 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 Michael Burlingame about his book, The Black Man's President, which looks at Abraham Lincoln's personal connections with black people over the course of his career. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up in the next couple of weeks on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, November 23rd at 1 p.m. H.W. Brands, author of Our First Civil War, Patriots and Loyalists in the American Revolution, will describe the American Revolution in a way that shows it to be more than a fight against the British. It was also a violent battle among neighbors forced to choose sides. And on Wednesday, December 1st at 1 p.m., Fay Yarbrough will discuss Choctaw Confederates, her new book about the Choctaw Nation's role in the Civil War. A century and a half of Lincoln's scholarship has shown us many facets of this complex man, lawyer, politician, war leader, husband. In Black Man's President, Michael Burlingame invites us to look at Abraham Lincoln through his personal relations with African Americans. He takes his title from a statement by Frederick Douglass six weeks after the President's assassination that Lincoln was emphatically the Black Man's President, the first to show any respect for the rights of a Black Man. Lincoln is forever linked to the Emancipation Proclamation, which he issued midway through the Civil War. Although it did not free all those in bondage at the time, the proclamation's promise of freedom changed the character of the war. That landmark document signed by President Lincoln is on display in the National Archives Museum for three days starting today. Also on display today is general order number three issued on June 19, 1865 by the commander of Union troops in Galveston, Texas. Fulfilling the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, this order announced that 250,000 enslaved persons in Texas were all free. The order became the foundation of Juneteenth, the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This is the first time these two milestone documents have been exhibited at the same time. You can also read about the Emancipation Proclamation in general order number three in an online featured document exhibit at archives.gov. Our guests today are Michael Burlingame and James Oakes. Michael Burlingame holds the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author or editor of numerous books about Lincoln including An American Marriage, Lincoln Observed, The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, and the two-volume Abraham Lincoln Alive. James Oakes is professor of humanities at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York and award-winning author. His books include The Crooked Path to Abolition, The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, and The Radical and The Republican, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln. Now let's hear from Michael Burlingame and James Oakes. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you David for that introduction and welcome everyone to this conversation. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. Michael is a good friend and he's the premier historian, biographer of Abraham Lincoln and he's written a very important book on a very important subject, Lincoln's relationship to African Americans and his views about race and slavery. It's a well-worn topic that Michael's book represents in some sense the culmination of a trend that began about 15 years ago or so when we first began to uncover much more information than we previously had about Lincoln's personal relationships with African Americans. Stuff that when I wrote my book on Frederick Douglass and Lincoln, I assumed, as did most historians, that Lincoln had few interactions with African Americans before he got to Washington, D.C. as president. But Michael's book brings to light a wealth of information about that and it's a very important book and I recommend it to everyone who's listening and watching this podcast. So let me dive right in. The book is called, The Backman's President, where does that title come from and why is it significant? Well, first of all, thank you, Jim, for participating in this and thank you, David, for the archives' second invitation this year to speak on this slide. I'm very honored. And the title of the book comes from a eulogy that Frederick Douglass delivered six weeks after Lincoln was assassinated. It was delivered in Cooper Union in New York, obviously the most prominent spot in the country to give a public utterance in those days. It was covered extensively by New York newspapers and amazingly has escaped to the attention of historians and anthologists. You look through all the collections of five fat volumes of Frederick Douglass speeches that Yale published, the speech isn't there. You look in the four-volume edition that Philip Foner put together, that's not there. And it's just astounding to me. And when I was doing research on the Frederick Douglass papers, this was some time ago, I was astounded to come across this eulogy because he starts off by saying that Abraham Lincoln was emphatically the black man's president, the first to rise above the prejudice of his time in his country by inviting me, Frederick Douglass, to consult with him on public affairs at the White House. He was saying by that gesture, I am the president of the black people as well as the white people and I mean to honor their rights as men and citizens. And so I was sitting in the Library of Congress and came across the speech and Frederick Douglass's handwriting and I was just flabbergasted because I, like almost everybody who's paid any attention to the question of Lincoln and race, was intimately familiar with the 1876 speech that almost everybody knows who pays any attention to this sort of thing in which he said that Abraham Lincoln was preeminently the white man's president. We black people were only his stepchildren and I was just astounded. And so I tried to get in touch with the people at Yale and say, why was this omitted and no response. Well, those of us who went to Princeton aren't surprised that Yale would conduct itself in this fashion, but what can I tell you in any event? And so I thought, well, this needs to be more widely known. And then when your book came out on Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, the Rapical and the Republican, it gave some publicity or called readers' attention to this very important document. And so I then tried to explain or come to terms with why was it that Lincoln would say, Frederick Douglass would say that Lincoln was emphatically the black man's president in 1875 and then the opposite in 1876. And so I devoted chapter of my book to this question and I'm acting on a cue that is contained in the excellent biography of Frederick Douglass that was published recently, written by David Blight of Yale. In which he said, you must understand that when Lincoln is mentioned by Frederick Douglass, when he expounds on Lincoln, it's in the context of a specific political moment. And it has that context, that significance. And in 1876, what Frederick Douglass was concerned about foremost, like any reasonable person at that time who cared about racial justice, is that reconstruction, which had gotten really a boost from Lincoln and during the war in 1863 when he puts forward a reconstruction plan and then a big boost on April 11th, 1865, two days after Robert E. Lee surrendered surrendered virtually ending the war and Lincoln calls for black voting rights for the first time. And so he sets in motion the reconstruction, which led to the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendment and the 13th Amendment, of course. And Lincoln gets murdered for that, by the way. Lincoln was not murdered because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves in the Confederate States. He was not murdered because he supported the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery throughout the nation and the border states as well in the occupied regions as well. He was murdered because he called for black voting rights. And therefore, I think it's appropriate for us in the 21st century to regard Lincoln as a martyr to black civil rights, voting rights, citizenship rights, as much as Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers or any of those people who were murdered back in the 1960s as they championed the civil rights revolution of that period. So in any event, so in 1876, reconstruction is going down the tubes. Congress and the public has supported a remarkable set of laws and amendments to establish first-class citizenship for black people. And for a little while, those statutes and amendments were vigorously and rigorously enforced. But by the mid-1870s, public attention had waned. A depression had occurred. People concerned more about unemployment and financial matters and the like. And so the question of racial justice in the South got put onto the back burner. And so what Frederick Douglass was doing that day in 1876 was addressing the power elite of the country. It was the occasion was the dedication of a famous statue now very controversial, but a large black population was there. But also, this is in Washington, D.C. It's the Emancipation Memorial, the official term. And included in the audience was the president, members of the cabinet, leaders of Congress, justices of the Supreme Court, the power elite. And so Lincoln, I mean, Frederick Douglass was really addressing them, saying that Abraham Lincoln was not some kind of bleeding heart sentimentalist. He was a tough-minded fellow who understood that the interests of the white race, which he really cared about most, would be promoted by having black people enjoy first-class citizenship. So don't don't let reconstruction go. Don't let what he started not out of a bleeding heart sentimentality, but out of a practical, hard-nosed understanding of what was good for white folks was black folks having first-class citizenship. So I think and so that that speech of 1876, which is widely known as really an outlier compared to what the eulogy of sixty five and then almost every statement that Frederick Douglass makes about Lincoln after 1876. And so it has to be understood in that context. And so he says in that 1876 speeches, Lincoln had the prejudices of his time in his country, but he'd said just the opposite. And what my book attempts to show is that he really didn't have those prejudices and that is manifested in a way that has not been explored in sufficient depth, I think. And that is how Lincoln interacted face to face with black people in Springfield and in Washington. And if you look at that record, which I go into in some detail, it shows that he really was a kind of an instinctive, racial egalitarian. Why don't we do that then? Why don't we start because some of the most important information that's new in your book is the material you have on Lincoln's relationship with African Americans in Springfield, even before he got to Springfield. But but it sets the stage for much of the rest of the book. So why don't you talk about William Johnson we knew about, but it's much more extensive than that. Right, right. Now, I don't pretend to be the pioneer in this in this particular aspect of the story. There is a very fine historian attorney in Springfield named Richard Hart, and he's a good friend. And Dick has been doing research on black people in Springfield in the Lincoln era for a long time. And he is an indefatigable researcher and has uncovered all kinds of really valuable information, but painstakingly garnered from court records and graveyard records in all kinds of places. And he's shown that Lincoln interacted with black people a lot in Springfield and that the people with whom he interacted, insofar as we know what they felt because these were people who didn't leave autobiographies or diaries or letters of collections, was very positive that Lincoln treated them with kindness and respect and dignity. And and and it wasn't just the people who worked in the house. There were black servants who said this, but there were there were there were actual friends and sometimes legal clients and the most telling piece of evidence about the nature of his interaction with black people in Springfield is the story of his relationship with his barber. William Floorville, sometimes called Floorville. And during the war in 1863, Lincoln receives a long letter from William Floorville, this black gentleman, which is clearly not the letter of a client to a patron or an attorney and it's his client, but a real friend. Because he talks about how much he admired Lincoln's son, Willie. And had he sang his praises and said he seemed much more mature than any boy that he knew of that age and Willie had died at the age of eleven in the White House and Lincoln was deeply distraught. And so this is a letter of condolence and the feeling tone of that letter, particularly when he talks about Willie, is clearly somebody who's who's personally connected to to Lincoln as a friend and not just as a customer or a client. And then he goes on to talk about how how the boy's dog, the Lincoln boy's dog, Fido is being well cared for. And even the house that's been sublet by the Lincoln is being well cared for by the people who live there, in part, because they don't have any children to ruin things as he puts it in that letter. And and then he goes on to talk in ways about his wishing him well and be expressing gratitude for all he's done for the black race. It's it's clearly a man talking to another, a friend talking to another friend. And so this is indicative of the kind of relationship he had with people in Springfield. And just just for people who are listening, if they're interested, that letter, it's it is quite a remarkable letter that letter has just been published in a in a very important collection of letters written to Abraham Lincoln from African Americans. It's the opening letter in a book published by Jonathan White, another fine Lincoln scholar. Indeed, Jonathan White's book is very important. If you are interested in looking at that letter, look up that book. I can't remember the title of the book, but a collection of letters. Me either, but there's a pair of Absinite professors. So why don't you talk a little bit about the his his relationship to African Americans, who were his clients? Because everybody's talked about the Batson case for many years, but there's a lot more to that, to his story of his relationship to blacks as a lawyer. Well, right. And one of the things that I discovered and was actually I was called to my attention to to my attention by another very fine historian who's been doing work on black people in Illinois for a long time, Roger Bridges. Roger recently sent an obituary of a woman who died in the 1890s. And in the course of this this obituary, all the details of which check out except this this one area, which is hard to to nail down. But it's in so far as the rest of the obituary is all above board and accurate. It's seem plausible. According to this obituary, this woman as a teenager was a servant and in Vandalia, Illinois, which at the time was the state capital. And the this woman's mother worked in this boarding house where Lincoln may well have stayed. And we're not sure exactly that he stayed there, but it seems plausible. In any event, according to this obituary, the this dead woman's mother was an indentured servant slash slave in Illinois. There's a somewhat big boundary between those two categories at that time. And she and she was to be indentured and in effect, a slave until the age of 18. But the Lincoln got her out of her indentures beforehand. Yeah. And I'd never seen anything to this effect. And then I went through the papers and so far as I got rid of a Fayette County, Illinois and for the 1830s, which are very spotty. And I didn't find the free paper, but that doesn't mean it didn't exist. And what I did find with doing a little research was that at that time, the Illinois State Supreme Court had just ruled that black people who were indentured before 1818, that is when Illinois entered the Union, became state, had to had to honor their indentures. They were bound by them. But any children born of folks who were indentured after 1818 could not be held to those indentures. And that's right in 1836. And it would it fits the time scheme. And it seems plausible to me that Lincoln as a fledgling lawyer, who had just been admitted to the bar, would know about this. And the Supreme Court men in Vandalia is a small town. So he's bound to know about it. That he probably told this young woman that, you know, you're really not. You don't have to be. You don't have to be. I honor these indentures and you're free. And so so he may have free that may be even the first person, first black person he freed in 1836. But it makes sense. It fits into a larger pattern of of freedom suits that took place under the auspices of the Northwest Ordinance and and the like. So it made perfect sense to me when I read your story of it. I had never heard that story. Well, this this this was new. And I'm very grateful to Roger for having called it to my attention. You're called the crocodile speech to my attention, too, by the way. He's right. We can we can talk about that later. So despite the paucity of written documentation about Lincoln's interactions with African Americans in Springfield, the sense that he was a kind and and perfectly non prejudicial friend of so many African Americans in Springfield seems to be reinforced by what you talk about in Lincoln's relationship with the staff at the White House when he gets to Washington DC. So a little bit about that. There we do have more documentation and it confirms your analysis, it seems to me, of his of his prior history in Springfield. Right. Well, and there's an overlap of those two categories of Springfield blacks and then white staff because Lincoln brought with him from Springfield to Washington, a black servant, body servant, a valet and a fact named Waymage Johnson, a young man in his 20s. And Lincoln wanted to put him on the White House staff and did so. But there was a kind of revolt by the black people who were on the staff. The staff consisted of a lot more people than just black people. But the black people were all light skinned and Waymage Johnson was dark skinned and there was strong prejudice against dark skinned blacks by light skinned blacks, which goes way back to the house slaves versus the field hands that Frederick Douglass so eloquently describes in his autobiography. And so Lincoln backwards to get him some first of all, just put him in the basement to attend the furnace while he tried to find him. He wouldn't offend the light skinned blacks on the staff. And so he went to to the Navy Department tried to get him a job. That didn't work out. And finally, the Treasury Department, which was headed up by the most radical anti-slavery member of the cabinet, got him a job in the Treasury Department, just right next door to the White House. So evidently he worked in the mornings with Lincoln, helped shave him and get him ready for the day. And then we go over to act as a messenger in the library at the Treasury Department. But then we know a lot about Lincoln's interaction with the black staff members because an amateur historian named Johnny Washington in the 1930s interviewed a lot of people who either knew Lincoln, that has served in the Lincoln White House or whose parents or other relatives serve. And this very important book called They Knew Lincoln appeared. And the people who were interviewed recall Lincoln's kindness and generosity and lack of prejudice and respect uniformly. And it wasn't just it wasn't just the interactions and the White House would and Lincoln never would give an order. He would request people to do this, that or the other thing. But in addition, one of the seamstresses who worked at the White House recalls that when Lincoln went to the summer White House in the warm months in Washington in 62, 63 and 64, the Lincoln family spent the warmer months in what was known as the soldier's home, still is. And it's about three miles north of the White House. It's elevated. So if there were any breeze blowing or any place to escape the oppressive heat and humidity of Washington, which I grew up in, it was most welcome. And so on that occasion, he would pass by what was known as a contraband camp, which was a place where refugee slaves were congregated. And Lincoln would greet the people there and they would be involved in a hymn sing. And he would join in singing the hymns. And this seamstress, Rosetta Wells, when he was there, he was not the president. He was just another member of the gang singing songs and tears would come to his eyes. And then when the old people were particularly jubilant, Lincoln would not ridicule them or like he would join with them. And so he showed a kind of instinctive egalitarianism, which reflected what we had seen in Springfield. And so, which brings us to the more famous interactions with prominent African Americans who visited with Lincoln and the White House. This was, although it had been a couple of occasions in which African Americans had come to the White House, they pale beside the numbers and significance of the African Americans that Lincoln himself greeted in the White House and discussed, as you mentioned, Frederick Anderson. Issues, you know, national, and so it's not just one, it's a lot of them. Right, yes. And one of the more interesting, and one of the first ones that's actually recorded, in 1861, we don't have a record of black visitors coming to the White House, but we do have Lincoln's interaction with the state. Now, in 1862, black people start to come and appeal to him. And one of the first is a very prominent black leader who urges Lincoln, this was a Bishop Daniel Payne of the African American Episcopal Church, the AME Church. And he urges Lincoln to sign the bill to emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia. The Congress had passed the bill, had sat on the President's desk for a couple of days, and there was some anxiety among blacks about whether or not Lincoln would actually sign the bill, although he himself had written the bill to Obama's slavery when he was a member of Congress back in 1849. So he asked him to please sign the bill, and Lincoln treats him very cordially and expresses his sympathy with the effort. It doesn't contain every feature of the bill that he would like to see, but then he does sign it that day or the day thereafter. And that leads to something very interesting, and that is a newspaper account written by a British journalist stationed in Washington for a newspaper in London, the London Star. And so he describes this piece of legislation, which was the first step, the first action by the federal government to abolish slavery, all the slaves in District Columbia are to be freed. And this gentleman, this newspaper correspondent and guy named Frederick Milne's Edge, describes this bill in some detail, and then says, look, there's one feature in it, which Europeans are going to find hard to understand. And that is that Congress has appropriated $100,000, which in modern terms would be say three or four million, to promote colonization. And Europeans are bound to be somewhat puzzled by this. And so he says, and if I may just briefly quote, he says, it is likely to meet with misconstruction in Europe. That is namely the appropriation for colonizing the freed slaves. And then he goes on to say, this was adopted to silence the weak nerve whose name is Legion. That number one is to have an effect on the public opinion. That is the people who are fearful that emancipation is going to lead to a tsunami of black people flooding the North and all kinds of disruption. That's number one. And number two, to enable any of the slaves who see fit to migrate to more congenial climes, not to force of all the black people out of the country, but to make it possible for people who, as you put it so eloquently in your book, are black pessimists who understandably fear that they never are going to achieve first-class citizenship in the United States, that anti-black sentiment was so widespread and so deep-seated that reasonable black people would despair of ever having a fair shot at first-life citizenship. And this I think is accurate. Those two things are the things that make Lincoln a publicly espoused colonization, not the notion that he's going to have all the black people in the country deported, but that racial pessimists deserve some that the government owes them some kind of chance to get first-class citizenship in another country and the government has a responsibility to help facilitate that. Well, in a way, that last interview you discussed with Bishop Bain, no, the last one in January of 1865 with the father of black nationalism, I'm not skipping. But Delaney, you know, he says something very similar, you know, we need to get more blacks down into the South, black soldiers, and they should be commanded by blacks. We can't put them in, we can't put black officers in charge of whites, because we all know that the overwhelming number of whites will not accept and tolerate that. So this is widely known and Lincoln makes a very similar argument. So that brings us to the very famous meeting. Why don't we discuss this with the African-American delegation in Washington DC about colonization? Because the context you've established of Lincoln's graciousness and friendliness and openness and lack of prejudice, which all African-Americans who met him commented on, seems so different from this particular meeting and helped put that in context. And you do a better job than anyone I've seen of establishing the context in which that meeting takes place. So why don't you tell us about what that meeting was and the context in which it took place? Well, thank you, Jim. The meeting took place on August 14, 1862, and Lincoln summons to the White House five black leaders. He sent out a message to the black churches a few days earlier saying that the president has been granted, recently granted, a lot of money to promote colonization back in April. The Congress that appropriated $100,000, and that dealt just with Washington blacks now in July, $500,000, which deals with black people in general. And so he has $600,000 and they mean 30, 40 million, so I'm modern currency. And he wants to know how to spend it. And so that's the official, that's the message that goes out to the black clergymen who then share that with their audiences. And then five gentlemen step forward. Leaders of black society, these are people of some stature, educated people of real social respect among the black community in Washington and the white community too, for that matter. And so he calls them into the office ostensibly to discuss, but in fact to listen to a lecture. And so Lincoln delivers them a lecture about colonization. And the tone, as you suggest, Jim, the tone is a little condescending and is very different in texture and feeling from all the descriptions we have prior to that August 14, 1862 meeting, and all the meetings subsequent to that August 14, 1862 meeting. And so what accounts for that? Well, I think the main thing that's on Lincoln's mind at that point is what the British journalist Frederick Milne's edge said. Lincoln was worried about the weak nerve, whose number was legion, that is particularly people who would grudgingly accept emancipation, but only if they were assured that their states would not be overrun by freed slaves fleeing to the north. And he is at that moment, he is sitting on a draft of emancipation proclamation. Exactly. He knows it's going to come. Right. A month earlier he had told his cabinet that he was going to issue an emancipation proclamation. He said, I'm not asking your opinion, I'm going to do it. But I want you to know this. And then he's told by Seward and others that look, we've just suffered a humiliating defeat in our attempt to capture Richmond. If we issue an emancipation proclamation on the heels of that disgraceful defeat, it will look insincere and we count for nothing. Let's wait till we have on a military victory. So Lincoln takes the emancipation proclamation and puts it on his desk drawer and is waiting for an opportunity to issue it on the heels of a union victory. In the meantime, he realizes and he's been told by lots of people that, look, if you don't couple emancipation with colonization, it's not going to sit well with our constituents. Members of the Senate, members of the House, old friends from Kentucky, we're all telling this. You've got a couple emancipation with colonization because of this significant fear, groundless though it might be, of a black tsunami coming northward. And so Lincoln then invites these people in and urges them to be pioneers in an colonization effort in what we now call Panama. And he starts off by saying, we are of different races and your race suffers and our race suffers and therefore we really shouldn't be together. And there are already attempts to establish places of refuge in Africa like Liberia, but that's pretty far away. And a lot of you, I understand, would like to say in the same hemisphere with your enslaved friends and relatives and do something to help free them. Also, it's also Lincoln's clearest expression of racial pessimism, right? Because there's no place you can go in this country. Go to the place you're treated best and you're still not treated equally. And that is true. It's almost the day that this account of Lincoln's interaction with these five black leaders appears, John Rock, a Boston attorney who then becomes the first black person to be admitted to the Supreme Court bar to argue cases before the high court, says, look, even in Boston, we're treated like second-place citizens. And Boston is in the vanguard. And so Lincoln was just telling a hard truth. He didn't approve of it. And actually, he says, you and I both deplore this. We both think alike. And that's pretty strong language. Even back in Peoria, right? He said, this feeling, of course, with justice is irrelevant. If the vast majority wants to feel this way, we have to deal with it. Right. And time and again, when Lincoln makes statements that sound to our ears directionary and high-bound and retrogressive, he qualifies it in a way so that you can interpret it whether this is right or wrong, we needn't discuss. But that means it could well be wrong to judge black people this fashion. But that's for another topic. But this larger point is that he wanted, and a striking feature of this meeting is that he invites a shorthand reporter to come in to take his words verbatim. It's the only time he does that. Unfortunately, from an empiric point of view, you wish somebody had been doing that for every meeting that he had. Oh, I see. Just that one. But it's an indication that it's to some extent a performance for the wider public. Exactly. And his audience, to his mind, is not these five gentlemen so much as it is all the newspaper readers who will get to hear or read his words as they're being transcribed verbatim by this reporter for a local newspaper, anti-slavery newspaper, pro-administration newspaper. So Lincoln is trying to grease the skids for emancipation. That doesn't mean that he was insincere. But it does mean that he didn't envision ethnic cleansing, getting rid of all black people. But he did envision that it would increase the chances that emancipation would be accepted by skeptics and conservatives. And also that there are black pessimists, and they do deserve some kind of government support in attempting to find a place overseas where they can be treated like first-class citizens. And then how do we know this is the case? Well, one of the striking things I found in my research for this particular book was an account in a black newspaper by a prominent leader of the black community in Washington. Henry Neal Turner becomes pretty famous after the war. And in his journalism, his account of this meeting, Henry Neal Turner says, let's not get too excited. There's some fear that Lincoln is trying to deport all the black folks. That's not true. He loves liberty just as much as anybody, and he knows that it's a physical impossibility to get rid of all four million blacks in America as preposterous. But what Lincoln was doing was to create, and this, if I may, again just use some of his own words, Mr. Lincoln has not half such a stickler for colored expatriation, interesting term, as has been pronounced. His meeting with the black leaders was a strategic move upon his part in contemplation of the emancipation proclamation just delivered. This was just slightly after the emancipation proclamation was announced publicly on September 22nd. It was the preparatory nucleus around which he intended to cluster the reign of objections when the emancipation proclamation went forth. Now, that's a somewhat clouded image, but I think it's a kind of shield to protect the emancipation proclamation from this reign of objections. And then he goes on to say the president needed a place to point to where blacks could go. And so he, in that meeting with the five black leaders, he talks about Panama and the very specific about how this one region would be really a suitable spot for people who wanted to emigrate in order to achieve first place citizenship. And then a lot of black leaders go berserk, including Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass really lashes out at Lincoln. It calls him, this is an example of Lincoln's race, hatred, and white supremacy. And it's just terrible, really harsh language. And one of the ironies is Frederick Douglass had three adult sons, two of them volunteered to go to Panama as part of this project. So if Lincoln was a hopeless racist, putting forward a hopeless racist project, what are Frederick Douglass's adult sons doing, signing up for it? And according to the guy who was in charge of 14,000 black, 14,000 volunteered to go on this. Now it all fizzled because of the objection of some of the Central American nations and also some shaking. The contracts were pretty shaky. It was a shady deal. Lincoln had to throw the contracts into trash. But the larger point, I think, is once you understand the strategic point of that meeting and it took place in his tone and notice, because of all we now know about, a very different tone he took with African-Americans in every other venue that we've seen, it stands out. It is not a representative of the way Lincoln interaction with African-Americans. It's the exception that proves the rule, correct? It's very much an outlier, yes. Very much an outlier. And that raises the question, one of the larger questions that your book raises. And that is, we've known for decades, historians who have about Lincoln's statements about race and some of the unfortunate ones, some of the terrible ones, but also many of the more enlightened ones. And there are many enlightened statements about race in the Lincoln corpus, right? What does this new information we have about Lincoln's very gracious and friendly and unprejudiced personal interactions with so many African-Americans do to help us maybe go back and look at those very familiar statements? Does it change the way we should think about them? Does it help us understand them? What do you think? Well, I think that the, as you point out, the statements that are trotted out regularly to prove that Lincoln was a hopeless racist are widely known, but they're not put in context. And most of them come from the 1858 debate with Stephen A. Douglas, the debates in which Lincoln, as you point out in your book, Lincoln was trying to get, to just sideline, to put to the side the whole question of blank citizenship rights. And because put yourself in Lincoln shoes, if Lincoln believes that they're, let's say, hypothesized, Lincoln believes that there are two evils. One is slavery, four million people enslaved. And he says, this is, your people suffer the worst in prejudice and oppression of any people ever. That's what he says to the five black gentlemen. And then he also says to them that go where you will, you're still under the ban. And you and I both feel that's terrible. So now, now in 1858, Lincoln says, okay, are we going to attack slavery or black discrimination, second-class citizenship in the North? Now there are 250,000 or so free blacks in the North who can't vote and can't hold office and can't intermarry with whites or serve on juries. There are four million black people in the South who are suffering this most egregious oppression. And so if, now, ideally you'd be able to campaign against both of those evils simultaneously. And you could if you were in New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Vermont, but not if you're in central Illinois, which arguably, or Illinois, which is arguably, and it's pretty clear, the most necrophobic state in the union. And so if you come out and you say, I believe black people should be voters and jurors and the lab to serve and intermarry with whites, Stephen A. Douglas is going to trance you. And if Stephen A. Douglas wins this election, he probably goes on to become president. And he will then forward the, as Freddie Douglas said, the Stephen A. Douglas was the most dangerous person in the country when it came to preserving and protecting slavery. And Douglas said, well, I don't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down, but he was trying to convince the public, don't care about slavery. Don't care about the morality of slavery. View it as a local option question, whether there should be cranberry laws or whether there should be a local option on liquor or that sort of thing. And Lincoln says once he does that, slavery will be expanded by the Supreme Court to every state in the union if the United States will be entirely a slave nation. So in Lincoln's mind, the defeat of Stephen A. Douglas was a very high priority, not just for his own personal ambition, although he was freely admitted that he was an ambitious man, but that the stakes involved were so high that he couldn't afford to let Douglas win by default by failing to respond to Douglas's shameless race bidding. We won't go into it here, but take our word for it. He was just flagrant, awful. The N-word just appears all the time. And the government was formed by white men, for white men, and didn't include the Declaration of Independence. This did not include Negroes or the Fiji Islands or Mayleys or Coolies. I mean, he was a really flagrant racist. So Lincoln had to respond. Right. So tell me what you think of this because I've thought this for a while. I don't know if I can prove it or not, but I think Lincoln was scarred, not scarred, shocked by the level of racist demagoguery in that 1858 campaign because after it, after it, starting in 1858, he starts announcing not only slavery, but racism. He starts saying the danger, the danger that Douglas's, Stephen Douglas's racist demagoguery represents is that it will condition more thaners to the belief that slavery is okay. Right. And he starts explicitly attacking the racist, that kind of racist demagoguery, you know, more and more openly, more openly than he ever had and culminating, I think, in that New Haven speech where it's just a frontal assault on that kind of racial demagoguery. Did you ever get that impression that there was something about that campaign that tripped Lincoln into that kind of, that way of thinking about things as well as it is to be more open? Yes, I think it intensified, intensified his understanding of the depth and breadth of anti-black sentiment. And he was appalled by it. And he starts off by saying in the 1858 campaign, he starts officially with the House divided speech, but then a month later, he and Douglas both give speeches in Chicago, and Douglas engages in the most flagrant race-baiting. And Lincoln the next day concludes his very eloquent remarks by saying, let's set aside all this quibbling about this race and being superior and that race being inferior and the inferior race must be placed in an inferior position and let's all unite once again behind this as a country, behind the great old Declaration of Independence and declare that all men are created equal. And then Douglas hammers him with that, hammers him and hammers him and hammers him. And so Lincoln feels obliged to pay lip service anyway to the dominant a negrophobia of Illinois, because that's the you have to make that minimum gesture in order to have any chance of defeating Stephen A. Douglas. So how does this, you have a chapter in your book called 1864, Anas Marables, right, in which you just go through the extraordinary series of what's what do we call them, anti-racist things that happen thanks to Lincoln and the Hogan's in 1864. Why don't you go through some, because ultimately it seems to me this is the significance of what you're finding and what you're talking about. It leads to genuine policy changes, you know. Right, and that's another thing that needs to be underscored. In 1864, one of the most dramatic episodes of Lincoln interacting with the Black people occurs in March, when two gentlemen from New Orleans come bearing a petition signed by a thousand residents of that city, saying, look, we're property owners, we're educated, we're literate, we're when we would like to vote. Yes. And Lincoln says, I'm very sympathetic, but you should realize that under our Constitution, voter eligibility is determined by states and not by the federal government. That, of course, gets changed by the postwar amendments. And sympathetic as I am, I urge, I would urge the local, the state government to deal with that. And then a few days later, he writes a letter to the governor of Illinois, Louisiana, the newly elected governor of Louisiana as a free state, congratulating him on his victory and saying that he believes that at the new constitutional convention, which will be, which is about to be held, that it should enfranchise some Black people, at least the kind of people whose signatures appeared on this petition, that is the educated and also veterans of the war. They didn't have to be educated or literate, but if you served in the Army, you should be allowed to vote. And if you're educated, that is to say literate, you should be allowed to vote too. And then that, of course, doesn't happen. What happens is that the constitutional convention in Louisiana meets, and the first thing they do is say, well, legislature of this state shall never be authorized to enfranchise Black people. Well, thanks to Lincoln's letter and some lobbying on behalf of Lincoln's point, they turn about and say, if the legislature in Switzerland decides to enfranchise Black people, that's fine. They can do that. And then Lincoln makes that point publicly for the first time and gets murdered, as I mentioned earlier, for calling for Black voting rights. But then in 1865, you get again and again and again examples of how much progress has been made toward racial equality and racial justice during the course of the war, during the course of Lincoln's administration. For example, on New Year's Day, that the New Year's reception at the White House, lots and lots of Black people show up, and they're admitted and treated respectfully. That had actually started back in 64. But in 65, you get a large number coming to the White House. On March 4th, on Lincoln's second inauguration day, large numbers of Black people turn out. And to the amazement of journalists, they're just astounding to see this many Black people involved in public ceremonies. Black soldiers participate for the first time in an inaugural parade. Black musicians participate for the first time in an inaugural parade. A Black person, as John Rock mentioned earlier, becomes the first Black person to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, Henry Highland Garnett, a preacher and leading Black abolitionists in New York, delivers a speech in a sermon in the House of Representatives. And so all kinds of milestones are reached in at the beginning of 1865. Right, Martin Delaney is appointed. Right, Martin Delaney, who's the father of Black nationalism, as modern historians have dubbed him, has very impressed by Lincoln's openness to his suggestion that an all-Black army with Black officers under the regular union army couldn't have Black officers. And that they should then go and spread the word that emancipation is following in our way, that the president has made this war a war, not only for the preservation of the union, but also for the elimination of slavery. And Delaney himself is. And he is commissioned, right? He gets a commission. He's commissioned as a major. This is the highest ranking line officer. That is one who is at a really in charge of troops. And he goes off to South Carolina to raise troops for that mission. But then along comes the end of the war. And so it's scrapped. Yeah, go ahead. So I hadn't thought about this until I read your book. We've known about these very prominent African Americans who come to the White House and discuss public affairs with Lincoln. But there is another different kind of color line about these these inauguration balls, these inauguration, these various non-official kind of events that African Americans begin to show up at and break a different kind of color line. That is they're not coming to the White House to discuss public affairs with Lincoln. They're coming to, as you said, the January 1st New Year's inaugural, you know, New Year's annual New Year's bash at the White House and they're showing up, especially in significant numbers. So that too. I hadn't thought too much about that. But it was controversial, right? Oh, exactly. Right. Every time Lincoln treats a black visitor to the White House and then it gets publicized in the paper, the Democrats go ballistic. Now, everybody who studies American history at all knows that when Theodore Roosevelt invited a black man, Booker D. Washington to the White House to dine, there was a huge explosion. Well, that was foretold by all kinds of similar explosions that took place every time Lincoln interacted with a black person and then I got reported in the newspaper. So the Democrats were so now he's promoting a miscegenation. Now he's promoting racial equality and this is just appalling. And Lincoln just just shrugged it off. And so who are some of the want to talk a little bit about the Frederick Douglass meetings? Those are among the most compelling and need to sort of set up our understanding of those two speeches we began with. So why don't you summarize those three meetings? Sure. I feel a little sheepish doing that. You can respond to the question by the man who's written the definitive book on this subject. But anyway, so Frederick Douglass comes to the White House the first time in August of 63, not at the invitation of Lincoln, but because he wants to go there and because he has a senator leading him and escorting him, Senator Palmer of Kansas. And so Lincoln then thanks to the president for issuing an order of retaliation. That this has been a sore subject among black people in general and Douglass in particular, that is that black prisoners of war were being badly mistreated if not actually, I mean really murdered in cold blood by Confederates and that something had to be done to stop that. And so Lincoln did issue an order of retaliation at the end of July and Douglass so thanks him in mid August. And Lincoln then explains that was pretty hard to enforce actually, but and then Douglass says now about the differential pay, the black soldiers are getting paid less than white soldiers and Lincoln said, well, it's an unfortunate I disapprove of that. But in order to get that legislation through Congress, we had to make this concession, but we'll take care of it. And for the most part, not entirely not 100%, but but it was retroactively paid by soldiers who had been shortchanged. An indication, it's one of the many indications of Lincoln's sensitivity to public opinion, right? He says, we just have only recently have this experience of black troops at these various battles who have proven themselves worthy and it's having a salutary effect on Northern public opinion. So he says something like public opinion had to be brought up to this point where they would accept equal pay for black soldiers. And it's an interesting aspect of Lincoln's approach to this whole issue that he's willing to push public sentiment, but he's also aware of the limitations that public sentiment places on him. Right. And he says that to Douglass. Right. And it's in keeping with his favorite play when Hamlet says, ripeness is all. Timing really counts. And the fact that the black soldiers have distinguished themselves at Millican's band and Fort Hudson and Battery Wagner, and not just Battery Wagner, it was just the preceding month. So that's having a profound effect on public opinion, which indeed it did. And he starts pushing right after that. He starts actually taking an active role in pushing public opinion in the conquering letter and the various public letters. So what about the second meeting? The second meeting is more interesting because Lincoln summons Frederick Douglass. Douglass doesn't comment escorted by a senator. Lincoln says, I want to talk to you about something. And that is, I think I'm going to lose my reelection bid. And as of March 4th, 1865, there's going to be a Democrat in the White House. And we don't know who it is yet. And he's going to end the war. And all the slaves who have made it to our lines are going to be free. And all the slaves who haven't made it to our lines are going to remain in slavery. So let's do everything we can to let the black people know that the clock is running and that they should get to union lines as quickly as they can. So I'd like you to organize an outfit of spies and in effect of scouts to go into the behind the Confederate lines and tell the black people, come flee to union lines. Get your freedom. This is a matter of extreme importance. And this is very much like John Brown's initial idea that you go out and you encourage the blacks to run away as a kind of prelude to an uprising in Brown's case. And so Frederick Douglass is flattered and he goes off and he drafts a plan to carry out this vision. But then Lincoln's reelection seems assured in the time between the meeting in the White House and the time that Frederick Douglass has the plan and submits it to the president. Union victories at Atlanta and in the Shenandoah Valley and Mobile Bay at all guaranteed Lincoln's reelection. So it was not really necessary to do that, but it's extraordinary that Lincoln would invite Douglass to and give him this important charge. And it changes the way Douglass thinks about Lincoln in significant ways. It needs Douglass to realize that Lincoln was far more committed to the abolition of slavery than he had realized. And that I think is the setup for that eulogy. Don't you think he had come away, he went to visit Lincoln, he went to visit Lincoln one more time, you know, girl, all and famously he's not allowed in by the guards and Lincoln finds out about it and insists that he'd be brought in and clearly in front of everyone, hundreds of people, announces his friendship to Douglass. And that's the context in which I think we have to understand that eulogy later that year, right, don't you think? Right. Yes, and that brings us full circle as our lines down, that the larger point of my book is that in addition to Frederick Douglass, the Frederick Douglass's statements about Lincoln being cordial and open and respectful and all that are fairly well known. The fact is there are lots of black people who said that and those black people's voices have not really been heard or they haven't all been gathered in one spot, which is what I tried to do. Very well. Thank you. Thank you. And so the larger point is that Lincoln's essential instinctive racial egalitarianism is illustrated vividly in the way he interacted with black people, with the exception of that meeting on August 14th, but then that was given the political situation at the time almost necessary to be prepared. As you say, even in that meeting, he makes some of his most damning remarks about slavery and his most damning remarks about white racism. So I think your book does all of this very beautifully and it's an important book and I'm glad we've had this chance to talk about it and then bring it to a wider public. Thank you, Jim. Thank you so much for those kind words and thank you for participating in this and it's been my very distinct pleasure. Fine as well. Thank you.