A Confederate lieutenant’s long, gray frock coat sits quiet now, boxed up for auction, its flared hem and 14 brass buttons far from the Civil War battlefields of Antietam, Shiloh and Bull Run.Nearby, a gray frock hangs as the only known surviving coat worn by one of William Quantrell’s Raiders, a savage unit of Confederates who fought Union soldiers guerrilla-style along the Kansas-Missouri border. There is a flag from Napoleon Bonaparte’s launch at Elba, an island to which he had been exiled; a set of binoculars, allegedly lost by Gen. George Armstrong Custer at Little Big Horn; and a powder horn that may have been used at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.Those items and dozens of other Civil War, Revolutionary War and American Indian artifacts, along with hundreds of rare and important firearms, have been assembled for auction over four days beginning Oct. 1 at a James D. Julia auction in Hampton Falls, N.H.

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Posted: 10|1|05 at 10:10 am. Filed under: US News.