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Lot Essay
The "Authorized Edition" of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln as the sixteenth President, William Seward as Secretary of State, and Lincoln's secretary John Nicolay.
The Leland-Boker broadside is the only printing of the full text of this historic document to be signed by the President.
This copy, once part of the noted collection of Philip D. Sang, is one of just twenty-seven signed copies surviving from the edition of forty-eight printed for the United States Sanitary Commission.
As historian John Hope Franklin has written, Lincoln's Proclamation "has maintained its place as one of America's truly important documents," even though "it had neither the felicity of the Declaration of Independence nor the simple grandeur of the Gettysburg Address. But in a very real sense, it was a step toward the extension of the ideal of equality about which Jefferson had written." 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" (The Emancipation Proclamation, 1963, pp.143-144). The influence it commanded, from the very moment of its issuance is amply demonstrated by the multiple printed forms in which it was issued, in many localities, over the next year (this plethora of versions is the subject of Charles Eberstadt's bibliography).
While it did not eliminate slavery in the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation constituted a fundamental act of justice with great moral and humanitarian significance. Frederick Douglass wrote that he "saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter." By Lincoln's Proclamation, the road to freedom was thrown open to millions who had previously existed only as chattel slaves, and it paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which finally eliminated slavery forever, a major step towards the fulfillment of the promise of Jefferson's ringing lines in the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal." Truly, it gave the nation what Lincoln would rightly term, a few months later, "a new birth of freedom."
The present authorized oversize printing of the historic text was the creation of two eminent Philadelphians, both dedicated to the Union and profoundly opposed to slavery. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), an author and journalist, had studied with 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 took charge of the Continental Monthly, a Boston paper conceived as an organ for 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, determined to fight for the cause, he enlisted in a Pennsylvania artillery regiment which 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 fellow Princetonian whose stage plays were successfully performed in the U.S. and abroad. During the Civil War, he published a poem critical of General McClellan, "Tardy George," and another entitled "Black Regiment." A founder of the Union League Club of Philadelphia, he was active in raising funds for the Union wounded and aiding families of soldiers and sailors.
Apparently Leland and Boker conceived the idea to issue the text of the Emancipation Proclamation in a limited edition and to enhance the issue by obtaining the signatures of the President and Secretary of State on each copy. These, they planned, would then be offered for sale to the public for ten dollars each at the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia from 7 to 29 June 1864 and intended to raise funds for war relief. According to Eberstadt, "the fair attracted more than one hundred thousand visitors who spent more than one million dollars, yet not all copies of this souvenir edition were sold. Of the remaining copies, a few were presented to libraries, and five others were sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission (a counterpart of the later Red Cross) at the National Sailor's Fair (9-19 November 1864) in Boston."
Rare. While in 1950 Eberstadt located only eight copies in institutions, several additional institutions have since acquired copies. A recent census enumerates 27 copies, of which 17 are in institutions. Charles Eberstadt, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, 1950, no.32; Grolier Club, One Hundred Influential American Books, No.71; Randolph G. Adams, "Hudibrastic Aspects of Some Editions of the Emancipation Proclamation," in To Dr. R. Essays...Published in Honor of the Seventieth Birthday of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, Philadelphia, 1946, pp.10-17.
"The great event of the nineteenth century" Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.
On 16 April 1861, soon after learning the news that Confederate batteries had opened on Fort Sumter, Frederick Douglass sent a sample of the handwriting of John Brown to his friend Samuel Porter. In closing his letter, Douglas exclaimed, "I am deeply exercised by what is going now in the country. Oh! That out of the present trouble and chaos might come the Slaves deliverance! The calamity of civil war can have no compensation short of this."[1]
In 1861, Douglass was very much a radical—aligned with the most extreme of abolitionist movement—willing to aid and abet John Brown in his failed attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The newly-elected President, who had been sworn into office five weeks before, while derided in the South as a “Black Republican,” was considered a moderate at best in the spectrum of anti-slavery politics. While he was outspoken in his distaste for the “peculiar institution,” and publicly wished for its ultimate demise, he ran on a platform that confined itself to opposing the further expansion of slavery into the territories. When he entered office, one of his first acts was to forward the Corwin Amendment, passed by Congress during the previous administration, as a last effort to hold the Union together by protecting slavery where it existed in the United States Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to betray his innermost thoughts and motivations vexed both contemporary observers and generations of historians that followed, leading many to openly question his motivations behind his most famous act: the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863. Upon reading the text, Karl Marx remarked that the proclamation was akin to a dry legal motion—a critique taken up by Richard Hofstader nearly a century later when he claimed that Lincoln’s act did virtually nothing to end slavery beyond lip service and propaganda, with “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”[2]
These critiques failed to take into account the treacherous political landscape in which Lincoln operated. At the opening of the Civil War, most northerners still considered Abolitionists dangerous radicals, while much of their economy was dependent on the staples produced by enslaved labor. In 1861, Lincoln’s primary message to the American public was to save the Union, not to end slavery. And despite his own contention that slavery violated the principles of equality as set out in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln was not planning to jeopardize the north’s resolve by injecting an issue that would threaten that unity.
While Lincoln’s innermost feelings on the matter may never be truly known, the course of events over the first two years of war, offered Lincoln opportunities to attack the edifice of American slavery. Soon after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, enslaved people began to defect to Union posts—first most notably at Fortress Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia and then spreading along the front lines nationwide. It quickly became obvious to many that these defections helped sap the Confederacy of an important source of labor. This became one of Lincoln’s justifications for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation—providing critical ammunition to convince skeptics.
Meanwhile, the Radical Republicans both in Congress, and on the field of battle, were pushing to transform the struggle to save the Union to one to explicitly destroy slavery. General John C. Frémont, commanding the Department of the West, issued his own Emancipation order in Missouri, confiscating all rebel property, and freeing all enslaved people in August 1861. Viewing the action as premature, and not wishing to alienate Unionists in the state, Lincoln ordered Frémont to revoke the order. Meanwhile, thousands of enslaved people were fleeing to Union lines, often assisted by Union troops. Many of the escapees found employment supporting the Union Army and Navy. Lincoln was moving closer to embracing a similar strategy as the war grew longer and increasingly devastating.
In the spring 1862, Congress passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which Lincoln signed into law on 16 April (the day celebrated as Emancipation Day in the District since 2005). At the same time, Lincoln mounted a futile campaign to convince the legislatures of the border states to commit to some form of gradual, compensated emancipation. Complicating matters was General George B. McClellan, his forces stalled on the Peninsula before Richmond amid a flood of rumors that the ambitious general, known for his pro-southern sympathies, would stage a coup d’etat, setting the stage for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. He needed to beat McClellan to the punch by using his own authority over the military to effect emancipation.
In July, Lincoln broached the topic with his cabinet. While the cabinet supported the measure overall, Secretary to State Seward cautioned that any public issuance should await a major victory in the battlefield. That victory came in September at Antietam Creek, won by none other than Lincoln’s rival, George McClellan. On 22 September, Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Not only was the text dry and legalistic, the scope of the measure was limited to localities that remained in rebellion and outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. Lincoln was mindful of the limits of his power—unwilling to interfere in state affairs. He was also mindful that the order needed to survive any court challenges before a skeptical Supreme Court. Allen Guelzo remarked that “Lincoln knew that nothing would melt faster under the gaze of [Chief Justice] Roger Taney and his ilk than a war powers emancipation in states where there was no state of war.”[3]
The development of the Proclamation itself demonstrates both an evolution of thought as well as a means to convince the skeptical. The Preliminary Emancipation, issued in September 1862, contains some notable differences in the text and scope to the final version issued in January 1863. Most notably, it included an endorsement of “colonization” — a movement to resettle formerly enslaved Blacks to West Africa. Moreover, it also contained a provision that would allow for a degree of compensation for those deprived of their human property. Both of these provisions can be viewed as a means to make the proclamation more palatable to a wider audience.
In the final version issued on New Year’s Day, 1863, both of these provisions had been stripped away, while still following the constraints of executive power by excluding the border states from its provision. But it also included a new, and politically risky measure:
And I further declare, and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison and defend forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
It can be argued that this passage alone was transformative. Not only was Lincoln offering permanent freedom, albeit to a narrowly-defined class of enslaved people, but he was now enjoining African Americans to take arms for the Union—forever altering the focus of the northern war effort. Over the course of the next two and a half years, 200,000 black men would enlist in the Union Army. Despite the proclamation’s narrow focus, free Blacks in the north celebrated its issuance. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of enslaved people who had fled to Union lines were immediately freed, and tens of thousands more as Union troops advanced. Even Frederick Douglass, who like others, criticized the Proclamation’s limited scope and dry prose, later conceded that “it was a vast and glorious step in the right direction.”[4]
As expected, the proclamation also proved divisive. In the summer of 1863, a draft lottery in New York City sparked a riot that raged for days—much of the anger directed at the city’s Black population—many of whom were lynched in the streets by roving mobs. The Emancipation Proclamation also emboldened Lincoln’s Democratic opponents in the North. George McClellan, who had been dismissed from command by Lincoln later in 1862, became the Democratic standard bearer in the Presidential election of 1864—running on a platform favoring a negotiated settlement to end the war. And until the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, McClellan appeared to be poised to defeat the “Great Emancipator.”
***
At about two in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, 1863, after the annual public reception at the Executive Mansion, Lincoln retired upstairs where William Seward presented him with a final manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation to sign. Yet his hand trembled. Was he hesitant to sign it after all? Then he recalled he had been shaking hands with supporters all morning, and remarked to the Secretary of State, “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”[5]
And Lincoln never retreated from his commitment to the momentous process he had set in motion. When Mary Aston Rice Livermore, a coordinator for the northwestern branch o the U.S. Sanitary commission appealed to Lincoln to donate the original, signed manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation to be sold to benefit Union troops, Lincoln, appreciating its historical importance, resisted. When he relented, the manuscript fetched $3,000 at the Great Northwest Sanitary Fair held in Chicago in late 1863. The purchaser was Thomas B. Bryan, who in early 1864, presented Lincoln with a lithographic facsimile he planned to sell with a portion of the proceeds going to a new facility to house injured veterans in Chicago. (It was fortunate that Bryan undertook this effort as the original was lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Similarly, in early 1864, the draft of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was sold by raffle at a fair in Albany. Fortunately, that document survived and is now housed at the New York State Library in Albany.[6]
Thus, when Charles Leland and George Boker approached Lincoln on behalf of the Union League of Philadelphia and proposed the production of 48 large printings of the proclamation for their planned Sanitary fair in June 1864, they were following a well-worn path. They spared no expense in making their print. They hired Philadelphia printer Frederick Leypoldt to typeset a broadside edition, produced under the supervision of the State Department on fine thick, paper by J. Whatman. Leland and Boker then sent the broadsides to secretary John G. Nicolay, who was tasked with convincing the highly-distracted Lincoln, who then was in the depths of politicking in advance of the Republican National Convention, to sign them. But sign them he did, together with William Seward and Nicolay.[7]
While Lincoln signed these copies ostensibly in light of the charitable aspect, and perhaps because the Union League of Philadelphia made him an honorary member, the Leland-Boker broadsides underscore Lincoln’s pride in what he had called, “The central act of my Administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century.”[8] His commitment to destroying slavery did not end with his executive action—he would drive home the effort for a complete abolition of slavery in the form of a constitutional amendment. And when the Thirteenth Amendment was finally passed by both houses of Congress at the end of January 1865 and sending it to the states for ratification, the President, although not required, proudly added his signature to several engrossed versions of the document. Both of these acts would cement Lincoln in our collective historical memory while securing a “new birth of freedom,” that ensured that a government, “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall never perish from the earth.”[9]
The Leland-Boker Emancipation Proclamation: a Census
1. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois
2. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts
3. British Library, London, United Kingdom
4. Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, New York
5. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma
6. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7. Huntington Library, Pasadena, California
8. Indiana University, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana
9. Library of Congress, Washington, District of Columbia
10. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana
11. Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan
12. New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
13. Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
14. Union League Club of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
15. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
16. University of Delaware, Wilmington, Delaware
17. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nine copies in private ownership, not including the present copy. One or more copies sold privately in the late 1980s and early 1990s, offering no means to trace current ownership or to understand if those are already included in this census.
We would like to thank Seth Kaller for his assistance in compiling the present census.
[1] Frederick Douglass to Samuel D. Porter, 16 April 1861. See Christie’s, New York, The Private Collection of William S. Reese, Part II,26 May 2022, lot 248.
[2] Richard Hofstader, The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973 [1948]), 169.
[3] Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation The End of Slavery in America. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 120.
[4] Harold Holzer. Emancipating Lincoln The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 85-86. Quoting from a handwritten manuscript, June 1865, Library of Congress.
[5] Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation The End of Slavery in America. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 182-183.
[6] Holzer, 108-118.
[7] Ibid, 76-78.
[8] Quoted in Franics B. Carpenter, “The Emancipation Proclamation: interesting Sketch of Its History by the Artist,” New York Times, 16 June 1865, 1.
[9] Lucas E. Morel, “The Central Act of Myt Administration,” in Mazy Boroujerdi, ed. Abraham Lincon His Life in Print.(New York: The Grolier Club, 2024),142. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Dedicated of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” 19 November 1863, in Roy P. Basler, ed. Collected Works, 7:23.
The Leland-Boker broadside is the only printing of the full text of this historic document to be signed by the President.
This copy, once part of the noted collection of Philip D. Sang, is one of just twenty-seven signed copies surviving from the edition of forty-eight printed for the United States Sanitary Commission.
As historian John Hope Franklin has written, Lincoln's Proclamation "has maintained its place as one of America's truly important documents," even though "it had neither the felicity of the Declaration of Independence nor the simple grandeur of the Gettysburg Address. But in a very real sense, it was a step toward the extension of the ideal of equality about which Jefferson had written." 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" (The Emancipation Proclamation, 1963, pp.143-144). The influence it commanded, from the very moment of its issuance is amply demonstrated by the multiple printed forms in which it was issued, in many localities, over the next year (this plethora of versions is the subject of Charles Eberstadt's bibliography).
While it did not eliminate slavery in the United States, the Emancipation Proclamation constituted a fundamental act of justice with great moral and humanitarian significance. Frederick Douglass wrote that he "saw in its spirit a life and power far beyond its letter." By Lincoln's Proclamation, the road to freedom was thrown open to millions who had previously existed only as chattel slaves, and it paved the way for the Thirteenth Amendment, which finally eliminated slavery forever, a major step towards the fulfillment of the promise of Jefferson's ringing lines in the Declaration of Independence: "all men are created equal." Truly, it gave the nation what Lincoln would rightly term, a few months later, "a new birth of freedom."
The present authorized oversize printing of the historic text was the creation of two eminent Philadelphians, both dedicated to the Union and profoundly opposed to slavery. Charles Godfrey Leland (1824-1903), an author and journalist, had studied with 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 took charge of the Continental Monthly, a Boston paper conceived as an organ for 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, determined to fight for the cause, he enlisted in a Pennsylvania artillery regiment which 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 fellow Princetonian whose stage plays were successfully performed in the U.S. and abroad. During the Civil War, he published a poem critical of General McClellan, "Tardy George," and another entitled "Black Regiment." A founder of the Union League Club of Philadelphia, he was active in raising funds for the Union wounded and aiding families of soldiers and sailors.
Apparently Leland and Boker conceived the idea to issue the text of the Emancipation Proclamation in a limited edition and to enhance the issue by obtaining the signatures of the President and Secretary of State on each copy. These, they planned, would then be offered for sale to the public for ten dollars each at the Great Central Sanitary Fair, held in Philadelphia from 7 to 29 June 1864 and intended to raise funds for war relief. According to Eberstadt, "the fair attracted more than one hundred thousand visitors who spent more than one million dollars, yet not all copies of this souvenir edition were sold. Of the remaining copies, a few were presented to libraries, and five others were sold for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission (a counterpart of the later Red Cross) at the National Sailor's Fair (9-19 November 1864) in Boston."
Rare. While in 1950 Eberstadt located only eight copies in institutions, several additional institutions have since acquired copies. A recent census enumerates 27 copies, of which 17 are in institutions. Charles Eberstadt, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, 1950, no.32; Grolier Club, One Hundred Influential American Books, No.71; Randolph G. Adams, "Hudibrastic Aspects of Some Editions of the Emancipation Proclamation," in To Dr. R. Essays...Published in Honor of the Seventieth Birthday of Dr. A.S.W. Rosenbach, Philadelphia, 1946, pp.10-17.
"The great event of the nineteenth century" Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.
On 16 April 1861, soon after learning the news that Confederate batteries had opened on Fort Sumter, Frederick Douglass sent a sample of the handwriting of John Brown to his friend Samuel Porter. In closing his letter, Douglas exclaimed, "I am deeply exercised by what is going now in the country. Oh! That out of the present trouble and chaos might come the Slaves deliverance! The calamity of civil war can have no compensation short of this."[1]
In 1861, Douglass was very much a radical—aligned with the most extreme of abolitionist movement—willing to aid and abet John Brown in his failed attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in 1859. The newly-elected President, who had been sworn into office five weeks before, while derided in the South as a “Black Republican,” was considered a moderate at best in the spectrum of anti-slavery politics. While he was outspoken in his distaste for the “peculiar institution,” and publicly wished for its ultimate demise, he ran on a platform that confined itself to opposing the further expansion of slavery into the territories. When he entered office, one of his first acts was to forward the Corwin Amendment, passed by Congress during the previous administration, as a last effort to hold the Union together by protecting slavery where it existed in the United States Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to betray his innermost thoughts and motivations vexed both contemporary observers and generations of historians that followed, leading many to openly question his motivations behind his most famous act: the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863. Upon reading the text, Karl Marx remarked that the proclamation was akin to a dry legal motion—a critique taken up by Richard Hofstader nearly a century later when he claimed that Lincoln’s act did virtually nothing to end slavery beyond lip service and propaganda, with “all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.”[2]
These critiques failed to take into account the treacherous political landscape in which Lincoln operated. At the opening of the Civil War, most northerners still considered Abolitionists dangerous radicals, while much of their economy was dependent on the staples produced by enslaved labor. In 1861, Lincoln’s primary message to the American public was to save the Union, not to end slavery. And despite his own contention that slavery violated the principles of equality as set out in the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln was not planning to jeopardize the north’s resolve by injecting an issue that would threaten that unity.
While Lincoln’s innermost feelings on the matter may never be truly known, the course of events over the first two years of war, offered Lincoln opportunities to attack the edifice of American slavery. Soon after the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, enslaved people began to defect to Union posts—first most notably at Fortress Monroe in Hampton Roads, Virginia and then spreading along the front lines nationwide. It quickly became obvious to many that these defections helped sap the Confederacy of an important source of labor. This became one of Lincoln’s justifications for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation—providing critical ammunition to convince skeptics.
Meanwhile, the Radical Republicans both in Congress, and on the field of battle, were pushing to transform the struggle to save the Union to one to explicitly destroy slavery. General John C. Frémont, commanding the Department of the West, issued his own Emancipation order in Missouri, confiscating all rebel property, and freeing all enslaved people in August 1861. Viewing the action as premature, and not wishing to alienate Unionists in the state, Lincoln ordered Frémont to revoke the order. Meanwhile, thousands of enslaved people were fleeing to Union lines, often assisted by Union troops. Many of the escapees found employment supporting the Union Army and Navy. Lincoln was moving closer to embracing a similar strategy as the war grew longer and increasingly devastating.
In the spring 1862, Congress passed the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which Lincoln signed into law on 16 April (the day celebrated as Emancipation Day in the District since 2005). At the same time, Lincoln mounted a futile campaign to convince the legislatures of the border states to commit to some form of gradual, compensated emancipation. Complicating matters was General George B. McClellan, his forces stalled on the Peninsula before Richmond amid a flood of rumors that the ambitious general, known for his pro-southern sympathies, would stage a coup d’etat, setting the stage for a negotiated peace with the Confederacy. He needed to beat McClellan to the punch by using his own authority over the military to effect emancipation.
In July, Lincoln broached the topic with his cabinet. While the cabinet supported the measure overall, Secretary to State Seward cautioned that any public issuance should await a major victory in the battlefield. That victory came in September at Antietam Creek, won by none other than Lincoln’s rival, George McClellan. On 22 September, Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Not only was the text dry and legalistic, the scope of the measure was limited to localities that remained in rebellion and outside of the jurisdiction of the United States. Lincoln was mindful of the limits of his power—unwilling to interfere in state affairs. He was also mindful that the order needed to survive any court challenges before a skeptical Supreme Court. Allen Guelzo remarked that “Lincoln knew that nothing would melt faster under the gaze of [Chief Justice] Roger Taney and his ilk than a war powers emancipation in states where there was no state of war.”[3]
The development of the Proclamation itself demonstrates both an evolution of thought as well as a means to convince the skeptical. The Preliminary Emancipation, issued in September 1862, contains some notable differences in the text and scope to the final version issued in January 1863. Most notably, it included an endorsement of “colonization” — a movement to resettle formerly enslaved Blacks to West Africa. Moreover, it also contained a provision that would allow for a degree of compensation for those deprived of their human property. Both of these provisions can be viewed as a means to make the proclamation more palatable to a wider audience.
In the final version issued on New Year’s Day, 1863, both of these provisions had been stripped away, while still following the constraints of executive power by excluding the border states from its provision. But it also included a new, and politically risky measure:
And I further declare, and make known, that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United States to garrison and defend forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.
It can be argued that this passage alone was transformative. Not only was Lincoln offering permanent freedom, albeit to a narrowly-defined class of enslaved people, but he was now enjoining African Americans to take arms for the Union—forever altering the focus of the northern war effort. Over the course of the next two and a half years, 200,000 black men would enlist in the Union Army. Despite the proclamation’s narrow focus, free Blacks in the north celebrated its issuance. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of enslaved people who had fled to Union lines were immediately freed, and tens of thousands more as Union troops advanced. Even Frederick Douglass, who like others, criticized the Proclamation’s limited scope and dry prose, later conceded that “it was a vast and glorious step in the right direction.”[4]
As expected, the proclamation also proved divisive. In the summer of 1863, a draft lottery in New York City sparked a riot that raged for days—much of the anger directed at the city’s Black population—many of whom were lynched in the streets by roving mobs. The Emancipation Proclamation also emboldened Lincoln’s Democratic opponents in the North. George McClellan, who had been dismissed from command by Lincoln later in 1862, became the Democratic standard bearer in the Presidential election of 1864—running on a platform favoring a negotiated settlement to end the war. And until the fall of Atlanta in September 1864, McClellan appeared to be poised to defeat the “Great Emancipator.”
***
At about two in the afternoon on New Year’s Day, 1863, after the annual public reception at the Executive Mansion, Lincoln retired upstairs where William Seward presented him with a final manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation to sign. Yet his hand trembled. Was he hesitant to sign it after all? Then he recalled he had been shaking hands with supporters all morning, and remarked to the Secretary of State, “I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right than I do in signing this paper.”[5]
And Lincoln never retreated from his commitment to the momentous process he had set in motion. When Mary Aston Rice Livermore, a coordinator for the northwestern branch o the U.S. Sanitary commission appealed to Lincoln to donate the original, signed manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation to be sold to benefit Union troops, Lincoln, appreciating its historical importance, resisted. When he relented, the manuscript fetched $3,000 at the Great Northwest Sanitary Fair held in Chicago in late 1863. The purchaser was Thomas B. Bryan, who in early 1864, presented Lincoln with a lithographic facsimile he planned to sell with a portion of the proceeds going to a new facility to house injured veterans in Chicago. (It was fortunate that Bryan undertook this effort as the original was lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Similarly, in early 1864, the draft of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was sold by raffle at a fair in Albany. Fortunately, that document survived and is now housed at the New York State Library in Albany.[6]
Thus, when Charles Leland and George Boker approached Lincoln on behalf of the Union League of Philadelphia and proposed the production of 48 large printings of the proclamation for their planned Sanitary fair in June 1864, they were following a well-worn path. They spared no expense in making their print. They hired Philadelphia printer Frederick Leypoldt to typeset a broadside edition, produced under the supervision of the State Department on fine thick, paper by J. Whatman. Leland and Boker then sent the broadsides to secretary John G. Nicolay, who was tasked with convincing the highly-distracted Lincoln, who then was in the depths of politicking in advance of the Republican National Convention, to sign them. But sign them he did, together with William Seward and Nicolay.[7]
While Lincoln signed these copies ostensibly in light of the charitable aspect, and perhaps because the Union League of Philadelphia made him an honorary member, the Leland-Boker broadsides underscore Lincoln’s pride in what he had called, “The central act of my Administration, and the great event of the nineteenth century.”[8] His commitment to destroying slavery did not end with his executive action—he would drive home the effort for a complete abolition of slavery in the form of a constitutional amendment. And when the Thirteenth Amendment was finally passed by both houses of Congress at the end of January 1865 and sending it to the states for ratification, the President, although not required, proudly added his signature to several engrossed versions of the document. Both of these acts would cement Lincoln in our collective historical memory while securing a “new birth of freedom,” that ensured that a government, “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall never perish from the earth.”[9]
The Leland-Boker Emancipation Proclamation: a Census
1. Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Springfield, Illinois
2. Boston Athenaeum, Boston, Massachusetts
3. British Library, London, United Kingdom
4. Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn, New York
5. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma
6. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
7. Huntington Library, Pasadena, California
8. Indiana University, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana
9. Library of Congress, Washington, District of Columbia
10. Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection, Indiana State Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana
11. Meisei University, Tokyo, Japan
12. New-York Historical Society, New York, New York
13. Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey
14. Union League Club of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
15. University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
16. University of Delaware, Wilmington, Delaware
17. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nine copies in private ownership, not including the present copy. One or more copies sold privately in the late 1980s and early 1990s, offering no means to trace current ownership or to understand if those are already included in this census.
We would like to thank Seth Kaller for his assistance in compiling the present census.
[1] Frederick Douglass to Samuel D. Porter, 16 April 1861. See Christie’s, New York, The Private Collection of William S. Reese, Part II,26 May 2022, lot 248.
[2] Richard Hofstader, The American Political Tradition and the Men who Made It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973 [1948]), 169.
[3] Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation The End of Slavery in America. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 120.
[4] Harold Holzer. Emancipating Lincoln The Proclamation in Text, Context, and Memory. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). 85-86. Quoting from a handwritten manuscript, June 1865, Library of Congress.
[5] Quoted in Allen C. Guelzo. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation The End of Slavery in America. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 182-183.
[6] Holzer, 108-118.
[7] Ibid, 76-78.
[8] Quoted in Franics B. Carpenter, “The Emancipation Proclamation: interesting Sketch of Its History by the Artist,” New York Times, 16 June 1865, 1.
[9] Lucas E. Morel, “The Central Act of Myt Administration,” in Mazy Boroujerdi, ed. Abraham Lincon His Life in Print.(New York: The Grolier Club, 2024),142. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, “Address Delivered at the Dedicated of the Cemetery at Gettysburg,” 19 November 1863, in Roy P. Basler, ed. Collected Works, 7:23.