No bids for cloth from Lincoln's coat

ST. LOUIS -- A day after drawing no bids for a cloth swatch he claims came from the coat President Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated, George St. Pierre wasn't blaming the $1 million minimum selling price for his failure to close a deal.

The eastern Missouri man who bought the postage stamp-sized scrap for just $10 at a secondhand store in 1987 suspected Monday that he simply didn't make the sale on proving its authenticity.

Bids were to have started at $100,000, though St. Pierre said he wouldn't part with the piece until that bidding reached $1 million.

Minutes before the auction on GoAntiques.com, he had the opportunity to drop the drop-dead price to $500,000, "but I didn't think that would be wise."

"Maybe I made a mistake -- the million-dollar price may have scared off some potential bidders," St. Pierre said from his home in Louisiana, Mo. "For me, I could take a gamble buying it at $10 as I did. But for $1 million, you might be quite cautious."

"Although there are strong statements from authorities to support the claim [that the swatch is authentic], I don't have it to 100 percent certainty."

Still, he said, "I'm satisfied with the validity of the piece itself."

No one definitively can say the silk-lined swatch was from the silk-lined overcoat the 16th president wore the night he was shot in the head in 1865 by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in Washington.

Some Lincoln collectors have been skeptical, saying in days prior to the auction that St. Pierre has no documentation of ownership of the item from the time it supposedly was snipped from Lincoln's coat by souvenir scavengers until St. Pierre bought it.

St. Pierre has authentication, of sorts -- most of it written correspondence from people who have examined the cloth since he bought it in Quincy, Ill., where Lincoln once debated Stephen Douglas.

Frank Hebblethwaite -- a one-time technician at Ford's Theatre museum, where Lincoln's coat is prominently displayed -- has told St. Pierre in writing that "it is quite possible that you do have a piece of the overcoat worn by President Abraham Lincoln on the night of his assassination."

But museum officials have kept the coat behind glass to keep it protected, refusing to let experts pluck fibers from the garment for microscopic comparison to St. Pierre's swatch.

In the mid-1990s, the Ford Theater museum's then-curator, Marshal Kesler, had the St. Pierre swatch inspected and compared to the coat. Kesler told The Associated Press, "It did appear that in all likelihood the piece is part of the coat. I'm 90 to 95 percent sure."

But Randy Bresee, a University of Tennessee professor specializing in textiles, said he can't positively link the swatch to the Lincoln era, much less to the coat. "You would have to compare it to the coat to be definitive," he said.

St. Pierre says he'll press on trying to make the connection, convinced he'll still manage to sell the "highly significant piece" someday to an individual or a museum -- but not for less than $100,000.

"Of course, the price is negotiable," he said. "I've had it for a long time, and I can be patient. I'm not discouraged. I've had setbacks on this over the years; this is just one more."

---

On the Net

National Park Service's Ford's Theatre site: www.nps.gov/foth

Photograph of Lincoln's overcoat: www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/hh/3b/hh3h3.htm