Lincoln, Abraham | The official State Department printing of the Final Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln, Abraham

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, containing, among other things, the following, to wit: "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; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom." …Now, therefore 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, on this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and in accordance with my purpose so to do publicly proclaimed for the full period of one hundred days, from the day first above mentioned, order and designate as the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit: Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, … Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia. … Done at the City of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty three. [Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ca. 3 January 1863]

Printed circular (330 x 210 mm) on a bifolium of wove paper, the text of Lincoln's Proclamation printed on the recto the first leaf, the other three pages blank; soiled and slightly frayed at margins, pencilled date ("Jan 1 / 63") at head of first leaf. Blue morocco portfolio gilt.

The official State Department printing—and the earliest obtainable printing—of the Final Emancipation Proclamation, the presidential decree of which Lincoln said, "If my name goes down in history, it will be for this act." 

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."

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.

And although immediate reaction to Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was favorable (see previous lot), 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 time, 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.

To ensure that the Emancipation Proclamation could withstand court challenges to its constitutionality, Lincoln's prose is legalistic. Because of his allegiance to due process—and his pragmatic balancing of necessity and possibility—he 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.

He 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 enslaved people in the United States, 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 enslaved persons to be free—the first time that the federal government had set slaves free; in practical terms, as many as 50,000 men, women, and children were immediately freed. The Emancipation Proclamation provided, also for the first time, 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 African Americans—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 see sent to the states but would not live to see ratified.

If the language of the Emancipation Proclamation was not eloquent, its intention and result were. And any lack of eloquence was compensated for by the conclusion of Lincoln's 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. … 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."

This official State Department printing was preceded only by a small-format government broadsheet (Eberstadt 8) and a newspaper "extra" broadside (Eberstadt 9), both of which survive in a single copy. Seven other copies of the present edition are recorded at four institutions: the Huntington Library, the Library of Congress, Brown, and the Clements Library. 

REFERENCE

Eberstadt, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation 10; Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Basler, 6:28–31; for further references, please see preceding lot