Will Seippel | June 20, 2025

I look forward to seeing what exciting items have gone under the hammer at auctions held by our WorthPoint Industry Partners. Our Price Guide updates daily, with thousands of new items streaming in, and I always try to highlight a few of my favorites to share with our followers. There’s usually a good story behind so many of these pieces, and sharing my passion for antique and vintage items is the best part of my job. Let me tell you about an interesting item that one of our partners recently auctioned.

Every single item that sells in any auction has a story behind it, so when I noticed the bloody gloves from a recent auction of Lincolnania, I wanted more information. What was the story behind the gloves?

It’s well-known that there are rumors about some of the artifacts of Lincoln’s life, especially anything related to that fateful night at Ford’s Theater. Still, some can be hard to find, and even experts cannot always verify an item’s provenance, which is crucial in the auction space. However, for this auction, the story wasn’t just about the items but the relationship between a museum tasked with curating, displaying, and protecting a collection of Lincoln items and a nonprofit foundation whose mission was to fundraise and assist the museum in its work.

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and the private nonprofit The Lincoln Foundation had a long and eventually contentious relationship, and those issues were definitely part of the reason an extensive collection of Lincoln memorabilia was removed from the museum and sold at auction by the foundation that owned the pieces. The story is complex, but one point stands out: Working together to ensure historical items like this are cared for and protected is essential. 

You can read more about the story behind the gloves here. 

I hope that after all the dust settles, the items sold are preserved for future generations to learn about the legacy of President Lincoln.