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Young World
Letter to freedom
COMPILED BY SUBAJAYANTHI
Photo: Bloomberg News
Let the children go: On sale at Sotheby’s New York.
A letter written by former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln has sold for $3.4m (£1.7m) at an auction in New York, setting a record for any American manuscript. It was bought by an American collector bidding by telephone, Sotheby’s said. The record-breaking manuscript was “arguably Lincoln’s most personal and powerful statement on God, slavery and emancipation”. The letter was the highlight of a sale of some 100 manuscripts written by other American historical figures. Other highlights included documents written by George Washington, a Lincoln autograph penned on the day of his famous Gettysburg Address, and one from the sixth U.S. president, John Quincy Adams, foretelling the Civil War. The letter dated April 5, 1864, is a response to some 195 boys and girls who put their names to a document entitled “Children’s petition to the president asking him to free all the little slave children in this country.”
“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.”
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