You can buy Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation – for $8 million
President George Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation is truly historic, but would you fork over $8.4 million to own one of two copies of the original document?
If you are a person who collects historic documents and have a few extra million dollars to spend, it is a tempting proposition.
Today marks the 225th anniversary of the first national Thanksgiving holiday celebrated at the direction of the first President of the United States.
Washington issued the proclamation on October 3, 1789 and he asked the states to tell their citizens they should seriously consider celebrating Thanksgiving on November 26, 1789.
As this was George Washington making a personal request, many people honored it.
“I must request the favor of you to have published and made known in your State in the way and manner that shall be most agreeable to yourself,” he wrote.
Washington wanted people to be thankful “for the peaceable and rational manner in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national one now lately instituted; for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed.”
And now, 225 years later, the only privately owned copy of Washington’s Thanksgiving Proclamation is up for public sale. (The official copy remains in the city named after Washington.)
Collector Seth Kaller is auctioning the document in conjunction with Leigh Keno, President of Keno Auctions, of Antiques Roadshow fame.
The Proclamation has some additions made by Washington to working approved by Congress and it has Washington’s own signature. William Jackson, the personal secretary to President Washington and the secretary at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, wrote the document for Washington to sign.
If $8.4 million seems a bit steep for a one-page document, the Proclamation was originally expected to fetch as much as $12 million last year when it was up for sale at another auction house.
That would have broken the record for an American historical document at auction, set in 2012 when Washington’s personal folio of the Constitution and Bill of Rights sold for $9.8 million.
The last time the Thanksgiving Proclamation was sold at a public auction, it went for $3,800 in 1977. The document has changed hands in private sales since then.
Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.
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