"By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation. Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States … 'That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever, free'; … 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 t.mes 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 I further declare and make known that such persons, of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States. … 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. … Done at the City of Washington this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the Independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh."

THE "AUTHORIZED EDITION" OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION, THE PRESIDENTIAL DECREE OF WHICH LINCOLN SAID, "IF MY NAME GOES DOWN IN HISTORY, IT WILL BE FOR THIS ACT."

THIS FINE, FRESH COPY IS ONE OF TWENTY-SEVEN SURVIVING FROM THE EDITION OF FORTY-EIGHT PRINTED TO BENEFIT THE GREAT CENTRAL FAIR FOR THE SANITARY COMMISSION HELD AT PHILADELPHIA IN 1864.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS, SPEAKING AT NEW YORK'S COOPER INSTITUTE JUST A MONTH AFTER THE DOCUMENT WAS ISSUED, CALLED THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION "THE GREATEST EVENT OF OUR NATION'S HISTORY." FROM THE SAME STAGE WHERE ABRAHAM LINCOLN HAD INTRODUCED HIMSELF TO EASTERN VOTERS ONLY THREE YEARS EARLIER, DOUGLASS THUNDERED, "I HAIL IT AS THE DOOM OF SLAVERY IN ALL THE STATES. 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."

Introduction

The Emancipation Proclamation is as complex as the man who wrote it—and the subject, if possible, of an even wider range of interpretations. Martin Luther King Jr., speaking at the New York Civil War Centennial Commission's Emancipation Proclamation Observance, yoked the Emancipation Proclamation with the Declaration of Independence, claiming that had the United States "done nothing more in its whole history than to create just [these] two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. … The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity." But to Richard Hofstadter, the highly influential Marxist historian and DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University, the Emancipation Proclamation was simply a "propaganda" ploy intended to protect "the free white worker" and having "all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading."

Hofstadter's cynical study has inspired three generations of academic and popular revisionists, and yet somehow it is King's view of the Emancipation Proclamation that continues to hold sway. As Allen Guelzo stated in his monograph on the document, "if the Emancipation Proclamation was not … the most eloquent of Lincoln's writings, it was unquestionably the most epochal." Guelzo's simple pronouncement embodies the intricate ambiguity of Emancipation Proclamation: even those who believe it to be the greatest act of the greatest American president feel the need to apologize for it.

The Emancipation Proclamation may not have fully satisfied any of Lincoln's constituencies—but it satisfied Lincoln's (admittedly fluid) commitment to constitutionality. And it was enough. It made into the law of the land the moral truth expressed in the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal." It linked emancipation to the war effort, demonstrating, for the first t.mes , President Lincoln's acknowledgement that the Civil War was being waged not only to preserve the Union, but also to abolish slavery. And, although it freed only the slaves in the states and territories "in rebellion against the United States," it led directly to the total abolition of slavery in the country.

"If there was one defining moment of the American Civil War, it was Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. … [T]he Proclamation, by declaring emancipation a Union war aim, did more than any other act or action during the war to signal a shift in the conflict and in the direction of the United States" (Vorenberg, Emancipation Proclamation, p. 1).

Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation

But while Frederick Douglass—a frequent critic of the President—and many of his contemporaries welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation as a signal achievement in American history, today the act seems just as well known, as Allen Guelzo commented, "for what it did not do" as for what it did accomplish. Two principal failings have been ascribed to the Proclamation. First, that it is not as eloquent as Lincoln's other most famous writings, principally the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address. Second, that it freed slaves only in territories of active rebellion against the United States—the very territories, presumably, where the federal government had the least ability to enforce its provisions. Both of these points have been employed to justify the belief that Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation grudgingly and without personal zeal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Lincoln is, of course, now susceptible to the charge that he was not an "abolitionist," meaning one who called for the immediate cessation of slavery. He recognized constitutional and practical limits to the ability of the nation to curtail the system. Thus, within the first few minutes of his First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, he stated, "I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so." Lincoln is equally susceptible to the charge that he was not free from the racial prejudices of his t.mes . But Lincoln is not susceptible to the charge that he was not wholly and passionately opposed to slavery.

In 1855, Lincoln confided to his good friend Joshua Speed that he was still tormented by the memory, from fourteen years earlier, of having seen a group of shackled slaves while he was travelling by steamship from Louisville to St. Louis. While Lincoln had been anti-slavery for decades, he only began to openly express those views when he ran for the United States Senate against Stephen Douglas in 1858. As candidate Lincoln said at a Chicago rally in July of that year, "I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any Abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the Nebraska Bill began." (Lincoln had little choice in abandoning his Old Line Whig reticence: The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854—underpinned by the concept of "popular sovereignty"—exacerbated tensions between pro- and anti-slavery factions within the party, leading to the complete dissolution of the Whigs. Many northern Whigs reorganized as the explicitly anti-slavery Republican Party, for which Lincoln would become the second presidential standard-bearer, following the 1856 candidacy of "The Pathfinder," John C. Frémont.)

A triumvirate of brilliant indictments of slavery from the period of the late 1850s survived among the pre-presidential papers that Lincoln entrusted to Mary Todd Lincoln's cousin and close friend, Elizabeth Todd Grimsley, when he departed Springfield for Washington as president-elect. These all likely date to a two-year period, June 1857 through June 1859, when Lincoln, who had served a single term in the House of Representatives a decade earlier, reentered politics and made himself a viable candidate for national office. These fragments include Lincoln's earliest formulation of his "House Divided" doctrine, which demonstrated his willingness to confront an issue that most politicians chose to avoid ("I believe this government can not endure permanently, half slave, and half free"; sold at Replica Shoes 's, 16 December 1992, lot 194), as well as his famous syllogism on slavery ("If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may of right, enslave B. why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally that he may enslave A?"; sold at Replica Shoes 's, 23 October 1987, lot 23A).

Both of these pronouncements are principally concerned with what Don Fehrenbacher calls "the divisive influence of slavery." In the third manuscript, Lincoln condemns not simply the threat posed by slavery to the solvency of the American union, but the fundamental and overriding evil of slavery in any circumstance. The injustice of slavery is abundantly plain, Lincoln writes: "So plain, that the most dumb and stupid slave that ever toiled for a master, does constantly know that he is wronged. So plain that no one, high or low, ever does mistake it, except in a plainly selfish way; for although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself" (sold at Replica Shoes 's, 21 May 1993, lot 87). Lincoln recast this conceit when addressing the 140th Indiana Regiment during the final weeks of the Civil War: "I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others. Whenever I hear any one, arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally."

But despite his personal abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln was constrained not just by the Constitution, but also by political and military reality. Horace Greeley's letter-editorial, "The Prayer of Twenty Millions," published in the New York Tribune, perfectly expressed the frustrations of those who called for full and immediate emancipation. Greeley accused the President of being "strangely and disastrously remiss" by delaying emancipation; of being "unduly influenced by the counsels … of certain fossil politicians hailing from Border Slave States"; and of seeming to pursue a "preposterous and futile" strategy by attempting "to put down the Rebellion and at the same t.mes uphold its inciting cause."

Greeley printed Lincoln's response in the 25 August 1862 issue of the Tribune: "As to the policy I 'seem to be pursuing' as you say, I have not.mes ant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be 'the Union as it was.' If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same t.mes save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same t.mes destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."

Lincoln ended his letter to Greeley with a noteworthy coda, "I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free." The President chose not to share with Greeley and the Tribune readers a more momentous stat.mes nt: that he had, in fact, already drafted a proclamation of emancipation and was simply awaiting an auspicious t.mes to promulgate it. Lincoln knew that if the Union could be saved "without freeing any slave," its salvation would be short-lived.

Lincoln read the first draft of what came to be known as the preliminary emancipation proclamation to his cabinet on 22 July 1862. Given the criticism directed at Lincoln for moving too slowly on the issue of emancipation, it is worth noting that this first reading took place just sixteen months after he had pledged not to "interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." He continued to revise the document throughout the summer and, following the Union victory at Antietam, he issued the preliminary proclamation—which managed to balance daring with prudence—on 22 September. This first proclamation essentially gave the Rebel States one hundred days to return to the Union, after which period any slaves within their borders would be "then, thenceforward, and forever free." Any rebellious states that returned to the Union in the interim would be able to adopt immediate or gradual—and compensated—abolition of slavery within their borders.

In their diaries both Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase and Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles recorded that Lincoln claimed to have followed Divine direction in issuing the order. Welles wrote that the President "remarked that he had made a vow, a covenant, that if God gave us the victory in the approaching battle, he would consider it an indication of Divine will, and that it was his duty to move forward in the cause of emancipation. … God had decided this question in favor of the slaves."

Although immediate reaction to the preliminary proclamation was favorable, criticism soon followed. Some Federal Army officers resigned their commissions rather than command troops in what was likely to become a war of abolition. At the same t.mes , the anti-slavery faction in the North attacked Lincoln for allowing slavery to remain in effect in Unionist Border States and former Confederate territories now under Union control.

The preliminary proclamation did help solidify European support of the Federal cause, but otherwise the one hundred days were discouraging for Lincoln: the Federal Army suffered a humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg on 13 December, and a crisis in his Cabinet nearly resulted in the resignations of secretaries Seward and Chase. Still, Lincoln continued resolute and on Christmas Eve he confided to the Senate's most ardent abolitionist, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, that the Emancipation Proclamation would be issued. The following week, Lincoln listened to suggestions and amendments from his Cabinet and then retired to draft the final version of the historic document.

If Lincoln's prose is legalistic, it is because he wanted to be sure that the Emancipation Proclamation could withstand potential court challenges to its constitutionality. If he still withheld emancipation from the Border States, from Union-controlled parishes in Louisiana, and from the forty-eight Virginia counties that were in the process of reconstituting themselves as West Virginia, it is because of his allegiance to due process.

The President would make this clear yet again in an April 1864 letter to A. G. Hodges of Frankfort, Kentucky: "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling. It was in the oath I took that I would, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. I could not take the office without taking the oath."

Even while acknowledging the restraints placed on him by the Constitution, Lincoln did more than anyone before or since to bring freedom to America's enslaved people, and he rightly earned the title of the Great Emancipator. When on 1 January 1863 he left the annual White House New Year's Day reception to sign into law the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln observed, "I never in my life, felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper."

With his signature he declared nearly four million slaves to be free—the first t.mes that the federal government had set enslaved people free; in practical terms, as many as 50,000 men, women, and children were immediately freed. The Emancipation Proclamation provided, also for the first t.mes , that former slaves "will be received into the armed service of the United States," and by the conclusion of the Civil War, more than 180,000 free blacks—most of whom were emancipated slaves—had worn the blue uniform of the Federal Army. The Emancipation Proclamation also eliminated the references in the preliminary proclamation to compensated emancipation and colonization of former slaves, thus indicating, albeit subtly, that the newly freed persons would make their future lives within the United States. Decades of political and moral compromise in the name of "Union" were ended: the war to restore the Union became a war of liberation, and the way was made clear for the Thirteenth Amendment, which Lincoln would proudly see sent to the states but would not live to see ratified.

One enslaved child who remembered the moment of his emancipation (which was not immediate with the Proclamation) was Booker T. Washington, who wrote about the day more than forty years later in his autobiography, Up From Slavery: "Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom came. It was a momentous and eventful day to all upon our plantation [in Franklin County, Virginia]. … As the great day drew nearer, there was more singing in the slave quarters than usual. It was bolder, had more ring, and lasted later into the night. Most of the verses of the plantation songs had some reference to freedom. True, they had sung those same verses before, but they had been careful to explain that the 'freedom' in these songs referred to the next world, and had no connection with life in this world. Now they gradually threw off the mask, and were not afraid to let it be known that the 'freedom' in their songs meant freedom of the body in this world. The night before the eventful day, word was sent to the slave quarters to the effect that something unusual was going to take place at the 'big house' the next morning. … The most distinct thing that I now recall in connection with the scene was that some man who seemed to be a stranger (a United States officer, I presume) made a little speech and then read a rather long paper — the Emancipation Proclamation, I think. After the reading we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased. My mother, who was standing by my side, leaned over and kissed her children, while tears of joy ran down her cheeks. She explained to us what it all meant, that this was the day for which she had been so long praying, but fearing that she would never live to see."

If the language of the Emancipation Proclamation was not eloquent, its intention and result (as demonstrated by Washington's memoir) were. And any lack of eloquence on Lincoln's part was compensated for by the conclusion of his annual message to Congress, delivered on 1 December 1862, exactly a month before he signed the Proclamation. In this State of the Union speech, Lincoln could write of his desire—and the country's need—for emancipation without the worry of legal challenges: "Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless."

The last best hope of earth was nobly saved by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.

The United States Sanitary Commission and the Authorized Printing of the Emancipation Proclamation.

The United States Sanitary Commission was established in June 1861 to assist sick and wounded Union soldiers and their dependent families. The Commission was supported almost entirely by private contributions and provided aid in myriad ways, including hospital assistance, field ambulance and hospital service, field and camp rations, blankets and tents, and financial assistance for medical care for veterans and for the families of soldiers killed in action. The work of the Sanitary Commission was absolutely vital for the Federal Army, especially their maintenance of hygienic hospital and camp conditions: a soldier in the Civil War was in fact twice as likely to die of disease as of a wound.

The most successful source of funding for the Sanitary Commission was a series of "Fairs" held in major cities: Boston, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, Baltimore, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. These Fairs displayed a huge range of donated goods, both antique and newly manufactured, that were sold to benefit the Commission. Just three months after its founding, Lincoln sent a strong endorsement to General Winfield Scott: "The Sanitary Commission is doing a work of great humanity, and of direct practical value to the nation, in this t.mes of its trial. It is entitled to the gratitude and confidence of the people, and I trust it will be generously supported. There is no agency through which voluntary offerings of patriotism can be more effectively made."

The President often donated autographs to the Fairs. Indeed, he gave his original autograph draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the Northwestern Fair for the Sanitary Commission, held at Chicago in the autumn of 1863. Lincoln made the donation somewhat reluctantly, writing to the Ladies Committee in charge of the Fair that he "had some desire to retain the paper; but if it shall contribute to the relief or comfort of the soldiers that will be better." (The draft was purchased at the Fair by Thomas W. Bryan, who presented it to the Chicago Soldiers' Home. It was subsequently lost in the Great Chicago Fire.)

One of the largest and most successful Sanitary Commission Fairs was held at Philadelphia from June 7 to 29, 1864. The Great Central Fair (so-called because the central states of New Jersey and Delaware joined with Pennsylvania in sponsoring it) was housed in temporary buildings that spanned Logan Square and offered an astonishing variety of merchandise, including finely bound books, jewelry, clothing, carpets, china and porcelain, shoes and boots, musical instruments, photographs, perfume, prints and pictures, stoves and ranges, a yacht, battlefield relics, all manner of foodstuffs, and autograph letters and documents of the presidents and other persons of note.

All of these goods were gathered together to celebrate what committee member Charles Stillé termed the twin sisters of the Civil War: "patriotism and holy charity." In his Memorial of the Great Central Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, Stillé wrote that "No sooner has the smoke cleared away from the battle-field, than—to borrow the language of Mr. Everett, in his Gettysburg oration—angel visitants, in the shape of those whose hearts are stronger than their hands, have hastened to soothe and relieve those who have suffered in their stead. … The Great Central Fair is then to be considered not.mes rely as a grand collects ion of all that was curious and valuable in works of industry and art, freely offered in aid of a benevolent enterprise; but also as one, and a most significant one, of the many indications of the truest and most wide-spread patriotic enthusiasm." After expenses (which were confined almost entirely to the cost of erecting and then striking the elaborate temporary exhibition halls), the Great Central Fair raised over $1,010,000 for the Sanitary Commission.

President Lincoln was invited to attend the opening celebration, but had to postpone his visit until 16 June. On that day he addressed the organizers and attendees, thanking them for proving to the soldier in the field that "he is not forgotten" and praising donors for their "voluntary contributions, given freely, zealously, and earnestly, on top of all the disturbances of business, of all the disorders, the taxation and burdens that the war has imposed upon us, giving proof that the national resources are not at all exhausted, that the national spirit of patriotism is even firmer and stronger than at the commencement of the rebellion."

Although Lincoln attended the Great Central Fair for only one day, his presence pervaded the event in the form of a specially printed and signed authorized edition of the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite some initial lack of enthusiasm to the preliminary proclamation (and retrospective criticism of the final proclamation itself), many in the North quickly embraced and celebrated the Emancipation Proclamation. In less than two years, more than fifty separate editions—including many decorative broadsides—were issued to meet public demand for the text.

Two ardent Unionists from Philadelphia, George Henry Boker (1832–1890) and Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903), conceived the idea of printing a limited edition of the Proclamation for sale at the Great Central Fair. Earlier in 1864, a fundraising broadside of the Proclamation was printed in San Francisco, and three surviving copies of this printing have Lincoln's signature. However, the San Francisco broadside published only about half of Lincoln's text. The Leland-Boker broadside is the only printing of the full text of the Emancipation Proclamation to be signed by President Lincoln; it is additionally signed by Secretary of State Seward and John G. Nicolay, the President's personal secretary.

Boker and Leland were both men of letters and strong supporters of Lincoln's emancipation policy. Boker was a founding member of Philadelphia's Union League, and in his capacity as president of that organization he conferred on Lincoln an honorary membership. Boker was not a strict partisan, however, and among other occasional poems of the Civil War he satirized Mary Todd Lincoln's White House excesses in "The Queen Must Dance." He later served in ministerial posts to Turkey and Russia.

Leland edited Continental Monthly during the war years and wrote many pro-Union editorials and pamphlets. He is credited with (or blamed for) helping to moderate Northern policy from abolition to emancipation. Leland's most enduring creation was the dialect-humor character of Hans Breitmann. His Ye Book of Copperheads was owned by Lincoln. Leland took up the sword as well as the pen in the Union cause and actually saw action during the Gettysburg campaign as an enlisted man. From shortly after the end of the war until his death, Leland lived in Europe as an expatriate.

The Leland and Boker broadside edition was publicized in the 17 June 1864 issue of Our Daily Fare, the promotional newspaper of the Great Central Fair. "The original Proclamation of Emancipation, signed by President Lincoln, sold at the Chicago Fair for three thousand dollars. A few duplicates, with the 'veritable and authenticated' signatures of Abraham Lincoln, Secretary Seward, and Mr. Nicolay, are for sale at the Daily Fare table; price only ten dollars. Every branch of the Union League, and indeed every patriot, should be proud to own one of these. They were obtained for the Fair, by Messrs. George H. Boker and Charles Godfrey Leland, who guarantee the authenticity of the signatures."

The "few duplicates" printed for Boker and Leland by Frederick Leypoldt numbered forty-eight, and while it has evidently not been previously noted in print, this odd limitation was doubtless intended to recognize the forty-eight western and northern counties of Virginia that broke with the Old Dominion in order to establish a thirty-fifth state: pro-Union, anti-slavery West Virginia. This printing was preceded by a trial—or, more accurately, rejected—issue whose text was based on the clerically engrossed copy of the Proclamation, which contained numerous discrepancies in punctuation and other incidentals from Lincoln's preferred text, as well as typographical variations from the final printing. The rejected issue also did not allow sufficient space for Nicolay's attestation and signature. According to bills from Leypoldt surviving in the Leland papers, the first, rejected printing comprised twenty-four copies, never issued or signed, and apparently divided between the partners; it is further believed that Boker's copies were subsequently lost or destroyed. Printer's bills from the same archival source confirm that forty-eight copies of the textually accurate Authorized Edition were printed. These were then signed by the President, Secretary of State, and the president's secretary and made available for purchase at the Great Central Fair.

A few copies of the signed Authorized Edition of the Emancipation Proclamation were unsold during the three weeks of the Fair. Some of the unsold copies were presented to libraries and five others were sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission at the National Sailors Fair, held at Boston in November 1864.

Only twenty-six other copies of this precious relic are now recorded, eighteen of which are in institutions.

Census of Surviving Copies of the Leland-Boker Authorized Edition of the Emancipation Proclamation

Institutional collects ions 

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois
Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts
British Museum, London
Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, New York
Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Gilder Lehrman collects ion, on deposit at The New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Huntington Library, San Marino, California
Library of Congress, Washington, DC
Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Lincoln Financial collects ion, Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana
Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan
New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
Union League Club of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
University of Delaware, Wilmington, Delaware
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Private collects ions 

In addition to the present example, eight other copies are currently known in private hands. Several of those are either committed, or at least more likely, to be donated to institutions than to come back on the market.

EXHIBITION

On deposit at the National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, from 2007 through 2024, and frequently exhibited during President's Day, Black History Month, and during other thematically appropriate occasions.

PROVENANCE

The Douglass Campbell collects ion of Presidential Letters, Documents and Signed Photographs, Sold to Benefit a Charitable Institution (Christie's New York, 19 December 2002, lot 321)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Randolph G. Adams, "Hudibrastic Aspects of Some Editions of the Emancipation Proclamation," in To Doctor R. (Philadelphia, 1946)
Michael Burlingame, ed., At Lincoln's Side: John Hay's Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings (Carbondale and Edwardsville, 2000)
Charles Eberstadt, "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation," in The New Colophon: A Book-collects ors' Miscellany (New York, 1950)
Paul D. Escott, "What Shall We Do with the Negro?": Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America (Charlottesville, 2009)
Daniel Farber, Lincoln's Constitution (Chicago, 2003)
Eric Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York, 2010)
John Hope Franklin, The Emancipation Proclamation (New York, 1963)
George M. Frederickson, Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008)
Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York, 2004)
Richard Hofstadter, "Abraham Lincoln and the Self-Made Myth," in The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948)
Harold Holzer and Sara Vaughn Gabbard, eds., Lincoln and Freedom: Slavery, Emancipation, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Carbondale, Illinois, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, 2007)
Seth Kaller, "The Emancipation Proclamation: The Document that Saved America," in The Rail Splitter, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Winter, 2002)
Charles Godfrey Leland, Memoirs (New York, 1893)
Abraham Lincoln, The collects ed Works, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, 1953–1955)
Lucas E. Morel, "'The Central Act of My Administration,'" in Abraham Lincoln: His Life in Print, ed. Mazy Boroujerdi (New York, 2024)
Mark E. Neely Jr., The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (Cambridge, Massachusetts, San Marino, and Springfield, 1993)
Charles Stillé, Memorial of the Great Central Fair for the U.S. Sanitary Commission (Philadelphia, 1864)
Michael Vorenberg, The Emancipation Proclamation: A Brief History with Documents (Boston & New York, 2010)
Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2001)
Michael Vorenberg, Lincoln’s Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War (New York, 2025)