Books & Manuscripts

1864 Abraham Lincoln letter

Appraisal: 1864 Abraham Lincoln Letter

Transcript

GUEST: I brought a signed and written letter to Abraham Lincoln and a letter from Abraham Lincoln responding to the letter. The letter was written to him by someone from Philadelphia, from the Custom House...

APPRAISER: Mm-hmm.

GUEST: ...in the 1860s, 1864. He's requesting a letter, like, of reference to... He was trying to get somebody a job. My parents, when we moved to our home back in the early '70s, bought this. I don't know exactly where they bought it. When my parents got divorced, my father took it, and I remember my mother was, you know, upset that he took it. And when my father passed away after my mother had already passed away, this was the first thing that I wanted.

APPRAISER: Do you have any idea what they may have spent on it?

GUEST: I don't, but today, as I was bringing it here, I noticed on the back that, what loo, what appears to be $1,850.

APPRAISER: Ah! That seems like a lot of money for your parents to, to spend on it. So did, were they big history buffs?

GUEST: My father was a bit of a history buff.

APPRAISER: Obviously, Abraham Lincoln made so many contributions to history, and so his, uh, autograph has been collected back, way, all the way back to when he was president. People would write a letter, send him a card, and, and just ask for his autograph.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: And also, you see autograph books from the 1860s, where people have gone around, gone down to D.C., visited the president if they could, because he did see people publicly. Those are kind of the lowest level for value for any, anybody, any president, just because there's no real content. And the spectrum goes from that up until, there are handwritten copies of the Gettysburg Address. There are, uh, letters that he wrote that were mission critical to the Civil War, and those are going to be higher in value. We do see documents like this. I mean, it's, it's really a letter, it's a note.

GUEST: He had written the letter to this person, this Thomas, but it's on a letterhead of someone else. It's not Abraham Lincoln at the top of the letterhead. So it's almost like, I, I don't... I never understood that.

APPRAISER: He may have enclosed that, because I think that is the letter writer, because William...

GUEST: I see that now, right, okay.

APPRAISER: ... B. Thomas was the man who wrote.

GUEST: Right, right, right, okay, did it, right.

APPRAISER: Thomas was a Republican. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party in Philadelphia, and he served in the Civil War. He was a customs agent. He was the first Republican to be given the job of customs agent. He was actually given that job by President Lincoln, so they had a direct connection. The thing I found a little hard to understand was that it seems to be addressed to Salmon Chase...

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: ...who's the secretary of Treasury Department. And somehow it got to Lincoln.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: When we're trying to figure out whether something is authentic, his erratic handwriting...

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: ...that's obviously key, and you have that, a wonderful example of the

erratic handwriting. Also, the fact that he is responding to Thomas on Thomas's paper kind of cements that connection and makes it feel like it's a definite, authentic thing.

GUEST: Right.

APPRAISER: If you ever take it out of the frame, you can often see, because you think, you know, he's writing with a nib pen, it scratches the surface of the paper.

GUEST: Mm-hmm.

APPRAISER: And that's a great indication for authenticity. Other really important signs are, you can see that we have all sorts of different-colored inks.

GUEST: Yeah.

APPRAISER: Different handwriting. The printing is different. A reference that is out there, a key reference that is out there for us to consult, is something called The Lincoln Log, and someone has gone through and recorded where Abraham Lincoln was every day of his life that they can find. This letter was written on July 29?

GUEST: July 29, 19... 1864.

APPRAISER: And that was a Friday, and he was in D.C. And there are two letters that he wrote on that day. He wrote a quick note to U.S. Grant and he wrote a letter to a woman in Scotland. So we know he was in D.C., he was looking at his correspondence, he was writing letters. I wish I could tell you whether Mr. Van Allen, who is the subject of this recommendation, got a job.

GUEST: Job, yeah, I know.

APPRAISER: I cannot find anything of Mr. Van Allen nor his fate. It would be good to have it out of the frame and take it to a framer, who will do an archival frame. They're cutting them now so that they're big, so you can see all the edges of the document...

GUEST: Oh, okay. Right, right.

APPRAISER: ...which is kinda cool. Sometimes they, you can do one where there's glass on both sides. There might be other information on the other side.

GUEST: Right, right.

APPRAISER: So it might be good to take a look at it.

GUEST: To, yeah.

APPRAISER: At auction, I would say that, that your letter, I would estimate it at $8,000 to $10,000.

GUEST: Okay.

APPRAISER: So definitely worth getting it conserved, so that you can keep it and pass it along to your children.

GUEST: Wonderful. Yeah. It's amazing.