The Election of the President of the United States (Professor Laboulaye, the great friend of America, on the Presidential Election).

1864. Washington, Printed for the Union Congressional Committee, 1864. 8°. 14 pages. Softcover / Original Pamphlet. Original brochure. Some foxing. Unopened. Extremely RARE ! "To vote for Lincoln is to vote for Union and for Liberty". This is how this pamphlet ends in which Laboulaye urges the americans to vote for Lincoln instead for McClellan. But Laboulaye was even more important to the american people in his overall favour of this country as a leading role for freedom and future. He suggested the present by France, which was later erected as the "Statue of Liberty" "In the summer of 1865, a group of Frenchmen were gathered together one evening at the home of the well-known author, Edouard Rene de Laboulaye, in the village of Glavingny, a suburb of Paris. Among those present were Oscar and Edmond de Lafayette, grandsons of the Marquis d' Lafayette, Masonic brother of George Washington; Henri Martin, the noted historian and French Mason; and a young artist from Colmar in French (later German) Alsace by the name of Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who at the time was engaged in making a bust of Laboulaye, called by one biographer "America's most ardent admirer in France." Laboulaye told the group that it would be a splendid gesture on the part of all liberty-loving Frenchmen to acknowledge their friendship to America by presenting a fitting memorial. (Some have speculated that he had a second motive in mind to call attention to the contrast between the American way of life with its freedoms and that of the French under the repressive Second Empire.) The 31-year-old Bartholdi became imbued with the idea and also the challenge it presented to his artistic talent. But the proposal lay dormant during the autocratic rule of Napoleon III and throughout the destructive years of the Franco-Prussian War. In 1871, Laboulaye, the Brother Lafayette with their cousin, the Marquis de Noailles, and the Marquis de Rochambeau, along with Henri Martin, revived the plan for the as yet unnamed memorial. They suggested that Bartholdi visit America and make arrangements for the presentation of the monument on July 4, 1876, the Centenary of the Declaration of Independence. Armed with letters of introduction and full of high hopes, Bartholdi sailed for America, although it is said that he did not have even a rough drawing of the proposed monument. Two weeks later, while standing on the deck of the ship Pereire steaming up Lower New York Bay, he caught a vision of a magnificent goddess holding aloft a torch in one hand and welcoming all visitors to the land of freedom and opportunity. Quickly obtaining paper and brush, Bartholdi sketched in water-color the idea of the Statue of Liberty substantially as it appears today. It was his thought to have this symbolic structure tower over the steeple of Trinity Church, then the tallest building on the New York skyline. He wrote to Laboulaye, "these outlines may well aim beyond the mere monument at a work of great moral value." (MasonicWorld - By R. W. Robert C. Singer) Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye (French pronunciation: ?[edwa?? ??ne l?f??v? d? labul?]) (18 January 1811 – 25 May 1883) was a French jurist, poet, author and anti-slavery activist. In 1865 he originated the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States that resulted in the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. He got the idea thinking that this would help strengthen their relationship with the United States. Laboulaye was received at the bar in 1842, and was chosen professor of comparative law at the Collège de France in 1849. Following the Paris Commune of 1870, he was elected to the national assembly, representing the departement of the Seine. As secretary of the committee of thirty on the constitution he was effective in combatting the Monarchists in establishing the Third Republic. In 1875, he was elected a life senator, and in 1876 he was appointed administrator of the Collège de France, resuming his lectures on comparative legislation in 1877. Laboulaye was also chairman of the French Anti-Slavery Society. Laboulaye was president of the Société d'économie politique. Always a careful observer of the politics of the United States, and an admirer of its constitution, he wrote a three-volume work on the political history of the United States, and published it in Paris during the height of the politically repressed Second Empire. During the American Civil War, he was a zealous advocate of the Union cause and the abolition of slavery, publishing histories of the cultural connections of the two nations. At the war's conclusion in 1865, he became president of the French Emancipation Committee that aided newly freed slaves in the U.S. The same year he had the idea of presenting a statue representing liberty as a gift to the United States, a symbol for ideas suppressed by Napoleon III. The sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, one of Laboulaye's friends, turned the idea into reality. (Wikipedia)