Emancipation Proclamation Inkstand

The brass inkstand was from the desk of Major Thomas Eckert in the War Department Telegraph Office. At the time, the War Department handled all the president’s telegrams and Lincoln frequently stopped by to obtain the latest news of the war. Lincoln often used the major’s desk and according to Eckert worked on an early draft of the Emancipation Proclamation while sitting there in the summer of 1862.

Years later Eckert would recall, “The President came to my office every day and invariably sat at my desk while there. Upon his arrival early one morning in June, 1862, shortly after McClelan’s "Seven Day’s Fight,” he asked me for some paper as he wanted to write something special. . . . I became much interested . . . with the idea that he was engaged upon something of great importance, but did not know what it was until he had finished the document and then for the first time he told me that he had been writing an order giving freedom to the slaves of the South, for the purpose of hastening the end of the war. . . . I still have in my possession the inkstand which he used at the time.”

Abraham Lincoln had always opposed slavery but had never sided with abolitionists who called for its immediate end. Lincoln had sought solutions that would make slavery gradually fade from white society—limit its location, sponsor compensation programs for slave owners, and relocate freed blacks outside the country. He came to understand that to achieve a lasting peace, slavery must end. By mid-1862 Lincoln saw that a solution to slavery could not wait and that it had to address integrating freed African Americans into American society.

Published in September 1862, the Lincoln’s executive order declared that, as of January 1, 1863, all persons held in slavery in areas still in rebellion would be “then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not directly free any enslaved people in Union-controlled areas, it was widely understood that a Union victory would mean the end of slavery.