Fine Printed Books & Manuscripts, Including Americana

The Official and First Obtainable Broadside Printing of the Lincoln's Final Emancipation Proclamation

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, ca. January 3, 1863). Bifolium; 13 1/8 x 8 1/2 in. (330 x 216 mm). Eberstadt 10

A particularly fine copy.

While the Civil War raged, Abraham Lincoln sought ways to address the root cause of the conflict: slavery. Less than a year into the war Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens argued for the total war against the Confederacy to include emancipation of all slaves, making the economically-based argument that doing so would cripple the Southern economy. On 13 March 1862, Congress passed the Act Prohibiting the Return of Slaves, which effectively prohibited all representatives of the United States military from returning fugitive slaves to their owners. A month later, Lincoln signed a law abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, with compensation to slaveowners. On 19 June, Congress passed a law prohibiting slavery in all current and future United States territories (though this did not apply to current states), which Lincoln promptly signed.

That summer, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune demanded in an open letter to President Lincoln, published in his paper, for immediate emancipation, writing that ""On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one...intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel...that the rebellion, if crushed tomorrow, would be renewed if slavery were left in full vigor and that every hour of deference to slavery is an hour of added and deepened peril to the Union."

In an open letter to Greeley, Lincoln responded, "If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time 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." What Greeley did not know at the time was that Lincoln had already composed a draft proclamation addressing this very issue and planned to issue it after the next great Union victory; it is believed that Lincoln composed this response in order to paint the proclamation as a gesture towards winning the war and not necessarily towards emancipation.

The 1862 Union victory at Antietam gave Lincoln the opportunity he'd been waiting for to issue his proclamation. On the first day of January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, though its immediate effectiveness was minimal; emancipation only applied to states then in rebellion, while slaves in Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri remained in bondage. It was only as the Union Army advanced deeper and deeper south that the full effect of the Proclamation began to be felt. The Proclamation further allowed for former slaves to join the Union Army, a move which contributed not only to an ultimate Union victory but also gave Union soldiers a higher cause to rally around, as many found themselves interacting for the first time with former slaves. Lincoln further painted the war as one rooted in the greater cause of human freedom, in his Gettysburg Address of 1863.

With many Republicans afraid that the Emancipation Proclamation would be construed as a war measure that could be easily repealed at war's end, they, in conjunction with President Lincoln, pushed for a constitutional amendment formally banning slavery once and for all. Lincoln staked his 1864 re-election campaign on slavery's final destruction, and on 6 December 1865 (eight months after Lincoln's assassination), the Thirteenth Amendment was formally ratified, though like the Emancipation Proclamation, it was criticized for its half-measured approach; involuntary servitude had been abolished, except as punishment for a crime.

The final text of the Emancipation Proclamation was rushed to the government printer, and this official State Department printing of the final proclamation is thus preceded only by the following:

1. Eberstadt 8. A small-format issue, "printed in haste to serve the urgent need for a few copies until the resplendent, official folio edition [this one] could be prepared" (Eberstadt, p. 17). Known in only a single copy.

2. Eberstadt 9: A broadside "extra" issued by the Illinois State Journal, Springfield, 2 January 1863. Known in only one copy, at the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield.

Rare: Only about ten other copies are known extant, four of which are part of institutional collections, including Brown, Clements Library, The Huntington Library, and the Library of Congress.