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
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.
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.
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
Jonathan W. White’s A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House is very much a book for our time. Mr. White persuasively shows how Abraham Lincoln and African-Americans worked together to push for equality in the United States and how they forged a relationship that fostered unity along racial lines during the Civil War. Many readers will be surprised to learn that Lincoln met hundreds of black men and women around Washington, D.C., and that he engaged with them in conversation, as one black visitor said, ‘as though I had been one of his intimate acquaintances or one of his friendly neighbors.’ The strength of the book lies in the many African-American voices that Mr. White unearthed in his research. In a time when many Americans look at great leaders like Lincoln with skepticism, if not disdain, it lifted my spirits to read a book that documents Lincoln’s humble character and genuine belief in the principle that ‘all men are created equal.’ I recommend A House Built by Slaves”—which was the co-winner, with Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle, of this year’s Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize—to anyone who cares about American history and the future of America.
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 African Americans) remains highly recommendable. Its short chapters make this an extremely accessible title for the undergraduate classroom. And the book has a beautiful and effective collection of photos.
American Nineteenth Century History
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
White uses the voices of Lincoln’s visitors, whether critical or favorable, to explore the evolution of opinions about the president's views and actions. White shows us how political and military developments, the evolution his own views on slavery and race, and even what would today be thought of as minor acts, such as his unprecedented reception of African American men and women as guests in the White House, influenced public opinion, which in turn helped further the cause of emancipation.... White has written a readable and thought-provoking account of Lincoln's views and their reception, which is highly recommended.
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
[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.
A House Built by Slaves is a well-written and researched corrective to the counter narrative prevalent in some circles that Lincoln cared little about the lives of Black people and reluctantly pursued emancipation only for military and political reasons. In fact, as White illustrates, precisely the opposite was true. Lincoln’s policies toward African Americans were driven by his humanity and personal regard for the numerous Black people he encountered, often at considerable political risk. Far from being the tale of a closet racist and white supremacist, the story of Lincoln’s various encounters with African Americans, both before and during the war, is that of a man who knew these meetings “could cost him votes, but [who] did not stop. .. welcoming African Americans into his home and office” (xx). Lincoln was (as we all know) a man who lived in a profoundly white-supremacist age; but, as White amply illustrates, he was capable of transcending the shabby bigotry around him by routinely inviting into the people’s house an impressively large number of African American visitors and by treating those visitors with respect.
The Journal of the Civil War Era
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
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 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.
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
[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.
White has written a readable and thought provoking account of Lincoln's views and their reception, and is highly recommended.
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.
11/08/2021
White (Emancipation, the Union Army, and the Reelection of Abraham Lincoln ), 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. Through these and other visits, Lincoln demonstrated his “willingness to welcome black leaders into his orbit when discussing great matters of state,” according to White, who admits that it was “terribly condescending” of the president to lecture a group of African American leaders who visited the White House in 1862 about slavery’s “evil effects on the white race” and why free Blacks would be better off leaving the country, but raises the possibility that it was part of Lincoln’s efforts to prepare “a white racist Northern public” for the Emancipation Proclamation. The detailed recaps of each meeting can grow tedious, and White sometimes overreaches in his readings of primary sources. Still, this is a rich and comprehensive account of a groundbreaking aspect of Lincoln’s presidency. (Feb.)
12/10/2021
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. VERDICT An original and revealing book on a subject heretofore surprisingly missing from the large Lincoln literature. —Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia
