Emancipation Proclamation (Leland-Boker authorized edition, 2025 sale)

The act Lincoln said he would be remembered for

Lincoln read a first draft of an emancipation order to his cabinet on July 22, 1862. After the Union victory at Antietam he issued the preliminary proclamation on September 22, giving the rebelling states 100 days. On January 1, 1863, he left the White House New Year's Day reception to sign the final version, and said, "I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper."

The proclamation declared enslaved people in the states in rebellion "forever free" and opened the Union army and navy to them. It did not reach the loyal border states or Union-held areas, a limit critics have pointed to ever since. But it made freedom a Union war aim, and by the end of the war more than 180,000 Black soldiers, most of them formerly enslaved, had served in the Union army. It cleared the way for the Thirteenth Amendment.

Frederick Douglass, speaking in New York a month after it was issued, called it "the greatest event of our nation's history." Lincoln's original handwritten draft did not survive: he donated it to a Sanitary Commission fair in Chicago in 1863, where it sold for $3,000, and it was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Two Philadelphia men of letters

The United States Sanitary Commission, founded in June 1861, cared for sick and wounded Union soldiers and their families, and paid for much of its work with great fairs in Northern cities. Philadelphia's Great Central Fair ran from June 7 to 29, 1864, in temporary halls across Logan Square and raised more than $1 million. Lincoln attended on June 16, the only such fair he visited, and his speech moved the crowd so strongly that officials judged it unsafe for him to attend another.

George Henry Boker, a poet, playwright and founder of Philadelphia's Union League, and Charles Godfrey Leland, an editor who in 1863 had enlisted in a Pennsylvania artillery regiment that fought at Gettysburg, came up with the idea of a limited, signed printing of the proclamation to sell at the fair. Leland later claimed to have coined "emancipation" as a substitute for the word "abolition."

Their printer, Frederick Leypoldt, first produced a rejected issue of 24 copies based on the engrossed manuscript, which differed from Lincoln's preferred text and left too little room for Nicolay's signature. Printer's bills in Leland's papers confirm that 48 copies of the corrected text were then printed. Lincoln, Seward and Nicolay signed each one, and Nicolay certified it as "a true copy, with autograph signatures of the President and the Secretary of State."

Reading an Authorized Edition

The broadside is a single column of 52 lines under a headline, printed on a full sheet of Whatman wove paper with wide margins; the copy sold in 2025 measures 558 by 438 mm and carries a "Whatman 1861" watermark at the lower left. It is the only printing of the full text of the proclamation that Lincoln signed. An earlier fundraising broadside printed in San Francisco in 1864 also bears his signature on three surviving copies, but it reproduces only about half the text.

Lincoln signed with his full name, "Abraham Lincoln," as he did on presidential documents, rather than the "A. Lincoln" of his letters. His signature tends to stand out darker than Seward's and Nicolay's. On the 2025 copy, Seward's and Nicolay's signatures are slightly faded while Lincoln's remains bold.

The fair's newspaper, Our Daily Fare, advertised the copies on June 17, 1864: "A few duplicates, with the 'veritable and authenticated' signatures of Abraham Lincoln, Secretary Seward, and Mr. Nicolay, are for sale at the Daily Fare table; price only ten dollars." Not all sold. Some went to libraries, and five more were sold for the Sanitary Commission at the National Sailors' Fair in Boston in November 1864.

Counts of survivors differ slightly. The 2025 sale catalog and a January 2026 catalog both give 27, and one census lists 27 copies by location while stating that 26 are known. The 2025 catalog listed 18 institutional owners, including the Library of Congress, the Huntington Library, Princeton, and three in Philadelphia; the 2025 catalog counted eight other copies in private hands.

This copy and its sales

The copy sold in 2025 came from the Douglass Campbell collection of presidential documents, sold at auction in New York on December 19, 2002, to benefit a charity. From 2007 through 2024 its owner kept it on deposit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, which exhibited it on Presidents' Day, during Black History Month and on similar occasions.

On June 26, 2025, it was offered at auction in New York with an estimate of $3 million to $5 million and sold for $4.4 million. The buyer was Kenneth C. Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund Citadel, who in the same sale paid $13.7 million for a Lincoln-signed copy of the 13th Amendment. Griffin said he pursued both because they "marked a profound step forward, abolishing the scourge of slavery."

The price topped the earlier public high for a signed Authorized Edition: $3,778,500 paid on December 10, 2010, for a copy that Robert F. Kennedy had bought in early 1964 for $9,500, sold by his widow, Ethel. Another copy brought a reported $2.1 million in June 2012 and went to David Rubenstein.

The 2025 mark did not stand long. On January 23, 2026, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History sold its copy, once owned by Chicago executive Philip D. Sang, at auction in New York for $6,785,000 against the same $3 million to $5 million estimate.

The numbers

Copies printed and signed

48

Rejected trial printing

24 copies, never signed

Surviving signed copies

27 (one census says 26)

Price at the 1864 fair

$10

Black soldiers who served in the Union army by war's end

More than 180,000

Timeline

1. Jul 22, 1862

   Lincoln reads a first draft of an emancipation proclamation to his cabinet.

2. Sep 22, 1862

   After Antietam, Lincoln issues the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

3. Jan 1, 1863

   Lincoln signs the Emancipation Proclamation.

4. 1863

   Lincoln's handwritten draft sells for $3,000 at a Sanitary Commission fair in Chicago; it burns in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

5. Jun 1864

   Frederick Leypoldt prints 48 copies of the Leland-Boker Authorized Edition in Philadelphia; Lincoln, Seward and Nicolay sign them.

6. Jun 16, 1864

   Lincoln visits the Great Central Fair in Philadelphia's Logan Square and speaks.

7. Jun 17, 1864

   The fair newspaper Our Daily Fare advertises the signed copies at $10 each.

8. Nov 1864

   Five unsold copies are sold for the Sanitary Commission at the National Sailors' Fair in Boston.

9. 1964

   Robert F. Kennedy buys a copy at auction for $9,500.

10. Dec 19, 2002

    The copy later sold in 2025 is sold at auction in New York with the Douglass Campbell collection.

11. 2007

    The copy goes on deposit at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, where it stays through 2024.

12. Dec 10, 2010

    The Kennedy copy sells at auction in New York for $3,778,500.

13. Jun 26, 2012

    Another copy sells at auction for a reported $2.1 million and goes to David Rubenstein.

14. Jun 26, 2025

    This copy sells at auction in New York for $4.4 million to Kenneth C. Griffin.

15. Jan 23, 2026

    The Gilder Lehrman Institute's copy sells at auction in New York for $6,785,000.

The world in 1864

• Mar 9, 1864

  Lincoln appoints Ulysses S. Grant commander of all Union armies.

• Apr 12, 1864

  At Fort Pillow, Tennessee, Confederate forces kill most of the Black Union soldiers who try to surrender.

• May 5, 1864

  The Battle of the Wilderness begins in Virginia.

• Jun 15, 1864

  Arlington National Cemetery is established on the grounds of Robert E. Lee's home.

• Aug 22, 1864

  The First Geneva Convention, on care for wounded soldiers, is signed by 12 European states.

• Sep 2, 1864

  Union forces under William T. Sherman enter Atlanta.

• Oct 31, 1864

  Nevada is admitted as the 36th state.

• Nov 8, 1864

  Lincoln is reelected, defeating George B. McClellan.

Price record

A realized auction price is what a buyer actually paid on the date shown, including the buyer's premium where the sale reported it. It is the strongest kind of reference price, and it is a record of one sale of one object on one day, not a promise of what the next example will bring.

By reference price, Emancipation Proclamation (Leland-Boker authorized edition, 2025 sale) is number 20 of 100 in the memorabilia entries of the FLOAT 100. 100 of those 100 rest on a realized sale; the rest carry an asking price or a guide value, and each page says which. Rank within the FLOAT 100 itself (20 here) is editorial: how much an object defines its field, not price alone.

Did you know

• The fair price of $10 was about a week's wages for a day laborer at the time, according to a Philadelphia newspaper's 2025 account.
• Lincoln's handwritten draft of the proclamation sold for $3,000 at a Chicago fair in 1863 and was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
• One cataloger has suggested the odd edition size of 48 honored the 48 Virginia counties that broke away to form West Virginia.
• Robert F. Kennedy bought his copy in 1964 for $9,500. It sold at auction in New York in 2010 for $3,778,500, on the same day the original rules of basketball sold there.
• Charles Godfrey Leland, one of the two men behind the edition, claimed he coined "emancipation" as a substitute for "abolition."
• The buyer of the 2025 copy, Kenneth C. Griffin, had paid $43.2 million in 2021 for a first printing of the U.S. Constitution.