 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C. which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Jonathan W. White about his new book, To Address You as My Friend, which brings together 120 letters written by African-Americans to Abraham Lincoln. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, October 14th at 1 p.m., Woody Holton will discuss his book, Liberty is Sweet, a reassessment of the American Revolution that looks at how the founders were influenced by women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and religious dissenters. And on Wednesday, October 20th at 1 p.m., Francesca Morgan will talk about her new book, A Nation of Descendants, which traces Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage and explores how genealogy has always mattered in our country. Historians come to the National Archives and other research institutions for the raw material of history. Sometimes the stories they extract from the records tell of sweeping events and broad movements. And sometimes the stories are more personal and told by individuals in their own words. Jonathan White has mined the records of the National Archives and Library of Congress to find these personal stories. In his book To Address You as My Friend, we hear the voices of African-Americans during the era of the Civil War, speaking directly to the President of the United States. The letters express opinions and support as for help, share private thoughts, and offer sympathy. Professor White also extensively used the papers of Abraham Lincoln and the freedmen and Southern Society Project, both of which received financial support from our own National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The increasing online availability of these documents allow us all to come face to face with history and gain a greater understanding of the lives of people in the past. Jonathan W. White is Associate Professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University and author or editor of several previous books, including Midnight in America, Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War. Now let's hear from Jonathan White. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me today. It's really a pleasure to speak with the National Archives. I wish I could be in Washington, D.C. with you, but I'm really thrilled to be here and very grateful for the invitation to talk about my new book. I also want to take a moment just to thank the staff of the National Archives. The staff at the Archives are some of the best in the world. And in particular, I want to thank Trevor Plant and Haley Maynard because they have always been just wonderful help whenever I have a question. I can email them and get an answer. And I couldn't have done this book without folks like them. I'm going to share my screen with you and talk about, let's see here, the genesis of the book and what the book seeks to do. Here we go. This book contains between 120 and 125 letters from African Americans to Lincoln. And as the archivist, the United States said, this is drawn to a large extent from the work of other folks who are standing on the shoulders of giants, really. Ivor Berlin, Leslie Rowland and the other editors of the Friedman and Southern Society project at the University of Maryland, they transformed our understanding of the American Civil War through the digging they did at the National Archives and that they continue to do. For 30 or 40 years now, they have been mining the records of the National Archives to unearth a new and different story of what emancipation looked like. And I couldn't have done my work without the work that they have done before me. And in fact, I did my PhD at the University of Maryland, and I'm so grateful for what they've done in my life that I dedicated my book to them as my teachers at the University of Maryland. I'm also indebted to the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project. This is a project run out of Springfield, Illinois at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and they too are spending lots and lots of hours at the National Archives and other repositories around the country, in fact, around the world trying to find every document that they can that was sent either to Abraham Lincoln or received or sent by him or maybe his name's not on it, but we know that he held it. And they are trying to find every document that Lincoln would have held and then scan them in and make them available to the public. And on their website, they have placed over 81,000 documents from the National Archives and the Library of Congress online. And I spent hours and hours and hours and hours just scrolling through those files looking for letters from African Americans. And so the work that I was able to do is, to a large extent, the result of the work that other scholars have done and made available. And then finally, some of the letters I found just doing projects, other research for other projects at the National Archives. And I might be going through a court martial case file and record group 153, find a letter to Abraham Lincoln of a soldier who's been convicted by court martial asking for pardon. Now, these are some of the faces of some of the men who wrote to Abraham Lincoln. And I say men specifically, because so far I have not been able to find photographs or images of any of the women who wrote to Lincoln. There are about 125 letters in the book. The vast majority of them, about 100 or 101, are from the National Archives. And I have had so many joyous hours doing research at Archives One in D.C. and Archives Two in College Park and, in fact, a number of the regional branches as well. And so a lot of the letters in the or almost all the letters in this book are from men and women. And they got filed through or routed through the federal bureaucracy and then wound up in different record groups at the National Archives. And for today, I'm going to focus mainly on letters that I have a photograph or an image of the writer, because I think it can help to humanize their experience to not only see the words on the page, but also their face and know what they look like. And in the middle of this collage, I have Abraham Lincoln sitting at his White House desk. And I love to think about Lincoln sitting in his White House office, which, of course, is now the Lincoln bedroom, and he would be receiving these letters and looking through many of them and, in some cases, responding personally. Now, the letters come from three sources. As I mentioned, the majority of them come from the National Archives, but about 21 of them come from the Library of Congress. And I'll just tell you about a couple of those. One of them came from a man named Leonard Grimes, who you see pictured here. On August 21st, 1863, Leonard Grimes led a delegation of 11 Baptist ministers to the White House, and they came to the White House to ask for assistance in their ministry. Grimes had been born free in Virginia in 1815. And in the 1830s, he was actually working to help slaves run away from Virginia and escape to freedom, and he was arrested and imprisoned in Richmond. When he got out of prison, he ended up going to Boston, moving there and working on the Underground Railroad. And by the time the Civil War rolls around, he's working as a recruiter for Black soldiers, even for some in the very famous 54th Massachusetts. And on this particular day in August of 1863, Grimes and 10 other Baptist ministers go to the White House and they hand a petition to Lincoln. And they ask him for protection, they said, toward sending missionaries on southern soil to promulgate the Gospel of Christ within the lines of the military forces of the United States. And Lincoln welcomed these men into his office, and he took their petition and he listened with patience, and then he wrote out a little note of his own. And he said, he said this, the object is a worthy one. And I shall be glad for all facilities to be afforded them, which may not be inconsistent with or a hindrance to our military operations. In other words, I'll do what I can as commander-in-chief to help these ministers go within the lines of Union armies as long as it doesn't hurt the military cause. A few months later on November 5th, 1863, a delegation of five African Americans from the African Civilization Society traveled from New York down to Washington and met with Lincoln. And again, they hand him a note asking, or they hand his secretaries a note asking for an interview, and then they go and meet with him. Two of the men were George Washington Laverre, who you see pictured here. He was a minister from Boston. And then another was Richard Harvey Cain. Cain was a native from Virginia who ended up going to Wilberforce University in Ohio. And these men went to Lincoln and asked him for $5,000. They said, we need the money. They said to support our work of giving civilization, the gospel, science and commerce to our people wherever they may need them. In their petition, they compared Lincoln to Moses and they thanked him. They said, for your many timely services recently rendered a suffering portion of our race in this land. Now, that letter is in the Library of Congress, but in doing my digging, I found that Richard Cain wrote to Lincoln again in January of 1864. And that second letter is at the National Archives. And in this one, Cain asked for support in going as a missionary to the South. And what's incredible about Cain is he ended up doing this and he moved to South Carolina after the war. He was elected to Congress. One of the African American men who gets elected to Congress during Reconstruction and he served as pastor of a manual AME church in Charleston. Another letter at the Library of Congress is from William Slade. Slade was Lincoln's valet. He was the third highest ranked White House staff at the time of the Lincoln administration. He was a close confidence of the president. Slade's daughter said that her father knew every word of the Emancipation Proclamation before it was issued. And Slade was a very important leader in the black community of Washington, D.C. And in April of 1863, a number of African Americans wrote a petition to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton asking for a particular white officer to be appointed to be a commander of a black regiment. And Slade wrote a cover letter for that addressed to his boss, Abraham Lincoln, endorsing this petition. And I think it speaks to the close relationship that Slade had with the president. And then the final Library of Congress letter that I'll talk about is from William Fleurville. Fleurville was a Haitian immigrant. He came to the United States in the early 19th century. And in 1831, he was moving to Illinois and he was passing through the very small boom town of New Salem, Illinois. And there happened to be a young man living there named Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln and Fleurville meet in the woods. And Lincoln invites Fleurville back to his home for the night so that Fleurville has a place to stay. And they begin a friendship at that point. And Fleurville moves to Springfield. Lincoln moves to Springfield a few years later and they maintain a friendship. Fleurville is a barber. He cuts Lincoln's hair. Lincoln is a lawyer. He handles Lincoln or he had handles legal matters for Fleurville. And they maintain their friendship for the rest of their lives. And in December of 1863, Fleurville sent Lincoln a letter. And it was just a personal letter saying here. Sorry, I jumped ahead saying, here's what's going on in Springfield. Here's what you're missing out on. By the way, your dog Fido is doing OK. He sent his condolences to Lincoln because Lincoln had lost his favorite son Willie in February of 1862. And he expressed his wish that Lincoln would be reelected in 1864. And it's just this really beautiful personal letter from an old friend. And I called this book to address you as my friend. I'll talk more throughout the talk about how African Americans really come to see Lincoln as a friend. But the first letter in the book is this one from Fleurville because it really was from an old friend. About four of the letters and four or five of the letters in the book appeared in newspapers. And one of them came from a Liberian immigration commissioner named Alexander Krummel, who met with Lincoln in 1862 and tried to convince Lincoln to send African Americans to Liberia through the process of colonization. And there's a letter that Lincoln wrote to Krummel that appears in this book that appeared in the newspapers. Another one is from George Vashon. George Vashon was a very highly educated African American. He was actually a college professor. And Vashon had the opposite view of colonization, whereas Krummel liked it. Vashon represented the vast majority of African Americans in opposing colonization. And he wrote a scathing and learned public letter to Lincoln, saying, we have been born in this country. This is our country. We don't want to move to another place. And then one other public letter that was handed to Lincoln as a petition came from Abraham Galloway. Galloway was a former slave from North Carolina. He escaped from bondage on a ship filled with turpentine. He was hidden below decks in this ship, escaped to Philadelphia to the very famous Underground Railroad conductor, William Still. And William Still later described meeting Galloway. The turpentine on the ship had caused his pores to open up and he was bleeding when he got into freedom. But Galloway self emancipated before the war in that way, escaping on the Underground Railroad. During the Civil War, he went back into the South and became a spy for Union General Benjamin Butler. And then in April of 1864, Galloway goes to the White House with five other North Carolinians and they present a petition to Lincoln calling for the right to vote. And that petition, the original no longer survives or if it does, I haven't been able to find it, but it was published in the New York Anglo-African newspaper and we get it that way. And so, you know, 21 of the letters come from the Library of Congress and then a handful come from newspapers. The vast majority, though, are held as manuscripts at the National Archives. And so now, for the rest of my talk, I'm going to tell you about some of the highlights that I found at the archives. One of the most interesting figures in my book is and I have just become fascinated with him as a man named Alexander T. Augusta. I was actually in Washington, D.C. three days ago and I went to Arlington Cemetery. He is buried there and I dragged my five and eight year old daughters around for 40 minutes and we couldn't we knew roughly where his tomb was. We couldn't find it. And after 40 minutes, a five and eight year old can only take so much. So we gave up now I know exactly where it is and I'm going to go back and take them there to see his grave. Alexander Augusta is one of these guys who really should have a monument built to him. He was born in Norfolk, Virginia, about 30 minutes away from where I am right now, and he was born into a free black family. But at some point in the early 1830s, his family moved to Baltimore. My hunch is that after Nat Turner's rebellion, as Virginia began to clamp down on enslaved people and free black people, his family probably thought we need to get out of Virginia. And so they moved to Baltimore. He went to California during the gold rush, and then he decided that he wanted to be a doctor. So he applied to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, but Jefferson would not allow him in on account of his race. And so he moved to Toronto, where he was able to get a medical education. He got his medical degree there and practiced medicine for several years in Toronto. Then the Civil War begins, and on January 1st, 1863, Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation. And six days later, and in this document, Lincoln says black men can join the army. Six days later, Alexander Augusta sends this letter to Abraham Lincoln, and he explains how he says, I was compelled to leave my native country and come to this one to Canada on account of prejudice against color so that he could become a doctor. And then you'll see at the top right, he says he wants to join the army so that he can be of use to my race. Now, Alexander Augusta was eminently qualified to be an army surgeon, but he faced an incredible amount of discrimination in the process of applying. He traveled to Washington, DC to be examined by the Army Medical Board in March, 1863. And the president of that board was a man named Meredith Clymer. And Clymer said that he was surprised to see that Augusta, quote, appeared to be a person of African descent. And so Clymer didn't want to examine Augusta. And Augusta explained to the board, he said, I have come near a thousand miles at great expense and sacrifice, hoping to be of some use to my country, and my race at this eventful period. He said, I hope the board will take a favorable view of my case. But the board was unmoved. Dr. Clymer and Surgeon General William Hammond, they both wanted Augusta's invitation recalled. Fortunately, the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, refused to give in to their racially motivated request. And he ordered that the examination proceed. On April 1st, 1863, Augusta passed the board's examination with flying colors, and he was commissioned a major in the U.S. Army. He is the first African American to receive an Army commission in U.S. history. There was one witness who said this about his examination. He said, Dr. Augusta was put through a squeezing process which few surgeons in or out of the service could have sustained unscathed. And then this person said, the fun of it, the fun of the thing is that it is highly probable that Augusta knew more than his questioners. And after this examination, the Surgeon General of the United States Army goes to the examining position, whose name was Dr. Cronin. And I'm going to edit what he said a little bit. It uses the N-word twice. He said, I say, Cronin, how did you come to let that N-word pass? And Dr. Cronin replied, the fact is, General, that the N-word knew more than I did, and I could not help myself. It's an incredible moment. So Dr. Augusta is now a major in the U.S. Army, but he did not have an easy time after that. And he went on to have a very turbulent Army career. It involved walking in Baltimore with his uniform on and being publicly assaulted, punched in the face with a bleed until he had a bleeding nose by a white ruffian in the streets of Baltimore. It involved two other white men ripping off his epulates that he was wearing that he had earned as an officer in the Union Army. It involved riding a streetcar in Washington, D.C. and being forced off of the streetcar because he refused to sit in a racially segregated streetcar or actually sit in the front with the driver because they wouldn't allow him to ride in the streetcar itself with white passengers. But Augusta would not allow himself to be mistreated without fighting back. And one of the high points of his career is that in February of 1864, he and another black Army surgeon, Anderson Abbott, went to the White House for a public reception. Lincoln would hold these receptions on Tuesday evenings and Augusta and Abbott walk up to the White House uninvited and they go through the door and they shake Abraham Lincoln's hand. And Mary Lincoln sends her son, Robert, over to say to the president, are you really going to do this? And Lincoln says, why not? And you could just see that Lincoln was so pleased to shake the hands of these two Army doctors. And one of Lincoln's private secretaries later wrote about this and he said that seeing these two black men go into the White House was a practical assertion of Negro citizenship for which few were prepared. And then he added it was as good as a play. And I love those lines, a practical assertion of Negro citizenship. Alexander, Augusta and Anderson Abbott were saying, Abraham Lincoln is our commander-in-chief. This White House is our people's house. And we have as much of a right as anyone else to walk into it and to meet the president and shake his hand. In some cases, black men offered their services as military recruiters. This is Paschal Randolph. He was a famous black spiritualist and sex magician. Please don't ask me during the Q&A what a sex magician means. I am not prepared to answer that question. At any rate, Paschal Randolph had he wrote a letter to Lincoln in October of 1863 saying that he wanted to work as a recruiter for black soldiers. He also met with Lincoln earlier in the war. Lincoln told Randolph that he would do better work in the field of education. And so Randolph moved to New Orleans and helped found a school for black teachers that was named after Lincoln. It became known as Abraham Lincoln School. Out of gratitude for all Lincoln had done for African-Americans and for the nation, Randolph dedicated a book that he wrote and published in 1863 to Lincoln. And you can see the dedication page on the bottom right here to Honest Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States as a testimonial of my gratitude for his efforts to save the nation and widen the area of human freedom. And here is an image of the school that Paschal Randolph helped found in New Orleans called the Abraham Lincoln School. And it was a it was a school for freedmen and to train up new teachers. Now, sometimes when people wrote to Lincoln making a suggestion, Lincoln actually tapped them for the job. This is Jeremiah Asher. Jeremiah Asher was born free in Connecticut in 1812. His grandfather had been a little boy living in Africa and at four years old was kidnapped and brought over through the Middle Passage and enslaved in the United States. Jeremiah Asher was born free in Connecticut and he grew up to become a pastor. And in 1840 he was ordained. And when the Civil War came around, he was shepherding a church in Philadelphia. In September of 1863, he sent this letter to Lincoln calling for more black chaplains to be appointed to serve in black regiments. And he explained why. And you can see it about halfway down this letter. He said the soldiers are anxious to have colored ministers as their spiritual teachers. And in this case, Lincoln hated his call. And he said, how about you? He appointed Asher to be a chaplain in the sixth United States colored infantry, which was a regiment largely raised in the Philadelphia area and trained at a camp called Camp William Penn. And Asher served in that position and he served well. In addition to caring for the needs, the spiritual needs of the soldiers of the 60 US colored troops, he also would travel from Tidewater, Virginia, where I am here, down into North Carolina to recruit new soldiers for the regiment. On one occasion, though, he wrote, the last month has been of constant one of constant excitement and fatigue. And he eventually ran himself ragged. Very sadly, Asher died in the service in July of 1865, very close to where I am here in Tidewater, Virginia. He was the only black chaplain to die while in the service during the Civil War. Another chaplain that Lincoln met with and then received a letter from was a man named Chauncey Leonard. Chauncey Leonard is pictured on the right here of this image. Chauncey Leonard met with Lincoln in 1862. He was in favor of colonization at the time. He said, will you give me some money to travel to Africa on a scouting mission to try to figure out if we can take more African Americans to Africa? And Lincoln gave him two hundred dollars. And Chauncey Leonard went across the Atlantic Ocean, spent some time in Africa, in Liberia, ended up getting very sick and then returning to the United States. And after he got back, he sent this letter to Lincoln. And I should point out all of the scans that I'm showing you of letters, except for this one, come from the papers of Abraham Lincoln and from the national that were scanned at the National Archives. This one I got from the microfilm of letters received by the Commission branch. But Chauncey Leonard sends this letter and he says, being anxious to accomplish the greatest amount of good to the colored soldiers of the United States Army, I most respectfully asked to be appointed hospital chaplain at the Hospital for Colored Troops in this place, Alexandria, Virginia. And Lincoln, Lincoln remembered this guy, remembered meeting with him, sent it on to the War Department and asked that Chauncey Leonard get this position. And here's an image, here's the full image of Chauncey Leonard with his men at this Hospital for African American Soldiers in Alexandria, Virginia. And Leonard cared for them, their physical needs, their spiritual needs. He led Bible studies, he baptized them, he taught them how to read. For those who were unable to read, he would write letters home for them. And when and actually some of those letters that he wrote still survive or he would write condolence letters when they died. When Chauncey Leonard received word of Lincoln's assassination, he wrote an official report that is held at the National Archives. And this is just a little bit of an excerpt. And I think it's a powerful statement for how he and his fellow black soldiers thought about Lincoln. He said, as soldiers in the US service, we mourn the loss of our noble chief magistrate, we have looked to him as our earthly pilot to guide us through this national storm and plant us securely on the platform of liberty and equal political right. But God and his wise providence has removed him. Brave men weep for him who is no more. Really powerful statement, I think. You might be noticing a theme here. There are a lot of chaplains who wrote to Lincoln. I have a bunch in the book and part of it has to do with literacy rates. These are people who are literate. And so they're going to be more likely to be able to write letters. I'll tell you about one more chaplain who I think is tremendously interesting and important. This is Benjamin Franklin Randolph. As far as I know, no no. Connection to the sex magician, Pashel Randolph, I told you about earlier. Randolph was born free in Kentucky. He studied at Oberlin College from 1857 to 1862. He became a chaplain in the 2060 United States Colored Troops. And in August of 1864, he wrote to Lincoln asking for new uniforms to be designed for chaplains. And this is his letter here. And he wrote this. He said, the present uniform has nothing to distinguish it from the ordinary clergyman's dress. And the consequences chaplains frequently suffer in dignities because they are not recognized as chaplains. I know this by sad experience. Now, I don't think that Lincoln changed the design for uniforms. But this lets you this shows you how African Americans appealed to Lincoln for all sorts of different concerns that they were facing. Now, I wanted to mention Randolph. This letter isn't the most interesting or most important in the book, but he has a great significance during reconstruction. During the Civil War, he is serving in South Carolina. And following the war, he remains there. And he becomes very active in Republican Party politics and in the fight for equal rights for African Americans. And in 1868, he was serving as a state senator in South Carolina and as chairman of the Republican State Central Committee. And he was traveling throughout the state and one day in broad daylight, he's standing on a train station platform and three white supremacists come up and assassinate him in cold blood. He is a martyr for equal rights for African Americans. And one newspaper at the time lamented that he was, quote, a victim of rebel hate. Here was an extraordinary man, a brave man who sacrificed his life in the cause of human freedom and equality during that very dark period of racial violence that took place after the Civil War. Now, one of the issues that is ubiquitous in this book is the issue of Black soldiers pay. Now, Black men could start serving in the army in late 1862. And then after the Emancipation Proclamation, they begin entering the army in great numbers so that by the end of the Civil War, somewhere around 200,000 Black men are going to fight for the union cause. But they didn't receive equal treatment. African Americans served in segregated regiments that were commanded by white officers. They often received subpar weapons and equipment. They were tasked with doing menial labor that was called fatigue duty rather than fighting. They wanted to be fighting, but they get stuck doing the grunt work. And more galling for them. Federal authorities determined that Black soldiers should be paid as laborers rather than soldiers. So they enlist in the Union Army expecting to be paid $13 a month. And instead, they receive only $10 in a month. And not only that, because they're laborers, they get taken an additional $3 out of their paycheck. For a clothing allowance. And so instead of $13 a month, they are getting paid $7 a month. And they are outraged by this. Some of them also have problems getting the bounty money that they had been promised. This is a 20 year old private named Thomas Pepper, who enlisted in the 102nd U.S. Colored Infantry. And this photograph that you see here is actually from Pepper's pension record at the National Archives. There's two photographs of him. And actually, I know the archives, whenever there's a photo, they want to pull it out to preserve it. So now you all know, I should have told you, maybe I told someone earlier. I don't remember. But now you know, and you can preserve these photos of Thomas Pepper. Thomas Pepper was a native of Canada who joins the Union Army in November of 1864. And he wrote to Lincoln because he never or he claimed he never got his bounty. And here's just a little bit of his letter. He said, I have not got one cent yet, and I don't think I have any business in the service at all. I am the only support for my mother and I can't support her on nothing. They agreed to pay the money before I left, but they did not do as they agreed. Therefore, I don't consider myself a soldier. If I am to be a soldier, I want to come in honest. And therefore, I beg the most honorable president to set me free. And you can see that language at the bottom of that big middle paragraph to set me free. I've I'm so struck by that language. You find this a lot in the letters that African Americans send to Lincoln. If they are forced into the service in a way that they see as unjust, if they're not getting paid, what they are owed, if they have been tricked into the service, or if they've been enlisted as a minor, they liken their service to slavery. They liken the recruitment or they're forcing into the service conscription like the slave trade where they think about kidnapping. In one case, a man wrote to Lincoln. This letter is one of the most incredible I've found. A man wrote to Lincoln in February of 1862, which is right when the Lincoln administration executed a slave trader named Nathaniel Gordon. Nathaniel Gordon is the only slave trader in American history to be executed. He had kidnapped over 900 Africans, got caught in the Atlantic Ocean, and Lincoln carries out the full sentence against him. And this was big news. And I found a man from Ohio who wrote to Lincoln and said, I thought we executed kidnappers and my son, who is only 16, has been forced into the army. Are you really going to allow him to be kidnapped? So these ideas, likening unjust military service to slavery, I think are very powerful reminders of the situation that many African Americans were in in the 1860s during the Civil War. Sometimes men banded together to call for equal pay. Seventy four members of the 55th Massachusetts Infantry signed a petition to Lincoln following a mutiny in the regiment. And here's what happened in the mutiny. On May 1st, 1864, there was a private in the regiment named Wallace Baker. And he mutinied against a white officer, a lieutenant named Thomas Ellsworth. And he said, I won't stand to attention for you or any other damned white officer. And an all out brawl erupted and Baker was arrested. And he was court-martialed and sentenced to be executed. And the execution was carried out a month and a half later on June 18th. According to one account of the execution, as private Baker was about to be shot. They said to him, do you have anything to say? And he said, yes, go and tell your damned lieutenant to fire and be damned. And I'll meet him either in heaven or hell and get even with him. Less than a month after this execution, seventy four members of this regiment, the 54th Massachusetts get together, they write out a petition to Lincoln and they demand the full pay they've been promised. The first signatory on this petition, presumably the man who wrote it, was this sergeant who you see pictured here, John Freeman Shorter. And the petitioner said, among other things, to us money is no object. We came to fight for liberty and justice and equality. These are gifts we prize more highly than gold. For these we left our homes, our families, friends and relatives, most dear to take as it were our lives in our hands to do battle for God and liberty. They concluded with ominous language. They said, if immediate steps are not taken to relieve us, we will resort to more stringent measures. Eleven of these men who signed this petition would later be killed in action and another nine would be wounded while fighting for their country. Eventually in June of 1864, Lincoln signed a law equalizing the pay of black soldiers for who had been free before the war. But it wouldn't be until 1865 that Lincoln would sign a law that gave all black men in uniform the same equal pay. This issue of equal pay is a common theme that runs throughout the letters in this book. I've got a whole chapter of men and women writing to Lincoln about equal pay and then it crops up in other letters in other chapters of the book as well. And black men and women often told Lincoln about how they needed this money to survive. And some of these letters are the most heart wrenching letters you'll ever read in your life. In January of 1864, a woman named Esther Ann Jackson, who was the wife of a soldier in the third US colored infantry, wrote to Lincoln. She said, I sent down to write you a few lines to see what can be done for my husband. He has been out for six months and has not got no pay yet. And he is sick and I want to know if he can't come home. I have three small children and no way for them to get along. Soldiers hated knowing that their loved ones were suffering. In January of 1864, four non-commissioned officers who were stationed in Pensacola, Florida, sent a letter to Lincoln. Like many other black soldiers, they asked for equal for treatment that was equal to that of white soldiers. And here's just a short excerpt of their very long letter. Please, your honor, when we enlisted in the United States Service, the understanding was that we should receive the same pay and ration as the white soldiers. We have the same feeling for our wives and children at home. And we study the welfare of them so much so as the white soldiers. They are in a starving condition. We can't support them on seven dollars per month. Please, your honor, all we ask is for justice bestowed on us. And there shan't be one star in the glorious banner of liberty that won't shine out brightly over all the patriots fighting to maintain your just law. Please, your honor, we don't look for any better treatment than the white soldiers, but the same. And then this next line I think is so powerful. The cannon and the rifles ball have not one bit of respect of person in action. In other words, when the bullets are flying, a black soldier is just as likely to be shot as a white soldier. They said our lives is as sweet to us as it is to them that receive 13 dollars a month. In some cases, petitions to Lincoln were successful. This is Samuel Harrison. He was the chaplain of the very famous 54th Massachusetts Infantry, the subject of the movie Glory, and they charged battery Wagner, which I put up here for you to see. And when it came to be payday, the paymaster at Hilton Head said to Harrison, well, you get ten dollars a month, just like any other black soldier, black laborer. And Harrison said, I'm a chaplain. I am owed a hundred dollars a month, plus two rations. And he refused to accept the lower rate. In March of 1864, he sent a letter to Lincoln and he described the dire circumstances he was in. And he asked that Lincoln would work to get the full amount owed to him. And Lincoln did. And the War Department eventually paid him the four hundred seventy dollars that he was owed. Now, with black soldiers serving in the Union armies, they now began to press the Lincoln administration for the full rights of citizenship. And in March of 1864, two black men from New Orleans brought this petition to the White House and presented it to Lincoln. They asked for the right to vote. And in it, in this petition, they appealed to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they pointed out that black men had served for the United States caused during the War of 1812. And we're now serving during the Civil War. And the petition carried the signatures of a thousand men, including 28 black men who had served in the army under Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815. They said, we are men, treat us as such. And they called for, quote, those inalienable rights, which belong to the condition of citizens of the Great American Republic. Now, Lincoln told his visitors, you know, he read this petition, he said to them that his priority at this point had to be winning the war. But he said, if black voting rights became necessary to winning the war, he said, I will not hesitate. For he said, I see no reason why intelligent black men should not vote. But this question was not a military question. Still, he assured them that their request, he said, he would support it whenever they could show that giving the black community or black men the right to vote, he said, would be necessary to bringing Louisiana, Louisiana back into the union. That the men Lincoln and these two men sat down at Lincoln's cabinet table in his White House office and had a conversation and wrote out some ideas. And one witness to this discussion later said, the southern gentlemen who were present at the scene did not hesitate to admit that their prejudices had just received another shock. On March 10th, these two petitioners, they wrote out a new petition that reframed their request. Now they said that black men should be given the vote. They said to give full effect to all the union feeling in the rebel states in order to secure the permanence of the free institutions and loyal governments now organized therein. In other words, the best way to subdue disloyal sentiment in the Confederacy is to create a new class of loyal black voters. It's a huge theme in these letters. African Americans write to Lincoln and they say, hey, all the white Southerners are disloyal, but they're not all, but many most. But black Southerners are the most loyal people you'll find in this country. In other words, put simply, black votes will be the way to win the war and sustain the peace. And incredibly, Lincoln listened to them and adopted their view. And a couple of days later, on March 13th, he wrote a private letter to Louisiana Governor-elect, a guy named Michael Hahn. And he said that educated black men or those who were serving in the army should be given the right to vote. He said such voters will probably help in some trying time to come to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. I love that line. Black votes will probably help in some trying time to come to keep the jewel of liberty within the family of freedom. Lincoln's eloquent words captured the idea that black voters would be essential to preserving liberty in the United States after the Civil War was over. He wasn't ready to take this position publicly yet, but he began working behind the scenes to push for black suffrage. And for Lincoln, what he came to see is that African-Americans' rights would be best protected if they had the ability to have a voice in the government. Now, so far, I've talked about letters from men. As I mentioned, there are about 19 or 20 letters from women that appear in the book. And there are also three letters that were written by white teachers who went to the South who wrote letters for illiterate black men. I'll talk about a few of my favorites here. Some of the letters are famous. This one is very famous. This is from a woman named Annie Davis, and she wrote to Lincoln in August of 1864. She said, I want to visit some of my family on the eastern shore. My mistress won't let me. I want to know, am I free, am I free yet? She wasn't free yet. She would become free on November 1st, 1864, when Maryland freed, adopted a new constitution for their state. This letter was discovered by Ira Berlin and the team of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project years ago. But this is just one of the most incredible letters at the National Archives, I think. Other letters have not yet seen the light of day. In September of 1864, a woman named Julia Rouser, who was a black refugee in Washington, sent Lincoln a letter describing the dire circumstances she was in because her husband William had been drafted and she asked for him to be discharged. Here's just a little bit of what she wrote. I am totally unfit to obtain a living for my young child and myself. It is impossible for me to go out to service or in any way provide for my children, for my child. Thus, in the absence of my husband, I am thrown upon my own exertions in order to feed and clothe us and subject and subject as I am to spasms and convulsions. I can find no person who will give me employment and no relative or friends to whom I look for for aid or assistance. Here's an excerpt from another soldier's wife. And this one's from upstate New York in September, 1864. She talks about how she can't get any help. She's tried every way and with her husband in the army, her friends have said, well, right to Lincoln. And she hopes that Lincoln will help. She says, I'm willing to work for myself so that my husband can work for his country. I am proud to be the wife of a union soldier. I could live on most anything so that I could live at all, but I cannot earn a single cent. I am sick in bed as I write and my little ones are crying for bread. And I have none to give them. And she pleads with Lincoln for help. The last story I want to tell involves a woman named Elizabeth Shorter. She was a black teenager living in Washington, DC, during the Civil War. And she was working as a servant in the home of a shoemaker named Frank Pruitt. And one night, Lizzie was going to bed on the sofa in Pruitt's store and Frank came in as it was getting dark and he sat down next to her. And it was dark and she couldn't see who was there. And she asked who it was. And he said, it is me, Liz, Frank, I want to get into bed with you. But you won't tell Lib, his wife, will you? And Lizzie said she was tired and she told him to go away. But he persevered and got into bed and put his arm around her. Put his arm around her neck, in fact, and ended up sleeping with her. Soon, Lizzie realized she was pregnant and she had a baby girl on November 30, 1863. Sometime around Christmas, Frank said to Lizzie that he wanted her to take the child and get out of the house. And she replied that she would only leave if he gave her financial support, but he refused. So she decided to confront him in front of his wife. And when she did this, he became angry and he turned to his wife and he said, Lib, do you believe this damned black bitch? And his wife said, yes, Frank, I do. For the last three months, you've acted as though you were afraid of Liz. And at that, Frank jumped up and he grabbed a revolver and he pointed it at Lizzie and he said, God damn you, I never intended to die a natural death and I'll blow your damned brains out. But Mrs. Pruitt grabbed the pistol and scolded him at that. Frank grabbed Lizzie, he choked at her neck, shoved her against the wall and ordered her out of the house. And Lizzie hurried away with her baby in her arms. When she returned later that day to get her belongings, Mrs. Pruitt gave her some money. Now, unfortunately, Frank went to the local court and he had her arrested for grand larceny. She spent a week in prison before being released on bail. And sometime around this, I'm not exactly sure when her baby died. Lizzie Shorter went to trial for larceny on November 3rd, 1864. What would have been her daughter's first birthday? She was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison at the Albany Penitentiary in New York. The following day, she sent a letter to Lincoln. An unknown hand wrote it for her and she signed it with an X for her mark. And here's a little bit of the beginning of the letter. She said, the fault was not my own for which I was convicted, but I was most I will most solemnly declare before my maker that I am guilty of no crime. She explained how at an evil hour, she gave way to the importunities of Mr. Pruitt and became pregnant with his child. Having now nowhere left to turn, she implored Lincoln for mercy. And she said the money which I was charged with stealing was given to me by Mrs. Pruitt on condition that I would say nothing of the connection between myself and Mr. Pruitt. As Lincoln sat in his White House holding this letter and reviewing her case file, many thoughts must have flashed through his mind. His own genealogy had some striking similarities to her story. He believed that his mother's conception was the result of a wealthy Virginia planter taking sexual advantage of a poor young girl. And this was a painful memory for Lincoln. He also had very strong misgivings about society's moral and inconsistencies in cases of seduction. He thought it was unjust that women received more blame than men who participated in sexual indiscretions. He even wrote a poem about that as a young man. He wrote, whatever spiteful fools may say, each jealous, ranting yellper. No woman ever played the whore unless she had a man to help her. Last time I checked, those lines were not carved in stone at the Lincoln Memorial. But Pruitt's sexual exploitation of Elizabeth Shorter clearly offended Lincoln's sense of justice, and he must have felt empathy for the young mother. After all, he knew the grief of losing a child, having lost two sons of his own. Considering all the evidence on hand and moved with compassion, Lincoln issued a pardon on November 5th before she could even be sent to prison in New York. On the back of her letter, he wrote these words that you see, pardon a Lincoln November 5th, 1864. This is probably the fastest pardon he ever granted two days after conviction, making it all the more remarkable is the timing. Three days later, Lincoln would stand for reelection for his second term in office. I think the story of Lizzie Shorter is such an important one. It's completely unknown today, but it confirms Lincoln's belief that all people deserve a fair hearing and equality before the law. He knew that Lizzie Shorter had been wronged, and so he did what he could to rectify the situation. He strove to be a president who acted upon principles of equality, regardless of a person's race, color or condition of servitude. There are 125 letters in the book. Again, about 101 of them come from the National Archives. And one of the most incredible things about them is that they come from 15 different record groups at the National Archives. And within these, some of the record groups have six or seven different entries that have letters from African Americans. This diverse array of record groups at the National Archives that contains letters from black women and men speaks to the wide array of problems that black people faced during the war, as well as the various levels of government or levers of government that they attempted to pull to resolve their dilemmas. I've gone about three minutes over, and so I'm going to stop sharing my screen. And I see we haven't gotten any questions yet. But if if you do have any questions, we've got a few minutes, please feel free to post them. But while I wait to see if there's any questions that come in, I'd like to just read a little bit, a very short excerpt from the book. And this comes from my introduction to the book. And I hope that you all will find this book to be a valuable contribution to our understanding of African American life during this most multuous period of American history. So here's just a very short excerpt. One gets a sense when reading these letters that some of the correspondence felt a personal connection to Lincoln, almost as if they knew him. Some likely believed that they could empathize with him since he too had grown up in extreme poverty and hardship. They therefore wrote him in very personal ways. A black Union soldier who was just learning to read and write sent Lincoln a poem with this post script. I send this for you to look at. You must not laugh at it. Lincoln retained this letter in his personal collection of papers, likely indicating that he was personally moved by the sentiments it contained. To be sure, Lincoln likely read only a small number of the letters that appear in this book, his private secretaries screened the two to three hundred letters he received each day, working under the rule, refer as little to the president as possible. Lincoln's private secretary, John Hay, estimated that Lincoln only read one in 50 of the letters he received. Nevertheless, these correspondence felt confident petitioning someone they considered their friend and their president who had been concerned with their freedom and rights for working to destroy slavery. It speaks volumes about Lincoln's reputation among poor, free black people and slaves, as well as about their own place in American society. Well, thank you so much for having me today. I am looking for we got a question in. Did Lincoln have anyone to field the letters for him or did he go through all of them himself? Great question. Lincoln hired a number of different private secretaries, starting with when he was elected president and then throughout the war. The two most famous are John Nicolet and John G. or John G. Sorry, John G. Nicolet and John Hay. Lincoln hired them when they were working in Springfield. He gets elected president November of 1860. That's when the avalanche of correspondence starts coming in. And Nicolet would work in Lincoln's office in the state capital going through the letters and only referring the things to him that were absolutely essential for him to see. Very sadly, you know, Lincoln got a lot of hate mail and Nicolet didn't want Lincoln to be alarmed by these kinds of letters. And so Nicolet burned lots and lots of the letters that Lincoln received that, you know, we wish as historians today we could know what people were writing. Only a handful of those survive. One is held by the Gilder and Lairman Institute in New York City. One is held by the Chicago Historical Society. Other than those two, I'm not sure of other. I guess two, two are at Chicago Historical, other than that, there's not much of the really vicious and vitriolic hate mail that survives. When Lincoln came to Springfield, he brought Nicolet with him. He was allowed to have one secretary on the payroll, but he knew that wouldn't be enough. And so he brought another young man named John Hay and Hay's uncle offered to pay Lincoln or pay the nephew's salary and Lincoln was able to work it out to get Hay a salary by getting him a commission in the federal government. Over the years, Lincoln hired other people as assistants as well. I quoted the one private secretary when Alexander T. Augusta and Anderson R. Abbott go to the White House for the reception. And one of his private secretaries says it was a practical assertion of Negro citizenship and as good as a play that was written by another man in William O. Stoddard, who was brought on to the White House staff. And then another man was brought on much later during the war. And so they are Lincoln's getting two to three hundred letters a day and they are screening those letters. They are routing a lot of them to different federal agencies or departments. And and that's why they're actually in so many different record groups at the National Archives, because the private secretaries get them and then send them out. And then sometimes they come back to Lincoln and then he might write something on them. But it's very few letters that Lincoln receives and actually deals with. In the book, I included any anything I found where Lincoln actually did personally respond in some cases, he wrote a personal response in cases like Elizabeth Shorter, he flipped that document over and wrote on the back pardon. And as a historian, one of the thrills for me is to be in the National Archives. And this has I've looked at hundreds of military commission trials and court martial case files in the National Archives. And it's always a thrill when you're going through one of those and you flip over the page and there's a little annotation written by Lincoln. Another one says, mentioned the book again before ending. I will be glad to do that. Thank you. The book is called to address you as my friend, African Americans, letters to Abraham Lincoln. It will be published officially on October 26th. So in about 20 days by the University of North Carolina Press, it's available for pre-order directly through UNC Press or on Amazon or Barnes and Noble through their websites. It is dedicated to my professors at the University of Maryland, again, out of gratitude for the work they did to make a book like this possible and also for them training me in graduate school. And the forward was written by a wonderful historian at Howard University named Edna Green Medford and Edna has spoken on the stage at the National Archives many, many times and is an incredible scholar of the Black experience and Lincoln and emancipation during the Civil War. And she read the book in its entirety and gave me some wonderful advice on how to make it better and she very graciously wrote a forward to the book. So I'm very grateful to her for that. Well, thank you so much for having me and I wish you all a great rest of the day.