A previously unpublished letter written by Abraham Lincoln during the civil war has been discovered and put up for sale in Pennsylvania, offering rare insight into the US president’s strategic thinking in the first year of the conflict.
The recipient of the short handwritten note was Charles Ellet Jr, later a colonel in the Union army who wrote to Lincoln seeking the formation of a well-funded civil engineer corps to help fortify Washington against the Confederate threat.
Dated 19 August 1861, four months after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter marked the outbreak of hostilities, the letter had been concealed in a private collection for more than 100 years and only came to light this year, according to Nathan Raab, principal of the Raab Collection of civil war and other historical artifacts.
“Discovering unpublished, unknown letters of Abraham Lincoln is increasingly rare,” Raab said in a statement accompanying a notice of the document’s upcoming sale on the collection’s website for its estimated $85,000 value.
“[His] autographs and historical documents are among the most collected and are always in demand. His letters are known for their great clarity and economy of words – never two where one would suffice.”
Raab said the letter “fills in a part of the historical record that had been missing”, namely its position in a chain of communication detailing Ellet’s efforts to seek the foundation and funding for a civil engineering corps to “survey terrain, disrupt Confederate supply chains and defend the city of Washington”.
The responsibilities, Ellet believed, were beyond the capabilities of the US army’s tiny corps of engineers, which was founded six decades earlier.
But in the letter from the White House, which he referred to as the “Executive Mansion”, Lincoln sidestepped the request. He told Ellet to consult three of the president’s top generals, Winfield Scott, Joseph Totten and George McClellan, whom Lincoln dismissed as commander of the army of the Potomac, then beat in the 1864 presidential election five months before he was assassinated.
“You propose raising for the service of the US a Civil Engineer Corps. I am not capable to judge of the value of such a corps; but I would be glad to accept one if approved by Gen Scott, Gen McClellan & Gen Totten. Please see them and get their views upon it,” Lincoln wrote.
McClellan, however, refused to meet Ellet and the project was shelved until 1862, when a Union fleet was destroyed by the Confederate ironclad ramming ship Merrimack at the battle of Hampton Roads.
The humiliation prompted Lincoln to appoint Ellet, then 52, as an army colonel to lead a hasty construction program. Ellet was shot aboard one of the Union’s own ironclad vessels on the Mississippi river later that year in the battle of Memphis and died two weeks later.
Raab said there was no record of Lincoln’s letter having reached the market publicly before or appearing in any published works.
“Its existence is referenced in a privately printed work by a descendant of Ellet, though even here its content is not noted,” he said in a statement.
A thriving market exists for civil war memorabilia, with autographed Lincoln artifacts in particular demand. The most expensive to change hands was a copy of his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation owned by the family of another assassinated president, John F Kennedy, which sold at auction at Sotheby’s in New York for $3.8m in 2010.
A signed copy of Lincoln’s 1864 election victory speech sold for $3.4m a year earlier, one of five documents to have achieved a selling price in excess of $3m.
