Beschreibung:

Lincoln, AbrahamBy 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