Historical American Documents Are Having a Historic Moment

L ate last month, just in time for the Fourth of July, Sotheby’s presented an auction of early printings of the three fundamental founding documents of America: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The sale – which also included Rhode Island’s ratification of the Bill of Rights – culminated in a live auction on 26 June that achieved $5.6 million.

It’s not the first time some of America’s most important documents have passed through the auction house founded in 18th-century England. In fact, if the results of recent sales are any indication, interest in the founding documents of the United States is at an all-time high.

In late 2021 Selby Kiffer, a Senior Vice President Sotheby’s Books & Manuscripts Department who specializes in early American documents, sold a first-edition copy of the Constitution at auction for an incredible $43.2 million – a category record. That’s a phenomenal sum on its own, but Kiffer says there’s more to the story: “I sold that very same copy in 1988 for $165,000 – a lot of money at the time.” In other words, in just over 33 years, the value of the exact same copy of the Constitution saw a 26,000% appreciation. Kiffer says that first printings of the Declaration of Independence have seen similarly dramatic increases, with sales for the rarest examples topping $20 million.

Past Auction

The Constitution of the United States. Sold to Benefit the Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation

18 November 2021 | 6:30 PM EST | New York

What accounts for this astonishing increase in the value of America’s founding documents?

Kiffer says it helps to look at the market for extraordinarily rare objects as a whole. “It’s not much different than how you could’ve bought a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting for a comparatively low sum in 1988 versus what it would sell for now.” But rarity also plays a factor. That $43 million copy of the Constitution is one of only 14 known surviving copies of the Constitutional Convention’s original first printing of 500. “We’ve seen a separation in a lot of categories of collecting: that the pinnacle of the best of the best has increased in value at a more rapid rate than more routine items.”

But the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights – documents drafted over 200 years ago – also feel more relevant in the 2020s than ever. That 2021 auction represented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to own an extraordinarily rare document, but Kiffer says it also came at a moment when the importance of the Constitution was on many Americans’ minds. “It all just fell into place.”

History, after all, doesn’t stop when the documents get drafted. “I think there’s sometimes an assumption that all early documents are in libraries or historical societies or other institutions. And that’s just not the case,” Kiffer says.

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In fact, part of what makes the market for early American founding documents so dynamic is the fact that the process of archiving official state documents was so informal and irregular before the 20th century. “John Hancock sends a copy of the Declaration of Independence to the 13 colonies, it gets to a particular colony, they read it, they give it to a local printer to reprint so there are more copies – and the one that was sent to them just disappears. Someone takes it home and no one cares,” Kiffer says. “What happened to a lot of material that today would automatically be part of the National Archives? Well, there was no National Archives during the Revolution.”

But what might be a challenge to an archivist can actually be a boon to collectors. The lack of formalized archival practices before the mid-19th century, spurred by the sheer volume of correspondence produced by early American political figures, makes for a booming market. “It’s hard to fathom how much these people wrote,” Kiffer says, noting that a handwritten letter from an early US president is a surprisingly accessible acquisition. “They’re much easier to find than a handwritten letter by the five most recent presidents. Nearly all our sales feature handwritten letters by Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, both of the Adamses, Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln.”

“Each one is unique,” he continues. “You get a huge range of values in a way that you don’t with printed material.” A collector could buy a letter from Lincoln declining an invitation to dinner for a few thousand dollars, even as some letters written by the 16th president have sold for as much as $3.5 million, Kiffer says.

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Provenance and condition also play huge roles in the value of early American documents.

“Ideally, a copy of The Federalist Papers would be offered in the original cardboard covers that it was issued in. The next best thing would be that whoever bought it put a binding on it in 1787 or ’88 when they were published. Still collectible, but less desirable, would be a copy in a modern binding.” Most significant of all would be if the copy had actually come from the library of someone who had been involved in the framing of the Constitution or the debates about its ratification.

Just as discussion about the US Constitution certainly didn’t end after its initial ratification, the market for American founding documents is hardly limited to those produced in the 1700s. “I think you would have to count the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, early copies of which will routinely sell for more than $1 million, as documents that helped the founding documents fulfill their promise.” Kiffer recalls selling one copy of the 13th Amendment signed by Lincoln, and says that the most well preserved of these delicate documents, written on vellum, could approach an eight-figure valuation. “A number of years ago now we sold an archive of the Martin Luther King Jr. papers,” he adds. “That could be considered a foundational document by the same virtue.”

As the country prepares to celebrate its 248th birthday, these documents – in some cases as old, and in some cases even older, than the country itself – continue to tell us a story about who we are, who we have been and who we may someday be.

That $43 million sale of the Constitution – the proceeds of which benefitted The Dorothy Tapper Goldman Foundation – may have broken records, but for Kiffer the document is overshadowed by the significance of the Declaration of Independence. “The audacity of it, to break away from the monarchy – the Declaration gave us the ability to become a nation. It’s very different to read the words in the same form and format that our ancestors read it, to read it the way that the first independent American citizens heard it.”

That audacity is something impossible to put a price on. “The founding documents were under-appreciated and undervalued,” Kiffer reflects. “And maybe comparatively, they still are.”

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