Broadside of George Washington’s 1795 Thanksgiving Day proclamation, $37,000 (£29,300) at Sarasota Estate Auction.
Quite different from the national holiday at harvest time, Washington’s second Thanksgiving Proclamation proposed a day of celebration on February 19, 1795, after the end of the Whiskey Rebellion.
The potential schism caused by a violent protest against the whiskey tax imposed in 1791 to pay down the war debt had been quashed without great bloodshed.
This proclamation was published in Gazette of the United States and Daily Evening Advertiser (Philadelphia) and other newspapers on January 1, 1795, and it also was issued in several guises as a broadside by the short-lived Secretary of State Edmund Randolf, whose name appears to the very foot of the text.
This 14 x 12in (35.5 x 30.5cm) copy, with some tearing to the folds, had been sent through the mail to Rev Joseph Gosse of Sutton in Worcester County, MA, with remnants of a red candle wax seal still visible on the envelope.
Estimated at $300-600 on January 20-21, it hammered for $37,000 (£29,300).
