Long 'Lost' Lincoln Letter Given To Archives
Lincoln's long 'lost' letter on a routine matter National Archives hide caption
You've been warned: If you're trying to sell an Abraham Lincoln of dubious provenance through an online auction, don't be surprised if you get a call from the National Archives.
That's what happened to a private collector who tried to sell a Lincoln letter. The letter was a routine piece of correspondence Lincoln wrote to his Treasury Secretary, asking him to dispose of a matter.
The letter was described as long 'lost' from the government files. But it sounds more like it was stolen by someone himself lost to history and eventually made its way into the hands of a collector.
As NPR's Deborah Telford reports:
Lincoln penned the two-sentence missive about a personnel issue to Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase on executive mansion stationery on Nov. 14, 1863 -- just five days before delivering the Gettysburg Address.
Historians were aware of the letter's existence because it was ripped from a volume of U.S. Treasury Department records. But the contents and whereabouts were a mystery until it surfaced in an online auction a few years ago, said Miriam Kleiman, spokeswoman for the National Archives.
Kleiman said the National Archives has a division that monitors auctions to see if government property is being sold. Investigators contacted Lawrence Cutler, the Arizona collector who bought the document -- and the rest is history.