They make an honest profit from honest Abe.
Two front-row balcony tickets from the night Abraham Lincoln was assassinated inside Ford’s Theater have sold at auction for $262,500, the Associated Press reports.
The trapezoid-shaped ticket – with a corner believed to have been cut off during entry – is from the DC playhouse performance “Our American Cousin” and is dated April 14, 1865. It is for seats 41 and 42, with a penciled “D” section for the circle area of theater clothes.
The tickets reportedly offered an unobstructed view of the president’s assassination, which was shot by Confederate sympathizer John Wilkes Booth.
“The Presidential box occupied by the Lincolns is also located on the dress circle, approximately directly across from the front row seats represented by these two tickets,” according to an early 2002 auction of the historic stub – which later fetched $83,650 – prior to Saturday’s sale from RR Auction based in Boston.
A ticket from the show where President Lincoln was assassinated has been auctioned for more than $262,000.AP
“Ford’s Theater ticket of this type for April 14, 1865, is extremely rare — auction records do not reveal another example offered since its original sale as part of the Forbes Collection in 2002,” according to RR Auction.
Another rare ticket from the show, held at Harvard’s Houghton Library, was used to authenticate two dress circle stubs through consistency.
Surprisingly, dress circle tickets weren’t the most expensive sold at Ford’s Theater that evening, despite Lincoln’s presence. They rang in a total of 75 cents, while orchestra seats cost $1, according to advertisements archived at the Library of Congress.
Tickets that purported to offer a first-hand view of Lincoln’s fatal shooting have been auctioned off for several hundred thousand dollars.AP
Family circle tickets are the cheapest at 25 cents, while private boxes cost $6 or $10.
Booth, an actor who knew the theater well, used his habit to sneak into the Lincoln booth — one the president shared with his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, among others.
After Booth fired the fatal shot, he jumped on stage, injured his leg, and shouted the Virginia state motto, “Sic semper tyrannis” — Latin for “So always to the tyrant” — before limping away on horseback.
He survived for 12 days but was shot dead by Union soldiers who found the assassin hiding in a Virginia barn, which they burned to force him out.
Theater tickets from Lincoln’s assassination fetch a pretty penny at auction.REUTERS
Lincoln’s assassination – which took place days after the end of the Civil War – was part of a larger plot to decapitate the newly reunited US government. Booth’s fellow conspirators also targeted Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
Lewis Powell’s staff stabbed Seward repeatedly in his bedroom, but the secretary survived and recovered. Johnson was never attacked because would-be assassin George Atzerodt backed out of the show.
Another artifact of the era, a first edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates signed by Lincoln, sold for nearly $594,000 at auction Saturday, the AP reported.
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
