First Magazine Appearance of The Star-Spangled Banner Leads Liberty & Legacy Auction

A rare printing of Francis Scott Key’s Star-Spangled Banner published while the War of 1812 still raged is among the highlights of Heritage Auctions' Liberty & Legacy: Celebrating 250 Years of the American Spirit sale on June 25.

It appears in The Analectic Magazine. Vol. IV. No. 23 (Philadelphia, Moses Thomas, November 1814) as the poem entitled The Defence of Fort M'Henry with an editorial note: "These lines have been already published in several of our newspapers... we think that their merit entitles them to preservation in some more permanent form than the columns of a daily paper...". The poem appears anonymously, with the detail that it is to be sung to the tune of Anacreon in Heaven.

Other highlights include:

• personal effects belonging to Declaration signer William Ellery including his 1776 Continental Congress credentials and spectacles
• original locks of hair belonging to George and Martha Washington
• a 1783 ship’s passport signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay in the aftermath of the Treaty of Paris, issued during the earliest days of American independence
• George Washington’s final handwritten letter to Thomas Paine in which he writes: “No one can feel a greater interest in the happiness of mankind than I do"
• the archive of Confederate spy Absalom Grimes who escaped capture six times and received three death sentences during the course of the Civil War
• a contemporary working manuscript draft of the 1845 Texas Constitution
• early engravings by Paul Revere