LINCOLN, Abraham.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Appointment document signed twice by Lincoln as President and countersigned by Salmon P. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury. Lincoln appoints Lawrence White Coe collector of federal taxes for the State of Oregon.In August 1861, Congress passed a new direct tax to fund the Civil War. Oregon's share was $35,000, seven-eighths of the state's annual revenue (Bancroft, p. 640). The measure marked both a substantial expansion of federal taxation and a wartime extension of presidential patronage through the appointment of tax officers.Oregon had become a state in 1859. Coe (1831-1897), resident in Wasco County, had opened steam navigation on the upper Columbia River with the stern-wheeler Colonel Wright, which was contracted to carry army supplies to Fort Walla Walla. His father, Nathaniel Coe, had been appointed by President Fillmore as the first postal agent in the Northwest.

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