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Alexander Hamilton: An Important Family Archive of Letters and Manuscripts

Results: Sotheby’s 2017 Americana Week achieved $19.4 million across six blockbuster auctions. This unforgettable series of sales are testament to collectors' continued interest in the finest works of American furniture, folk art, silver, letters and manuscripts. 

Auction Details: Never truly forgotten, Alexander Hamilton, one of America’s previously neglected founding fathers, has recently achieved a level of fame, and even celebrity, not seen since his own brief but momentous lifetime. Starting with the inclusion, 2001, of a wide-ranging selection of Hamilton’s letters, essays, and government papers in the canonical Library of America series; continuing with Ron Chernow’s prize-winning and best-selling biography, Alexander Hamilton, 2004; and culminating with Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway phenomenon Hamilton, which won eleven Tony Awards earlier this year, Alexander Hamilton now stands with Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Madison in terms of familiarity—and probably eclipses them all in terms of popularity.

Just reading the register of Hamilton’s achievements is exhausting: mercantile clerk, college student, poet, artillery captain, adjutant to General Washington during the Revolutionary War, congressman, abolitionist, founder of the Bank of New York, New York state assemblyman, member of the Constitutional Convention and the New York Ratifying Convention, essayist responsible for the majority of the Federalist Papers and all of the Pacificus Papers, first Secretary of the Treasury, founder of the New York Post, major general in the army, a titanic force in the country’s first four presidential elections—and the father of eight.

Sotheby’s is privileged to offer for sale a highly important family archive of manuscripts by and relating to Alexander Hamilton which touch on virtually every phase of his extraordinary life.