A previously unknown letter from George Washington in which the first US president hints at financial troubles is ironically expected to fetch $50,000 at auction, CNN reports. Raab Collection, an auction house with a focus on historical documents, revealed the discovery of the 1787 letter "unknown to scholars" and held in a private collection in West Virginia on Sunday. Two months before he agreed to chair the Constitutional Convention and two years before he became president, Washington wrote to a retired colonel of the need to sell some of his ample land holdings and stated he would accept nothing but cash, per CNN and WHYY.
Israel Shreve of New Jersey, who'd served under Washington in the Continental Army at Valley Forge, had offered to buy a 1,644-acre parcel of land in western Pennsylvania known as Washington's Bottom with bounty land warrants. "I wish it was convenient for me to accommodate you with it for military certificates; but to raise money is the only inducement I have to sell it," Washington wrote. "Consequently, certificates if they cannot be converted into cash, will not answer my purpose," he continued, proposing "one fourth of the money to be paid down" and "the other three fourths in three annual payments, with interest."
Joseph Stoltz of the George Washington Presidential Library says Mount Vernon's agricultural business declined as Washington led the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, putting the general "in a serious cash hole," per WHYY. Though Washington at one time owned up to 70,000 acres of land, "he was in a situation where he was helping family, entertaining people at his home, and he needed money," says Nathan Raab, president of the Raab Collection, which recently purchased the letter. "It shows him having the kinds of problems that anybody might have, which is, 'I need cash.'"
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Benjamin Huggins, associate editor of the University of Virginia's Washington Papers project, agrees the letter is "a great discovery with much historical interest." "Up until the discovery of this letter, the only known correspondence in this 1787 exchange were three letters from Shreve to Washington," he says, per WHYY. "Now, thanks to this discovery, we have Washington's reply." After leasing a small portion of the land, Shreve eventually purchased all 1,644 acres "for £4,000 Pennsylvania currency" in 1795, according to the Raab Collection. (More discoveries stories.)
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