Lincoln, Abraham | An uncommon souvenir of Lincoln and his cabinet

Lincoln, Abraham 

Document signed ("A. Lincoln"), as 16th president

Single sheet (222 x 146 mm). Letterpress heading "Autographs | of the | President and Cabinet. | 1864.," [Washington, spring 1864], decorative borders hand-ruled in ink, also signed by all seven members of Lincoln's cabinet; some browning, minor soiling and chipping to edges. Matted, glazed, and frames; not examined out of frame.

An uncommon souvenir of Lincoln and his cabinet. Lincoln put his signature to the present document together with his Secretary of State ("William H. Seward"), Secretary of the Treasury ("S. P. Chase"), Secretary of War ("Edwin M. Stanton"), Secretary of the Navy ("Gideon Welles"), Secretary of the Interior ("J. P. Usher"), Postmaster General ("M. Blair"), and Attorney General ("Edw. Bates").

While this autograph sheet does not bear any any explicit reference to the United States Sanitary Commission, it was produced as a fund-raising souvenir for that organization. Lincoln's personal assistance in benefitting the Sanitary Commission—which cared for the Union's sick and wounded soldiers and promoted clean and healthy conditions in Army camps—is best known through his signing of the forty-eight copies of an "authorized edition" of the Emancipation Proclamation for sale at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of 7-9 June 1864 (see lot 25). But the President also regularly contributed autograph quotations, brief notes, signed photographs, and, less frequently, jointly signed souvenir documents to be sold or auctioned at Sanitary Commission fairs around the Union. The present document is one of the most attractive examples of Lincoln's patronage to the Commission, and may have been available at 1864 fairs in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, and St. Louis.

A terminal date of 30 June 1864 can be set for this autograph sheet: on that date Lincoln accepted the resignation of Salmon P. Chase, writing the former Treasury Secretary that "you and I have reached a point of mutual embarrassment in our official relation which it seems can not be overcome, or longer sustained, consistently with the public service" (Basler, 7:419). (Despite the differences the two men might have had, when Roger Taney died later in the year, Lincoln appointed Chase to be his successor as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.)

This autograph form evidently continued to be used for at least a short while after Chase's resignation: in November 1982, Swann Galleries sold a copy signed by Lincoln and just six members of his cabinet. But by 24 November 1864, Montgomery Blair and Edward Bates had both also left the cabinet, and this autograph sheet was probably not distributed after Blair's resignation in late September.