1862 EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION. September 25 Imprint of the Proclamation in The Baptist Examiner

An exceptional assemblage of The Examiner, one of the most influential Baptist newspapers in antebellum and Civil War America. Northern Baptists were deeply engaged in the slavery controversy, the Southern Baptist Convention having formally split from northern Baptists in 1845 precisely over the question of slaveholding missionaries. By 1862 the northern Baptist press was an active participant in the theological and political debate over emancipation, Black military service, and the meaning of the war.

This collection of 16 nearly consecutive weekly issues brackets one of the most consequential 16 weeks in American history with almost perfect precision. Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. The September 25 issue contains the full printed text, signed in print by Abraham Lincoln, published just three days after its issuance. This is a contemporary Baptist newspaper reception document of the Proclamation in its first week of public existence. The issues immediately before and after track the full arc of anticipation, publication, and contested reception in real time, making this run an unusually precise instrument for reconstructing how northern Protestant communities processed the Emancipation Proclamation in its immediate aftermath.

The cluster of articles on Black military service across multiple issues; Arming the Negroes (August 28), Black Regiments (August 28), Negro Regiments in Louisiana (September 11), Colored Men for Soldiers (September 18), Enrollment of Colored Citizens (August 28) constitutes a sequential documentary record of how a major Protestant denomination's press tracked and interpreted the emergence of Black Union military service in real time. This debate was theologically charged as well as politically explosive: arming Black men implied a claim to citizenship and humanity that cut directly against the ideological foundations of slavery, and Baptist editors understood this perfectly well.

The articles Down on the Proclamation, The Emancipation Proclamation Condemned by Many, McLellan and the Proclamation, and Southern Reprisal for the Emancipation collectively document the contested, anxious, and divided reception of Lincoln's order even within the northern religious press. This is important corrective evidence against any retrospective sense that emancipation was immediately or universally celebrated in the North. General McClellan's barely concealed hostility to the Proclamation and the Southern governors' threats of reprisal are treated here as live and frightening developments, not settled history.

Running through the entire collection is also a sustained conversation on the impact of the War American religious life, and vice versa. The series, Pastors Becoming Captains, appears in multiple issues, tracking clergy who left pulpits for military commissions. The Trials of Army Chaplains, The Soldier's Conversion, Laboring for a Revival, Prayer for the Country, and Falling Back upon Prayer collectively constitute a real-time theology of war: the battlefield as a site of conversion and spiritual crisis, prayer as a military resource, the chaplaincy as a contested institution.

A truly unique, religiously lensed snapshot of one of the most consequential times in American history.

The group includes:

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, October 23, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: The Trials of Army Chaplains; A Convicts Prayer Meeting; The Edict of Emancipation; Down on the Proclamation; etc.

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, October 16, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: The Soldier's Conversion; Pastors Becoming Captains; What the War is Doing; A Voice from the South [J. Stella Martin]; Effect of the Emancipation Proclamation in the South; Southern Reprisal for the Emancipation; McLellan and the Proclamation; etc. 

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, October 9, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: Pastors becoming Captains; Our Little Contraband [Rescued Enslaved Children]; Teaching the Slaves to Live; The Black Flag of Emancipation; The Governors of the South and Emancipation; etc. 

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, October 2, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: Black and White [Fascinating Commentary on "White Privilege;" "White men who are much pleased with themselves for being white, and much displeased with black men for being black. . . "]; The Emancipation - How to Make it Effective; War Letters; The Rebels and their Tricks; The Emancipation Proclamation Condemned by Many; etc. 

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, September 25, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: The Battle Autumn of 1862; Full Text of the Emancipation Proclamation, signed [in print] by Abraham Lincoln; The Dead and Wounded; Bayonet Charges; Large Armies; etc. 

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, September 18, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: Laboring for a Revival; The Devil in the Church; Colored Men for Soldiers; Southern Experience of Slavery; Pastors becoming Captains; a Confederate Jubilee; etc. 

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, September 11, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: Prayer for the Country; Falling Back upon Prayer; The Heroines of the War; Negro Regiments in Louisiana; etc.

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, September 4, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: Degrees of Future Punishment; Arming the Negroes; The First Baptism at Serampore; Preaching War Sermons; Large Nap [c.12 x 12 inches] entitled The Field of Operations in Virginia; Dilletanti Slaveholding; etc.

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, August 28, 1862. 4pp. 

Contents include: The War - Our Sacrifices and their Fruits; Death and the Grave; Degrees of Future Punishment; Black Regiments; What a Colonel Saw; The Young Volunteer; Learning the Trade of War; Negro Colonization Begun [Excellent address of Senator Pomeroy of Kansas addressed To the Free Colored People of the United States]; Enrollment of Colored Citizens; etc.

[With]

The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, June 19, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, June 5, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, May 15, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, May 1, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, April 24, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, April 17, 1862. 4pp; || The Examiner: New-York Recorder and New-York Baptist Register. Thursday, August 28, 1862. 4pp. 

Generally good with some wear, cross tears on two issues, remains of flotsam at folds, two issues with diamond loss at inner hinge, just impacting text.