Gettysburg Rail Pass and Lincoln's Last Message to Congress to Auction

Items related to the Gettysburg Address and Abraham Lincoln's final Annual Message to Congress will go under the hammer at Heritage Auctions' Historical Manuscripts sale on February 26.

President Abraham Lincoln’s brief oration on November 19, 1863, is now referred to as the Gettysburg Address, He had arrived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the evening before with a small party of his closest associates, including William P. Dole, his Commissioner of Indian Affairs, on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on a special train arranged exclusively for Lincoln and his entourage. 

Each member of this small party was issued a special pass. Very few were issued, and fewer still of these passes have survived. Dole’s railroad pass and the marshal’s ticket that authorized him to stand with Lincoln on the speaker’s platform will be among the items at the auction. They are mounted in a scrapbook assembled by Dole’s wife Elizabeth “Lizzie” Dole which also features more than 70 pages of calling cards and invitations from politicians and dignitaries. 

Lizzie Dole also collected two albums full of autographs. One of those albums features the signatures of seven Presidents of the United States, including Lincoln, as well as Vice Presidents, Civil War generals and naval officers, and a strip of paper bearing the handwriting of the fifth monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, King Kamehameha V. The other has signatures from figures including President Franklin Pierce, President Andrew Johnson and Texas President Sam Houston, as well as various politicians, generals, artists and more.

The Dole collection also includes the opening passage of Lincoln’s final Annual Message to Congress, the war-time address delivered on December 4, 1864, in Washington in Lincoln’s own longhand. Only a few of the original pages of this address have survived and this manuscript fragment is possibly unique.  

Additional Lincoln material includes a signed letter written just two days after the conclusion of the Battle of Gettysburg in which he asks Surgeon General William A. Hammond to allow Sarah Fisher Ames to minister to the wounded on the battlefield.

Other highlights in the auction include:

• a 21-page letter from General George Custer to his wife, Elizabeth “Libbie” Carter dated January 2, 1869, just over a month after the Battle of the Washita River, also known as the Washita Massacre
• a May 6, 1791, letter from Marie Antoinette to her confidant Florimond Claude, comte de Mercy-Argenteau describing the dangerous situation she faces during her confinement at the Tuileries, written a few weeks before her flight to Varennes
• a March 19, 1947 legal document in which Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel assumes control from Billy Wilkerson of the Las Vegas hotel and casino complex that would come to be known as the Flamingo