Rare Thomas Jefferson letter is historic, mildly sassy.

You've heard similar stories before. Someone's rummaging around in an attic, finds some old, forgotten boxes, and discovers a piece of history worth $325,000. This inspires you to immediately run to your attic or basement where hopes of wonderful riches are quickly dismissed upon learning you only have old musty sweaters, 8-track cassettes, and dashed dreams. Que sera, sera.

And so the story goes again. A family is Mississippi recently discovered a letter in their attic that was written by Thomas Jefferson shortly after the War of 1812. Jefferson wrote the letter to then-U.S. Ambassador to France William Crawford, a relative of the modern Mississippi family.

In the letter, up for sale by The Raab Collection, Jefferson remarks about the Treaty of Ghent, which effectively ended the war and which was written in his Monticello home. The letter also offers Jefferson's thoughts on Napoleon--who had just lost his own war with Britain occurring the same time in Europe as the War of 1812 was raging in North America. According to Jefferson, Napoleon's "downfall was illy timed for us. It gave to England an opportunity to turn full handed on us, when we were unprepared. No matter. We can beat her on our own soil…"

Oooh, sassy passive aggression! Jefferson doing a little chest puffing and dismissive hand waving at both the British and Napoleon in one sentence.

All of Jefferson's sass can be yours for the sale price of $325,000.

But double-check your basement first. Just in case.

Napoleonic war diary found in secondhand bookstore in Tasmania.

That's how humans used to write.

Royal Engineer John Squire was a noted soldier for the king's military, a learned man of good standing with a penchant for fine handwriting. This led to a diary detailing his stops in battle during the crown's fight with Napoleon's war across the continent. Any sort of diary two centuries old is valuable, never mind one of an officer from the Napoleonic War.

Fast forward 200-years, and Squire's diary was discovered in a cupboard--stacked amongst old, dusty books--in the back room of  bookstore in Tasmania of all places. And no one knows exactly how it ended up there.

According to the BBC, the bookstore owner believes "the journal could have been in the shop for 20 years, but no-one [know's] how it arrived. A working theory is that it arrived with the colonists who established Van Diemen's Land." Van Diemen's Land was the former name of Tasmania shortly after it became known to Europeans in 1642.

Squire was no slouch, with a military resume that saw him at British campaigns in Egypt, including being present when the Rosetta Stone was handed over to the crown. He later spent time in South America, Sweden, and Portugal, where he eventually died of a fever.

Yet, strangely enough, his long lost diary might have been a better traveler than he ever was--however it was that it traveled.



FUN FACT!: After being discovered in 1642, Tasmania was thought to be part of mainland Australia. Somehow, despite a settlement long established on the southeastern tip, it took until 1798 for an explorer to circumnavigate the island and realize, you know, duh.


Photo:  abc.net.au