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US presidential manuscripts on sale

By Matthew Price
BBC News, New York


The pages are mottled and a little yellow. Some look almost burnt around the edges.


A letter from Abraham Lincoln is said to be the auction's centrepiece

Lincoln's reply "is a simple, heartfelt, almost fatherly letter," says Sotheby's American Manuscript Expert Selby Kiffer, as he wanders around a press preview ahead of the auction of Presidential and Other American Manuscripts from the Dr Robert Small Trust this week.

"Please tell these little people," Lincoln wrote, "I am very glad their young hearts are so full of just and generous sympathy, and that while I have not the power to grant all they ask, I trust that they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it."

"Lincoln couldn't reply as he sometimes did as a bloodless lawyer and explain why the constitution didn't permit him to do this," Mr Kiffer explains. "Here he essentially pledges to the children that through him, God will free the slave children."

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