George Washington (February 22, 1732 – December 14, 1799)
(Fox News) – A letter on God and the Constitution written by George Washington is up for sale after spending decades in a private collection.
The letter to Richard Peters, speaker of the Pennsylvania Constitution, is signed Sept. 7, 1788, and praises God for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
Written a week after Washington told Alexander Hamilton that he would likely accept calls to assume the presidency, the letter came at a time when the Constitution was under attack. Some states wanted to hold a second Convention that may have undermined the Constitution.
The letter, which is priced at $140,000, is up for sale at Ardmore, Pa.-based historical document dealer The Raab Collection.
(Fox News) – A rare piece of American history is up for sale, just in time for Christmas.
An original letter written and signed by President Abraham Lincoln in the middle of the Civil War was recently discovered among a collection of family heirlooms belonging to the direct descendants of Mary Todd Lincoln.
Written four days before Christmas in 1863, it requests that Mrs. Lincoln’s first cousin and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Craig, be allowed to safely return to their cotton plantation in Arkansas, which was by then in Union territory.
“[I]t is my wish,” Lincoln writes “that they be permitted to do so, and that the United States military forces in that vicinity will not molest them or allow them to be molested, when within their power to prevent, as long as the said Mr. and Mrs. Craig shall demean themselves as peaceful and loyal citizens to the United States.”
The letter was handed down from generation to generation, until it ultimately ended up in the care of a descendant now living in the Midwest.
It was recently acquired directly from that descendant by the Raab Collection, and is now for sale for $60,000.
“Finding something from Abraham Lincoln that is still in the hands of the family of the recipient is increasingly rare,” says Nathan Raab, the vice president of the Raab Collection. “Something of this importance and connection to Lincoln’s family is very uncommon.”
And he would certainly know. The Raab collection has worked on the sale and preservation of many important historical documents, and with the families of their authors, including Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant and Ronald Reagan among others.
BOSTON (AP) — An angry letter from John Lennon to Paul and Linda McCartney written shortly after the Beatles’ breakup has been sold at auction for nearly $30,000.
The two-page typed draft , with handwritten annotations by Lennon, was sold Thursday by Boston-based RR Auction.
RR says the letter is believed to have been written in 1971 in response to criticism Lennon received from Linda McCartney about his decision to not publicly announce his departure from the band.
The profanity-filled and sometimes rambling letter reads: “Do you really think most of today’s art came about because of the Beatles? I don’t believe you’re that insane — Paul — do you believe that? When you stop believing it you might wake up!”
The letter was sold to a collector in Dallas who requested anonymity.
John Winston Ono Lennon (John Winston Lennon) (October 9, 1940 – December 8, 1980)
Boston (AP) – Bonnie and Clyde made it quite clear how they felt about a former member of their gang in a letter they sent to him as he sat in the Dallas County Jail.
He was a coward, they wrote, and they should have killed him when they had the chance.
The four-page letter to Raymond Hamilton was written in April 1934 in Bonnie Parker’s neat cursive and signed by Clyde Barrow. The auction house’s executive vice president, Robert Livingston said It could fetch more than $40,000 when it’s sold next month by Boston-based RR Auction,
Livingston said Wednesday, based on the language, experts think Barrow, who had poor writing skills, likely dictated the letter to Parker.
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker andClyde Chestnut Barrowa.k.a.Clyde Champion Barrow.
(FOXNEWS) – The first letter written onboard the Titanic, penned just hours before the ship embarked on its doomed maiden voyage, will be sold at a U.K. auction this month.
The letter was written on April 10 1912 before Titanic set sail from Southampton for New York. The author, Paul Danby, wrote the note while visiting his wife’s uncle Adolphe Saalfeld, who was a passenger on the ship.
The Titanic struck an iceberg at 11:40 p.m. ship’s time on April 14 1912 and sank just over two hours later with the loss of more than 1,500 lives.
The letter, which has a pre-sale estimate of $14,117 to $21,175 will be sold at auction in Devizes, U.K. on April 23.