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Presidents and Elections

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Henry Clay ALS, Responding to St. Nicholas Society Speech, Takes a Jab at Martin Van Buren

HENRY CLAY, Autograph Letter Signed, to Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, December 30, 1837, Washington, DC. 1 p., 8¼ x 10¼ in.

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This letter is addressed to the president of the St. Nicholas Society of the City of New York, Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, and signed twice within the text as “H. Clay” and “H. C.” Clay thanks Verplanck for sending a copy of his recent speech to the Society’s annual meeting, praises it for its substance and cleverness, and wishes Verplanck could change places with President Martin Van Buren.

Item #27308, $950

Free Soil Rally Broadside, Dorchester Massachusetts, 1848. 23 x 29 Inches

[ELECTION OF 1848], Printed Document. Broadside, July 21, 1848, Dorchester, Massachusetts. 1 p. 23 x 29 in.

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“FREE SOIL! FREE LABOR! FREE SPEECH! RALLY OF THE PEOPLE!
All persons opposed to the Election of Taylor or Cass to the Presidency, and to the Extension of Slavery and the Slave Power, are invited to meet at the Lyceum Hall,” July 24, 1848. …”

Inviting “All persons opposed to the Election of TAYLOR or CASS to the Presidency, and to the Extension of Slavery and the Slave Power.” The meeting would choose delegates for a state convention on July 28. Speakers included Stephen C. Phillips (1801-1857), an 1819 graduate of Harvard University and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1834 to 1838. The bottom of the broadside contains the names of 178 local voters. It is curious that the Free Soil nominee, former Democrat Martin Van Buren, is not named here. Ultimately, with the support of the convention arranged after this broadside, he received 28.6% of the state’s votes. 

Item #27251, $10,000

Andrew Jackson Involved in Lawsuit over Tennessee Property in the Estate of His Deceased Brother-in-Law, Involved in the Major North Carolina and Tennessee Land Fraud that Jackson Revealed

[ANDREW JACKSON], Manuscript Document Signed in Secretarial Hand, Bond, August 23, 1812, Tennessee. 1 p., 7¾ x 13¼ in.

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This bond commits John McIver and his sureties John F. Jack and Sterling Cocke to pay costs in McIver’s lawsuit against John Anderson, his wife Elizabeth Glasgow Martin Donelson Anderson, and the other heirs of Stockley Donelson (1752-1805). Donelson died in debt and without a will. In addition to his widow and her new husband, Stockley’s heirs included his sister Rachel and her husband Andrew Jackson; his sisters Catherine Hutchings, Mary Caffery and Jane Hays as well as Jane’s husband Robert. And Stockley’s brothers Alexander, John, William, Severn and Leven Donelson; and nephews John and Andrew Jackson Donelson, and Daniel S. Donelson, sons of deceased brother Samuel.

Item #26377.02, $1,000

Receipt for Jewelry for Rachel Jackson

[RACHEL JACKSON], Manuscript Document Signed by the recipients, January 10, 1828, New Orleans, Louisiana. 1 p., 6¾ x 7⅞ in.

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In January 1828, a well-known Connecticut jeweler and watchmaker who had established a business in New Orleans supplied jewelry purchased by or for Rachel Jackson.

Item #26377.03, $1,250

Calvin Coolidge Appoints Trustee of the National Training School for Girls

CALVIN COOLIDGE, Partially Printed Document Signed, April 18, 1925, Washington, DC. Appointment of Mrs. Otto L. Veerhoff as Trustee of the National Training School for Girls. Countersigned by U.S. Attorney General John G. Sargent (1860-1939); includes a “Department of Justice” red embossed seal. 1 p., 10½ x 16 in.

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President Calvin Coolidge reappoints Amy Louise Veerhoff as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Training School for Girls. Originally appointed by President Warren G. Harding, Veerhoff served as president of the Board of Trustees for several years.

Item #26525, $1,500

President Franklin D. Roosevelt Thanks for a “Heartening” Telegram Received September 27, While FDR was Trying to Prevent Hitler from Starting War

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, Typed Letter Signed, to Frederic R. Coudert Jr., September 28, 1938, Washington, D.C. On White House stationery. 1 p., 7 x 9 in.

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“Please accept sincerest thanks for your telegram of September twenty-seventh. It is heartening and I appreciate much your sending it.”

FDR thanks Republican New York City attorney Frederick R. Coudert Jr. for a telegram received a day earlier, September 27, 1938. On that date, in response to Hitler’s threat to annex the western third of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, Roosevelt sent a message urging German Chancellor Adolf Hitler to avoid the “incalculable disaster which would result to the entire world from the outbreak of European war” and “the mutilation and death of millions of citizens.”

Item #27516, $1,250

Very Rare William Henry Harrison Four-Language Sea Letter Signed as President

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Partially Printed Document Signed as President, counter-signed by Daniel Webster as Secretary of State. [signed in Washington, D.C. between March 4 and April 4, 1841]. Four-language Sea Letter for Hydaspe, accomplished (filled out) in New Bedford, Massachusetts, dated April 20, 1841 and signed by Deputy Collector of Customs William H. Taylor. Includes two blind embossed paper seals. 1 p., 21½ x 16¼ in.

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Partially-printed sea letter in French, Spanish, English, and Dutch authorizing the Hydaspe, under the command of Francis Post, to leave New Bedford, Massachusetts, for a whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Signed by William Henry Harrison during his one-month long presidency. Only approximately a dozen William Henry Harrison presidential signed documents are known in private hands. An incredible rarity.

On March 4, 1841, a cold, wet day, Harrison, without hat or overcoat, rode on horseback to his inauguration, and delivered the longest inaugural speech of any American president. He became ill three weeks later and died of pneumonia on April 4, having been president for 31 days. He was the last United States president born as a British subject and the first to die in office. Our census counts fewer than 40 known Harrison presidential signed items of all types, ranging from letters and free franks to fragments of documents and clipped signatures. Of those, ours is one of only 22 intact presidential signed documents. 

Sea letters were signed in blank, and sent to the ports to be filled out. This one was used in New Bedford on April 20, sixteen days after Harrison’s death. The Hydaspe left New Bedford four days later with a crew of more than twenty. It returned just shy of four years later, on April 14, 1845, with 1,016 barrels of sperm oil, 821 barrels of whale oil, and 8,000 pounds of baleen (whalebone). The ship circumnavigated the earth, sailing throughout the Pacific and along the southern coasts of Australia and Africa, taking on six additional crew members in Tahiti in 1843 and eleven more in Maui, Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands), in 1844. A whaleboat crew deserted near Australia; at least three of the deserters were captured.

Item #27118.99, $240,000

Continuing Controversy Over Contested 1824 Election, Maryland Governor Accuses North Carolina Congressman of Lying To Hide His Vote for J.Q Adams over Andrew Jackson

[ANDREW JACKSON], Joseph Kent, Autograph Letter Signed, to Joseph Gales Jr. and William W. Seaton, October 6, 1827, Rose Mount, Maryland. 7 pp., 8 x 9⅞ in. Published in the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), October 8, 1827, 3:1.

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“… until that moment I did not suppose he could have been forced to Vote for Genl Jackson.… I might ask the Gentleman from North Carolina (Mr Saunders) if he does not know some, who made earnest and solem appeals to members who were uncommitted, saying, save the Nation, save the Nation, by the election of Mr Adams, and who are now to be found arrayed among the foremost of the opposition”

In this letter to the editors of the Daily National Intelligencer, Maryland governor Joseph Kent attacks a “false & scurrilous” publication by R[omulus] M[itchell] Saunders regarding the 1824 election, asking them to publish a “correction.” An excerpt from a letter Kent had written in May 1827 characterized Congressman Saunders, a supporter of William Crawford, as anxious that the election be settled on the first ballot so that North Carolina would not “be forced to vote for” Andrew Jackson.[1] In 1827, Saunders vehemently denied Kent’s recollection and denounced the governor and the newspapers that had published his charge.



[1] Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC), July 21, 1827, 2:3. Previously published in Phenix Gazette (Alexandria, VA), July 20, 1827, 3:1, which copied it from The Commentator (Frankfort, KY), July 7, 1827, 3:1-2.

Item #27455, $1,500

Bronze Bas Relief Portrait of Theodore Roosevelt: “Aggressive fighting for the right is the greatest sport the world affords”

[THEODORE ROOSEVELT], James Earle Fraser, Bas-Relief Portrait Plaque made of “medallium,” a type of bronze alloy of copper and tin, signed in the upper right corner. 1920. 10 x 11¾ in.

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Roosevelt looks to the right and is wearing his signature pince-nez eyeglasses attached to his clothing by a thin cord, above one of the most famous epigrams attributed to him.

Item #27255, $2,000

Eleanor Roosevelt Asks Pennsylvania Educator to Serve as Chair of Local Women’s Crusade

ELEANOR ROOSEVELT, Typed Letter Signed, to Mrs. E. M. Hartman, August 24, 1933, New York, New York. On “1933 Mobilization for Human Needs” stationery. 1 p., 8.5 x 11 in.

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We have been passing through a period of depression longer than that of the World War and more corrosive in its effects. We have before us a work of recovery and reconstruction.

Item #26385.01, $1,850

Madison’s Optimistic First Message to Congress: A Prelude to the War of 1812

JAMES MADISON, Special Session Message. National Intelligencer, May 23, 1809. Broadside. Washington, D.C.: Samuel Harrison Smith. Handwritten on the verso: “Presidents Message 1809” 1 p., 10¼ x 12½ in.

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it affords me much satisfaction to be able to communicate the commencement of a favorable change in our foreign relations....

Item #30051.005, $2,400

Great Report on the Hunt for Lincoln’s Assassin and Claim for Reward by Irish War Hero

[LINCOLN ASSASSINATION], James Rowan O’Beirne, Autograph Document, Claim for Reward for Capture of John Wilkes Booth, David E. Herold, and George A. Atzerodt, December 27, 1865, Washington, D.C. 6 pp., 8 x 13 in. With Handwritten Clerical Copies of Appendices to the Claim, including items found in Atzerodt’s hotel room and statements by Patrick Brennan and U.S. Marshal Robert Murray regarding the importance of O’Beirne’s telegram to the captures. Each signed by Assistant Adjutant General Robert Williams. 5 pp., 8 x 12½ in.

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Item #26049, $10,000

President Jefferson Sends, Rather than Delivers, His First State of the Union

THOMAS JEFFERSON, State of the Union Message. Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, Extra, December 18, 1801, signed in type twice. Broadside. Worcester, Massachusetts: Isaiah Thomas Jr. 1 p., 12-1/2 x 19-3/4 in.

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Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are then most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise.

This important first message contains his observations on Indian relations in America, the U.S. Navy versus the Barbary Pirates, the maintenance of armed forces, relying on a latent militia in peacetime while establishing the Navy and coastal defenses, the census and predictions of population growth along with “the settlement of the extensive country still remaining vacant within our limits,” decreasing the costs of government by removing unnecessary public offices, a laissez-faire approach to economics, the Judiciary, and taxation, foreseeing the removal of “all the internal taxes,” and stating that “sound principles will not justify our taxing the industry of our fellow citizens to accumulate treasure, for wars to happen we know not when, and which might not, perhaps, happen, but from the temptations offered by that treasure.

Unlike his predecessors, Jefferson did not deliver the message in person, but delivered it in writing through his personal secretary Meriwether Lewis. In doing so, Jefferson began a tradition that persisted until President Woodrow Wilson delivered his first State of the Union message to Congress in 1913.

Item #20822.99, $5,800

Whig Presidential Nominee William Henry Harrison to Daniel Webster

WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON, Autograph Letter Signed, to Daniel Webster, February 16, 1840, Cincinnati, OH. 2 pp., 7½ x 9¾ in.

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“My friends are preparing for a convention at Columbus on the 22d whichwill be the largest assemblage of citizens & otherwise the most interesting ever held in the Western Country…”

Harrison asks U.S. Senator Daniel Webster for assistance on the sale of land in Vincennes, Indiana, and mentions an upcoming Whig convention in Columbus, Ohio. After his election, Harrison appointed Webster as his Secretary of State.

Item #26779, $5,400

Large 1801 Folio Engraving of Thomas Jefferson as New President

[THOMAS JEFFERSON], Print. Engraved by David Edwin, published by George Helmbold Jr., 1801. 1 p., 13 x 19¾ in. (image); 14⅞ x 22 ½ in. (sheet). ,