The ‘Authorized Edition’ Proclamation is one of 48 sold at $10 each at Civil War ‘sanitary fairs’ to raise money for the Union cause. Only 27 are known to exist, 19 of which are in institutions. Of the eight (including the present example) known in private hands, most are planned for donation.
This example will appear at Sotheby’s ‘Two Centuries of American History’ sale on May 25 and is estimated at $1.5m-$2m.
The Emancipation Proclamation famously stated that “all persons held as slaves within said designated States and parts of States are and henceforward shall be free”. With this grand statement, President Lincoln began the process of institutionalising emancipation, immediately setting as many as 50,000 men, women and children free. He declared: “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper.”
The signature of Abraham Lincoln that appears on the copy of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 which is being offered at Sotheby’s.
13th Amendment
The Sotheby’s sale will also include a signed manuscript copy of the 1865 13th Amendment which banned slavery across the US. One of 14 signed by President Lincoln and Vice President Schuyler, it is estimated at $2m-$3m.
The 13th Amendment, signed on 1 February 1865, was the first significant change to the country’s notion of civil liberties since the Bill of Rights in 1791. It effectively abolished slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States
This particular manuscript has comes to Sotheby’s from The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
