Ken Griffin’s Constitution Loan Puts America’s Founding Texts on View in Lower Manhattan
A privately held first-printing copy of the U.S. Constitution is now anchoring a new exhibition at the South Street Seaport Museum in Lower Manhattan, where the nation’s founding documents are being read not as relics, but as evidence of an unfinished civic argument. The loaned copy belongs to Ken Griffin, whose holdings in historic American documents have become increasingly visible in museums rather than vaults.
The exhibition, “The Promise of Liberty: Words That Shaped a Nation,” marks the United States’ 250th anniversary with a concentrated look at the language that defined, expanded, and contested American freedom. Griffin’s Constitution is one of only 14 surviving copies from the roughly 500 printed in September 1787. Twelve are held by institutions; the other two are owned by Griffin. His first copy was previously shown at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and later at the National Constitution Center.
The version now on view at South Street Seaport Museum is the Van Sinderen copy, acquired for an undisclosed sum. It joins a local copy of the Declaration of Independence printed in Salem, Massachusetts, and an early printing of the Bill of Rights from March 1789, ratified in December 1791. Together, the documents trace a chronology of American liberty that begins with the founding and extends into the 19th and 20th centuries.
That broader arc includes an early printing of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, an advanced draft of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and a 1918 poster listing 12 reasons women should be granted the vote. The exhibition’s New York emphasis is equally deliberate: the museum frames the city as a crucial port and printing hub in the nation’s pursuit of liberty, a reminder that ideas of rights and citizenship were not only drafted in Philadelphia, but circulated, debated, and amplified in New York.
Griffin’s loan arrives after a year of headline-making acquisitions. In December, he bought copies of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment for $13.7 million and $4.4 million, respectively, both record prices for those documents. In 2021, he paid $43.2 million at Sotheby’s for a copy of the Constitution, then a record for any book, manuscript, or historic document.
At South Street Seaport Museum, 12 Fulton St, the exhibition turns those market milestones into a public encounter with the texts themselves — and with the long, uneven history of liberty they helped set in motion.
