_"Ladies having in charge The North Western Fair for the Sanitary Commission, Chicago, Ill._ "According to the request made in your behalf, the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation is herewith enclosed. The formal words at the top and at the conclusion, except the signature, you perceive, are not in my handwriting. They were written at the State Department, by whom I know not. The printed part was cut from a copy of the preliminary Proclamation and pasted on merely to save writing. "I have some desire to retain the paper, but if it shall contribute to the relief of the soldiers, that would be better. "Your obt. servt., "A. LINCOLN." In technical strictness the original Proclamation was of the archives of the Department of State when the signature of the President and Secretary of State had been affixed thereto, and its transfer by Mr. Lincoln was an act not within his competency as President, or as the author of the Proclamation. This point, however, is wholly speculative, but the country and posterity will be interested in the fate of the original of a document which is as immortal as the Declaration of Independence. The Proclamation was sold to the Honorable Thomas B. Bryan of Chicago for the sum of three thousand dollars and it was then presented by him to the Soldiers' Home of Chicago, of which he was then President. That position he still retains. The document was deposited in the rooms of the Chicago Historical Society, where it was destroyed in the great fire of 1871. Fortunately the managers of the fair had secured the preparation of _fac simile_ copies of the Proclamation. These were sold in large numbers, and thus many thousands of dollars were added to the receipts of the fair. The managers of the Soldiers' Home were offered twenty-five thousand dollars for the original Proclamation.* The offer came from a showman who expected to reimburse himself by the exhibition of the paper. The original now on the files of the State Department is not in the handwriting of Mr. Lincoln and it has therefore no value derived from Mr. Lincoln's personality. When I entered upon this inquiry, which has resulted in the preparation of this paper, I was ignorant of the fact that the original Proclamation had been destroyed, and it was my purpose to secure its return to the archives of the Department of State. That is now impossible. Its destruction has given value to the _fac simile_ copies. Many thousands of them are in the possession of citizens of the United States, and they will be preserved and transmitted as souvenirs of the greatest act of the most illustrious American of this century.