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The Black Man's President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality
Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the black man's president” as well as “the first who rose above the prejudice of his times and country.” This narrative history of Lincoln’s personal interchange with Black people over the course his career reveals a side of the sixteenth president that, until now, has not been fully explored or understood.
In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Lincoln's assassination, Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the black man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as men.” To justify that description, Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and utterances, like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the president’s own personal experiences with Black people. Referring to one of his White House visits, Douglass "In daring to invite a Negro to an audience at the White House, Mr. Lincoln was saying to the I am President of the black people as well as the white, and I mean to respect their rights and feelings as men and as citizens.”
But Lincoln’s description as “emphatically the black man’s president” rests on more than his relationship with Douglass or on his official words and deeds. Lincoln interacted with many other African Americans during his presidency His unfailing cordiality to them, his willingness to meet with them in the White House, to honor their requests, to invite them to consult on public policy, to treat them with respect whether they were kitchen servants or leaders of the Black community, to invite them to attend receptions, to sing and pray with them in their neighborhoods—all those manifestations of an egalitarian spirit fully justified the tributes paid to him by Frederick Douglass and other African Americans like Sojourner Truth, who "I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln.”
Historian David S. Reynolds observed recently that only by examining Lincoln’s “personal interchange with Black people do we see the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have leveled against him over the years.”
In a little-noted eulogy delivered shortly after Lincoln's assassination, Frederick Douglass called the martyred president "emphatically the black man's president," the "first to show any respect for their rights as men.” To justify that description, Douglass pointed not just to Lincoln's official acts and utterances, like the Emancipation Proclamation or the Second Inaugural Address, but also to the president’s own personal experiences with Black people. Referring to one of his White House visits, Douglass "In daring to invite a Negro to an audience at the White House, Mr. Lincoln was saying to the I am President of the black people as well as the white, and I mean to respect their rights and feelings as men and as citizens.”
But Lincoln’s description as “emphatically the black man’s president” rests on more than his relationship with Douglass or on his official words and deeds. Lincoln interacted with many other African Americans during his presidency His unfailing cordiality to them, his willingness to meet with them in the White House, to honor their requests, to invite them to consult on public policy, to treat them with respect whether they were kitchen servants or leaders of the Black community, to invite them to attend receptions, to sing and pray with them in their neighborhoods—all those manifestations of an egalitarian spirit fully justified the tributes paid to him by Frederick Douglass and other African Americans like Sojourner Truth, who "I never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality than were shown to me by that great and good man, Abraham Lincoln.”
Historian David S. Reynolds observed recently that only by examining Lincoln’s “personal interchange with Black people do we see the complete falsity of the charges of innate racism that some have leveled against him over the years.”
320 pages, Hardcover
Published November 2, 2021
About the author
Michael Burlingame
54 books40 followersMichael Burlingame is the author of THE INNER WORLD OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1994) and the editor of a dozen books of Lincoln primary resource materials. He taught history at Connecticut College in New London for 33 years, retiring in 2001 to devote full time to ABRAHAM LINCOLN: A LIFE. That work is based on extensive research in manuscripts, newspapers, and public records, many of them overlooked or underutilized by previous biographers. He lives in Mystic, Connecticut."
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
November 5, 2021
Michael Burlingame offers what is perhaps the most important Abraham Lincoln book of 2021. A preeminent Lincoln scholar known for his research, Burlingame takes direct aim at a huge question that has become relevant again today - was Lincoln a racist or not - and documents his interactions with African Americans throughout his political life. The book demonstrates conclusively that Lincoln was a "racially inclusive egalitarian," quite a radical accomplishment in an age of open racism. Frederick Douglass noted that Lincoln was "entirely free from popular prejudice."
Beginning in Springfield, Burlingame relies on the work of Richard Hart in documenting the interactions Lincoln had with African Americans in Springfield. Almost 10% of the African American population of the city lived within three blocks of the Lincoln home, and in all cases, Lincoln treated everyone with dignity and respect. In particular, his relationship with William Florville, known as “Billy the Barber,” showed that Florville was a true friend, not just Lincoln’s barber and client. This respect carried over to the White House, where Lincoln “treated the White House staff like ‘people.’” When the largely light-skinned staff rejected the dark-skinned William Johnson, whom Lincoln had convinced to come to Washington with him, Lincoln found Johnson work at the Treasury. After he died of smallpox, Lincoln made sure his family was taken care of and his mortgage paid off.
Burlingame dives deep into the infamous August 1862 meeting between Lincoln and leaders of Washington’s African American community. Often used to suggest Lincoln disdained them because of he lectured rather than listened, Burlingame shows how Lincoln used the meeting to allay the fears of whites to his forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, Burlingame documents how Lincoln’s “support” for colonization was tepid at best (he uses the term “emphatically noncommittal”) and primarily as one tool of many to address the fact that it was widely believed that the public would accept emancipation only if it was coupled with colonization. While Lincoln did pursue small scale colonization projects, he knew that the idea was impractical as a mechanism, but useful as a political tool.
And then there are the three meetings with Frederick Douglass, whose description of Lincoln in 1865 as “emphatically the black man’s president” inspired the title of the book. But there are many other meetings in the White House between Lincoln and African Americans, all of which Burlingame notes were consistently cordial, without bigotry, and welcoming in his personal relations.
Burlingame is no Lincoln apologist; he documents and analyzes everything in detail. At the end he includes a long appendix in which he specifically addresses all of the modern criticisms of Lincoln's racial beliefs. In each one, Burlingame makes the definitive case for why those criticisms are unpersuasive. Don’t agree? Then read this book and rethink your view of Abraham Lincoln.
Beginning in Springfield, Burlingame relies on the work of Richard Hart in documenting the interactions Lincoln had with African Americans in Springfield. Almost 10% of the African American population of the city lived within three blocks of the Lincoln home, and in all cases, Lincoln treated everyone with dignity and respect. In particular, his relationship with William Florville, known as “Billy the Barber,” showed that Florville was a true friend, not just Lincoln’s barber and client. This respect carried over to the White House, where Lincoln “treated the White House staff like ‘people.’” When the largely light-skinned staff rejected the dark-skinned William Johnson, whom Lincoln had convinced to come to Washington with him, Lincoln found Johnson work at the Treasury. After he died of smallpox, Lincoln made sure his family was taken care of and his mortgage paid off.
Burlingame dives deep into the infamous August 1862 meeting between Lincoln and leaders of Washington’s African American community. Often used to suggest Lincoln disdained them because of he lectured rather than listened, Burlingame shows how Lincoln used the meeting to allay the fears of whites to his forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. Similarly, Burlingame documents how Lincoln’s “support” for colonization was tepid at best (he uses the term “emphatically noncommittal”) and primarily as one tool of many to address the fact that it was widely believed that the public would accept emancipation only if it was coupled with colonization. While Lincoln did pursue small scale colonization projects, he knew that the idea was impractical as a mechanism, but useful as a political tool.
And then there are the three meetings with Frederick Douglass, whose description of Lincoln in 1865 as “emphatically the black man’s president” inspired the title of the book. But there are many other meetings in the White House between Lincoln and African Americans, all of which Burlingame notes were consistently cordial, without bigotry, and welcoming in his personal relations.
Burlingame is no Lincoln apologist; he documents and analyzes everything in detail. At the end he includes a long appendix in which he specifically addresses all of the modern criticisms of Lincoln's racial beliefs. In each one, Burlingame makes the definitive case for why those criticisms are unpersuasive. Don’t agree? Then read this book and rethink your view of Abraham Lincoln.
February 15, 2022
This review originally was published in Illinois Times' edition of February 10, 2022.
We used to put on pedestals countrymen deserving of honor for civic generosity or courage on behalf of good causes. Of late, we have taken down more statues than we have put up as the nation reconsiders the very notions of heroism.
Rhetorically, we have been knocking Abraham Lincoln off his pedestal for decades. Since the 1960s every generation of young activists seeking to explain why the citizens of this diverse and fractious nation are not yet singing in perfect harmony has looked at Lincoln’s legacy with a skeptical eye. Rude questions about Lincoln and race are being asked again as part of the national discussion excited by the Black Lives Matter movement. As we approach the 113th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, a new generation of Americans have reflected on their freshman history courses and concluded that the Great Emancipator was neither great or an emancipator. How, they ask, can we extol as a national hero a man who advocated sending freed slaves back to Africa? Who came late to abolition as a program if not an ideal? Whose Emancipation Proclamation was limited in its effect, being intended to help end the war and only incidentally to end black servitude?
So historians must again tiptoe to their desks through the rubble of smashed icons. One of them is Michael Burlingame, the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, who has risen to defend the late President with a new book, The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, & the Pursuit of Racial Equality. Much of this material appears in others of his works but he has revisited and reshaped it in answer to today’s Lincoln bashers.
At its simplest, The Black Man’s President (the phrase, by the way, is Frederick Douglass’s) is the story of Lincoln’s education in race matters, most of its being devoted to accounts of Lincoln’s interactions over his career with African Americans from all classes and backgrounds. That education began in Springfield, as Springfield’s Dick Hart has been trying to tell people for years. (The book is dedicated to Hart.) The young Lincoln didn’t need an education about slavery but he did need to learn about the lives and opinions of free black people and Springfield’s African American residents, Hart has written, “were a significant part not only of the town’s life, but of Abraham Lincoln’s life and environment.”
The black people Lincoln knew in Springfield were for the most part draymen and servants and barbers, so it was not until he got to the White House that he became acquainted with what Burlingame describes as educated and sophisticated people of color who “helped deepen Lincoln’s egalitarian faith and enlarge his frame of reference as he thought about the future of African Americans.”
The vignettes describing these encounters are neatly drawn and well illustrate the dimensions and the complications of the issues that various petitioners brought before the President, from colonization to voting rights to black enfranchisement in border states.
Just as valuable is Burlingame’s appendix, “Evaluation of Evidence Cited to Illustrate Lincoln’s Purported Racism.” There is no harm and some chance of good in challenging the conventional historical views on Lincoln and race. Historians, like committed social activists and politicians, are creatures of their times and often err. But if one wants to challenge the accounts of past historians, one must be better historians than they were, and as Burlingame demonstrates, too few critics are.
According to the more extravagant definitions of the term, Lincoln was not only a cynical and self-serving politician when it came to race but an actual racist. The claim is plausible. He was born white and raised among poor whites who barely recognized black people as human. He also spent his adult years before 1860 in Illinois, which Burlingame has said, was then arguably the most Negro-phobic state in the Union. That Lincoln might share some of the prejudices of those people is hardly remarkable. What was remarkable is how few of those prejudices he shared, a fact noted by a great many of the African Americans who knew him, and how he outgrew them.
In the opinion of many critics, it was not Lincoln’s personality but his policies that reveal his racism. Many of those policies date from the pre-Presidential years, and his views changed and matured as he did. Now and his own day, Lincoln is sometimes damned for doing only what was possible even if doing what was right was impossible. Burlingame better understands the depth and the social forces arrayed against Lincoln. What Lincoln’s critics damn as timidity was in fact patient politics. Lincoln knew that a President cannot lead until the people are ready to follow. So did Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the President, "He never shocked prejudices unnecessarily. Having learned statesmanship while splitting rails, he always used the thin edge of the wedge first—and the fact that he used it at all meant that he would if need be, use the thick as well as the thin."
Lincoln traveled a long way toward equal rights for African Americans in his 56 years. Much of the country has not moved so far in the past 156. The fear that enfranchised blacks would use the mechanism of democracy to unseat whites from their throne animates white antagonism to this day. Denying black citizens the vote that Lincoln would have given them is the raison d’etre of today’s political Right. It would have grieved Springfield’s best son to know that while he ended slavery, the old South would endure as a political and social movement.
Defenders of Lincoln risk being branded as dupes in not racists themselves. Burlingame by now knows what he was getting into; in his acknowledgements he thanks his publisher for daring to publish a book likely to “raise hackles in the stormy political and cultural climes of 2021.” Lincoln knew all about stormy climes, and in Burlingame he has a worthy advocate, judicious, informed, and temperate, and open-minded readers will find his book worth the reading.
We used to put on pedestals countrymen deserving of honor for civic generosity or courage on behalf of good causes. Of late, we have taken down more statues than we have put up as the nation reconsiders the very notions of heroism.
Rhetorically, we have been knocking Abraham Lincoln off his pedestal for decades. Since the 1960s every generation of young activists seeking to explain why the citizens of this diverse and fractious nation are not yet singing in perfect harmony has looked at Lincoln’s legacy with a skeptical eye. Rude questions about Lincoln and race are being asked again as part of the national discussion excited by the Black Lives Matter movement. As we approach the 113th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, a new generation of Americans have reflected on their freshman history courses and concluded that the Great Emancipator was neither great or an emancipator. How, they ask, can we extol as a national hero a man who advocated sending freed slaves back to Africa? Who came late to abolition as a program if not an ideal? Whose Emancipation Proclamation was limited in its effect, being intended to help end the war and only incidentally to end black servitude?
So historians must again tiptoe to their desks through the rubble of smashed icons. One of them is Michael Burlingame, the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield, who has risen to defend the late President with a new book, The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, & the Pursuit of Racial Equality. Much of this material appears in others of his works but he has revisited and reshaped it in answer to today’s Lincoln bashers.
At its simplest, The Black Man’s President (the phrase, by the way, is Frederick Douglass’s) is the story of Lincoln’s education in race matters, most of its being devoted to accounts of Lincoln’s interactions over his career with African Americans from all classes and backgrounds. That education began in Springfield, as Springfield’s Dick Hart has been trying to tell people for years. (The book is dedicated to Hart.) The young Lincoln didn’t need an education about slavery but he did need to learn about the lives and opinions of free black people and Springfield’s African American residents, Hart has written, “were a significant part not only of the town’s life, but of Abraham Lincoln’s life and environment.”
The black people Lincoln knew in Springfield were for the most part draymen and servants and barbers, so it was not until he got to the White House that he became acquainted with what Burlingame describes as educated and sophisticated people of color who “helped deepen Lincoln’s egalitarian faith and enlarge his frame of reference as he thought about the future of African Americans.”
The vignettes describing these encounters are neatly drawn and well illustrate the dimensions and the complications of the issues that various petitioners brought before the President, from colonization to voting rights to black enfranchisement in border states.
Just as valuable is Burlingame’s appendix, “Evaluation of Evidence Cited to Illustrate Lincoln’s Purported Racism.” There is no harm and some chance of good in challenging the conventional historical views on Lincoln and race. Historians, like committed social activists and politicians, are creatures of their times and often err. But if one wants to challenge the accounts of past historians, one must be better historians than they were, and as Burlingame demonstrates, too few critics are.
According to the more extravagant definitions of the term, Lincoln was not only a cynical and self-serving politician when it came to race but an actual racist. The claim is plausible. He was born white and raised among poor whites who barely recognized black people as human. He also spent his adult years before 1860 in Illinois, which Burlingame has said, was then arguably the most Negro-phobic state in the Union. That Lincoln might share some of the prejudices of those people is hardly remarkable. What was remarkable is how few of those prejudices he shared, a fact noted by a great many of the African Americans who knew him, and how he outgrew them.
In the opinion of many critics, it was not Lincoln’s personality but his policies that reveal his racism. Many of those policies date from the pre-Presidential years, and his views changed and matured as he did. Now and his own day, Lincoln is sometimes damned for doing only what was possible even if doing what was right was impossible. Burlingame better understands the depth and the social forces arrayed against Lincoln. What Lincoln’s critics damn as timidity was in fact patient politics. Lincoln knew that a President cannot lead until the people are ready to follow. So did Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the President, "He never shocked prejudices unnecessarily. Having learned statesmanship while splitting rails, he always used the thin edge of the wedge first—and the fact that he used it at all meant that he would if need be, use the thick as well as the thin."
Lincoln traveled a long way toward equal rights for African Americans in his 56 years. Much of the country has not moved so far in the past 156. The fear that enfranchised blacks would use the mechanism of democracy to unseat whites from their throne animates white antagonism to this day. Denying black citizens the vote that Lincoln would have given them is the raison d’etre of today’s political Right. It would have grieved Springfield’s best son to know that while he ended slavery, the old South would endure as a political and social movement.
Defenders of Lincoln risk being branded as dupes in not racists themselves. Burlingame by now knows what he was getting into; in his acknowledgements he thanks his publisher for daring to publish a book likely to “raise hackles in the stormy political and cultural climes of 2021.” Lincoln knew all about stormy climes, and in Burlingame he has a worthy advocate, judicious, informed, and temperate, and open-minded readers will find his book worth the reading.
October 13, 2022
Posting a full review here just for the reason this book has very few reviews and people need to know the truth about it.
==
This is another failed attempt to whitewash Lincoln on the issue of colonization of African-Americans, above all else. When Burlingame started citing David S. Reynolds and James Oakes as additional justification on the issue, I knew the game was up.
Both of them are wrong, too, and I got into a multiple email exchange argument with Oakes.
Here's the basics: Burlingame claims that LIncoln never talked **in public** about colonization after the middle or so of 1862. True as bare fact, but the ethical equivalent of a lie by omission on the big picture.
Reality? Even after Congress had cut off all money for federal support of colonization schemes in the summer of 1864, Lincoln asked his Attorney General, Edward Bates, in the fall of 1864 if 1862 Congressional legislation allowed him to still push colonization without funding.
Then, Ben Butler claimed that, the week of Lincoln's assassination, the president mentioned the idea of reviving the Panama colonization effort to him. Yes, Butler is not the most reliable person, and he said that years later, but it has been confirmed that he met Lincoln on the date in question, at the White House, April 11, 1865. Read this article for a great assessment of Butler's statement, and one that directly refutes Oakes, who claims they didn't meet, and by extension, Reynolds and Burlingame. Per this, we must also question all three authors' rejection of Gideon Welles. I do think Welles does project a lot of himself onto Lincoln, but I don't think he is 100 percent wrong as an observer. (That link is good for other things, too, like people connected to Lincoln and Seward being war profiteers.)
Bates, who was resigning in preparation for Lincoln's second term, declined to give a formal opinion, but informally said that Lincoln could retain colonization agent Mitchell. That would partially corroborate that Butler and Lincoln talked about this issue, and in some depth.
Does that make Lincoln a racist? Not necessarily. But, it does cast a darker shadow on him than Burlingame, along with Oakes and Reynolds, would like to have appear.
That in turn leads one to be skeptical of Burlingame's efforts to sanitize some of Lincoln's older — and some White House-era — comments.
On the colonization, I think Lincoln probably pushed it primarily because he was worried about post-Civil War America. But, did that mean there was only so much lifting he wanted to do on civil rights, and beyond civil rights, on broader societal reform? Remember, Andy Johnson believed he was faithfully following Lincoln's "rosewater" Reconstruction strategy, also not mentioned by Burlingame, or Reynolds or Oakes.
As for racism? By his death, I think Lincoln was better than 90 percent of White Americans of his time, maybe more. Was he better than 100 percent? No. Had John Brown still been alive, we know he would be better. And, related to that? In 1848, or 1858, was Lincoln better than 90 percent of White Americans? Probably not. Maybe 75 percent.
The book gets almost 3 stars (2.75 on StoryGraph — there, Goodreads, it's mentioned by name), to show it's not quite a full 3, in part because of Burlingame repeating the sins of Reynolds and Oakes. But, rather than falling below that, him collecting some lesser-known meetings that Lincoln had with Black Americans partially redeems it.
Note: If ratings on this book continue to trend high, I reserve the right to drop it another star to offset that.
I LOVED his book about the Lincolns' marriage. But, with this? I doubt I'll read him again.
==
This is another failed attempt to whitewash Lincoln on the issue of colonization of African-Americans, above all else. When Burlingame started citing David S. Reynolds and James Oakes as additional justification on the issue, I knew the game was up.
Both of them are wrong, too, and I got into a multiple email exchange argument with Oakes.
Here's the basics: Burlingame claims that LIncoln never talked **in public** about colonization after the middle or so of 1862. True as bare fact, but the ethical equivalent of a lie by omission on the big picture.
Reality? Even after Congress had cut off all money for federal support of colonization schemes in the summer of 1864, Lincoln asked his Attorney General, Edward Bates, in the fall of 1864 if 1862 Congressional legislation allowed him to still push colonization without funding.
Then, Ben Butler claimed that, the week of Lincoln's assassination, the president mentioned the idea of reviving the Panama colonization effort to him. Yes, Butler is not the most reliable person, and he said that years later, but it has been confirmed that he met Lincoln on the date in question, at the White House, April 11, 1865. Read this article for a great assessment of Butler's statement, and one that directly refutes Oakes, who claims they didn't meet, and by extension, Reynolds and Burlingame. Per this, we must also question all three authors' rejection of Gideon Welles. I do think Welles does project a lot of himself onto Lincoln, but I don't think he is 100 percent wrong as an observer. (That link is good for other things, too, like people connected to Lincoln and Seward being war profiteers.)
Bates, who was resigning in preparation for Lincoln's second term, declined to give a formal opinion, but informally said that Lincoln could retain colonization agent Mitchell. That would partially corroborate that Butler and Lincoln talked about this issue, and in some depth.
Does that make Lincoln a racist? Not necessarily. But, it does cast a darker shadow on him than Burlingame, along with Oakes and Reynolds, would like to have appear.
That in turn leads one to be skeptical of Burlingame's efforts to sanitize some of Lincoln's older — and some White House-era — comments.
On the colonization, I think Lincoln probably pushed it primarily because he was worried about post-Civil War America. But, did that mean there was only so much lifting he wanted to do on civil rights, and beyond civil rights, on broader societal reform? Remember, Andy Johnson believed he was faithfully following Lincoln's "rosewater" Reconstruction strategy, also not mentioned by Burlingame, or Reynolds or Oakes.
As for racism? By his death, I think Lincoln was better than 90 percent of White Americans of his time, maybe more. Was he better than 100 percent? No. Had John Brown still been alive, we know he would be better. And, related to that? In 1848, or 1858, was Lincoln better than 90 percent of White Americans? Probably not. Maybe 75 percent.
The book gets almost 3 stars (2.75 on StoryGraph — there, Goodreads, it's mentioned by name), to show it's not quite a full 3, in part because of Burlingame repeating the sins of Reynolds and Oakes. But, rather than falling below that, him collecting some lesser-known meetings that Lincoln had with Black Americans partially redeems it.
Note: If ratings on this book continue to trend high, I reserve the right to drop it another star to offset that.
I LOVED his book about the Lincolns' marriage. But, with this? I doubt I'll read him again.
January 11, 2024
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Book 4 of 2024. “The Black Man’s President” by Michael Burlingame.
Subtitled “Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality,” and with title taken from a speech by Frederick Douglass, Burlingame’s book focuses on exactly that: what kind of president was Lincoln to Black Americans?
“Frederick Douglass called the martyred president “emphatically the black man’s president” as well as “the first who rose above the prejudice of his times and country.” This narrative history of Lincoln’s personal interchange with Black people over the course his career reveals a side of the sixteenth president that, until now, has not been fully explored or understood.”
Burlingame has written a two-part biography of Lincoln entitled “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” which I’ve read and was very, very good and interesting. So this has been on my TBR for a while and I got it for Christmas.
This book, including an appendix essay, clocks in at around 230 pages so it is very specific to the subject matter and is a more general read than the intensive biographies.
I had read quite a lot about Douglass and Lincoln’s encounters and relationships in their respective biographies I’ve read. This book shed further light on those and some interactions I wasn’t aware of.
Burlingame makes a good argument that Lincoln isn’t a prototypical racist president that some recent interpretations has him made out to be.
Subtitled “Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Equality,” and with title taken from a speech by Frederick Douglass, Burlingame’s book focuses on exactly that: what kind of president was Lincoln to Black Americans?
“Frederick Douglass called the martyred president “emphatically the black man’s president” as well as “the first who rose above the prejudice of his times and country.” This narrative history of Lincoln’s personal interchange with Black people over the course his career reveals a side of the sixteenth president that, until now, has not been fully explored or understood.”
Burlingame has written a two-part biography of Lincoln entitled “Abraham Lincoln: A Life,” which I’ve read and was very, very good and interesting. So this has been on my TBR for a while and I got it for Christmas.
This book, including an appendix essay, clocks in at around 230 pages so it is very specific to the subject matter and is a more general read than the intensive biographies.
I had read quite a lot about Douglass and Lincoln’s encounters and relationships in their respective biographies I’ve read. This book shed further light on those and some interactions I wasn’t aware of.
Burlingame makes a good argument that Lincoln isn’t a prototypical racist president that some recent interpretations has him made out to be.
June 11, 2023
Detailed and thoughtful exploration of Lincoln’s views on race. Lincoln was a master politician who advanced the rights of African-Americans as quickly as possible. He treated all African-Americans that he met with kindness, respect, and dignity.
July 13, 2022
As a US History teacher I have read as many books about Abraham Lincoln as a could, This book let me see how others viewed him and brought to life has actions.
February 20, 2023
A look at Lincoln's early belief.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews