Check your attic for Lincoln letters!

This just in from the auction world:

"A fabulous Lincoln letter, magnificent both for its content and price, broke all kinds of U.S. auction records at Sotheby's last month. The President wrote the 1864 letter in response to a petition he had received from schoolchildren in the Concord, Massachusetts, class of Mary Mann, widow of famed educator and abolitionist Horace Mann. Their petition was headed "Petition of the children of the United States; (under 18 years) that the President will free all slave children." In his reply, Lincoln writes, "Please tell these little people 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 they will remember that God has, and that, as it seems, He wills to do it." If it sounds odd that Lincoln was not willing to free slaves in 1864, long after the Emancipation Proclamation, it must be remembered that the Proclamation only freed slaves in states in rebellion against the United States. Slavery was still legal in the border Union states of Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware and West Virginia. This letter was sold for a record price of $3,401,000. Sotheby's noted that this was not only a record price for a Lincoln manuscript, but for any presidential or any American manuscript ever sold at auction. It was sold to an unnamed American telephone bidder."

By Michael Stillman. For the full article, see http://www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/article.asp?f=1&page=1&id=633)