25
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY MORNING, 1863, AS ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS TO make the final Emancipation Proclamation official, he noticed a typographical error in the boilerplate language at the bottom of the beautifully handwritten “holograph” copy awaiting his signature. The template was supposed to read: “In witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.” Though the flaw he spotted was minor and legally inconsequential, Lincoln decided he could not approve an imperfect document—not one as important as this—and instead ordered that, holiday notwithstanding, a government scribe redraft it. A hundred days earlier, Lincoln had issued a preliminary proclamation—an ultimatum giving the states in rebellion until this day to throw down their arms or risk forfeiting their slave property forever. Now that threat had come due. But Lincoln chose perfection over haste. While the scribe worked on a revision, the president energetically threw himself into a thronged White House reception and for the next several hours ushered in the year 1863 by greeting hundreds of visitors and shaking most of them by the hand.
PLATE 25–1
Although African Americans and abolitionists had gathered at dawn in churches throughout the North awaiting the expected news that the president had issued the final emancipation order, no word of any kind came until early afternoon. Lincoln had spent much of the holiday at the reception. Now, as a handful of witnesses, including his private secretary, John G. Nicolay, and Secretary of State William H. Seward, looked on, Lincoln at last picked up a steel-tipped pen from the Cabinet table where he sat, dipped it in ink, held it to the proclamation, and then unexpectedly paused and set the pen down. After a few seconds passed, he took up the pen again and directed it toward the page once more, only to place it down a second time. Rumors had abounded in Washington for days that the president might, in the end, waver and decline to make the revolutionary order official after all. In New York, the diarist George Templeton Strong, for one, wondered whether “Lincoln’s backbone” would “carry him through the work he is pledged to do.…If he come out fair and square,” predicted Strong, “he will do the ‘biggest thing’ an Illinois jury-lawyer has ever had a chance of doing, and take high place among the men who have controlled the destinies of nations. If he postpone or dilute his action, his name will be a byword and a hissing till the annals of the nineteenth century are forgotten.” Strong need not have worried. As Lincoln had only recently confided to a delegation of Kentuckians, he “would rather die than take back a word of the Proclamation of Freedom.” Nevertheless, Seward and Nicolay surely wondered what Lincoln’s unanticipated New Year’s Day pantomime signified.
Finally, Lincoln turned to his perplexed secretary of state and explained: “I have been shaking hands since nine o’clock this morning, and my right arm is almost paralyzed. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. If my hand trembles when I sign the Proclamation, all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’” For the next few moments, Lincoln sat silently and massaged his massive hands together. Finally, when he was satisfied that they had regained enough feeling, he “took up the pen again, and slowly, firmly wrote that ‘Abraham Lincoln’ with which the whole world is now familiar. He looked up, smiled, and said: ‘That will do.’”
Indeed, it did. Although the Emancipation Proclamation is today perhaps the most misunderstood and underappreciated act of Lincoln’s presidency, in its time it was regarded as truly revolutionary. Modern skeptics sometimes unfairly condemn Lincoln by pointing out that the proclamation freed slaves only in areas that were still under Confederate control, where Lincoln could not enforce it. The reason, of course, is that Lincoln drew his authority for the proclamation from his war powers as commander in chief and he could apply those powers only to areas in rebellion. Nevertheless, his act transformed the war overnight from a fight to restore the Union into one to destroy slavery altogether. It is no wonder that its author wanted his name to be as legible and firm as possible on the final document. Lincoln thought it was the “most important act of the nineteenth century.”
As a piece of literature, however, the proclamation was immediately found sorely lacking. Frederick Douglass noticed it at once: “It was not a proclamation of ‘liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof,’ such as we had hoped it would be, but was one marked by discriminations and reservations.” In the end, however, Douglass came to regard it as “a great and glorious step in the right direction.” Still, as breathlessly as both North and South alike awaited the document, it remains astounding that more people did not clamor for copies once it was issued. Although countless publishers eventually did offer illustrative versions of the proclamation—the New-York Historical Society boasts several in its collection—the first examples appeared only in 1864 for the presidential campaign, and most rolled off the presses in 1865, after Lincoln’s murder and martyrdom made his greatest act safe for celebration among previously recalcitrant white audiences. For the most part, the proclamation took the form of small booklets carried by Union soldiers to help them enforce its liberating terms when they seized rebel territory or of official war orders formally sent to generals in the field after January 1 (a copy of that order exists in the collection, too).
Today the scant surviving copies of the most famous of all these editions grace the best public and private Lincoln collections in the country. One such copy decorates the Oval Office. But when it first appeared, it was anything but popular.
The broadside featured here is one of a limited edition of just forty-eight, originally printed in 1864 by two leaders of Philadelphia’s pro-Lincoln Union League club, George Henry Boker and Charles Godfrey Leland. These two enterprising Republicans hatched the idea of publishing and selling twenty-one-by-seventeen-inch copies for the benefit of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. By then, Lincoln no longer had the original handwritten draft at his disposal, so Leland and Boker had to typeset a version from the published record.
PLATE 25–2
General Orders, No. 1, January 2, 1863, Abraham Lincoln
The two spared no expense in producing faithful editions. Under the supervision of the State Department, they printed several rounds of drafts and proofs, and only when fully satisfied did they publish the final run of four dozen and send them off to Washington to be signed by Seward and the president.
Lincoln likely proved willing to participate in the project not only because of its promised benefit to wounded veterans but also, at least in part, out of gratitude to the Union League organization. It had awarded him an honorary membership in the Philadelphia chapter just eight months earlier, a tribute that the president accepted by pledging to the club’s “patriotic” members—and potential supporters in his upcoming bid for reelection—“to do my duty in the trying times through which we are passing.” Now he was doing that duty, repaying a political debt he no doubt expected would reap further dividends for his campaign in the coming months. But surely he was doing something more: aiding and abetting the transfiguration of a prosaic piece of writing into a canonical national treasure. And the chief beneficiary of such a metamorphosis would be Lincoln himself.
As promised, Boker and Leland went on to offer the signed broadsides at ten dollars apiece at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair later that June—just days after Lincoln won his party’s nod for a second term and the convention indeed proposed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery. The only piece of the plan that failed to fall into place was the anticipated public enthusiasm for the limited edition of Emancipation Proclamations. For while the Philadelphia fair attracted more than a hundred thousand visitors, several of the reproductions went unsold.
This remains difficult to comprehend, much less explain. Conceivably, it was a sign that not everyone, not even in the City of Brotherly Love, yet endorsed the liberty order enthusiastically enough to embrace it as an icon. If so, then skepticism reigned in Philadelphia, even though Lincoln made a rare trip from Washington to visit the fair personally, making three different speeches to enthusiastic audiences at both his hotel and Union League headquarters. To one audience he specifically declared that he hoped “my presence might do some good towards swelling the contributions of the great Fair in aid of the Sanitary Commission, who intend it for the soldiers in the field.” Apparently, it did not—at least where the Leland-Boker edition was concerned.
The autographed proclamations were certainly not priced higher than the art, artifacts, machinery, and crafts on display and for sale. It cost two dollars merely to attend the fair, and multitudes did so, reportedly spending a total of one million dollars during its twenty-two-day run. Had the recent national convention politicized Lincoln and his order? Perhaps, but political campaigns in nineteenth-century America also tended to expand public demand for collectibles and display pieces associated with the candidates; they did not ordinarily suppress it.
One possible explanation for the lethargic response to the printings may be that the president was simply not popular at the time. After three years of bloody and costly war, the Northern public was growing deeply impatient with its leader, and Lincoln himself expected for a good while thereafter that he would be defeated in the fall election. And yet the Leland-Boker edition involved not thousands of souvenirs for purchase but only four dozen—each of them autographed by hand. Unless they were inadequately advertised or improperly identified at the fair, it remains almost incomprehensible that they did not sell out immediately. So it is reasonable to wonder whether their sluggish sales might then be attributable to the words themselves.
In the abstract the words had changed the war, changed the armed services, and changed the nation. But any prospective customer who carefully studied a copy at the Philadelphia fair might well have been reminded that, phrase for phrase, the proclamation was rather dull. Even the antislavery radical Karl Marx, writing from London, thought Lincoln’s document called to mind “the trite summonses that one lawyer sends to an opposing lawyer, the legal chicaneries and pettifogging stipulations of an actiones juris”—a court case. Certainly capable of loftier prose, Lincoln had wanted a proclamation that would withstand legal challenges, not necessarily a call to sentiment and soul. He may have gotten what he wanted, but, for a time, enthusiasts like Leland and Boker paid the price—because prospective customers would not.
All we know for sure is that only five months later, the intrepid Philadelphia publishers suggested that the remainder of their unsold autographed editions “be disposed of” in some other way, again if possible “for the benefit of those who are now fighting for their country.” That November—the very month of the presidential election—they sent five of the white elephant broadsides to offer at another Sanitary Commission–backed charity event: the National Sailors’ Fair in Boston. There the remaining “autograph emancipation proclamations” presumably found an appreciative audience at last. At least we know of no more leftover copies or additional venues. They may even have been disposed of in what amounted to a bargain sale.
Ironically, the official holograph copy of the proclamation, which Lincoln had insisted be perfect so future generations would bear witness to his bold signature, has faded so badly over time that his handwriting is now barely legible. But the thickly inked autographs he provided for forty-eight copies of the document a year later look as if they were signed yesterday.
And though the words of the document remain uninspiring, and its immediate impact continues to be misinterpreted, the publishers Charles Leland and George Boker surely appreciated the truth of what the governor of their home state of Pennsylvania had said when Lincoln made the original act official: “The great proclamation of Liberty will lift the Ruler who uttered it, our Nation, and our age, above all vulgar destiny.” As the journalist Frederic Perkins put it: “Notwithstanding all this guarded negation of statement and conditional assertion, yet such were the aspects of the war in the field, and of the public opinion of the North, that these two gigantic forces, embodying the moral sum total of the United States…inspired into the words of this short paper that whole and complete and immense meaning which has rendered it immortal.”