His signature costs five figures. His words cost six.

It is the clearest case on this index of a rule that keeps turning up: the name is the entry fee, and what surrounds it sets the price.

The numbers

Here is what the certified Washington material this index records has sold for, leaving out documents that carry a second official's signature.

A signed cut, graded EX 5 on the autograph: $10,980.
A signed cut, graded Mint 9: $14,043.
A signed soldier's discharge from June 1783: $15,250.
A signed letter of 12 November 1776: $109,800.

The first three sit within about five thousand dollars of each other. The fourth is nearly eight times the dearest of them.

What the letter says

It is addressed to Colonel Daniel Hitchcock, who commanded a Rhode Island regiment, and it was written from Peekskill, New York.

The business is recruiting. Congress had just authorised Washington to name officers for new regiments where a state had not sent its own commissioners, and he tells Hitchcock to report to General Charles Lee with the list of recommended officers so that recruiting can begin without delay. He closes by asking for Hitchcock's best efforts to raise the regiments, and adds: "you must feel the necessity of the measure."

It is a short, practical letter. Nothing in it is famous. What makes it matter is when it was written.

When it was written

In the autumn of 1776 the Continental Army was losing the war and about to lose itself. Most of its soldiers had enlisted only until the end of the year. Washington had been warning for weeks about the approaching dissolution of the army, and the new regiments this letter is about were the attempt to replace it before it was gone.

Days later, Fort Washington on Manhattan fell, with its garrison captured. The army retreated across New Jersey. General Lee, the man Hitchcock was told to report to, was captured by British cavalry in December.

Hitchcock himself led a brigade at the Battle of Princeton on 3 January 1777, one of the victories that kept the army alive through that winter. He died of illness at Morristown ten days later.

So the letter is not a document about a famous event. It is a document from inside the worst weeks of the war, about the one problem that decided whether there would be an army at all, addressed to a colonel who had two months to live.

The words are not in his hand

Here is the detail that turns this from a high price into an argument.

The editors of the Papers of George Washington, the standard edition of his correspondence, record this letter as an LS, a letter signed, written out by Robert Hanson Harrison. Harrison was one of Washington's aides and wrote a great deal of his headquarters correspondence. Washington's own pen touched only the signature at the bottom.

Collectors draw a firm line between an LS and an ALS, an autograph letter signed, which is written entirely in the signer's own hand. An ALS is generally the more valuable of the two, because every word on it is his.

Which means the buyer of this letter paid something like ninety-five thousand dollars more than the price of a bare signature, for a page of handwriting that belongs to Washington's aide. They were not paying for more of Washington's hand. They were paying for the moment.

The grade barely mattered

The two cut signatures make the same point from the other side.

One is graded Mint 9 on the autograph and the other EX 5, which is a wide gap on the grading scale. The Mint 9 made only about a quarter more. At this level the market is paying for the name and the certainty that it is genuine, and quibbles about how crisply the quill moved come a distant third.

What moves a Washington price is not the signature. It is what the signature is attached to.

The same rule elsewhere on this index

We have seen this on very different signers.

On Roger Maris's page, anything tied to his 61st home run sells far above the rest of his market. On Vince Lombardi's, a signed Ice Bowl ticket stub sold for many times a stub from a title game he lost. And we have written about when the writing beside a name is worth more than the name.

Washington is the extreme case, because the content premium here is paid even though the content is in another man's handwriting.

What to check before buying

Ask whether it is an ALS or an LS. A reputable auction description will say, and the difference is large. Many Revolutionary War letters that carry Washington's signature were written out by an aide.

Read what it says. Content and date move the price far more than the grade of the signature. A letter about the army in a crisis is a different object from a routine order.

Look for it in the Papers. Washington's correspondence has been edited and published in detail, and many letters that come to auction can be matched to an entry that records who wrote the body and what the letter concerns.

And buy it certified. This letter carried letters of opinion from three authenticators.

The thing worth sitting with

Washington wrote his name at the bottom of a page his aide had filled, in a town on the Hudson, while his army was dissolving around him.

Two hundred and fifty years later, the name on its own is worth between eleven and fourteen thousand dollars. The page around it, in someone else's hand, is worth nearly a hundred thousand more, because of the week it was written in.

This index records documented sales of his signed material. You can read how we work the numbers out.

Sources