[Presidential] [Lincoln, Abraham] Leale, Charles A. Autograph Document Recounting Lincoln's Assassination

No place, no date, ca. 1890s. Two sheets of lined yellow paper, 12 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (318 x 201 mm). Three-page autograph notes in the hand of Dr. Charles A. Leale, recounting the night of President Abraham Lincoln's assassination. Scattered emendations and notes to text and in margins. Creasing from old folds.

Rare autograph notes recounting President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, written by Charles A. Leale, the first doctor to aid the mortally wounded President at Ford's Theatre the night of April 14, 1865.

In part: "I was the first person to be admitted to the box of the Theatre in the response to shouts from Mrs Lincoln Major Rathbone & Harris for help and a Surgeon and on approaching was pleadingly requested by Mrs. Lincoln to take charge of her husband I found President Lincoln with closed eyes and mouth open still in the right upright sitting position but paralyzed his head and shoulders being held partly and backward in which he was now crouching up against the right side of the large high back easy chair, with his right hand dangling over the right side of the chair I found that the President had stopped breathing and there was no pulse was perceptible at the wrist...I lifted his closed eyelids by the top of my fingers and instantly saw his ___ of paralysis of the optic nerve and that therefore this was a central brain lesion I then quickly passed the tops of my fingers over his head through his thick bushy hair. I discovered a firm molten clot of blood over the left side of the back of his cranium, this I quickly rubbed off and using the little finger of my left hand as a probe...and removed the coagulation plug from the opening and found that the bullet had made a whole through the back of the cranium and had passed into the brain..."

Charles A. Leale (1842-1932) was only 23 years old on the night of Lincoln's assassination. An Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army Volunteers, he had received his medical degree only six weeks earlier from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City. He was then assigned to duty as the surgeon in charge of the Wounded Commissioned Officers’ Ward at the General Hospital at Armory Square in Washington, D.C. Having read that the President was likely to attend, Leale bought tickets for the April 14 production of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. According to testimony given by Leale after the shooting, he had been seated less than 40 feet from the Presidential box, and had witnessed President Lincoln's arrival, accompanied by his wife Mary Todd and Major Henry Rathbone and his guest. At about half past ten Leale heard a gunshot followed by screaming and then saw assassin John Wilkes Booth, with dagger in hand, leap from the Presidential box onto the stage, where he quickly made an exit. Answering pleas for a doctor, Leale rushed to the Presidential box where he was the first person to aid the mortally wounded president. He found him unresponsive in his chair with labored breathing. Placing him in a recumbent position, Leale searched Lincoln's body for what he at first thought was a knife wound. He soon discovered a bullet hole in the back of Lincoln's head, and upon dislodging a blood clot, noticed that the President's breathing improved. Despite this, he understood the wound to be mortal.

Leale was soon joined in the box by Dr. Charles S. Taft and Dr. Albert F.A. King. They determined that the president could not survive a carriage ride back to the White House, and agreed that he should be removed immediately to the nearest house. With the aid of others, the three men carried the president out of the theater and across the crowded street to the home of William A. Peterson. Placing him diagonally on a bed in a back room, the men stripped the president of his clothes and retrieved water and blankets to keep him comfortable. Shortly after, the President's family physician, Dr. R.K. Stone, and Surgeon General Henry H. Crane arrived. Taking charge of the situation, Stone, along with Leale and company, monitored the president's pulse and breathing throughout the night, while probing the wound for the bullet, and removing coagula to help sustain his breathing. Leale remained at the President's beside into the morning and held his right wrist to note his pulse. At 7:20 the President succumbed to his wound. It was due to Leale's quick actions and medical care that the President survived for another 10 hours following the shooting.

Only hours after Lincoln's passing, Leale sat down and penned an account of his actions that night for the Surgeon General. Two years later, in 1867, he wrote another account for a congressional committee, largely copied from his original report, but containing some minor changes. In the years that followed, Leale rarely spoke about that night's events. He only publicly discussed it for the first time 44 years later, in 1909, during the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, after a request from the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States.

According to Helena Iles Papaioannou and Daniel W. Stowell there are seven extant accounts by Leale of his experience. Five date to 1865, four being copies of his first report (two at the National Archives and two at the New York Public Library), each in a clerical hand (the original report in Leale's hand has not been located), and one letter by Leale, dated May of 1865, to physician Dwight Dudley (in the Shapell Collection). One is from 1867, addressed to Representative Benjamin F. Butler, chair of a committee in the United States House of Representatives investigating Lincoln’s assassination (in the Library of Congress). The last is from 1909, the aforementioned speech given to the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (published in Harper's Weekly and separately as Lincoln's Last Hours). We have subsequently sold in these very rooms two autograph notes by Leale recounting that night's events (Lots 85 and 86, January 29, 2026).

As the above notes attest, decades after the assassination Leale was still recording the events of that night to keep them fresh in his mind, such was the magnitude of it that it would loom over the remainder of his life, and to keep for posterity the details of his actions in aiding the mortally wounded president.

This lot is located in Philadelphia.

[Presidential] [Lincoln, Abraham] Leale, Charles A. Autograph Document Recounting Lincoln's Assassination