When the Emancipation Proclamation Came to Chicago: How Mary Livermore Turned a Fair into a Relief Network

American Historical Figures · Story 18 By Clio Walker. This historical narrative was prepared with AI assistance and checked against its sources. It is not a submission by Mary Livermore and is not a translation of her memoir.

At noon on October 27, 1863, thirty-four guns sounded near the courthouse grounds in Chicago. When the last report ended, the crowd surged toward Bryan Hall, and the city's first Northwestern Sanitary Fair opened its doors. Courts, the post office, schools, banks, and the Board of Trade had suspended ordinary business for the day. A procession had already stretched for miles through the streets, while farm wagons carried potatoes, onions, squash, beets, cabbages, apples, and cider behind it.

These goods were not decorations for a harvest festival. They were to become cash, and the cash was to become food, clothing, and medicine for military hospitals. In the third year of the Civil War, sick and wounded men continued to arrive. An emptied bed did not necessarily mean that the pressure had eased; recovery or death was often followed by another patient. The Northwestern Branch of the United States Sanitary Commission in Chicago had shipped great quantities of supplies, while its treasury kept shrinking.

Mary Livermore and Jane Hoge understood the size of the gap. They helped run the branch, organized aid societies, wrote bulletins and letters, and carried supplies to camps and hospitals. Livermore later recalled that by the summer of 1863 the usual methods of raising money seemed exhausted. She and Hoge proposed a fair in which the entire Northwest would take part. Their goal was to raise twenty-five thousand dollars for the branch.

The men on the commission did not immediately share their confidence. In Livermore's later account, they approved without enthusiasm, and some laughed at the proposed sum. The two women did not wait for doubt to disappear. They first appealed to women's aid societies, Union organizations, churches, and newspapers, inviting delegates to meet in Chicago on September 1. About ten thousand copies of the first circular went across the Northwestern states. After a two-day convention, representatives returned home with commitments to arrange local donations and labor.

The second circular did more than ask people to help. It specified what was needed, where it should be sent, and when it should arrive. Livermore's memoir records that on one occasion the branch office mailed seventeen bushels of material about the fair. The old unit of volume makes the detail sound comic, but it captures the nature of the work. Before a fair could become flags and music, it had to become a machine made of addresses, lists, replies, railroad schedules, storage, and accounts.

Women wrote to governors, legislators, military officers, postmasters, ministers, and teachers. Hoge sought help in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. The merchant Potter Palmer gathered goods in New York; Boston and Connecticut also sent contributions. Towns across the Northwest held meetings. Families offered handmade goods, merchants gave stock, and owners loaned works of art. Chicago businessmen and manufacturers who had been indifferent at first eventually joined in, donating agricultural machines, furnaces, metal, boots, paper, wine, oil, instruments, livestock, and so much else that another building had to be fitted up as an exhibition hall.

Livermore called it an avalanche of gifts. That metaphor belonged to a successful organizer writing more than twenty years later, not to a daily log from 1863. Yet the contemporary material she preserved also reveals the scale of the mobilization. During the war she wrote front-line correspondence for newspapers and edited the branch's monthly bulletins and appeals. When she composed her memoir, she drew on clippings, letters, circulars, memoranda, and private correspondence saved by her husband and friends. She explicitly warned that the book did not claim to be a history; it was a collection of experiences and reminiscences.

Opening day carried the machine into the streets. Convalescent soldiers rode in the procession. Children filled carriages and omnibuses. Bands, civic groups, and banners moved through the city. The farmers from Lake County drew particular attention: hundreds of wagons carried vegetables and grain, with flags tied to teams and vehicles. When the wagons reached the branch office, boxes, barrels, and sacks filled the street. Bystanders began unloading. Streetcars were delayed. The farm goods were not symbolic scenery; they could be used at once by hospitals and by the fair's dining hall.

Livermore lingered over one battered wagon. Its driver farmed poor soil and had received notice only at eight the previous evening. He, his wife, and their daughters nevertheless went through the rain to collect potatoes, onions, rutabagas, meal, cabbages, and ducks from nearby households, working through the night to join the convoy. Their son had died after being shot at Stones River; his widow and baby rode behind them. The published memoir preserves an extended conversation, but more than twenty years separated the book from the event, so this narrative does not treat every word as stenography. What the episode securely demonstrates is the principle Livermore wanted to preserve: people who had suffered loss did not appear only as recipients of aid. They were donors and organizers too.

The fair was not a few rows of stalls in a single building. Bryan Hall held a bazaar and dining room, while other spaces contained machinery, curiosities, art, and evening entertainment. Railroads scheduled discounted excursion trains. Food arrived from the countryside. Women canvassed Chicago household by household, recording who could provide turkeys, ducks, roasts, pies, puddings, milk, or coffee on which day, and then consolidated the promises into a daily plan. They intended to serve fifteen hundred people each day with the comfort of a home meal. Crowds often left still more people looking for other restaurants.

The most conspicuous exhibit came from the White House. On October 11, Livermore wrote to Abraham Lincoln asking him to contribute the original manuscript of the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln enclosed it with a letter dated October 26. He explained that some formal words were not in his handwriting and that part of the preliminary proclamation had been cut from a printed copy and pasted onto the draft to save writing. He had wished to keep the paper, he said, but if it could aid the relief or comfort of soldiers, that was better.

Later accounts do not assign the same dollar value to the manuscript. Livermore wrote that Thomas B. Bryan purchased it for three thousand dollars, after which lithographic copies raised additional money for a permanent soldiers' home. The Chicago History Museum summarizes the associated proceeds as ten thousand dollars. This story does not combine the figures into a false certainty. The accounts agree on the essential transformation: a presidential document announcing emancipation was turned into resources for soldiers, then reproduced so that its images could continue raising money. The original went to the Chicago Historical Society and was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Its meaning cannot be reduced to celebrity memorabilia. The Sanitary Commission supported the Union armies, and the fair was full of the political language of loyalty to the Union. Emancipation had also changed the war's purpose and altered who could become a soldier, a worker, and a citizen. Livermore's memoir records a Black woman who had escaped slavery bringing a sheet she had purchased and sewn herself, as well as gifts from other Black families. These scenes still reach us through the prose of a white organizer and cannot replace the donors' own testimony. They nevertheless show that the fundraising network extended beyond white middle-class women and urban merchants.

The fair lasted two weeks. Its financial result varies according to the accounting date and category. Livermore reported net receipts of nearly eighty thousand dollars, with the later sale of unsold goods bringing the total close to one hundred thousand. The National Park Service summarizes the result as nearly ninety thousand dollars; the Chicago History Museum gives more than eighty-six thousand. On any of these measures, the fair far exceeded the original goal of twenty-five thousand dollars. Its model then traveled to Cleveland, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

This does not mean that Livermore and Hoge single-handedly invented mass civilian relief. Local women's aid societies, railroads, newspapers, churches, factories, farm families, soldiers, and Black donors already possessed distinct skills and networks. What the organizers achieved was to join dispersed labor to one system of transport, sale, and accounting, and to make that system publicly visible in the city. Visitors could buy a ticket, eat a meal, donate a sack of potatoes, or attend an entertainment. Different actions entered a common relief account.

After the war, Livermore redirected her organizing ability toward women's suffrage. She later explained that wartime service had made a contradiction unmistakable: women could manage large institutions, enter military camps, and move substantial sums of money, yet still lacked political equality. In 1868 she helped establish the Illinois Woman Suffrage Association. She then founded the Agitator and spent years on the lecture circuit. It would be too simple to make one fair the sole cause of her political development. Wartime public work more plausibly gave her experience and evidence.

Chicago in October 1863 held both a presidential manuscript and a worn farm wagon, machinery donated by manufacturers and vegetables gathered overnight by families. If we remember only the cannon and parade, the fair becomes a colorful patriotic tableau. Livermore's materials allow us to see the order behind it: who wrote the letters, copied addresses, scheduled trains, counted pies, unloaded boxes, and directed money toward hospitals. A relief network was not an abstraction. It was assembled, item by item, by people who knew wounded soldiers were still waiting.

Sources and editorial boundaries The core primary source is Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War (A. D. Worthington, 1889; copyright entered in 1887), available as a scan and OCR transcript at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/mystoryofwarwomalive and https://archive.org/stream/mystoryofwarwomalive/mystoryofwarwomalive_djvu.txt . This story uses the preface and Chapters XX–XXII for the preparation, September convention, seventeen bushels of mail, October 27 procession, Lake County wagons, six exhibition spaces, Lincoln donation, two-week operation, and receipts. The memoir was written more than twenty years after the events. Livermore says that it “does not purport to be a history” and identifies clippings, bulletins, letters, memoranda, and private correspondence saved by family and friends as her materials. The narrative therefore distinguishes organization supported by contemporary records from her later scenic recollection; long conversations, emotional descriptions, and exact sequencing are not treated as stenographic records.

Livermore's biography, branch responsibilities, the fair's opening day and duration, and her later suffrage work were cross-checked with the U.S. National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/people/mary-livermore.htm . The Chicago History Museum's account of the 1863 fair, Livermore's October 11 request to Lincoln, attendance and revenue estimates, the manuscript's later custody, and its destruction in 1871 is here: https://www.chicagohistory.org/mary-livermore/ . Lincoln's October 26 covering letter is reproduced in Livermore's memoir; the Library of Congress catalog page for Livermore's October 11 letter in the Abraham Lincoln Papers is https://www.loc.gov/resource/mal.2715400/ .

Numerical boundary: Livermore's three-thousand-dollar purchase, the Chicago History Museum's ten-thousand-dollar summary, and totals of eighty thousand, eighty-six thousand, ninety thousand, or one hundred thousand dollars may refer respectively to sale price, later lithograph proceeds, net receipts, or totals including unsold property. They are preserved as distinct claims rather than silently reconciled. Rights boundary: the 1889 English edition is in the U.S. public domain; both language versions here are new paraphrases and do not reproduce a modern translation. Spatiotemporal boundary: the main events are confirmed only within Chicago during the two weeks beginning October 27, 1863. The map uses a city reference point and does not claim the demolished Bryan Hall, courthouse grounds, temporary exhibition buildings, or procession route as a precise surviving site.