The Flag That Covered Lincoln’s Coffin Goes Up for Auction

Good morning. Today we’ll look at the flag that covered Abraham Lincoln’s coffin on the funeral train in 1865. It is on the auction block in New York. We’ll also get details on a major housing plan that is now headed for a vote by the full City Council.

Rhonda Hiser found it by accident: a flag with a past.

It was in a museum in Florida — the Museum of Southern History, perhaps an odd place for a flag associated with Abraham Lincoln, whose presidency is defined by a war that the South lost.

But there the flag was, on a shelf in a corridor. It was folded in a deep-framed display box that was so filthy that she had to clean the glass to get a good look at what was inside: the flag that had covered Lincoln’s coffin on the funeral train after his assassination in April 1865.

On its way from Washington, D.C., to Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln was buried, the train rolled through more than 400 cities and towns. At major stops, the coffin was taken off the train. In New York, a horse-drawn carriage carried it along cobblestone streets to City Hall.

The flag is going on the auction block today, with the money from the sale going to the museum, which had to vacate its rented building last month. “It broke our hearts to have to do this,” said Hiser, the museum’s volunteer president and curator. Part of the building had once been a service station, she said, and old fuel tanks underground had leaked. She said that Superfund money had gone into the cleanup, but contamination remained.

Guernsey’s, which is handling the sale, will auction other Lincoln memorabilia, including “Death of Abraham Lincoln,” a huge painting by James Burns, a Scottish-born artist who lived in New York from the 1850s until his death in 1877. Guernsey’s said the painting shows 28 onlookers in the room where Lincoln had been taken after he was shot — more than the tiny room could hold, though everyone in the painting had been there at some point.

The painting shows Vice President Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s death. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and Attorney General James Speed are on the other side of the room talking, perhaps about the hunt for the assassin. The “Art Gossip” column in an 1867 newspaper said that “there is much excellence in the grouping and perspective in the picture.”

As for the flag, Hiser said that the museum had documents showing that it had been donated to the museum in 1996 after having been passed through one family for generations. It was not clear why it had been relegated to the shelf, away from public view.

She said it was unusual because it had 37 stars. Nebraska, the 37th state, did not join the union until two years later, but she said that Stanton had given the order to make the flag with that many stars.

When the Lincoln funeral train arrived in the city, “the man who made his first important visit to New York as a partisan, largely unknown orator, returned in death as an iconic national martyr,” Harold Holzer, a Lincoln expert who is not involved with the auction, wrote in his book “Lincoln and New York.”

Holzer told me that at City Hall the coffin was placed outside the room where, in 1861, the city’s pro-Confederate mayor had held a reception for Lincoln, then the president-elect. The mayor, Fernando Wood, hinted that he wanted to take New York out of the union so merchants there could continue to do business with the states that had seceded.

“Lincoln put an end to it,” said Holzer, who is also director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. “And now, four years later, there was his body, right outside those same doors.”

Thousands of people filed by. Thousands more watched as the procession went from the train to City Hall and back — among them Theodore Roosevelt, the future president. He was 6 years old at the time and was at an upper-floor window of his family’s house on East 20th Street.

“That’s supposedly what turned Teddy into a Lincoln admirer for life,” Holzer said. “Roosevelt’s secretary of state, whom he inherited when President William McKinley was assassinated, had been Lincoln’s assistant private secretary, and ultimately gifted Teddy with a ring that contained a lock of Lincoln’s hair.”

Weather

Today will be partly sunny, with a high near 45 and gentle to moderate breeze. Showers are probable during the day and the evening, which will be mostly cloudy with a low around 39.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until Nov. 28 (Thanksgiving Day).

The latest New York news

Brooklyn priest in hot water: Msgr. Jamie Gigantiello’s dealings with a top adviser to Mayor Eric Adams became a strange sideshow to Adams’s own legal issues after the pop star Sabrina Carpenter made an offhand remark during a show at Madison Square Garden.
Charged with fraud: Johanna Smith Griffin, the founder of AllHere Education, an A.I. start-up focused on education, was accused of lying to investors and falsely claiming that some of the largest school districts in the country, including New York City’s, were customers.
Sentenced to life: A fertility specialist convicted of sexually abusing seven patients, including five who were minors, was sentenced to life in prison.
Anthony Weiner’s redemption arc: The disgraced New York politician is considering a run for City Council. He sat down for an interview with an owner of the famed Astor Place Hairstylists in Manhattan.
What we’re watching: Ashley Southall, a Metro reporter, discusses Jessica Tisch’s move from sanitation commissioner to police commissioner, on “New York Times Close Up With Sam Roberts.” Another guest will be Mark Levine, the Manhattan borough president, to discuss congestion pricing. The program is broadcast at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

A housing plan moves forward

After a day of down-to-the-wire negotiations, a major housing proposal moved forward with an additional $5 billion in city and state money for affordable housing and infrastructure projects.

Mayor Eric Adams and City Council leaders announced a deal that slightly watered down some of the original elements of the plan, known as City of Yes. Parking requirements for new buildings were softened; the ways that homeowners will be allowed to add apartments were tightened. City officials estimate that the plan could make way for 80,000 additional homes.

It was approved by the Council’s Land Use Committee in an 8-to-2 vote, with one abstention. It will go to the full Council for a vote next month.

The plan has been a top priority for Adams and was seen as a test of his influence after his indictment on federal corruption charges in September. Adams had been largely absent from the push to win approval for the housing plan. He relied on two allies: Dan Garodnick, the director of the City Planning Department, and Maria Torres-Springer, the first deputy mayor.

The politics were complicated, with many progressive Council members supporting the plan despite their frosty relationships with the mayor. But it was opposed by some pro-tenant groups, who said it would not improve short-term affordability. It also faced resistance from people who live in some low-density areas, who worried about the pressures that new housing could bring to their neighborhoods.

Chuck Scarborough is leaving the anchor desk

Chuck Scarborough is leaving the anchor desk after more than 50 years on WNBC-TV.

Scarborough, 81, said on Thursday that his last regular broadcast would be on Dec. 12. By his count, he has appeared in nearly 20,000 news broadcasts on Channel 4, putting in 93,000 hours on camera.

“It just seemed like the right time,” he said. When he passed the 50-year milestone at the station in March, he said, “I wasn’t quite certain what the future held but I knew that I at least wanted to get through the election.”

He said that he was still “contractually tethered” to the station and that “if projects come up that excite me,” he would do them.

In his decades at Channel 4, Scarborough has covered blizzards and blackouts, parades and protests, the Sept. 11 attacks and the coronavirus pandemic. He had worked at stations in Atlanta and Boston as an anchor before arriving in New York in 1974.

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