Will A Copy of Lincoln’s 13Th Amendment Ending Slavery Set An Auction Record? The Rare Document Could Fetch $8 Million
— By Kelly Crow | June 12, 2025
Sotheby’s will Auction Copies of Both the Emancipation Proclamation (Left) and the 13th Amendment (Right) on June 26. Photo: Sotheby’s
Two of the most pivotal documents President Abraham Lincoln ever signed are coming up for sale.
Rare copies of both the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment will be auctioned off in Sotheby’s upcoming books and manuscripts sale on June 26 in New York. The 1863 proclamation originally signed by Lincoln and issued during the Civil War declared that all enslaved people in the Confederate states would be free. This copy, which was signed a year later, is estimated to sell for at least $3 million.
The handwritten amendment he signed on vellum in 1865 ending slavery nationwide is expected to sell for at least $8 million, a price that would triple its auction record.
The two single-sheet papers represent the priciest examples of each document to enter the marketplace and should serve as a major test of collectors’ appetites for historic American artifacts. Although the overall art market is still trying to claw its way out of a yearslong slump, this category has enjoyed an influx of Gen X and millennial bidders ever since a copy of the U.S. Constitution sold to billionaire Ken Griffin for $43.2 million in 2021, said Sotheby’s senior specialist Selby Kiffer. Griffin famously outbid a consortium of cryptocurrency investors to win it. Aficionados in this niche are also getting more active as the country approaches its 250th anniversary next year, and they tend to focus on anything signed by the 16th president, Kiffer said.
Within the pantheon of historic signatures, demand has fallen off in the past decade for President Thomas Jefferson and Confederate General Robert E. Lee, he said, and remains steady for President George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.
A Copy of the Emancipation Proclamation is Estimated to Sell for at least $3 Million. Photo: Sotheby’s
But Lincoln has long proved to be the most-coveted name in the American rare-documents arena. “Lincoln reigns supreme,” Kiffer said.
The record for any Lincoln-related document is held by a $3.8 million copy of the Emancipation Proclamation that Sotheby’s sold to an anonymous collector in 2010. But that version stood out in part because it also belonged to Robert F. Kennedy, who bought it in early 1964 for $9,500 while he served as Attorney General. Carlyle Group chairman David Rubenstein bought a different, $2 million copy of the proclamation in 2012.
The upcoming version of the proclamation headed for sale has a storied history of its own. Lincoln was already embroiled in the Civil War when he signed the original document freeing enslaved people in the Confederate states on Jan. 1, 1863. “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right, than I do in signing this paper,” Lincoln said at the time.
Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward later signed an additional 48 folio broadsides that were sold for $10 apiece at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair in 1864 to raise funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a private relief agency that helped wounded Union soldiers and their families. Since Lincoln’s original handwritten manuscript of the proclamation was later lost in the 1871 Chicago fire, these printed copies have become coveted. Only 27 are known to survive, 18 of which are now tucked away in institutions and nine that are privately owned.
The Handwritten Amendment Ending Slavery Nationwide is Expected to Sell for at least $8 Million, A Price That Would Triple its Auction Record. Photo: Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s declined to name the seller of its proclamation but said it had been previously on long-term loan to Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. A spokeswoman for the center said from 2007 until a few months ago, it had displayed a proclamation owned by one of its former trustees, venture capitalist Steven Galbraith. Galbraith is a managing member of London investment firm Kindred Capital Advisors LLC. Messages left for Galbraith at his firm and elsewhere were not immediately returned.
Publisher and collector Malcolm S. Forbes previously owned the 13th Amendment coming up for sale, but its current seller remains anonymous. Of the 15 manuscript copies of the amendment signed by Lincoln, only four remain in private hands. This copy is also one of only nine to tout additional signatures by 37 senators and 114 congressmen who supported Lincoln in passing the amendment. No known copy was signed by all the supporting legislators, but Kiffer said this one contained signatures by 96% of them.
The auction record for any 13th Amendment is $2.4 million, sold in 2016.
— Appeared in the June 13, 2025, Print Edition as 'Civil War-Era Documents Expected To Draw at Least $11 Million at Sale'.
