Abraham Lincoln’s coat, and its hidden, bloody stories

While some arrivals at this year’s Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City were greeted with a lot of fanfare, one treasured object arrived undercover, amid great secrecy, from a museum warehouse outside Washington, D.C.: the coat that Abraham Lincoln was wearing on April 14, 1865, the night he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre. It arrived with a police escort.

“It’s slightly an out-of-body experience to realize that this was worn by President Lincoln, and the circumstances in which it was worn,” said Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Met’s Costume Institute. “It’s just incredibly meaningful and very emotional, I think.”

The coat is part of the Met’s new exhibit, “In America: An Anthology of Fashion,” which illuminates the complex history of our country through clothing

“Sometimes the most moving stories are stories that are untold,” Bolton told correspondent Faith Salie. “And this story, for many people, will be an untold story.”

Untold and unseen, as well. Shortly after her husband’s death, Mary Todd Lincoln gave the coat to their beloved doorman, Alphonse Donn, whose family kept it for over a century, before bequeathing it to Ford’s Theatre in 1968.

The coat, created by Brooks Brothers for Lincoln’s second inauguration, has never before left the D.C. area, and is rarely shown to the public in order to protect its fragile nature.

What’s not on display is an embroidered message in the coat’s lining: “The inside of the coat is very meaningful because it has the inscription, ‘One country, one destiny,’ which came from a speech from one of Lincoln’s heroes. So, it has…