NOS News•today, 11:14 PM
The governor of the American state of Illinois has purchased a crucial document from the American Civil War and given it away to a museum in his own state.
With the one-page document, signed by President Lincoln on April 19, 1861, the president ordered the blockade of the ports of the states of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
That was the first military response from the Union (the Northern states), exactly one week after the Confederacy (the seceded Southern states) fired on a Union fort.
After the shelling of this complex, Fort Sumter, the civil war actually started. Through Lincoln’s document, the Union responded militarily to that attack for the first time.
Bought at auction
Democratic Governor Pritzker of Illinois said his state now has a document underscoring that the US “has stood the test of time, despite our differences and challenges, more than 150 years later.”
Pritzker himself bought the paper last July for about $471,000 at an auction from an anonymous collector. The billionaire then donated the document to his state, because Lincoln was closely tied to Illinois; the president started his political career there and lived there.
Civil war
The American Civil War broke out in 1861, after decades of built-up tension between the Southern states, whose economies were based on slavery and agriculture, and the more industrialized Northern states.
The debate came to a boiling point when Lincoln was elected president in 1860. He was firmly opposed to more so-called slave states in new areas in the west of the country. Subsequently, the southern states decided to secede.
During the Civil War, Lincoln signed the famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, declaring all enslaved people in the Southern states free. That document initiated the abolition of slavery in the US.
Shortly before the end of the war, Lincoln was shot dead while visiting a theater in Washington.
Museum
The 1861 document now in Illinois’ hands will be on display until February next year at the Lincoln Museum in the city of Springfield, where Lincoln lived until his presidency.
The museum’s director, Christina Shutt, is pleased with the gift. After the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln had to “respond or accept that the country would be torn apart, condemning millions to slavery,” she said. “This document shows that Lincoln believed America was worth saving.”
