A House Built by Slaves

White, a professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University, provides a granular study of Abraham Lincoln’s practice of welcoming African Americans to the White House. Pushing back against historians who have questioned Lincoln’s commitment to “racial egalitarianism,” White documents the president’s meetings with Daniel Payne, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; former slaves who joined the Union Army; and abolitionists including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.... this is a rich and comprehensive account of a groundbreaking aspect of Lincoln’s presidency.

* Publishers Weekly *

White, the author and editor of several books on Abraham Lincoln, extends his recent work on Black Americans’ engagement with Lincoln to include their visits to Lincoln’s White House. Drawing heavily on the letters, speeches, memoirs, and newspaper accounts of such meetings, White shows that Black people were welcome visitors, both as invited guests and uninvited drop-ins. That Lincoln extended his hand in greeting them and treated them with dignity and respect spoke volumes about his attitudes toward Black people and gave lie to arguments then, and later by some historians, that Lincoln regarded Black people as inferior and unworthy of serious attention. Rather, as White tells it, Lincoln took Black leaders into his confidence, sought their advice, and encouraged them to promote his policies, especially those securing emancipation and raising Black troops. Lincoln’s unassuming nature in dealing with Black people earned him the respect of Black leaders, but it also cost him politically among northern whites who worried Lincoln’s practices opened the door to social and political equality. White argues these visits did much to move Lincoln toward ever stronger commitments to civil rights. An original and revealing book on a subject heretofore surprisingly missing from the large Lincoln literature.

* Library Journal *

White does not write about the enslaved people who helped build the White House but rather capably documents the experiences of African Americans who came to see President Lincoln. White shows Lincoln zigging and zagging in words and actions on race relations, and one key event is Lincoln's 1862 meeting with five African American leaders, during which he avidly pushed for them to leave the U.S. But White asserts that this meeting is the exception to Lincoln’s otherwise substantive, empathetic, and respectful discussions with African Americans thereafter. Using a format that is partly chronological and partly organized by subject, White describes, movingly, Lincoln’s meetings with many African Americans of all backgrounds, providing brief biographies of each participant and describing the conversation and its aftermath. Readers will perceive the sacred and the profane in White’s accounts of the historical context for these encounters. During this era, politicians, journalists, and the public often used biblical references in framing their opinions, yet their commentary was also laced with racial epithets. Images of 20 African Americans who met with Lincoln complete this unusual history.

* Booklist *

Jonathan W. White's A House Built by Slaves steps into the debate about Abraham Lincoln’s attitudes and policies toward African Americans.... White, an important participant in the recent disputes over removing Lincoln statues and Lincoln’s name from public schools, brings impressive credentials to this pathbreaking book about Lincoln’s engagement with African Americans during his four years as president from 1861 to 1865. From the beginning, he pulls no historical punches.... Many historians have tried to understand Lincoln’s journey with slavery. How were Lincoln’s ideas about slavery affected by his 1828 journey to New Orleans, where, at 19 years old, he first encountered the horrors of slave markets? When the Kansas-Nebraska Act made it possible for slavery to extend west into the territories, how did it restart the political career of Lincoln the lawyer? What did he say about African Americans in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois senator who attacked Lincoln as the ‘Black Republican’? Recently, some have emphasized Lincoln’s advocacy for colonization right up to the moment when he first drafted an emancipation proclamation in 1862. Did he craft the final proclamation simply as a shrewd political or military act without any real feeling for African Americans? White references all these questions in Lincoln’s journey with African Americans, but this is not the story he has chosen to tell. By mining diaries, letters, and memoirs, he has uncovered the White House visits of multiple African Americans, either at Lincoln’s invitation or on their own initiatives. White’s analyses of the nature of those engagements are the depth and breadth of this impressive book.... White’s accessible book puts a human face — many human faces — on the story of Lincoln’s attitudes toward and engagement with African Americans.”

* Los Angeles Review of Books *

White shows how the Lincoln White House, in becoming an unprecedented venue for numerous black audiences with the president, served as a daring symbol of their prospects for social and political elevation at a time when sympathy for black Americans was not a majority sentiment even in the North.... A signal contribution of White’s book is his account of the manifold ways that black Americans did not wait to be treated with equal dignity and respect but constantly pressed for their rights as citizens and took the opportunity of social functions and private audiences provided by Lincoln to make their presence and demands known as American citizens.

* Claremont Review of Books *

A fascinating look at how our 16th president welcomed Black guests…. With his new book, White, a history professor at Christopher Newport University and a Lincoln scholar, has given me a fuller, more nuanced view of the Great Emancipator and his legacy. And shouldn’t that be the goal of all good historical writing?.... By chronicling the visits of Black guests to the White House — and Lincoln’s warm reception of them in an era that all but forbade it — Jonathan White has produced in A House Built by Slaves a valuable addition to the Lincoln canon. It’s one that captures not an infallible man, perhaps, but one who grappled to overcome his flaws and rise to the level of greatness later assigned to him.

* Washington Independent Review of Books *

This is an intriguing addition to the world of Lincoln scholarship that takes us inside the Executive Mansion at the dawn of the second founding of the nation. It’s more than a record of handshakes; it’s an attempt to size Lincoln up through the eyes of Black Americans who visited the “people’s house” that their people had built and in whose names they were determined to win the fight for freedom and citizenship.

-- Henry Louis Gates Jr.

In a pioneering work of original scholarship, Jonathan White sheds new light on Lincoln's lifelong encounters with Black Americans from his boyhood through his presidency. In our troubled times, A House Built by Slaves makes a brilliant, necessary, and convincing case for Abraham Lincoln's greatness as a towering American hero and as a valiant martyr to the cause of freedom and civil rights.

-- James L. Swanson, New York Times bestselling author of Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer

Jonathan White tells intimate stories of Black Americans—soldier and civilian, men and women, famous and obscure—often in their own words, who met Abraham Lincoln during the tumult of the Civil War. Those conversations often challenged Lincoln, leading him to embrace freedom and respect for all Americans as redemption of the war’s agony. This eloquent, humane, and important book helps us understand the crucial role played by Black Americans in guiding that journey.

-- Edward L. Ayers, author of The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America

Prior to Abraham Lincoln occupying the White House, Jonathan W. White reminds us, “African Americans were more likely to be bought and sold by a sitting president than to be welcomed as his guests.” The White House became a far more welcoming place for African Americans under Lincoln—and because of Lincoln. White leaves no detail unnoticed as he recreates the many visits to Lincoln’s White House by African Americans. Although Lincoln could be clumsy at first at such encounters, he grew to embrace and enjoy the visits—all the while facing in response a storm of racist invective by his political opponents. White’s excellent, deeply-researched book corrects recent factual inaccuracies and harsh judgments surrounding Lincoln’s treatment of African Americans. In the process, he offers a rich, vivid portrait of the White House in wartime, its vestibules and receiving rooms enriched with the presence of African Americans welcomed by a President eager to hear what they had to say.

-- Michael Vorenberg

A House Built by Slaves continues the discourse regarding Lincoln’s racial views and argues that the president’s treatment of African American visitors to the White House was an indicator of his willingness to accept black men and women as equals. Jonathan White has produced an important work that offers insight into Lincoln’s response to prevailing racial sensibilities and political fallout while attempting to be president to all the people.

-- Edna Greene Medford, Howard University

Jonathan White’s A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House reveals a more complete picture of Lincoln through recorded visits of many African Americans, from humble stations to the intellectual elite. In the current climate of reassessing how America tells its history, A House Built by Slaves illustrates how Lincoln walked among his people as a common, flawed man and ultimately a singular purpose.... White masterfully shows the African American communities’ efforts to influence Lincoln in obtaining full rights for their people, and his choice to use their language of the day makes for a good read. Historians and Lincoln fans will enjoy this accurate retelling of the epoch where America almost came apart at the seams.

* New York Journal of Books *

White’s careful accumulation of Lin­coln’s unfettered interactions with black Americans provides a valuable resource for understanding a more farseeing Lincoln than the shriller voices of despair have described. Be­yond that, it opens a tantalizing win­dow into the enduring question of what would have happened had Lincoln lived.

* National Review *

A House Built By Slaves is...not simply a record of the visits to the White House by African Americans. The stories of these guests are fleshed out and they are placed in a historical context that is fascinating and informative. William J. Walker, a founding father of Fredericksburg’s Shiloh Baptist Church, was a guest at the White House in 1863 as part of a delegation of Baptist ministers who wanted Lincoln’s permission to minister to Black soldiers fighting for the Union. Lincoln granted their request and said “the object was a worthy one.” To purloin Lincoln’s words, A House Built By Slaves is a “worthy one” in the canon of Lincoln scholarship and shows White to be an able and welcome guide in preserving his legacy.

* Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star *

[This] is the work of a scholar in command of his subject and his craft—rendering the book instantly accessible to a wide audience, but also informative to readers possessing a range of expertise about the war.... Because of the richness of these stories, the book will be particularly enriching in classrooms at all levels.... In sum, this is a work that will long deserve a place on the bookshelves of Civil War historians and enthusiasts. To find something new to say about Abraham Lincoln is certainly an achievement; to tell the stories of countless others while doing so cements White’s work as some of the best in the field today.

* The Civil War Monitor *

[E]xcellent and highly readable.... White doesn’t merely discuss one visit after another, which might become tedious. Rather, he provides much background, and...creates a flowing narrative.

* The Federal Lawyer *

It is Abraham Lincoln, and his evolving relationship not only with policies aimed at reordering the lives of Black people in the United States but also his personal attitudes towards African Americans, that is addressed in this character study. By carefully assessing how Mr. Lincoln communicated with and welcomed Black people into the White House, historian Jonathan White, returns the focus on fact rather than emotion in terms of both Abraham Lincoln’s policies and his personal beliefs about race relations in America.... [W]ell-researched and compellingly written.

* Civil War Courier *

White narrates a familiar story of the Civil War transforming Lincoln’s thinking on race and emancipation. But the nature of Lincoln’s wartime evolution unveils White’s vital contribution. Lincoln’s myriad meetings with African Americans compelled him to recognize a new reality born by the fiery trial of war. The presidency was no longer an imposing obstacle to black liberation, the White House no longer a sealed edifice inhabited by powerful slaveholders…. Jonathan White’s fine book relates the many stories of black Americans who unsettled rigid racial barriers to confront an American president in their pursuit of authentic justice. Their appeals for freedom, petitions for equality, and stalwart loyalty to the nation presented unparalleled moral demands on the American regime. Without their full measure of devotion, Lincoln might well have never acted. And the Union might well have perished from the earth.

* Law & Liberty Book Review *

White makes his case with ample, often touching, accounts of less momentous, but equally revealing, meetings with African American callers and petitioners…. A House Built by Slaves is a welcome and crucial contribution to the Civil War literature, and should be cited as long as Lincoln biography is written.

* Civil War News *

This is an exceptional and detailed look at a little discussed and often misunderstood aspect of Lincoln's presidency. The prolific White is known for his extensive research and this book is no exception. It's also eminently readable.

* The Lincolnian *

Through mining a wealth of anecdotes, White presents an engaging and convincing case that the surprisingly amenable relationship forged between President Lincoln and African American visitors to his White House is worthy of the sustained attention it receives across the book.… A House Built by Slaves (or enslaved A