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 The documents listed in this section are not for sale; the descriptions and history below are provided for educational purposes. Six Lincoln-signed copies of the Emancipation Proclamation have sold publicly in the last 40 years. I have had the privilege of acquiring and placing all six with institutional and private clients. Here, I am delighted to share the historic background we have gathered in the process.
Please ask if you wish to re-publish or broadcast any of this information; it is almost always granted. Free use is allowed for schooling at any level, but the information should be credited to Seth Kaller, Inc., with a link to our website. Depending on the use, better quality images may also be provided. Requests by museums to borrow client’s documents, or to provide for display exact size fine quality reproductions, is often considered, and accommodated whenever possible. I am always interested in updating the census (list of known copies); if you know something we don’t, please tell! Also, if you own a related document, or work for a museum or library owner, and can grant us permission to publish an image, please let me know. In 2010, I intend to add to our site images of as many of the original documents we can get permission to publish. Sincerely,
Seth Kaller
“All persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free…” Summary:
Rarely has a single document affected so much of a nation’s history. Perhaps no other besides the Declaration of Independence so clearly created the vision of a new future while marking the end of what came before. In sounding the death knell of slavery, Lincoln took a decisive stand on the most contentious issue in the country’s history. No other pronouncement more clearly allowed the North to remake American society in its own image, without “Slave Power” in the national government. The primacy of rural, agricultural, slaveholding South would give way as the United States joined several western European nations in embracing a future of industrial capitalism—with all the cultural change that came with it. Rare “Authorized Edition,” with the complete text of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln as President, William Seward as Secretary of State, and John Nicolay, Private Secretary to the President, January 1, 1863 [printed and signed in 1864]. Historical Background:
The Emancipation Proclamation was the single most important act of Lincoln’s presidency. The preliminary proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862, warned Southern states that if they did not abandon the war they would lose their slaves. As the final version took full effect on January 1, 1863, slavery in the United States at last approached its demise, allowing the nation to take the crucial first steps in granting citizenship to African Americans.Rarely has a single document affected so much of the nation’s history—perhaps no other besides the Declaration of Independence so clearly created the vision of a new future. In sounding the death knell of slavery, the national government took a decisive stand on the most contentious issue in the country’s history. American society was remade in the Northern image, without a counterbalancing “Slave Power” in the national government. The rural, agricultural, slaveholding South gave way as the United States joined several western European nations in embracing a future of industrial capitalism—with all the cultural change that came with it. The text of the Proclamation reveals the major themes of the Civil War: the importance of slavery to the war effort on both sides, the courting of border states, Lincoln’s hopes that the rebellious states could somehow be convinced to come back into the Union, the role of black soldiers, constitutional and popular constraints on emancipation, the future place of black people in American society and America’s place in a worldwide movement toward the abolition of slavery. In addition to the moral impact of this “sincerely believed…act of justice,” the Proclamation aided the Union cause tangibly and decisively. It deprived the Confederacy of essential labor by giving slaves a reason to escape to Union lines. It encouraged the enlistment of black soldiers, who made a crucial contribution to the war effort. It restrained England and France, which had already abolished slavery, from pursuing their economic interests and supporting the Confederacy. Lincoln summed up the Proclamation’s importance in 1864: “[N]o human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done” (McPherson, 769). As historian John Hope Franklin has written, Lincoln’s Proclamation “was a step toward the extension of the ideal of equality about which Jefferson had written” in the Declaration of Independence. And in time, “the greatness of the document dawned upon the nation and the world. Gradually, it took its place with the great documents of human freedom” ( Franklin, 143-144). Frederick Douglass, speaking at The Cooper Institute in New York, on February 6, 1863, ably discussed the Proclamation and its effects: “I congratulate you, upon what may be called the greatest event of our nation’s history, if not the greatest event of the century. In the eye of the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, there is not now, and there has not been, since the 1 st day of January, a single slave lawfully deprived of Liberty in any of the States now recognized as in Rebellion against the National Government. In all these States Slavery is now in law, as in fact, a system of lawless violence, against which the slave may lawfully defend himself… The change in attitude of the Government is vast and startling. For more than sixty years the Federal Government has been little better than a stupendous engine of Slavery and oppression, through which Slavery has ruled us, as with a rod of iron… Assuming that our Government and people will sustain the President and the Proclamation, we can scarcely conceive of a more complete revolution in the position of a nation… I hail it as the doom of Slavery in all the States…. At last the out-spread wings of the American Eagle afford shelter and protection to men of all colors, all countries and climes, and the long oppressed black man may honorably fall or gloriously flourish under the star-spangled banner. I stand here tonight not only as a colored man and an American, but by the express decision of the Attorney-General of the United States, as a colored citizen, having, in common with all other citizens, a stake in the safety, prosperity, honor, and glory of a common country. We are all liberated by this proclamation. Everybody is liberated. The white man is liberated, the black man is liberated, the brave men now fighting the battles of their country against rebels and traitors are now liberated, and may strike with all their might, even if they do hurt the Rebels, at their most sensitive point. [Applause.] I congratulate you upon this amazing change—the amazing approximation toward the sacred truth of human liberty.”
The Leland-Boker Authorized Edition of the Emancipation Proclamation
This “Authorized Edition” was printed and signed in June of 1864, as a special souvenir to be sold for the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of June 7-29, 1864. The Sanitary Fairs were created to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers, and to improve conditions in military camps. According to historian James McPherson,
“[T]wo soldiers died of disease for every one killed in battle... Disease hit Civil War armies in two waves. The first was an epidemic of childhood maladies, mainly measles and mumps... The second wave consisted of camp and campaign diseases caused by bad water, bad food, exposure and mosquitoes. These included the principal killer diseases of the Civil War: dysentery, typhoid and malaria.” A soldier in the Civil War was ten times more likely to die of disease than a soldier in World War I. The Sanitary Fair’s role in ameliorating conditions was of paramount importance, and Lincoln’s support of the Sanitary Commission, though given begrudgingly at first, grew warmly as its work progressed. The Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia’s Logan Square June 7-29, 1864, had the honor of being the only event of its kind attended by President Lincoln. His address, delivered on June 16, caused such an outpouring of emotions among spectators that officials decided it would be dangerous for him to attend another. His impassioned speech explained the importance of the Sanitary Commission’s work: War at its best, is terrible, and this war of ours, in its magnitude and in its duration is one of the most terrible. … it has carried mourning to almost every home, until it can almost be said that the “heavens are hung in black.” Yet the war continues … The Sanitary Commission, with all its benevolent labors ... [has] contributed to the comfort and relief of the soldiers.... The Commission provides voluntary contributions, given zealously, and earnestly, on top of all the disturbances of business, of all the disorders, of all the taxation, and of all the burdens that the war has imposed upon us, giving proof that the national resources are not at all exhausted, and that the national spirit of patriotism is even firmer and stronger than at the commencement of the war (Basler, 394-396). The Sanitary Commission also allowed those at home to feel as if they were a part of the war effort. When Northerners attended fairs, donated money or goods or volunteered their time, they were actively aiding “their” soldiers at the front. Autographs of leading Americans were often sold at the Sanitary Fairs. However, only the Great Central Sanitary Fair commissioned a printing of the Proclamation. The present dramatic printing was created by two eminent Philadelphia men dedicated to the Union and profoundly opposed to slavery. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903) studied with transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott as a youth and later attended Princeton. A successful journalist, from 1857 he was the editor of Graham’s magazine, and in 1862 he took charge of the Continental Monthly, a Boston paper dedicated to the Union cause. In that role he later claimed to have “coined the term emancipation as a substitute for the disreputable term abolition” (DAB). In 1863, he enlisted in a Pennsylvania artillery regiment that fought at Gettysburg. George Henry Boker (1823-1890), his partner in this edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, was the scion of a Philadelphia banking family and also attended Princeton. A founder of the Union League Club of Philadelphia, Boker was active in raising funds for the Union wounded and aiding families of soldiers and sailors. During the Civil War, he published a poem, “Tardy George,” critical of General McClellan, and another entitled “Black Regiment.” Only forty-eight copies of this “Authorized Edition” were printed, and signed by Lincoln. We cannot be sure how many survived the war or its aftermath. In all probability about half still exist, most by now in museums and libraries.
The Writing of the Emancipation Proclamation
Lincoln ’s stance on emancipation evolved over the course of the war. At the beginning, he aimed only to keep the Union together, regardless of slavery. In a message to Congress on July 4, 1861, Lincoln restated that he had “no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with slavery in the States where it exists” (McPherson, 312). In 1862, freeing slaves became, in McPherson’s words, “a means to victory, not yet an end in itself,” as the government decided to confiscate slaves as “contraband of war.” Lincoln privately told advisers, “ We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably an element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or against us” (McPherson, 504). By 1864, Lincoln insisted on both reunion and emancipation as preconditions of any peace negotiations, even though he was sure it would cost him the election. And by the war’s end the President, who commended black soldiers and sailors for their decisive role in the Union victory, supported not only freedom but suffrage for black veterans. Finally, in promoting the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which formally ended slavery, Lincoln demonstrated his willingness to change the Constitution itself.
Major Thomas Thompson Eckert, the chief of the War Department’s telegraph staff, recalled the quiet drama of watching the President draft his famous document. Lincoln often went to the War Department building to wait, head in hands, for telegraphed news of battles. In the first week of July 1862, he asked Eckert for some paper, “as he wanted to write something special.” The president seated himself at Eckert’s desk, took the special foolscap writing paper, picked up a Gillot small barrel pen and began to write what has been regarded as the first draft of the Proclamation. Eckert remembered that Lincoln would look out of the window a while and then put his pen to paper, but he did not write much at once. He would study between times and when he had made up his mind he would put down a line or two, and then sit quiet for a few minutes (Eberstadt, 6). Lincoln returned to Eckert’s office to work on this and other documents almost daily over the next few weeks. By the end, Eckert became impressed with the idea that he [Lincoln] was engaged upon something of great importance, but did not know what it was until he had finished the document and then for the first time he told me that he had been writing an order giving freedom to the slaves in the South. He said he had been able to work at my desk more quietly and command his thoughts better than at the White House, where he was frequently interrupted (Eberstadt, 6). Lincoln first informed his cabinet of his intent to issue the proclamation on July 22, 1862. Secretary of State William Seward advised him to wait for a federal victory, fearing the Proclamation would be considered a desperate act if issued before the North won a major battle. Two months later, when federal troops stopped Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s invasion of Maryland at Antietam Creek, Lincoln finally had the opportunity to issue his preliminary Proclamation. Southern and even some Northern newspapers condemned it as a usurpation of property rights and an effort to start racial warfare. During two cabinet meetings at the end of 1862, Lincoln listened to suggestions for final revisions of his draft. Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, proposed one that was adopted: to close the document by invoking the “judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God.” Lincoln had always believed slavery to be immoral and had championed against it for most of his political career. However, he also believed that the president did not possess the constitutional power to abolish slavery, except as a matter of military necessity; only Congress had that authority. Furthermore, Lincoln feared that attempting to enact the Proclamation at the wrong time would doom its chances for public acceptance while harming the Union cause. Emancipation threatened one of his most crucial goals in the first half of the war: keeping the support of the slaveholding border states that were still in the Union. Lincoln reportedly said that while he hoped to have God on his side, he must have Kentucky (McPherson, 284). Therefore, the president carefully worded the final document to affect only those states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863: I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by virtue of the power in me vested as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States in time of actual armed rebellion against the authority and government of the United States, and as a fit and necessary war measure for suppressing said rebellion ... do order and declare that all persons held as slaves within said designated states and parts of states are, and henceforward shall be, free; and that the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authorities thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of said persons. ... And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity, I invoke the considerate judgment of mankind and the gracious favor of Almighty God. But in his final Proclamation, Lincoln went beyond the preliminary version . He eliminated earlier references to colonizing freed blacks and compensating slave-owners for voluntary emancipation. He also added provisions for black military enlistment. Pausing before he signed the final Proclamation, Lincoln reportedly said: “I never, in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right that I do in signing this paper.”
The Proclamation and Black Troops
One of the more controversial and successful aspects of the Proclamation was its support of black troops. Lincoln declared that “such persons of suitable condition will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”
The impact was soon revealed. Black men, at last fighting for their own people’s liberation, redoubled their efforts to join the army, and the army finally accepted them, abandoning the notion that the conflict was “a white man’s war.” By some estimates, three hundred thousand African-Americans fought for the Union between 1863 and 1865. They would form ten percent of Union forces by the war’s end, performing key roles in the federal victory and giving crucial support to future claims on citizenship. African Americans’ battle for full participation in the army, with equal wages, was yet to be won. But, as in many other ways, this provision of the Emancipation Proclamation marked an important new stage in the evolution of Abraham Lincoln—and the nation.
The Myth of Non-Emancipation
The Emancipation Proclamation has faced criticism as a document of little actual impact, because it offered freedom only to slaves “within any state or designated part of a state … in rebellion against the United States”—not to slaves in areas that the Union actually controlled. (The March 1862 Confiscation Act had freed slaves in rebellious states, though it only described such slaves as “captives of war” who would not be returned to “claimants.”) Some have therefore challenged the Proclamation’s importance in ending slavery.
But in formally tying the Union’s war aims to a policy of abolishing slavery, Lincoln dramatically expanded the scope of the conflict. From black soldiers to European statesmen, from Lincoln’s political enemies in the North to outraged rebels in the South, observers understood that the war, and the future course of the nation, had undergone a fundamental change. Whether they approved or not, after January 1, 1863, Americans no longer could deny that freedom for African Americans was now a central part of the Union war effort. As issued in September 1862, The Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation after January 1—if they could win the war. And it also invited the slaves to help them win it. Most antislavery Americans and Britons recognized this. “We shout for joy that we live to record this righteous decree,” wrote Frederick Douglass, while William Lloyd Garrison considered it “an act of immense historical consequence” (McPherson, 558). Slaves themselves were instrumental in forcing Lincoln and the Northern public to make emancipation a central goal of the war. In historian Ira Berlin’s words, Lincoln and the slaves played “complementary roles” in bringing about emancipation ( Berlin, 284): By abandoning their owners, coming uninvited into Union lines, and offering their assistance as laborers, pioneers, guides, and spies, slaves forced federal soldiers at the lowest level to recognize their importance to the Union’s success. That understanding traveled quickly up the chain of command. In time, it became evident even to the most obtuse federal commanders that every slave who crossed into Union lines was a double gain: one subtracted from the Confederacy and one added to the Union. The slaves’ resolute determination to secure their liberty converted many white Americans to the view that the security of the Union depended upon the destruction of slavery ( Berlin, 279-280). But, though slaves could put emancipation on the wartime agenda, “They could not vote, pass laws, issue field orders, or promulgate great proclamations. That was the realm of citizens, legislators, military officers, and the President.” ( Berlin, 280). When Lincoln decided to act, he seized the moment and acted decisively. In 1860, Lincoln had been elected with less than half the popular vote in Union states, with no mandate for abolition. By 1863, when his Proclamation took effect, it did find significant support among the Northern public and Union soldiers, demoralized by nearly two years of fighting. An Indiana colonel wrote that few soldiers were abolitionists, but they wanted “to destroy everything that in aught gives the rebels strength,” so “this army will sustain the emancipation proclamation and enforce it with the bayonet” (McPherson, 558-559). But by no means was such acceptance universal. A newspaper editor in New York told a mass meeting that “when the President called upon them to go and carry on a war for the nigger, he would be d___d if he believed they would go” (McPherson, 609). Draft riots in that city in July 1863 constituted the worst mob violence in American history. Threatened with being conscripted to fight a war now bound up with emancipation, rioters targeted black people with beatings, lynchings and the destruction of property, including the burning of the Colored Orphan Asylum. A total of 105 people were killed, eleven of whom were African-American. Even with its limited powers, the Emancipation Proclamation seriously threatened Lincoln’s re-election in 1864. The chairman of the Republican National Committee told the president: [T]he tide is setting strongly against us… Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success, and the impression…that we can have peace with Union if we would… [but that you are] fighting not for Union but for the abolition of slavery (McPherson, 769). Lincoln denied that emancipation was his only goal but pointed to the 130,000 black soldiers and sailors then fighting for the Union cause: “The promise being made, must be kept… Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, …& we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks” (McPherson, 769). He invoked a moral commitment as well: There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson and Olustee. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will (McPherson, 769). But Lincoln worried that he had failed to convince the Northern public. He and many others thought he would be defeated in 1864, and his likeliest replacements, including General George B. McClellan, did not support abolition. His campaign was only saved by William Tecumseh Sherman’s decisive military victory in Atlanta, aided by Philip Sheridan’s in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Emancipation was therefore a precarious undertaking even as late as 1863. Lincoln issued the Proclamation at a precise moment of opportunity, when the exigencies of war made the radical step of abolition possible. The abolitionist cause would not have rallied the Northern public to support the war in 1861. And as students of Reconstruction would recognize, the radicalism that finally did lead to Constitutional amendments granting African Americans freedom, citizenship and suffrage would not survive many years after the war. Though emancipation was not what Lincoln had planned when he was elected,he rightly regarded his Proclamation as “the central act of my administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century” (Eberstadt, 16). As Ira Berlin observes, “The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the war in ways only the President could.” He concludes, The Emancipation Proclamation’s place in the drama of emancipation is thus secure—as is Lincoln’s. To deny it is to ignore the intense struggle by which freedom arrived. It is to ignore the Union soldiers who sheltered slaves, the abolitionists who stumped for emancipation, and the thousands of men and women who—like Lincoln—changed their minds as slaves made the case for universal liberty. Reducing the Emancipation Proclamation to a nullity and Lincoln to a cipher denies human agency as fully as writing the slaves out of the struggle for freedom ( Berlin, 283).
The Emancipation Proclamation in Global Context
The forces behind the “great event” of proclaiming emancipation were not limited to the United States. In ending slavery, America took its place in a worldwide movement that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the middle of the nineteenth. Western European nations first abolished the slave trade—though enforcement was usually weak—and then slavery itself, out of a combination of economic inducements (such as the Industrial Revolution, which more profitably used free labor) and ideological arguments. By the middle of the nineteenth century, industrializing nations formed a consensus that slavery had no economic or social place in their future.
Northerners in America had reached that conclusion in the antebellum era, but they focused their efforts on keeping slavery out of new territories in the West, believing that slavery would eventually die out if confined to its current borders. The Civil War was the necessary catalyst for more direct action. A conflict of ideals and pragmatism had confounded America on the subject of slavery from the nation’s beginnings. The Emancipation Proclamation wedded the ideal and the pragmatic into a single purpose—in its own words, emancipation was “sincerely believed to be an act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon military necessity.” The republican ideals protected by a Union victory offered, in Lincoln’s words, the “last, best hope of Earth.” This Leland-Boker Edition shows Lincoln publicly commemorating his Proclamation, at a time when widespread disapproval of it threatened his re-election. By offering signed copies to raise money for the Sanitary Commission, Lincoln directly tied the emancipation of slaves to one of the best examples of Northern public support for the war effort. This rare document captures a dramatic moment in the nation’s history, when the country embraced a new commitment to ending slavery—thereby rededicating itself to the inalienable right of liberty. Historical Background – Slavery and Emancipation in American History
From the 1600s on, slavery provided Americans with a wide range of labor and built fortunes from New England to Georgia. But ideals from Christianity, the Enlightenment and the Revolution forced many to grapple with the idea of ending it. Where bondage became less profitable, antislavery sentiment was able to take a firmer hold. Northern states abolished slavery in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And Southern critics, including slave-owners such as Thomas Jefferson, arose in the upper areas of the South. While some founders believed that slavery should and would last forever, most foresaw its demise. At the time of the Constitutional Convention in 1787, slavery was declining in the Northern states, and upper South states such as Virginia and Maryland also became less dependent on slave labor. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 kept slavery out of a large new territory in the Ohio Valley, and the Constitution set an end to the importation of slaves in 1808. But a technological innovation reinvigorated slavery and set it at the center of the nation’s economy and politics for seventy years: the cotton gin. In 1793, when Eli Whitney patented the device that separated cotton fiber from seeds, short-staple cotton instantly became a highly profitable crop across the South. “King Cotton” also enriched Northern mill owners and financiers. The increased domestic slave trade offset the Constitutional ban on importation (which continued despite its illegality), and slave labor became even more deeply entrenched in the Southern economy, culture, and politics. Southerners articulated a new philosophy, defending slavery as a “positive good” for slaves and society and portraying the slave master as a kindly patriarch. The two major barriers to emancipation were economic and social forces. Ending slavery threatened a cheap labor supply and one of America’s leading industries. And white Americans, from commoners to Jefferson and Lincoln, had difficulty envisioning a society that would include blacks on an equal standing, even though free blacks had existed successfully in America since before the Revolution, with 5,000 fighting in George Washington’s army. Proposed solutions such as colonization, which would “repatriate” freed blacks outside the U.S., and compensation, which would pay slaveholders to emancipate voluntarily, met with little success. From the colonial period to the Civil War, the problem of slavery stubbornly resurfaced. Each time the country expanded westward, Northerners and Southerners fought over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories. A parade of political compromises consumed the national attention for seventy years: • The "Three-fifths compromise" of 1787, which helped enable passage of the U.S. Constitution, supplemented representation by calculating a slave as three-fifths of a person in allotting congressional representatives. This was a significant concession to Southern interests: in 1790, for example, 26% of North Carolina’s population and 43% of South Carolina's were slaves. This compromise helped protect and prolong slaveholders' power in the national government, from the presidency (nine of the fifteen presidents before Lincoln were Southern slaveholders) to the Supreme Court (twenty of the thirty-five justices up to 1861 were from Southern states). • The Northwest Ordinance, also in 1787, barred slavery in America's first territory. • Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase of 1803 doubled the nation’s size, opening up immense new territories for the expansion of slavery. • The Missouri Compromise of 1820 added a slave state and a free state and prohibited slavery in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase above the 36°30' latitude. • Debate over the annexation of Texas, which became a slave state in 1845, intensified dissension between North and South, threatening to divide the Democratic Party along sectional lines. Many Northerners balked at provoking a war with Mexico that would produce new slave states, although Americans North and South generally favored expansion. • The Wilmot Proviso of 1846 sought to bar slavery in any lands taken from Mexico. For the first time, the House and Senate voted along sectional instead of party lines. The Senate, where Southerners were more powerful, rejected the proposal. • The Mexican War added huge new territories in the West in 1848, leading almost immediately to the Compromise of 1850. That compromise admitted California as a free state and outlawed the slave trade in Washington, D.C., in exchange for federal assistance in enforcing fugitive slave laws and no prohibition on slavery in the New Mexico and Utah territories. • The Gadsden Purchase added Mexican lands in 1853-though Northern Senators limited the amount of land acquired because they feared the territory would be turned into new slave states. • The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise. Senator Stephen A. Douglas sought a new compromise with the concept of "popular sovereignty," whereby residents of territories seeking statehood would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery. • The last-ditch Crittenden Compromise of 1861 proposed extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean and amending the Constitution to protect slavery wherever it existed. The plan failed to keep Southern states from seceding. Seventy years of federal compromises refuted the belief of many in the Revolutionary generation (found chiefly in states of the North and upper South) that slavery would eventually die out. John Adams, for example, had declared in 1801 that “the practice of slavery is fast diminishing” and, though an evil that would otherwise “threaten to bring punishment on our land,” it could be dealt with in a “gradual” manner ( Davis, 296). Antebellum Northerners did not want slavery to spread westward for a variety of additional reasons. McPherson summarizes their objections: Although many northern readers shed tears at [Uncle] Tom’s fate, the political and economic manifestations of slavery generated more contention than moral and humanitarian indictments. Bondage seemed an increasingly peculiar institution in a democratic republic experiencing a rapid transition to free-labor industrial capitalism. In the eyes of a growing number of Yankees, slavery degraded labor, inhibited economic development, discouraged education, and engendered a domineering master class determined to rule the country in the interests of its backward institution (McPherson, 39). These antislavery sentiments helped Lincoln’s Republican Party rise to prominence in the 1850s. Although the party attracted abolitionists, it mostly championed the “free soil” idea that slavery limited opportunity for the common white man. National tensions came to a head when Lincoln was elected president in 1860 without the support of a single Southern state. Southerners believed he and his party were bent on ending slavery. Historians will never cease to debate exactly what Lincoln wanted to do about slavery and when he wanted to do it, but several points are clear: he was morally opposed to the institution; he resolutely opposed its expansion into the West; he believed it would die out if confined to its current borders; he believed Congress, not the president, had the constitutional right to end it; and he entered the war to preserve the Union, not to end slavery. Ironically, Southern fears that Lincoln would abolish slavery proved true, but only after a combination of developments, starting with the South’s secession and attack on Fort Sumter. Slaves themselves forced the Union’s hand when they fled to Federal lines at every opportunity, hoping for freedom. The Union’s response ranged from returning them to their masters to on-the-spot emancipation. Generals John C. Frémont (August 1861) and David Hunter (May 1862) independently declared emancipation in areas of the South under their respective commands. Lincoln is still criticized for reversing their orders, but his reasons were clear. He believed that such decisions at the time hurt the overall war effort: Northerners were not ready for emancipation, and the loyalty of the crucial border states, including Kentucky, was not yet assured. Further, he thought that such decisions belonged to the commander in chief. Over the course of the war, Lincoln realized, and convinced others of, the practical benefits of emancipation: employing black laborers and soldiers, harming the Confederate war effort, appealing to antislavery European governments that otherwise would have supported the Confederacy for economic reasons, and removing the cause of future civil wars. The question of slavery’s role in bringing on the Civil War has provoked one of the most vehement debates in American history. Many Southerners then and now argue that Confederates went to war not to defend slavery but to protect states’ rights, which they saw as unconstitutionally threatened by the federal government. This is a specious argument. From the founding of the nation through the outbreak of war, recurrent clashes over states’ rights mainly concerned the protection of slavery, and the framers of secession understood this. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens called slavery the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy. The Confederate Constitution’s only major revision of the U.S. Constitution concerned slavery: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed” (Article I, Section 9). In all new territory, “the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the territorial government” (Article IV, Section 3). The “peculiar institution” dominated Southern politics and the Southern economy. Wealthy slaveholders formed the majority of state and national legislators, and slaves were crucial to both the agricultural and industrial labor forces. In addition to the slaveholding class, many white Southerners whose names were never entered in the census as slave-owners regularly depended on hiring or borrowing slaves. Moreover, most white Southerners feared the potential social consequences of emancipation, predicting everything from crime waves to the loss of their cheap labor force to black demands for citizenship. The threat of ending slavery therefore poseda significant threat to the wealthy and commoners alike, a total reordering of Southern society. Southerners of the time might well have been surprised by modern descendants who dismiss that fact. In a telling measure of slavery’s importance to both sides during the war, the Confederacy debated emancipation as well. Slavery caused class tensions even within the Southern union, notably when a law exempted owners of twenty or more slaves from the draft. But the major issue forcing the South to consider freeing slaves was the need for soldiers. As the Confederacy’s fortunes grew more desperate in the second half of the war, Southerners debated arming slaves, with emancipation and land as potential rewards. The proposal even attracted such supporters as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. However, the concept of arming black men, and rewarding them with freedom for themselves and their families, was too fundamental a challenge to Southern ideas of manhood, citizenship, race, and the “positive good” slavery created for blacks. Lincoln , Slavery and the Declaration of Independence: Toward Resolution
The Emancipation Proclamation, by ushering in full abolition, helped fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence, rescuing the nation’s founding philosophy of human liberty from the charge of hypocrisy. As historians James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton note, the history of African Americans “both illustrates and contradicts the promise of America—the principles embodied in the nation’s founding documents” (Horton, ix). Lincoln himself noted in 1855 that Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics [sic].” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty— Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy” (Peterson, 10). Lincoln believed that, although the Founders did not accord black people social and political equality, they did not expect blacks’ position in society to remain static. He argued that in the Declaration of Independence, They simply meant to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances would permit. They meant to set up a standard maxim for a free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all;…constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere. The assertion that “all men are created equal” was of no practical use to our effecting our separation from Great Britain; and it was placed in the Declaration, not for that, but for future use (Peterson, 11). Lincoln doubtless saw the war years as a time of particularly rapid transition toward this “free society,” and his Proclamation displays a degree of caution. Like most white Americans, he had doubts about how African Americans would fit into society as free citizens, though free blacks had lived in both the North and the South since colonial days, with a limited range of rights that even included the vote. Lincoln enjoined “upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defense; and I recommend to them that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” The decision to emancipate had not come easily, and the text of the Proclamation shows an attempt to control this social revolution.But Lincoln was himself evolving toward new ideas on the status of black Americans. By the war’s end, he supported giving the vote to literate black men and to black veterans, as he made clear in a speech from a White House balcony on April 11, 1865. On hearing it, John Wilkes Booth angrily told a companion, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever make” (McPherson, 852). Booth assassinated the President, but radical Republicans nevertheless enacted the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution (1865, 1868 and 1870), guaranteeing the end of slavery, granting blacks citizenship and giving black men the vote. As Reconstruction would show, addressing the aftermath of over two hundred years of slavery would be a long and difficult process, with repercussions to the present day. The revolution of emancipation was merely a great and necessary starting point The Emancipation Proclamation was the single most important act of Lincoln’s presidency. The preliminary proclamation, announced on September 22, 1862, warned Southern states that if they did not abandon the war they would lose their slaves. As the final version took full effect on January 1, 1863, slavery in the United States at last approached its demise, allowing the nation to take the crucial first steps in granting citizenship to African Americans. Rarely has a single document affected so much of the nation’s history—perhaps no other besides the Declaration of Independence so clearly created the vision of a new future. In sounding the death knell of slavery, the national government took a decisive stand on the most contentious issue in the country’s history. American society was remade in the Northern image, without a counterbalancing “Slave Power” in the national government. The rural, agricultural, slaveholding South gave way as theUnited States joined several western European nations in embracing a future of industrial capitalism—with all the cultural change that came with it. The text of the Proclamation reveals the major themes of the Civil War: the importance of slavery to the war effort on both sides, the courting of border states, Lincoln’s hopes that the rebellious states could somehow be convinced to come back into the Union, the role of black soldiers, constitutional and popular constraints on emancipation, the future place of black people in American society and America’s place in a worldwide movement toward the abolition of slavery. In addition to the moral impact of this “sincerely believed…act of justice,” the Proclamation aided the Union cause tangibly and decisively. It deprived the Confederacy of essential labor by giving slaves a reason to escape to Union lines. It encouraged the enlistment of black soldiers, who made a crucial contribution to the war effort. It restrained England and France, which had already abolished slavery, from pursuing their economic interests and supporting the Confederacy. Lincoln summed up the Proclamation’s importance in 1864: “[N]o human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done” (McPherson, 769). As historian John Hope Franklin has written, Lincoln’s Proclamation “was a step toward the extension of the ideal of equality about which Jefferson had written” in the Declaration of Independence. And in time, “the greatness of the document dawned upon the nation and the world. Gradually, it took its place with the great documents of human freedom” (Franklin, 143-144) Other Copies & Originals of the Proclamation
The only other known Lincoln signed Printing of the Emancipation Proclamation: Lincoln reportedly signed three copies of the privately designed “California printing.” This imprint features a large decorative flag at the top. The text of the Proclamation, however, is only about 50% complete. We can locate two: · The Gilder Lehrman Collection at The New-York Historical Society, New York, NY · Louise Taper -Seth Kaller For the sake of completion, we also list known manuscript copies: Final Proclamation: National Archives - the official, engrossed version of the Final EP http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation “The original of the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, is in the National Archives in Washington, DC. With the text covering five pages the document was originally tied with narrow red and blue ribbons, which were attached to the signature page by a wafered impression of the seal of the United States. Most of the ribbon remains; parts of the seal are still decipherable, but other parts have worn off.” Note: Lincoln’s handwritten draft of the Final EP was destroyed in the Chicago Fire of 1871. [though photographed copies survive] Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Issued September 22, 1862 Library of Congress – Autograph manuscript draft signed and endorsed by Lincoln, “Emancipation Proclamation as first-sketched and shown to the Cabinet in July 1862.” [July 22, 1862] http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/almss/dep002.html Draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, by President Abraham Lincoln, July 22, 1862.
The Robert Todd Lincoln Family Papers, Manuscript Division. Library of Congress New York State Library – September 21, 1862 [This draft has been facsimiled by Lossing, Nicolay and Hay, and others.] http://www.nysl.nysed.gov/mssc/allcwrec.htm Emancipation Proclamation (September 22, 1863). Collection Call Number: Vault. “The document is concerned with federal policy towards slavery in the states. It is in Lincoln's handwriting except for changes by Secretary of State, William H. Seward. The formal beginning and end are by the chief clerk of the Department of State.” National Archives – official Proclamation, signed by Lincoln and Seward, September 22, 1862 http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals_iv/images/emancipation_proclamation/preliminary_emancipation_page_1.html Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22, 1862. Record Group 11, General Records of the U.S. Government Unsigned manuscripts: Library of Congress: - has four manuscript copies, all in secretarial hands, of the 30 December 1862 draft of the Final EP (Lincoln is believed to have given copies to each of his cabinet members) - one has William Seward’s changes; one is believed to have Edward Bates’s changes; one has changes by an unknown individual; one has no changes (the latter two may have been the copies of Chase and Blair) - At the time Basler edited Lincoln’s papers, the Welles and Stanton versions were unlocated. That may still be true today. (An unsigned draft, in a secretarial hand, sold at Christie’s a few years ago, and could be one of those.) References
Basler, Roy P. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln Vol. 7: 394-396
Berlin, Ira. “The Slaves Were the Primary Force Behind Their Emancipation,” in The Civil War: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego, 1995)
Davis, David Brion and Steven Mintz, eds. The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War (New York, 1998)
Eberstadt, Charles. “ Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,” New Colophon (2d Series, 1950) no. 32 (Leland-Boker autographed edition)
Franklin, John Hope. The Emancipation Proclamation (New York, 1963)
Freehling, William W. “The Founding Fathers and Slavery,” in Allen Weinstein et al., eds.,
American Negro Slavery: A Modern Reader (New York, 1979)
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997)
Kantor, Alvin R. Kantor and Marjorie S. Kantor. Sanitary Fairs: A Philatelic and Historical Study of Civil War Benevolences (Chicago, IL, 1992)
“ Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,” New Colophon (2d Series, 1950) no. 19
McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988)
Peterson, Merrill D. “This Grand Pertinacity”: Abraham Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence .” Fourteenth Annual R. Gerald McMurtry Lecture, The Lincoln Museum (Fort Wayne, IN, 1991) Major Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibits "Abraham Lincoln in His Own Words: an Intimate View of Our Greatest President." at the New-York Historical Society, New York, NY. "The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden." at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington D.C.
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