SIGNED COPY OF THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION ON LOAN TO PENN STATE FOR A YEAR

For the next year, Penn State University will make available to scholars and students a rare copy of a signed war-time printing of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Penn State alumnus Albert L. Lord, a 1967 business graduate and Chairman of the Board of the Sallie Mae Corporation, worked with Penn State, its George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the University Libraries and Special Collections, and the document's owner to make the necessary arrangements for the yearlong loan. The copy at Penn State is on loan from collector William Chaney, a friend and associate of Lord's.

From Left: William Blair '75 English, '89 MA, '95 Ph.D. history, associate professor of history and director, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center; Albert L. Lord '67 BUS, Chairman of the Board, Sallie Mae Corporation; William Joyce, Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair and Head, Special Collections, University Libraries; James P. Quigel, '92 Ph.D. history, Head of the Historical Collections and Labor Archives unit of Penn State's Special Collections Library

Known as the Leland-Boker Authorized Edition of the Emancipation Proclamation, the document contains the entire text of the historic proclamation. Printed in June 1864 in a run of only forty-eight copies, the folio broadsides were signed by President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward and intended for sale at the Philadelphia Great Central Sanitary Fair of 1864, to raise money for sick and wounded soldiers.

Only half of the original forty-eight copies are thought to exist, with known copies currently in the collections of the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the British Museum, libraries at the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania, a few historical societies, and those of four or five private collectors, including H. Ross Perot.

“Bill Chaney is a collector of artifacts, and he was anxious that this particular document be put to good use,” Lord says. “The Civil War happens to be an interest of mine, and I like what I see being done at Penn State in this area, through the Richards Center. So we talked and Bill agreed to make the document available to the University for a year.”

The document will be at the center of several Richards Center events over its year at Penn State, including two notable gatherings:

• In June 2006, the Richards Center's annual teacher's institute will focus on emancipation from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. Sponsoring teacher's institutes is a central mission of the Richards Center, working to disseminate the latest scholarship to teachers and to assist them with teaching subjects like slavery and the African American freedom struggle. The summer institute will use the Proclamation as one of its key documents and will let participants visit the Paterno Library's Special Collections area.
• In the spring of 2007, the Richards Center's annual Steven and Janice Brose Lectures will be expanded to a symposium of scholars on the topic of emancipation, resulting in the likely publication of a volume of original work by participants. The public will be invited.

Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, with its effects taking the force of law on January 1, 1863. In frank and legalistic language that historian Richard Hofstadter described as “about as exciting as reading a bill of lading,” Lincoln spelled out that slaves held in any state in open rebellion against the United States would be considered free, welcomed into the Union, and enlisted in the Army.

When the proclamation was written in the summer of 1862, the Union army had faced a reversal of fortunes in the Virginia theater that caused many in the nation to begin to favor waging a sterner war against the Confederacy. Slaves increasingly were viewed as an additional resource for the enemy, allowing more extensive mobilization of white males in the South, while preserving war-time agricultural and industrial production. The Union won the battle of Antietam in September 1862, allowing Lincoln to issue the first version of the proclamation, which gave a deadline of January 1 for Confederates to give up their fight and rejoin the Union. When that did not happen, the version of the proclamation now housed in Paterno Library took effect, not only freeing slaves wherever the army went from that time forward, but also encouraging the enlistment of African Americans as soldiers.

As a result, the Emancipation Proclamation was a decisive step in eradicating slavery in the United States and an important change in the overall purpose of the Civil War. Even those who point out the proclamation's more conservative elements have admitted that the enlistment of African Americans as soldiers provided a radical turn to the conflict. The addition of slavery to preserving the Union as the reasons for the war allowed the nation to embrace, as Lincoln later declared in his Gettysburg address, “a new birth of freedom.”

“This is one of the more fitting gifts that could have come our way,” says William Blair, associate professor of history and director of the Richards Center. “It perfectly symbolizes the heart of the Richards Center's mission to interpret the struggle for freedom, a goal recognized most recently by the National Endowment for the Humanities.”

In 2005, the National Endowment for the Humanities named the Richards Center as one of the recipients of its We the People Challenge Grants for 2005. The award provides a grant of $1 million to the center to help build its endowment for programming in the humanities and must be matched by another $3 million raised by the University within a 56-month period. The initiative supports targeted institutions that can help fulfill the goal of the We the People Initiative to further the study, teaching, and understanding of American history. The NEH challenge grant helps build resources for those projects that explore significant events and themes in our nation's history, and shares these lessons with all Americans.

An avid reader of history, Lord lives in Virginia, minutes away from the site of Ball's Bluff, a Civil War battle location along the Potomac River. Lord says his interest in the period was sparked by driving past the location and ultimately reviewing a historical marker commemorating the battle. Lord notes that encountering the location and learning more about it brought history alive for him and began what is now a continuing interest in the era and its implications for modern times.

“The Civil War was essentially the country's second start,” he says. “Slavery was left delicately unaddressed in the Constitution, and the country's aspirations for freedom were left unfilled. The Civil War righted that wrong.”

Lord has worked in banking and financial services for almost four decades, the majority of it with Sallie Mae. Lord joined the company in 1981 as controller and oversaw its servicing, marketing and financial operations until late 1993, during which time Sallie Mae experienced record operating results. After a short absence, Lord rejoined the corporation as an independent director in May 1995, and now serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Lord and his wife, Suzanne, are among Penn State's most generous benefactors, having endowed a Chancellor's Chair at Penn State Abington, where Lord began his Penn State career. The Lords have also supported the Bryce Jordan Center, Penn State Athletics, the Smeal College of Business, and the Four Diamonds Fund.

In 2002, George and Ann Richards made a spectacular contribution not only to Penn State but also to Civil War scholarship itself when they made a gift of $3 million to provide the then-four-year-old Center with a permanent source of income. The Richards' gift helps fund graduate and faculty research, as well as outreach programs to influence students and educators around the country. Because of the magnitude of the Richards' gift, the University elected to name the Center in their honor.

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