantrap"), actor and Southern sympathizer John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln and severely wounded Rathbone with a knife. The attack was part of a plan to destroy influential members of the government.
Despite breaking a leg as he leaped onto the stage during his getaway, Booth mounted a waiting horse and escaped into southern Maryland. Lincoln, taken to a house across from the theater, died the next morning.
This sleeve cuff purportedly bearing Abraham Lincoln's blood
was worn by Laura Keene, the star of Our American Cousin.
According to legend, Keene rushed to Lincoln's box to bring water
to the wounded president. As she cradled Lincoln's head while he
drank, her cuff became marked with a trace of his blood.
