Authorized by President Lincoln in 1863, two examples of the first "greenback" paper currency backed by the authority of the federal government as legal tender. First U.S. paper money in the form of modern dollar bills.
Broadside advertising an NAACP City-Wide Mobilization Meeting at Fisk University, featuring a speech by Thurgood Marshall, Chief Legal Council for the NAACP. Also speaking are members of the J. C. Napier Lawyers Association. The meeting will...
This nine-page letter written from Arthur H. Harris in Monroe, Louisiana, to his brother George Carroll Harris in Nashville is a conscious political treatise. The author is advocating and justifiying the secession of Louisiana at the upcoming...
Document representing the oath of allegiance certificate issued to Mrs. Hannah M. Morey of Williamson County by the Provost Marshal's Office in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 15, 1863.
23 pages handwritten in ink that comprise the Cherokee Constitution of 1827. This early copy may have been written by Sam Houston. It was found in the 1827 Tennessee legislative papers and may have been given to the State of Tennessee in exchange...
Two-page letter from J. W. Maybin of Vicksburg, Mississippi, to John S. Brien. The letter requests legal advice from John S. Brien, "one of the first legal minds in the United States," regarding his legal options after having seen much of his...
Original manuscript of the Cumberland Compact of Government, or Articles of Agreement, entered into by settlers on the Cumberland River, May 1, 1780, at what is now Nashville, and signed May 13, 1780 by 255 inhabitants of five stations on the...
The first in a bound collection of colonial documents is a complete copy of the Proclamation of 1763 promulgated at the end of the French and Indian War by King George III of Great Britain. The item is hand-written in ink on paper, copied by John...
Former slave in talks with a former master whose continued paternal and patriarchal spirit is supposedly expressed in his affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan.
Communication by Andrew Johnson, military governor of Tennessee, stating his support for the adoption of a Constitutional amendment to ban slavery in the United States.
State government; Constitutions; Constitutional conventions; Law & legal affairs; Slavery; Freedmen; Suffrage; Lotteries
This first revision of the Tennessee Constitution addressed a variety of problems present in the original 1796 Constitution. Pages are handwritten on oversize paper and are laminated.
