A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

As the U.S. approaches its 250th birthday next year, the market for American “freedom” documents has never been stronger. In 2021, Sotheby’s auctioned a historic first printing of the Constitution for $43.2 million, and this past October, Brunk Auctions sold an original printed, signed archetype of the Constitution for $11 million. Then, last month, Freeman’s Hindman had a sale of Lincolnia, including many manuscripts and documents from throughout Abraham Lincoln’s life, that doubled its presale estimate to make $7.9 million. Given the interest in the field and the growing scarcity of good material on the market, dealers and consignors have been eager to jump in. This Thursday, Sotheby’s is selling rare copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, by which Lincoln ordered slavery abolished in the Confederacy in 1863, and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1865 to ban slavery nationwide—both of them signed by President Lincoln, himself. The former is estimated at $3 million, and the latter at $8 million. It’s one thing to read transcriptions of historic texts, but it’s another to experience the original documents once held by those who made history happen. “They’re a way of physically manifesting the concept of freedom and how it’s achieved,” said Selby Kiffer, who has been a books and manuscripts specialist at Sotheby’s for more than 40 years. Lincoln’s original, handwritten Emancipation Proclamation draft was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, but there are 27 known, full-text copies signed by Lincoln—those that remain from the 48 copies initially made for sale, at $10 apiece, at Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair, as part of a fundraising effort for sick and wounded Union soldiers. Most are in institutional collections, and Sotheby’s, which is selling one of the few still in private hands, is expecting a strong seven-figure result for this one.

The last auction price for this particular copy was $669,500, against an estimate of $600,000, achieved at Christie’s in the 2002 sale of the Douglass Campbell collection. The financier Steven Galbraith later purchased it, in a private transaction brokered by appraiser Seth Kaller, for the purpose of lending it to the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, according to a 2007 press release. The loan was then extended through 2024. There are fewer opportunities to buy this type of material than there were 30 years ago. That’s why the Freeman’s Hindman sale of Lincolnia did so well—it was a chance to buy items that had been off the market since the 1980s and 1990s. The current demand for “freedom documents,” Kiffer told me, transcends the traditional Americana or manuscripts markets, and attracts private American masterpiece collectors across categories, such as Ken Griffin, who bought the $43 million Constitution. Griffin announced last month that he’s loaning the document to the National Constitution Center—which is not a collecting institution—along with a copy of the Bill of Rights that he was not known to own. He’s also donating $15 million to fund a new Founding Principles exhibition, marking the institution’s largest renovation since 2003. The 13th Amendment has also soared in the national consciousness in recent years, especially since Ava DuVernay’s award-winning 2016 documentary, 13th. After Congress passed the law on their second attempt, on January 31, 1865, and sent it to the states for ratification, “there was a feeling in Washington that this was a great moment in the nation’s history, and needed to be commemorated in some way,” said Kiffer. Lawmakers passed around manuscripts of the Amendment on vellum for one another to sign. “People were proud to put their names on this,” Kiffer added. The version Sotheby’s is selling is one of only 15 of these copies, from February 1865, signed by Lincoln himself—just two months before he was assassinated. It’s one of only nine copies also signed by the senators and congressmen who passed the amendment. Only four of those copies are still in private hands, and this one has the most signatures of supporting legislators. Ink on vellum sometimes blurs, since it’s not absorbed the way it is on paper, but on this copy the text is sharp, distinct, and variably colored, adding visual interest. It was last sold at auction at Christie’s, also in 2002, from the Malcolm Forbes collection, for $721,000 against an estimate of $300,000. It then passed to the current consignor via private sale, as with the Emancipation Proclamation, also brokered by Kaller in 2007, according to the provenance in the catalogue. Of course, this historic legislation would not exist without Lincoln’s previous executive order outlawing slavery in the Confederate states. As the Constitution Center’s then-president and C.E.O., Joseph Torsella, said when Galbraith loaned his copy to the institution nearly two decades ago: “With the possible exception of the Declaration of Independence, no document has had a more profound impact on the American vision of liberty. … It deserves to be seen by, and to inspire, generations to come.”