NEW YORK (AP) — A very special birth certificate will be auctioned
off later this year — a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution.

Sotheby’s announced Friday — appropriately on Constitution Day —
that in November it will put up for auction one of just 11 surviving
copies of the Constitution from the official first printing produced
for the delegates to the Constitutional Convention and for the
Continental Congress. It’s the only copy that remains in private
hands and has an estimate of $15-$20 million.

CAMILLE BOHANNON

The original Instrument of Surrender of Japan’s surrender to the
Allied Forces in World War II is shown at an exhibition held by
the Japanese Foreign Ministry,

 
First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation by President
Lincoln. (Painted by Francis Carpenter)

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issues a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which sets a date of January 1, 1863 for the
freedom of more than 3 million black slaves in the United States and
recasts the Civil War as a fight against slavery.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, shortly after Lincoln’s inauguration
as America’s 16th president, he maintained that the war was about
restoring the Union and not about slavery. He avoided issuing an anti-
slavery proclamation immediately, despite the urgings of abolitionists
and radical Republicans, as well as his personal belief that slavery was
morally repugnant. Instead, Lincoln chose to move cautiously until he
could gain wide support from the public for such a measure.

President Lincoln signing the Emancipation
Proclamation.

The five page original document, held in the National Archives
Building. Until 1936 it had been bound with other proclamations
in a large volume held by the Department of State.

(Fox News) – An extremely rare 1776 printing of the Declaration of
Independence has gone on public display for the first time in over
a century.

The printing is on display at the Museum of the American Revolution
in Philadelphia through the end of 2019. This is also the first time that
the print has been displayed in a museum.

Printed by newspaper publisher and printer John Holt in New York in
1776, the artifact is addressed to Col. David Mulford, a Revolutionary
War colonel who died of smallpox in 1778. The print stayed in the
possession of Mulford’s family until 2017, when it was sold to Holly
Metcalf Kinyon, herself a descendant of Declaration signer John
Witherspoon.