“By virtue of the power, and for the purpose aforesaid, I do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free; and that the Executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons…”

One of the first obtainable printed editions of Abraham Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation, January 1863, issued by the State Department.

“I will go into Office totally free from pre-engagements of every nature whatsoever, and in recommendations to appointments will make justice & the public good, my sole objects.”

The still unofficial President-elect George Washington writes in March 1789 about his determination to go into the presidency with no pre-existing commitments, ready to purely judge the“justice & the public good” of every appointment. He would extend that sentiment to every aspect of his presidency.

Washington referred to the standard of “justice & the public good” only a few times, and the present letter is the only example we know of that has ever reached the market.

“Just at the moment I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we have wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy … they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution and may get things into such a snarl that we have no alternative save to intervene - which will at once convince the suspicious idiots in South America that we do wish to interfere after all, and perhaps have some land-hunger!...”

This “Confidential” letter brims with significant content, as Roosevelt comments on hunting, disarmament, the Cuban Revolution, and the American voter. He expressed particular frustration at the inability of the new Cuban Republic to maintain a legitimate democracy. In September 1905, candidate Tomás Estrada Palma and his party rigged the Cuban presidential election to ensure his victory over liberal candidate José Miguel Gómez. The liberals revolted in August 1906, leading to the collapse of Estrada Palma’s government the following month, and to U.S. military and political intervention.

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.

“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressor. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

“The mystic chords of memory stretching from every battle field and patriot’s grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

Extremely rare same day broadside. Only one other copy of this edition is presently known.

“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. 

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

“EXTRA / PRESIDENT LINCOLN ASSASSINATED / HE IS DEAD / SEWARD ASSASSINATED.”  This vivid early account of the assassination of President Lincoln includes Booth’s name as the suspected assassin and an account of the attack on Secretary of State William H. Seward, incorrectly reporting his death.

“Though, in reviewing the incidents of my administration, I am unconscious of intentional error, I am nevertheless too sensible of my defects not to think it probable that I may have committed many errors. Whatever they may be, I fervently beseech the Almighty to avert or mitigate the evils to which they may tend. I shall also carry with me the hope that my country will never cease to view them with indulgence; and that, after forty five years of my life dedicated to its service with an upright zeal, the faults of incompetent abilities will be consigned to oblivion....”

At the end of his second term, Washington sent an open letter emphasizing the importance of unity and warning Americans against entanglements with foreign powers. Though he had initially solicited James Madison’s assistance in crafting his remarks, Alexander Hamilton’s second draft is the basis of the final address. Delivered to Congress in writing, Washington’s Farewell Address warns against the dangers of sectionalism, and criticizes “the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” referring to the pro-French sentiments of Jefferson and the Republicans. Washington’s policy during the wars between Great Britain and France in the early 1790s had been one of strict neutrality, and in the closing paragraphs of his Address he argues for continued American isolationism. America heeded his advice against joining a permanent alliance for more than a century and a half.

“At 2:50 A.M. the President was still alive, but insensible and completely helpless.
President died at 7:22 this Saturday morning.”

This vivid early account of the assassination of President Lincoln notes that Secretary of State William H. Seward and his son Frederick (misidentified as Frank) had also been attacked. The newspaper obtained its information from a telegraph operator at the local railroad depot.

“… until that moment I did not suppose he could have been forced to Vote for Gen^l Jackson.… I might ask the Gentleman from North Carolina (M^r 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 M^r 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.

From a limited edition of Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe, (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1948), limited to 1,426 copies. The war had ended only three years earlier, and Eisenhower must have been looking towards politics - he was elected to the Presidency in 1952.

We can have this archivally framed for an additional fee. 

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.

“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.”

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