The Morgan Library & Museum in New York is currently presenting a selection of exceptional documents from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, one of the country’s leading collections of Americana. Reflections on a Nation features documents from the Revolutionary, early national, antebellum, and Civil War periods that represent an array of transformative moments that took place throughout the history of the United States.

Highlights from the exhibition include the only surviving copy of a 1776 edition of the Declaration of Independence printed in the South, a first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a letter written by George Washington to secretary of war Henry Knox, and a letter written by Frederick Douglass to Mary Todd Lincoln. In it, Douglass thanked the president’s widow for giving him her husband’s walking stick, which he said was an indication of Lincoln’s “humane interest [in the] welfare of my whole race.”

Reflections on a Nation will be on view at the Morgan Library & Museum through January 12, 2014.