A sale for the history books
The petition was signed by 195 children in Concord, Mass. Their single request was painfully simple: that the president free “all the little slave children in this country.”
On April 5, 1864, Abraham Lincoln replied to the woman who had organized the petition, ending his letter, “While I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it.”
Lincoln’s letter is the centerpiece of an extraordinarily rich collection of historic American manuscripts -- including about 20 rare Lincoln items -- that will be auctioned off Thursday in a sale that could yield at least $7.9 million for the New York doctor, who acquired the documents over the course of a 23-year collecting career.
“This is a very moving piece because Lincoln was a lawyer and he parsed the issue of slavery very closely,” said Selby Kiffer, a manuscript specialist at Sotheby’s in New York, where the collection went on display Friday. “So even though he abhorred slavery, he didn’t feel he had the right to end slavery. But he gives this very personal and fatherly reply in which he says he’s willing to be God’s instrument.”
The auction house estimates that the original letter, which became well known after it was widely reprinted during the Civil War, will sell for $3 million to $5 million and could probably become the most expensive Lincoln manuscript ever sold.
Among other highlights in the 111 lots that will be sold are three pages of autographs, including Lincoln’s, gathered at Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863, the only known Lincoln autograph from the day he delivered the Gettysburg Address.
Thomas Jefferson tells a correspondent in 1790 that he has decided to accept George Washington’s offer to become the first secretary of State of the young country.
A land deed signed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark is a rare example of a document bearing the signatures of both explorers.
An 1831 letter written by former President John Quincy Adams lays out the divisions between North and South and seems to foretell the bloody conflict that broke out 30 years later.
And writing from prison two weeks before his execution in December 1859, abolitionist John Brown contemplated his end in a densely written, heavily underlined three-page letter.
“As to both the time and manner of my death, I have but very little trouble on that score,” Brown wrote to a Connecticut minister who had been his teacher. “Farewell till we ‘meet again.’ ”
Dr. Robert Small, the owner of the collection, said his aim in seeking out historic documents was not simply to amass autographs but to find items in which famous figures revealed something about themselves.
“American history, a sense of American history, always overwhelmed me,” said Small, 54, a Manhattan internist who is selling the collection after retiring from his practice. “I admired the establishment of our government, how we formed as a democracy and retained our democracy. It’s amazing how this country has stuck together and abided by the Constitution.”
Among the items up for sale are letters or documents signed by 26 presidents, and letters or autographed items by such figures as Robert E. Lee, Thomas Edison, Gen. George S. Patton and Maj. John Andre, a British spy who was hanged during the Revolution.