Description: 1851-78 LINCOLN'S STATISTICIAN OF SLAVERY (later champion of Chinese Immigrants) JOSEPH C.G. KENNEDY: Group of 3 items: 1851 Autograph Letter and 1862 and 1878 printed documents, the first two as official of the US Census. · Kennedy. Superintending Clerk of the US Census. AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED. Census Office, Washington, DC, April 2, 1851, 1 pg. Rare letter to William Case, Whig Mayor of Cleveland, asking for statistics of “Mortality” in the city, and offering to “cheerfully” greet the Mayor if he should visit Washington. Folds, small residue of mounting marks on verso. Very Good. Kennedy's autograph letters are rare. · Kennedy, Superintendent of the US Census. PRELIMINARY REPORT OF THE EIGHTH CENSUS, 1860 (Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, 1862, 23pp. Original embossed cloth binding. Illustrated with tables and diagrams. Gilt spine title bit faded, foxing to endpapers, faint former owner’s inscription. Good. · Kennedy. “Argument” opposing bills ‘to restrict the immigration of the Chinese to the United States’ (US Senate Doc. No. 36), 1878) 36pp. Disbound. rough spine edge, small stain on front cover. Good. When President Lincoln visited the Antietam battlefield in October 1862 – weeks before signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the tall man in the stovepipe hat was photographed, surrounded by a half-dozen Generals (including George Custer) – and only one civilian: Joseph Camp Griffin Kennedy, the Interior Department clerk who had twice directed the US Census and played a hidden role in Lincoln's decision to issue the Proclamation. As editor of a liberal Whig newspaper in his native Pennsylvania, Kennedy had been rewarded with minor political patronage at what was then called the Census Board. No bench-warmer, in the 1850 Census, he modernized data processing, collecting, for the first time, a record of every household resident in America, including women and children – and slaves, counted by gender and age. He first explained those slave statistics in his report on the 1860 Census, published after the Civil War began, when those “slave schedules”, tabulated by some 200 clerks, were correlated to produce a Coast Survey map showing in great detail the geographic distribution of slaves throughout the Southern states. Lincoln reportedly pored over that map -, which bore Kennedy’s print signature - before deciding, 2 months later, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Kennedy’s accompanying Lincoln to Antietam suggests that the little-known Census clerk, an Abolitionist friend of Charles Sumner's, held in high esteem by the President, indirectly had some influence on the most significant presidential decision of the War. Fifteen years later, Kennedy came into Washington prominence again when, after his daughter married the Governor of California, he testified to Congress in opposition to legislative bills “to restrict the immigration of the Chinese to the United States” – denouncing such measures, promoted by “selfish and ignorant demagogues”. to “drive from our shores the very people to whom California is so largely indebted for her prosperity”. He lived in happy obscurity until ten years later, Kennedy was murdered by a lunatic on the streets of Washington.
Price: 195 USD
Location: Merced, California
End Time: 2024-11-27T18:37:24.000Z
Shipping Cost: 10 USD
Product Images
Item Specifics
All returns accepted: ReturnsNotAccepted
