93. Abraham Lincoln.
Nineteenth-century facsimile of letter to "Madam" [Mary Peabody Mann], Washington, April 5, 1864, on Executive Mansion letterhead.
From Concord Free Public Library Letter File, CFPL Vault Collection.

 

The delivery of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was a watershed moment in United States history, but it did not immediately end all American slavery.  Adding Concord support to the organized effort urging the president to eradicate slavery altogether, one hundred and ninety-five local school children signed a petition asking him "to free all the little slave children in this country."  The "Little Peoples' Petition"—so-called by Lincoln himself—is housed at the Library of Congress.  

Delivered by Senator Charles Sumner, the petition touched the president and prompted a personal response.  In April 1864, he wrote a letter to antislavery advocate Mary Peabody Mann—sister of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, widow of educational reformer Horace Mann, and a Concord resident and teacher during the 1860s.  The Concord Free Public Library's facsimile copy of this letter may be one of those reproduced—as Mrs. Mann wrote Lincoln—"to scatter fac-similes of your sweet words to the children like apple blossoms all over the Country."