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Partly-printed DS as president, one page, 8 x 10, January 21, 1860. President Buchanan directs the Secretary of State to “affix the Seal of the United States to a Warrant for the remission of the fine and costs imposed upon Emanuel Mason.” Signed prominently at the conclusion by James Buchanan. In very good to fine condition, with faint toning along folds, and small edge chips and tape repairs that could be matted out.
Emanuel Mason was a former slave who purchased his own freedom and moved to Washington. His arrest was related to the escape of his son, Ben, a slave, whom Mason was harboring. Mason’s ordeal, and his subsequent pardon by President Buchanan, are recorded in the 1861 publication, The Anti-slavery History of the John-Brown Year (Being the Twenty-seventh Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society), which reads as follows:
‘Our last Report made mention of the case of a free colored man in Washington awaiting trial on the charge of harboring his own son a Slave. He was tried and convicted on the 28th of March though all that was proved against him was that the boy having run off he knew not whither he did not give him up on demand of the officer sent for him nor at the officer's request go in search of him and bring him back. After waiting in prison forty nine days without a bed and with poor and scanty food he was sentenced on the 16th of May to pay a fine amounting with costs to about 200 and to remain in prison till it should be paid. His name is Emanuel Mason. He was formerly a Slave in Maryland but some years ago being crippled with inflammatory rheumatism and given up by the doctors as incurable his mistress sold him to himself for 300 after finding that no one else would give so much for him.
Having paid for himself by installments and meanwhile partially recovered his health his wife being still a Slave he hired her time by the year and they kept house in Washington and reared several children wholly at their own expense his wife's mistress appropriating them as they became old enough to be sold or put to service. Little Ben a boy of ten years whom he was convicted of harboring was his youngest child and for two or three years the only one the plunderers of his home had left him. A number of respectable citizens of Washington who had known Mason for years in petitioning the judge for a lenient sentence declared him to be an industrious moral temperate poor peaceable honest man. And such a man it is who is robbed of his children one by one then of his wife who had been taken from him about a year before little Ben’s escape and at last punished with barbarous severity for not joining the hunt to run down the last youngling of his little flock and with his own hands give him over to the devourers. On the 23d of January last almost ten months after his conviction the Washington correspondent of the Anti Slavery Standard writes that he lies in jail a wretched old man his fine unpaid and he complains bitterly of the treatment he receives But on the 7th of February the same writer says President Buchanan has pardoned Emanuel Mason out of jail and remitted his fine.’
In early 1862, as the U.S. House was considering a bill to end slavery in D.C., Rep. John Hutchins of Ohio told Emanuel Mason’s personal story during debates between lawmakers. This story helped convince lawmakers to pass the bill for D.C., setting a precedent for the nation. Hutchins said in part, 'The cruelties and oppressions here (in DC) practiced, in hearing and in sight of the nation’s representatives, are a burning disgrace to a nation claiming civilization or professing humanity or Christianity.' President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act in 1862 to end slavery in D.C. about eight-and-a-half months before the famous Emancipation Proclamation.
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