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Extraordinary 1858 autograph album containing signatures of President James Buchanan, Vice President John C. Breckinridge, members of Buchanan’s cabinet, and an astonishingly comprehensive assembly of senators and representatives comprising the 35th United States Congress, one of the most politically consequential congressional bodies in American history, seated on the eve of the Civil War. The leather-bound album, 5.5 x 8, features a gilt ownership stamp, “J. H. Meredith / Baltimore,” and contains 65 leaves filled with autographs gathered principally in the spring of 1858, just three years before the outbreak of the Civil War.
The album opens with signatures of President James Buchanan, dated April 26, 1858, and Vice President John C. Breckinridge, dated May 12, 1858. The following are signatures of major cabinet officers, including Howell Cobb, John B. Floyd, Jacob Thompson, Aaron V. Brown, and Jeremiah S. Black, all figures who would soon play pivotal roles in the sectional crisis and Confederacy.
Most remarkable, however, is the album’s near-complete representation of the 35th Congress itself, including approximately 54 of 64 United States senators and an extraordinary 239 of 244 members of the House of Representatives. Few nineteenth-century political autograph albums approach this level of congressional completeness, particularly from a legislative session seated on the eve of the Civil War.
Among the notable Senate signatures are Sam Houston, Andrew Johnson, Stephen A. Douglas, Hannibal Hamlin, William H. Seward, Simon Cameron, John Slidell, Robert M. T. Hunter, Clement C. Clay, Judah P. Benjamin, James Murray Mason, John J. Crittenden, Benjamin Wade, and John P. Hale. Equally significant is the album’s remarkable House representation, headed by Speaker James L. Orr and Clerk James C. Allen, and including John Sherman, John Bingham, Schuyler Colfax, Joshua R. Giddings, Francis P. Blair Jr., Thomas S. Bocock, Lawrence O’Bryan Branch, and George H. Pendleton. This group represents an extraordinary cross-section of the American political establishment immediately before the national rupture of the Civil War.
In very good to fine condition, with heavy rubbing to the spine and covers; interior pages are all clean and fine. An unparalleled political and historical archive assembled at a defining moment in American history, representing one of the most comprehensive autograph compilations of the 35th Congress and Buchanan administration ever to appear at auction.
