Yes, you saw that correctly. Not only is handwritten correspondence the most effective direct marketing you can use, it might just be worth something someday. That is, if you ever become President of the United States.

Lincoln’s emotional reply to petition calling on him to free ‘all the little slave children’ up for auction | the Daily Mail

The stirring letter - written in the year preceding the President’s assassination and the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution which formally abolished slavery - is the highlight of a 111-lot collection of Presidential and other historic American manuscripts being sold the Dr Robert Small Trust at Sotheby’s in New York next Thursday (April 3).

It is estimated to fetch between £1.5 million and £2.5 million. If it finds a buyer it will become the most expensive Lincoln manuscript ever sold at auction.

Sotheby’s manuscripts specialist in New York, David Redden, said yesterday: “This is Lincoln’s most personal and powerful statement on God, slavery and emancipation. No piece of mail touched Lincoln as deeply as as did this petition.”

The £6 million sale include other significant Lincoln manuscripts as well as those signed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Ulysses S Grant and Robert E Lee.