The Thanksgiving Proclamation is priced at $8.4 million, and is the only example in private hands. The only other Washington-signed copy was acquired by the Library of Congress in 1921. The document was offered at Christie’s on Nov. 14, 2013, where it was expected to sell for upwards of $12 million. Kaller represents the document’s owner, who has decided to offer the manuscript through exhibition and private sale.
Leigh Keno said, “I’m excited to be working with Seth again. His expertise was invaluable earlier this year when Keno Auctions sold a historical draft of “The Twelve Colonies by their Delegates in Congress to the Inhabitants of Great Britain” for $912,500 – a record price for an American Revolutionary War Manuscript at auction.”
In the proclamation, issued on Oct. 3, 1789, our first president designates “Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being . . . That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks-for . . . the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness… for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge.”
Washington issued another Thanksgiving Proclamation six years later and Presidents Adams and Madison proclaimed their own as well. The next president to do so was Abraham Lincoln, who issued several during the Civil War. On Oct.3, 1863 – exactly 74 years after George Washington’s Proclamation-Lincoln established the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving, setting the precedent that remains to this day.
In addition to the Thanksgiving Proclamation, other documents for sale include:
- A rare July 1776 broadside printing of the Declaration of Independence, attributed to a printer in Exeter, New Hampshire, priced at $1.2 million.
- The only known copy in private hands of “the greatest of early American maps,” Thomas Holme’s 1687 “Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsilvania in America,” priced at $375,000.
- A scare copy of the New York Times from Nov. 20, 1863 with a front page printing of the Gettysburg Address, priced at $9,500.
- A highly personal letter handwritten and signed by George Washington in 1782, priced at $98,000.
For additional information visit: www.sethkaller.com or kenoauctions.com .
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