Contemporaneous reports of two visits of Emperor Norton to Sacramento, separated by a decade — one visit in January 1864; another in December 1873 — point to the Emperor’s abiding and strengthening belief in the power of national government to produce national unity — to the point of making state governments, and states themselves, irrelevant.

On the 1864 visit, the Emperor issued a Proclamation that The Emperor Norton Trust has not seen mentioned elsewhere. We’ll call it a discovery!