According to the RR Auction house in Boston, Massachusetts, the items were sold during a Saturday auction for $81,250, which is more than the $75,000 the auction house was hoping the items would fetch.
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However, no information about the buyer was revealed.
The lock of hair was removed during Lincoln’s postmortem exam after he was fatally shot at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC, by John Wilkes Booth on April 14, 1865. Lincoln died the next day.
According to the auction house, the lock of hair was given to Dr. Lyman Beecher Todd, a Kentucky postmaster and cousin of Mary Todd Lincoln, Lincoln’s widow.
The hair is attached to an official War Department telegram sent to Todd by George Kinnear, his assistant at the Lexington, Kentucky, post office. The telegram was received on the day Lincoln was shot.
The telegram includes a typed caption written by Todd’s son, James A. Todd, that reads: "The above telegram … arrived in Washington a few minutes after Abraham Lincoln was shot. Next day, at the postmortem, when a lock of hair, clipped from near the President's left temple, was given to Dr. Todd - finding no other paper in his pocket - he wrapped the lock, stained with blood or brain fluid, in this telegram and hastily wrote on it in pencil: 'Hair of A. Lincoln.'"
The telegram is framed alongside a letter from James A. Todd, and is especially important because it debunks a theory that then-US Secretary of War Edwin Stanton plotted to kill Lincoln due to political and personal differences.
While some have floated claims that said Stanton ordered military communications to be cut off at the time of the assassination, which allowed Booth to temporarily escape, the time stamp on the dispatch shows that military telegraph lines were not disrupted the night Lincoln was killed.
The authenticity of the hair and telegram were both verified by RR Auction.
“When you are dealing with samples of Lincoln’s hair, provenance is everything - and in this case, we know that this came from a family member who was at the President’s bedside,” Bobby Livingston, RR Auction's executive vice president, said in a statement obtained by the Associated Press.
