The Fathers and Saviors of Our Country: A Presidential Sale

13 x 8 1/2 in. printed broadside. (Old folds, edge wear including chipping and some soiling to margins, tiny scorch mark not affecting text, a few manuscript notations on both recto and verso.) Framed (examined out of frame). An announcement of the sale at public auction of 9 enslaved persons by decree of the Louisville Chancery Court on 12 December 1864. The broadside concerns a case between Angeline Bull and Wm. Ables, is signed in type by Thomas A. Morgan, Marshal Louisville Chancery Court, and N. Beall Gantt, Deputy.

Lincoln was born approximately 60 miles from Louisville, near Hodgenville in Hardin County (now LaRue County). Being born in Kentucky, a slave state, exposed Lincoln from an early age to the pervasive presence of slavery and contributed significantly to the development of his moral opposition to the institution. He later recalled witnessing enslaved people “chained six and six together” being transported south, a spectacle he described in a letter on 24 August 1855 to Joshua Speed as “a continual torment to me”. In 1816, when Lincoln was seven, his family left Kentucky for Indiana, which he attributed to this removal “partly on account of slavery; but chiefly on account of the difficulty in land titles in Kentucky” (Lincoln, Autobiography, p.7).

RARE: According to online records, this is the only copy extant.