At Firestone Library, the dust was brushed off of a surprising Civil War-era artifact — a wanted poster for John Wilkes Booth printed just days after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
The poster, which was discovered by library staff in December, is now on display as part of the “A Republic in the Wilderness: Treasures of American History from Jamestown to Appomattox” exhibition in the library’s main gallery. The exhibition is open to the public from Feb. 22 until Aug. 4.
The poster was originally donated to the University in the mid-1980s by the Delafield family, along with hundreds of other manuscripts and historical documents. At some point, the poster became separated from the rest of its collection, and library staff eventually lost track of it because it was an oversize item. According to Curator of Manuscripts Don Skemer, the poster was rediscovered this past winter while library staff moved items during the library’s renovation process, “just in the nick of time for the exhibition.”
“It’s a wonderfully, visually striking artifact that encapsulates this very portentous moment right after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated,” Assistant Curator of Manuscripts Anna Chen said. Chen noted that the immediacy of the poster is highlighted by factual mistakes about John Wilkes Booth’s accomplices.
“It captures a moment in history as it’s being written,” she added.
Skemer originally proposed the idea for the exhibition in 2006 as a way to highlight the breadth of the University’s collection of historical artifacts related to America’s development. Chen’s team selected almost 100 items after spending a year examining thousands of items in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections and Scheide Library holdings.
“What all this does is to dramatize our history,” history professor Robert Wilentz said in describing the exhibition. “This is kind of a hall of fame of these kinds of documents and artifacts, of things that are very rich in meaning. You’re almost touching the past.”
The items on display cover a wide variety of time periods and subject matters, ranging from a set of keys for Thomas Jefferson’s wine cellar to photographs from General George McClellan’s collection depicting the dead after the Civil War’s Battle of Antietam.
“I hope [the exhibition] inspires visitors to explore these materials further using the collections they were drawn from,” Chen said. “The items that you see here are only a few of a very rich collection.”
History professor James McPherson will be giving a lecture titled “The Civil War and the Transformation of America” on March 5 to commemorate the Civil War’s 150th anniversary. The lecture will focus on the Civil War as a conflict between two opposing visions of the United States as a nation, McPherson said.
Several of the collection’s rarest and most delicate items will only be on display on March 5. These include a section of the Mason-Dixon Line drawn by hand by Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon and souvenir copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment that were signed by Lincoln.
On May 5, Wilentz will give an exhibition lecture to present a narrative of the time period that the exhibition’s artifacts span.
The exhibition was funded in part by the gift of the late Margaret Nuttle ’63.
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