Governor of Illinois Buys Vital Civil War Document: President Lincoln’s Response to Fort Sumter Attack

The governor of the American state of Illinois has bought a vital document from the American Civil War and given it to the state’s own museum.

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), just one week after the Confederacy (the Southern states) fired on the Union fort.

After this building, Fort Sumter, was destroyed, the civil war began. Through Lincoln’s document, the Union responded militarily to that attack for the first time.

Democratic Governor Pritzker of Illinois said his state now has a document that affirms that the US “has stood the test of time more than 150 years later, despite the differences and our challenges.”

Pritzker himself bought the paper last July for about $471,000 at auction from an anonymous collector. Then the billionaire gave the document to his state, because Lincoln was closely connected to Illinois; the president started his political career there and lived there.

The American Civil War began 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 head when Lincoln was elected president in 1860. He was strongly opposed to slave states which were called more in new territories in the western part of the country. After that, the southern states decided to secede.

During the Civil War, Lincoln signed the famous Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, declaring that all enslaved people in the southern states were free. That document started the abolition of slavery in the US.

Shortly before the end of the war, Lincoln was killed while visiting a theater in Washington.

The 1861 document that is now in the hands of Illinois will be on display until February next year at the Lincoln Museum in the city of Springfield, where Lincoln lived until he was president.

The director of the museum, 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 believes that America is worth saving.”