The Pursuit of Happiness, at Auction

On July 1, 1776, with the Revolutionary War well into its first year, the Second Continental Congress reconvened at Philadelphia to debate a resolution for independence. Delegates reviewed a draft — largely crafted by Thomas Jefferson — that would publicly explain and justify their historic decision to do the unthinkable: Declare independence from England.Exactly 250 years later, on July 1, 2026, on a sweltering summer day, one of the first official facsimiles of the signed manuscript of the Declaration of Independence sold for $2,027,000 at Christie’s New York to an unidentified buyer.I was sitting in the bidding room, flipping through the auction catalogue, when a man came up to me and handed me a note. “For the Declaration and the George Washington letter, the buyer can be listed as ‘a client of Seth Kaller, Inc.,’” the note read. Mr. Kaller, I later learned, is a leading Americana expert specializing in historic documents and a dealer who builds both museum and private collections. In celebration of America 250, Christie’s was selling roughly 70 “Icons of History,” pieces from the collection of the late Indianapolis Colts owner and philanthropist Jim Irsay.Irsay, who died in 2025, also owned one of the world’s largest collections of musical instruments. His collection made headlines in March when David Gilmour’s iconic “Black Strat” sold for $14.55 million, becoming the most expensive guitar ever sold at auction. During Wednesday’s auction, I witnessed a different kind of history unfold. Rather than focusing on record-breaking prices, Irsay’s collection brought America’s past to life. Among the most striking items was a pair of theater ticket stubs from the night of President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, which sold for $330,200.“They are exceptionally rare,” a senior specialist at Christie’s, Peter Klarnet, told me. “Those are among only four known single used tickets,” he said. “These are still the early days for tickets to be used in theaters. People would have subscriptions or just pay at the door.”The ticket stubs were for Section D, seats 41 and 42. The words “Dress Circle!” were printed in bold. They were front-row seats in the first balcony level, diagonally across from the presidential box.“The ticket holders would have been able to see the presidential box,” Mr. Klarnet said. “They probably couldn’t see Lincoln’s face, but they would have definitely seen Booth jump from the box onto the stage.”A pair of used dress circle tickets at Ford’s Theatre, Washington, for the night of President Lincoln’s assassination on April 14 1865. Christie’sOther highlights included photographs of astronaut Edward H. White II during America’s first spacewalk in 1965; first editions of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from 1885, and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” a year later ;a signed copy of Amelia Earhart’s “The Fun of It” published in 1932; Albert Einstein’s signature; letters from Ernest Hemingway; a 1963 March on Washington pennant; and a signed copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”I was kicking myself for not registering for a paddle when bidding opened on a cream-colored Stetson that Texas Governor John Connally had intended to give to President John F. Kennedy. The hat had been estimated at $60,000-$80,000. When no bids came, the auctioneer, instead of raising the price, began counting it down, starting at $10,000 and quickly dropping to $2,500.My father, who rarely leaves the house without a hat, has been searching for a new Stetson ever since he lost his favorite one on a flight through Europe several years ago. The Christie’s hat was custom-made and embossed with gold “JFK” initials on the leather sweatband. Governor Connally had commissioned it as a gift for the 35th president, intended for a November 22, 1963 fundraising dinner in Austin. It ultimately sold for about $3,000. “Too much,” my father texted me. “Imagine I’d lose it again.”The final lot — and centerpiece of the auction — was the working manuscript of “The Big Book,” the 1939 Alcoholics Anonymous guide written by William “Bill” Wilson and Henry “Hank” Parkhurst. The Library of Congress has recognized it as one of the “Books that Shaped America.”In a statement, Irsay’s daughters said that whenever people asked their father which object mattered most, “his answer was always “The Big Book.” The Colts owner, who struggled publicly with addiction, “understood the struggles countless people everywhere face every day,” they said.The original working manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous. Christie’s Alcoholics Anonymous itself grew out of the collapse of Wilson’s own life under the grip of alcoholism. Mr. Klarnet described the manuscript as “the conscious creation of the modern recovery movement.” Typed on a typewriter, its pages are covered with handwritten edits: words crossed out, passages underlined, annotations scribbled in the margins.He died in 1971, leaving the manuscript to his wife, Lois Wilson, co-founder of Al-Anon Family Groups. In 1978, she gave it to a friend, whose family eventually sold it. For the next 48 years, the manuscript remained in private hands until Wednesday.The Stepping Stones Foundation, which preserves the historic home of Bill and Lois Wilson — now a museum and archive in Katonah, New York — purchased the manuscript for $2.393 million. “It’s finally coming home,” the foundation’s executive director Sally Corbett-Turco told me, tears filling her eyes. She had placed the winning bid from the auction room, defeating a telephone bidder from an undisclosed location. When the auctioneer announced the foundation’s victory, members in the audience leapt to their feet, applauding, cheering, embracing one another, and wiping away tears.After the auction ended, I found Mr. Kaller, the Americana expert who had slipped me the note earlier. The Declaration manuscript he had just purchased for his client hung framed near the rostrum. Mr. Kaller invited me to step closer for a better look.“This is the greatest press release in history, basically,” Mr. Kaller said with enthusiasm. “If you think about what it really is, it’s news, it’s an announcement. The Founding Fathers are putting this out after they just declared independence.”But he clarified that the document we were looking at, which showed the signatures of the founding fathers, did not actually exist in 1776. The engrossed and signed text — the national treasure now preserved in the Rotunda of the National Archives in Washington, D.C. — was not created until later. I was confused. Wasn’t this a copy of the original Declaration of Independence? “There is not just one original Declaration of Independence,” he said. “The tricky phrasing is ‘original copy.’”Only two delegates, he said, signed the July 4th declaration: John Hancock as the president of Continental Congress and Charles Thomson as the secretary. “Just like today,” he added, “an act of Congress only has to be signed by the head of the body and the secretary.”Furthermore, he pointed out that New York had not voted yet. Of the thirteen colonies, twelve voted to cut ties with England on July 4. The delegates from New York, however, had not received permission from their local government and thus abstained.Regardless, copies of the declaration were quickly sent to revolutionary state governments, to George Washington and the Continental Army in New York, and to commanders across the colonies. On July 6, the Pennsylvania Evening Post became the first newspaper to publish the text. From there, copies moved swiftly through the hands of Congress members, printers, and private citizens.As Mr. Kellar noted, today information arrives instantly on our phones but in the 18th century it could only be distributed in print. One of the primary formats was the newspaper. Another was the broadside — a single sheet printed on one side, allowing the full text to be read at once and then posted in public spaces such as churches or town halls.“There were hundreds of printings,” Mr. Kaller added. “Each of these newspaper printings are original copies, each of the broadsides are original copies. It was really about transmitting the news that changed people’s lives.”On July 9, New York’s Congress approved the independence. Hours later, George Washington ordered that the declaration be read out loud to his troops. Hearing the list of grievances — the crimes King George III had allegedly committed against the American people — so enraged the crowd that men tied ropes to a gilded statue of the king at Bowling Green at Lower Manhattan. They tore the statue down and hauled it to Connecticut, where it was melted down and reforged into 42,088 bullets.After New York changed its vote, Congress decided for posterity to create a formal document. The delegates signed the engrossed text August 2, 1776. “And that’s the broadside manuscript people have come to know as the original Declaration of Indepence,” Mr. Kaller concluded.In 1820, about 40 years later, the Secretary of State at the time, John Quincy Adams — son of signer John Adams — noticed that the document had become damaged. “He wanted to preserve it,” Mr. Kaller said. “So he hires the best engraver in the country, William J. Stone. It took two years to make the copper plate. They printed 201 copies in 1823, and distributed them in 1824.” Of these 201 William Stone facsimiles, also known as the “Stone copies,” only “roughly 52 have survived,” Mr. Kaller said. The manuscript at Christie’s was one of those 52 copies.“It’s an important document,” he explained. “It’s what created the iconic image of the Declaration of Independence. Before that, people were familiar with the text. But it wasn’t an iconic object yet. And so the engrossed declaration with the signatures was made famous, and preserved by this facsimile.”The Declaration of Independence, William J.Stone, 1823. Christie’sWhen I called Mr. Kaller the next day to ask a few follow-up questions, he told me he had already resold the Stone facsimile to another buyer, “a private collector who regretted not bidding.”He said the first buyer had only been interested in the letter George Washington sent to Thomas Jefferson in 1787 along with a first official printing of the Constitution: “The buyer really wanted the Washington letter for his collection. He put up the money for me to buy the declaration to resell it.”Contrary to a common misconception, Mr. Kaller said Washington never signed the Declaration of Independence, because he was with the Continental Army in New York at the time. And Jefferson never signed the Constitution because at the time he was the American Minister to France.As I walked home from Christie’s, I passed the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. As part of commemorating the 250th birthday, the library is exhibiting another “rare and remarkable” version of the Declaration of Independence, one of only a few surviving so-called “fair copies” of the handwritten draft by Thomas Jefferson before it was ratified on July 4.Mr. Kaller had pointed out to me that the notion of “happiness” back in 1776 differed from today. “We think of happiness as joy,” he said. “Back then, it was much more. The idea of happiness included self betterment, doing things for your society. A happy day is a day that you learn something, you study something, you read something. It was the enlightenment ideal of happiness as opposed to something very simple like having fun.”When Jefferson was assigned to draft the Declaration of Independence, he had read Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and the Enlightenment writers John Locke and David Hume. “It wasn’t just Jefferson alone,” Mr. Kaller said. “The founders were all aware of the enlightenment thinking and they were all influenced by it. It’s very much built into the Constitution. The idea that ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union,’ is that we are a perpetual work in progress, and our country is supposed to be a perpetual work in progress.”How beautiful, I thought, as I left the auction, that there are so many versions and copies and printings of the Declaration of Independence, and yet the principal idea always remains the same: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Pursuit of Happiness, at Auction

The Pursuit of Happiness, at Auction

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