Some celebrate July 4 with cookouts and fireworks, but Philadelphia’s Raab Collection is marking Independence Day by offering what it describes as a unique letter from Thomas Jefferson. The seller, a private firm dealing in historical documents, says it’s the only known example in which the Founding Father argues for the people’s right to bear arms against an oppressive government. 

Tagged at up to $90,000, the letter was last sold privately 50 years ago, and it will be available on the seller’s website on a first-come, first-served basis. Jefferson’s letters have gone for prices well into the six digits: an 1818 letter smashed its $35,000 high estimate at Sotheby’s New York in 1986 to fetch $396,000, setting a record for the highest price ever paid at auction for any letter or any Presidential document. An Abraham Lincoln letter fetched $3.4 million at Sotheby’s New York in 2008.

A letter from Thomas Jefferson, dated December 31, 1783. Courtesy Raab Collection.

Jefferson wasn’t, strictly speaking, writing about an American right to bear arms. In the letter, he discusses the Dutch, who were rising up against the Prince of Orange in favor of a constitutional government. “They have demanded of the sovereign assembly of the states that the power of the Stadtholder to change or reinforce the garrisons be limited or taken away, and that they themselves be authorized to exercise in arms for the defense of their country: of 80,000 men able to bear arms among them it is believed scarcely any will refuse to sign this demand,” he wrote.

The letter is dated December 31, 1783, shortly after the United States’ victory over the British, codified in the Treaty of Paris on September 3. That treaty awaited ratification by nine of the original 13 U.S. states, and Jefferson was anxious that that wouldn’t happen within the required six-month time frame. “We have yet but seven states, and no more certain prospects of nine than at any time heretofore,” he wrote. “We hope that the letters sent to the absent states will bring them forward.” 

Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Thomas Jefferson (1853). Photo: GraphicaArtis / Getty Images.

The letter is addressed to Benjamin Harrison, a fellow signer of the Declaration of Independence who was serving as governor of Virginia, and comes six years before the passage of the Second Amendment, guaranteeing citizens the right to bear arms. Jefferson had argued for this right in drafting the Virginia Bill of Rights, in which he included the sentence: “No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”

“This letter speaks to us today on many levels,” said Nathan Raab, president of the Raab Collection, in press materials. “We can see the power and inspiration of Jefferson’s pen, as he can begin to reflect on the success of his work and the American Revolution and witness democratic ideals spreading worldwide.”

A letter from Thomas Jefferson, dated December 31, 1783. Courtesy Raab Collection.

Raab is also the author of The Hunt for History: On the Trail of the World’s Lost Treasures―from the Letters of Lincoln, Churchill, and Einstein to the Secret Recordings Onboard JFK’s Air Force One (2020), described as “a terrific feat of storytelling” by no less than former Metropolitan Museum of Art president and CEO Daniel Weiss.

It’s the second year running that Raab is celebrating the Fourth of July in this fashion. A year ago, the firm offered a Jefferson letter focusing on his finances, which, as Raab told the Guardian, showed him to be “a regular guy with financial burdens and worries, just like the rest of us.” Priced at a more modest $40,000, that letter remains on the market.