Mar 30, 2023 - Sale 2631

Sale 2631 - Lot 71

Price Realized: $ 6,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 7,500
(SLAVERY & ABOLITION.) Clinton B. Fisk. Telegram from the founder of Fisk University celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation. Autograph Letter Signed to Lieutenant Colonel William A. Pile in Rolla, MO. One page, 8 1/4 x 5 1/2 inches; folds, minor wear and soiling, mount remnants on verso. St. Louis, MO, 23 September 1862
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Clinton Bowen Fisk (1828-1890) was raised in Michigan and moved to St. Louis shortly before the war. At the time he sent this telegram, he was serving as colonel in command of the newly organized 33rd Missouri Infantry in the Union Army. On the day after Lincoln's preliminary announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, he sent this telegram to his lieutenant colonel William Anderson Pile (later a Radical Republican Congressman and governor of New Mexico). In full:

"Glory hallelujah. Freedom in all the land January 1st 1863. So says the President, and let all the people say Amen. How are my gallant boys? Lemonade by express."

Fisk soon became a general, after the war was an assistant commissioner with the Freedmen's Bureau, and is best known for his role in founding what became Fisk University.