 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 White about his new book, A House Built by Slaves, which looks at Lincoln's unprecedented welcoming of African American men and women to the White House. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs coming up next week on our YouTube channel. On Tuesday, March 1st at 1 p.m., Neil Thompson will tell us about his new book, The First Kennedys, which looks into the roots of the Kennedy dynasty beginning with Patrick and Bridget, who fled Ireland during the Great Famine and whose descendants were elected to a high government office. And on Monday, March 7th at 1 p.m., Megan Kate Nelson will discuss her new book, Saving Yellowstone, which gives the fascinating and complex historical context behind the National Park's establishment 150 years ago this month. Before Abraham Lincoln moved into the White House, notes author Jonathan White, African Americans were more likely to be bought and sold by a sitting president than to be welcomed as his guests. In his new book, A House Built by Slaves, White further asserts that Lincoln's White House became a site of significant transformations in the history of race in America. Black visitors of every background who came to Lincoln's White House were greeted by the president respectfully and with dignity. Lincoln welcomed both those whom he specifically invited than those who walked in unannounced. One drop in visitor in August 1863 was Frederick Douglass, who came to advocate for better treatment of African American soldiers. Douglass later wrote to a friend that he was received cordially and that my whole interim with the president was gratifying and did much to assure me that slavery would not survive the war. You're able to read the actual words written by historical figures because they have been preserved in archives, museums and special collections and today often in digital form. The letter from Douglass that I quoted comes from the papers of Frederick Douglass, which along with the papers of Abraham Lincoln is one of the many projects supported by the National Archives through the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. These publication projects as well as the many, many unpublished documentary sources preserved in research institutions are the raw materials of history. For his latest book, Jonathan White has drawn from an array of primary sources to show us the interaction between Abraham Lincoln and black leaders during the Civil War. Jonathan W. White is Associate Professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University, an author or editor of several previous books including To Address You as My Friend, African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln at Midnight in America, Darkness, Sleep and Dreams during the Civil War. His writing has appeared in Smithsonian Time and New York Times and The Washington Post. Now let's hear from Jonathan White. Thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much and I want to congratulate the archivist on his coming retirement. It's well deserved and it is really wonderful to join the National Archives again. I was with you in the fall to talk about To Address You as My Friend and it's great to be here again with the National Archives audience. I've been going to the National Archives for about 20 years and I could not write the kind of books I do without the work of the archivist and the accessibility that they provide to scholars and historians and biographers to dig into the material of history and so I'm really grateful to be here and thank you for all that you do. I'm going to share my screen and talk a little bit about this new book that I just published on Abraham Lincoln's birthday on February 12. This book is actually an outgrowth of the book that I was here in the fall to talk about so in the fall I talked about this one To Address You as My Friend African Americans Letters to Abraham Lincoln. Sometime around 2014 I had the idea to start collecting letters from African Americans to Lincoln and most of those out of the 125 letters in the book about 100 of them are from the National Archives collections and they tell an incredible story of the suffering and triumphs of African Americans in the Civil War era. They are writing to Lincoln for all sorts of different things trying to convey to him what they need, what they want, demanding rights, thanking him for emancipation and they give an incredible social history of black life in the Civil War era and so I started gathering these letters and then I realized that a number of these correspondents actually handed their letters to Abraham Lincoln. They might write out a petition and take it to the White House and personally present it to Lincoln and so I had the idea a number of years ago to write a book that I wanted to call Emphatically the Black Man's President and that comes from Frederick Douglass and then the subtitle was going to be something like African American Correspondents and Conversations with Abraham Lincoln and when I got to about 125 letters I realized I had too much material for correspondence and conversations in one book so I broke it into two and the correspondence is in the one I talked about last time and then tonight I'll talk about the meetings that Lincoln had with African Americans. Now one of the things we have to realize is that the President in the 19th century had office hours much like a college professor does today and now I am sitting in my office at Christopher Newport University and earlier today I had three or four students show up and knock on my door and come in and talk to me about anything they wanted to and in the 19th century presidents held office hours much like a college professor does and anyone who wanted to could go to the White House, wait in line and eventually get their turn to meet with Lincoln and people would describe the halls and the highways and the corridors just crowded with people at eight in the morning waiting to talk to Lincoln. For the first year of his presidency it is only white men and women who go to meet with Lincoln but beginning in April of 1862 black men begin claiming this right as well and one of the earliest to meet with Lincoln was the man you see pictured here Robert Smalls of South Carolina. Now Robert Smalls is a very famous person today and many of you have heard of him. He was born into bondage in South Carolina he is working during the Civil War as a slave aboard a Confederate ship called the planter which you see on the right side of the screen here and he is working on this ship in Charleston Harbor and because he is working on the ship he knows the harbor well he knows where the Confederate guards are he knows the signs that a captain would need to make to pass by the guard safely and he hatches a plan to flee from slavery by stealing this Confederate ship and taking it out onto the high seas to the Union blockading vessels on the Atlantic Ocean so Smalls and a few other men decide to do this before dawn on May 13th 1862 they bring their family and some other people with them without telling their wives and children what they're doing because they didn't want this plan to leak out but they bring their families onto the ship at night and they hide them there and then before dawn they go out into Charleston Harbor to escape. Now Smalls had this planned out very well he put on a suit and a straw hat that would make him look like a captain as they're going out of the harbor he is signaling to the Confederates who are in the forts around the harbor so that they think it's the Confederate captain just taking the ship out and when he gets out to the Union blockading vessels even then he is not yet fully safe because imagine the Union blockaders see a Confederate ship coming their way they might fire upon him and so Smalls signals to them that he is not a Confederate that he's surrendering and he eventually gets close enough that they see that he is not a danger to them and they eventually bring him in now this is an incredible moment because here is a man who frees himself and 15 other people including his wife and his two small children and his daring escape gets reported in newspapers throughout the North and he becomes a national hero everyone is talking about what Robert Smalls has done one New York newspaper writes with a sort of mixture of admiration and condescension the editor said this man though black is a hero one of the few history will delight to honor he has done something for his race and for the world of mankind he has added new proof to the evidence that the Negro have skill and have courage and tact and that they will risk their lives for the sake of liberty Congress in May of 1862 passes a law giving Smalls some of the value of the ship as salvage which would happen for sailors in the US Navy and Lincoln signs that into law in May 30th 1862 well Smalls is now a hero and he's in high demand he travels to Washington DC in August of 1862 and he goes to Israel church and gives which is an African-American Methodist Episcopal church or African Methodist Episcopal church and he delivers a speech there and this is the church that is pastored by Henry McNeil Turner who's a very prominent black preacher in the 19th century and this is Smalls' introduction to a northern audience and 1200 white and black Americans are there to hear him and he tells his story and Henry McNeil Turner is just really amazed by Smalls' story and he writes to a newspaper in Philadelphia a newspaper of the AME church that Smalls' lecture was a great success and that Smalls is a living specimen of unquestionable African heroism and what people are just amazed by is that this guy has risen out of slavery seized freedom for himself and his loved ones and then is able and out there telling the story well while he was in Washington DC Smalls decided to go to the White House and up to this point there have only been maybe a half dozen black visitors to the Lincoln White House so he is among the first now we don't know exactly what Smalls talked about when he met with Lincoln but I'd like to imagine and I think this is probably true that Abraham Lincoln said can you tell me the story of your escape and the story Lincoln would have wanted to hear now why does this meeting matter well up to this point in the war as many of you know Abraham Lincoln had opposed allowing black troops black men to enlist as soldiers in the Union Army part of this was political Lincoln feared that if he armed black men the racist white North would have a massive outcry in response to it but part of it was also that Lincoln feared that black men if they were given arms if they were given weapons he said they might quickly wind up in the hands of Confederates now Lincoln meets with Smalls Smalls presumably tells Lincoln about his daring escape and here Lincoln meets a man who has fought for freedom with bravery and I think that that influenced Lincoln how he thought about this issue of black soldiers while Smalls was in Washington DC the war department gave him an official letter that he took back to Buford, South Carolina which authorized the raising of black volunteers and in the fall of 1862 the first and second South Carolina volunteers are raised in that region of South Carolina I think this is a moment where Lincoln's interaction with an African-American helped to change Lincoln's thinking about how African-Americans could serve in the Civil War and of course a few months later Lincoln would issue his emancipation proclamation on January 1st, 1863 which explicitly authorized the arming of black soldiers now black men begin joining the army in late 1862 and then in much greater numbers in 1863 and then for the second half of the war they enlist in the army expecting to be paid $13 a month and instead they are only paid $10 a month because the war department decides to pay them under the terms of the Militia Act of 1862 which says that laborers will be paid $10 a month and not only will they receive a lower pay but they will also have $3 deducted from their pay as a clothing allowance and so thousands upon thousands of black men enlist in the army and find that they're getting $7 instead of $13 and not only that the Confederate War Department and the Confederate President come up with a policy that African-Americans who are captured on the battlefield will be treated as slaves in insurrection and they will therefore either be executed or sold into bondage and this could be men who were born free in the North who have never been enslaved in their lives could now be sold into bondage or executed as a slave in insurrection and so African-Americans who have been enlisting are very angry about this and in the book to address you as my friend I include a number of letters of black men and women who write to Lincoln calling on him to protect African-American soldiers from atrocities on the battlefield and to give them equal pay well they didn't only write letters some went to the White House to press Lincoln and as the archivist of the United States alluded to Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist is one of the first to push Lincoln on this issue in August of 1863 he goes to the White House unannounced, uninvited Douglass is angry he has been recruiting soldiers for the army his sons have joined the 54th Massachusetts and are risking their lives on the battlefield and now they're not getting paid the same they had been promised and they could be enslaved or executed by Confederates and so Douglass goes to the White House and meets with Abraham Lincoln and he doesn't know how that's going to go he doesn't know how Lincoln is going to treat him but Lincoln welcomes him into the White House and they talk about these issues now Lincoln asks Douglass for his position on these issues and Douglass tells him why he's upset and Lincoln on the atrocity issue and on this issue of retaliation says to Douglass that retaliation is a really hard thing Lincoln doesn't want to execute an innocent Confederate POW who has not committed an atrocity for someone who's on the battlefield who has committed an atrocity and so Lincoln is not he is not willing to do an eye for an eye because he worries about where that could go on the issue of the pay of black soldiers Lincoln says that there's too much political resistance in the north to give black men equal pay at this point in the war and he says that African-Americans who have been enslaved to become free should consider some sort of monetary value in that there's a value in becoming free that might compensate for the lack of equal pay now as you might imagine Frederick Douglass was not fully satisfied with these answers but Douglass did go away from this meeting with a new appreciation of the burdens that Lincoln was facing the political concerns that Lincoln had to take into account and he also was impressed that Lincoln treated him as an equal he made no mention of Douglass's skin color he didn't talk down to him in this meeting he shook his hand when they met and Douglass was really moved by this later Douglass gave a speech a few months later where he talked about this meeting and he said to the audience I imagine you would like to know how the President of the United States welcomed me, a man of color and Douglass said he greeted me as one gentleman would greet another meaning he treated me as an equal and Douglass joked he said I felt big there now Frederick Douglass is probably the most famous person to meet with Abraham Lincoln but he met with a lot of lesser known African Americans as well I talked about these two men in October or November when I spoke to the National Archives but I wanted to talk about them a little bit more tonight Alexander Thomas Augusta had been born free in Norfolk Virginia about a half hour from where I am right now in the 1820s his family moved to Baltimore in the 1830s I think probably in response to the Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 when Virginia authorities clamped down on enslaved people and free African Americans he was living in Baltimore for a while he wanted to attend medical school he applied to the University of Pennsylvania and was denied admission to the University of California and he was not allowed to attend any medical school he was not allowed to attend any medical school Augusta then moved to Toronto where he was able to get a medical degree and in Toronto he then practiced medicine and then taught other black physicians in training one of the men he taught was the man on the right side of the screen here Anderson Abbott very badly damaged by local whites who did not like profitable black businesses there and their family under threats left and moved to Toronto and so Anderson Abbott trains to become a physician under Alexander Augusta well the Civil War comes around January 1861 comes around and Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation and Alexander Augusta writes to Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton and says I want to be of some use to my race and he says I want to become a doctor in the Army and the War Department invites Alexander Augusta to come to Washington DC to be examined now the examining surgeons the Board of Examiners see Augusta and they say he appears to be a person of African descent and so they asked the War Department to rescind his invitation and the War Department Edwin Stanton to his credit refuses and so they put Augusta through what they called a squeezing process they asked him the hardest questions they could come up with and he passed with flying colors and later one of the surgeon general the United States goes to one of the examining surgeons and says say Cronin how did you come to let the N word pass and Cronin the doctor says the truth is sir the N word knew more than I did and I couldn't help myself so Augusta becomes a surgeon and then Abbott passes the exam and he becomes a surgeon and initially they're working in Washington DC now Augusta is traveling through Baltimore one day in the spring of 1863 and he's riding on a train wearing the uniform that you see pictured here and a white teenager comes up behind him and rips off shoulder straps and he turns around to see who's done it and to confront the person and another Baltimore Rowdy comes up and Augusta realizes he's not going to win this fight he sits back down he's eventually bullied off the train he goes through the city to try to get military protection as he's walking through the city at one point he's punched in the face and given a bloody nose a mob rises up around him he tries to find shelter of a woman there who won't let him in and he faces this sort of resistance but he refuses to cower and he ultimately gets his assailants arrested and thrown into Fort McHenry later in his military uniform he tries to ride on a streetcar in Washington DC and he is told he may not ride in the streetcar he has to sit on the front outside with the driver and Augusta refuses to do this and he takes that case all the way to the U.S. Senate and the Senate debates it and because Augusta went to the media and these two cases were reported nationwide the newspapers are commenting on there being a black surgeon in the Army who is a commissioned officer Democrats in Congress are thunderstruck they can't believe that there are black officers and a newspaper mocking him says well, if he has all these grievances maybe he should take them to Lincoln in the White House and on February 24th 1864 Alexander Augusta decides to do just that now Lincoln would have public receptions where anyone who wanted to could go and meet him and shake his hand and up until 1864 many white people had done this but Augusta and Abbott put on their uniforms and they bravely and boldly walk to the White House they go through the entrance they take off their winter wraps and hand them to a servant they get in line and they go to meet Abraham Lincoln and Lincoln eagerly goes to shake Augusta's hand and as Lincoln is shaking Augusta's hand Mary Lincoln looks over and sees this and she sends her son Robert over to the president to ask are you really going to do this and Lincoln turns to his son and says why not and Lincoln that Robert slinks back over to his mother and Lincoln turns back to Augusta and shakes his hand again and then turns to Abbott and shakes his hand and then the two men go to the beautiful East Room and they walk through the East Room of the White House and they try to pretend like they're looking at the paintings and the artwork and listening to the music but their adrenaline is just so high that they're having trouble paying attention but everyone else there is and Augusta or Abbott later described it that as they walked through the crowd a circle would just open up around them and all of the eyes were staring at them some with anger some with wonder some with amazement some with curiosity some with fear and then they were left and they were proud of that moment that Abbott later said because they had broken down a barrier that had been in place for a very long time one of Lincoln's private secretaries a man named William Stoddard was there and watched this scene unfold and Stoddard said it was a practical assertion of Negro citizenship for which few were prepared and then Stoddard added that it was as good as a play another group that I talked about briefly last time and I'll talk about very briefly now were two African-Americans very light-skinned creoles from New Orleans who came to the White House about a week later on March 30, 1864 they brought a petition that is housed at the National Archives bearing a thousand signatures and the argument they made to Lincoln in this petition and in the meeting was we are light-skinned educated wealthy men who pay our taxes have served in the military we deserve the right to vote and Lincoln sat down with these two men and engaged them in conversation and talked about the petition and he made the case that black men should have the right to vote but as president he didn't do anything about it this was a state issue but he said to them if you can come up with a rationale that will connect black suffrage to winning the war then maybe he as president could do something and so a few days later about a week later they write out a new petition on March 10th and I can't prove this but I think that they return to the White House on March 12th and they make two very important changes first they no longer advocate just for educated wealthy free born black men to be given the right to vote they argue that all black men should be given the right to vote whether they were born into slavery or not the second thing that they suggest is that giving black men the right to vote will be useful when reconstruction comes around and this is the gist of their argument there are millions of disloyal white confederates in the south and one day they will be brought back into the union and they will become voters again and you will need to counterbalance their political power and how do you do that by giving black men the right to vote and I love this moment because it shows again that there's an exchange of ideas between Lincoln and his black visitors that they come to him and he listens and he responds and they listen and they respond and he listens now again I said I think that they presented this to Lincoln on March 12th and the very next day Lincoln sends a letter to the governor elect of Louisiana a man named Michael Hahn and in this letter Lincoln writes this I barely suggest for your private consideration whether some of the colored people may not be let in that is into the suffrage as for instance the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks so those who have fought in the army or those who are educated should have the right to vote and then Lincoln adds this beautiful sentence they would probably help in some trying time to come that jewel of liberty within the family of freedom I love that line from Lincoln Lincoln is recognizing that reconstruction of the union will probably not go as smoothly as we might hope that in some time that probably will come a trying time we will need to figure out how to keep republican government small our republican government from falling apart that jewel of liberty in the family of freedom and how will we do that by broadening the franchise to include black men as well as white men from this point forward Lincoln would begin working behind the scenes to push for African Americans to be given the franchise for a year he works behind the scenes to support black suffrage at the state level in different places finally April 11th 1865 publicly comes out in favor of black suffrage and in the audience that night is a man named John Wilkes Booth who says that means and word citizenship that will be the last speech he ever gives by God I'll put him through and of course four days later Lincoln is dead now in the spring of 1864 there were actually three delegations of African Americans who came to meet with Lincoln to push for the right to vote another one came about a month after this first one and it was led by a man named Abraham Galloway Abraham Galloway had been born into slavery in North Carolina in the pre-war years he escaped to freedom in Philadelphia in the hull of a of a turpentine ship and he and another man escaped to freedom and they get to William Still the very famous abolitionist black abolitionist in Philadelphia who is in this turpentine ship and the chemical reaction still later wrote had caused their pores to open up and blood was just coming out of their bodies but now they were finally free Galloway spends time in the North in the years leading up to the war when the war comes around he returns to North Carolina after the Union armies have gained control of the Newburn area and he for a while works for Benjamin Butler the Union general and then after the army the US army begins recruiting black soldiers Galloway becomes sort of the center of black military recruitment in the Newburn area and in the spring of 1864 Galloway leads a delegation of six black men to the White House and they want to push Lincoln for the right to vote and they present a petition to Lincoln and they say to Lincoln that black men are serving in the army and have served before and deserve the right to vote for that reason and they point out to Lincoln that African Americans had voted in North Carolina from 1776 until 1835 and they say that had always happened without any problems and there's no reason that black men should not be allowed to vote again and again Lincoln welcomes them and he says he's doing what he can for African Americans to try to help bring about freedom and he believes they should have this right but again just like he told the delegation from Louisiana he says this is a state matter and must be dealt with when North Carolina is restored to its proper place in the Union now this meeting is really important as well because again Lincoln greets these visitors cordially and kindly he shakes their hand and what they are struck by is that they've been welcomed through the front door of the White House into his office one of the men who went with Galloway later gave a speech where he talked about what it was like to meet the president and he said that it would have been an insult for any person of color to go to the front door he said of the lowest magistrate of Craven County and to ask for the smallest right he said if any black person were to go to the front door of a white person in North Carolina at this time he said the offender would have been told to go around to the back door that was the place for the N words and then this black visitor likened Lincoln to Christ and he talked about he likened his meeting of Lincoln to the sermon on the mount he said we knock and the door is open done to us we seek the president and find him to the joy and comfort of our hearts we ask and receive his sympathies and promises to do for us all he could he didn't tell us to go around to the back door but like a true gentleman and noble hearted chief with as much courtesy and respect as though we had been the Japanese embassy he invited us into the White House and this is just such a really important moment because again Lincoln is welcoming people into the White House welcoming black people and white people into the White House but particularly African Americans in a way that no president had ever done before and it's not just famous people like Frederick Douglass it's people who are not well known like Anderson Abbott Alexander Augusta or Abraham Galloway and the men who came with him Lincoln also welcomed women to the White House and one of the women who came was a woman named Caroline Johnson and I don't have an image of her so I'll just have to show you the room in the White House where she met with Lincoln she met with him in the library which is this oval room on the side of the White House which is a little bit different from the 1870s or 80s of that room so it's a little bit later now Caroline Johnson was a woman from Philadelphia who was a well known artist in the city and she was known for being able to make beautiful wax fruit displays and she decided in the spring of 1864 to make a wax fruit display that she wanted to present to Abraham and Mary Lincoln and she makes this and covers it with an elaborate display of seashells and then a glass vase over it and the newspapers reported that it cost her $150 to make and that it had a retail value of about $350 and someone was able to get Caroline Johnson a letter of introduction to the White House through an interior department official and she is invited to go to the White House on Saturday April 2nd 1864 and so she and her black Baptist minister James Hamilton go down to the White House to meet with the president now I pointed out to you all that she met with him in the library and it is tremendously important that she met with him in the library because this was part of the private living space of the first family most people who meet with Lincoln are going to meet him in his office they are going to meet him on the ground floor of the building they are not going to be welcomed into the private living spaces of the family the people who would go into this room would be close friends very important visitors or servants other than servants or slaves my hunch is that mrs. Johnson are the first African-Americans to be welcomed into this very private space this was a space that Lincoln would go into in the early morning hours to read the bible it's the space he would go into to gaze out the window to collect his thoughts to take off his shoes and put up his feet to take a nap in the middle of the day he didn't welcome strangers very often in here and so April 2nd Caroline Johnson and Reverend Hamilton and the interior department official who had made the introduction come to the White House and Johnson goes in and she sets up the fruit display so that it looks the way she wants it to look and these three people are then greeted by Abraham and Mary Lincoln and they have a really beautiful conversation Hamilton opens up by talking about the past sufferings of African-Americans and he says the rapid deliverance the rapid progress of their deliverance deliverance under the present administration and he talked about the hope for the future and he asked Abraham and Mary Lincoln to accept this gift he said as a specimen of the handy work of a lady of color and as evidence of their confidence and esteem for their chief who had brought them thus far out of the land of bondage and then Johnson looked over at Caroline, sorry Hamilton looked over at Mrs. Johnson and said perhaps Mrs. Johnson would like to say a few words and you can imagine what she must have been feeling she was understandably nervous in this moment, there she is with the president of the United States and she looks down at her feet not really knowing what to say but then she put her hand over her chest and she later said that her chest burned and she thought it was the Holy Spirit coming upon her and her mind went to the Old Testament prophet of Isaiah Isaiah chapter 51 where the prophet says listen to me you who pursue righteousness look to the rock from which you were hewn look to your father Abraham and with those words inspiring her Johnson looked at the president and said Mr. President I believe God has hewn you out of a rock for this great purpose many have been led away by bribes of gold of silver of presence but you have stood firm because God was with you and if you are faithful to the end he will be with you now Lincoln was visibly moved by these words and he responded with emotional remarks of his own he thanked Mrs. Johnson for the beautiful present he reflected upon the difficulties he had faced as president but then he attributed he said the wondrous changes of these past three years to the ruling of an all wise providence and then choking back tears Lincoln said to her you must not give me the praise it belongs to God there were a few more words that passed between these visitors and the president first lady and then the three visitors walked out on the streets of Washington and it was a cold day it was 37 degrees that day at the time they walked out but I can't help but think they didn't even notice the cold they were just so overjoyed by this interaction they had had with the president of the United States now I'm going to skip that one Frederick Douglass would come back to the White House a few months later for a second visit in August of 1864 and this visit that Douglass had the second visit is very different from the first and also in many ways I think even more important and more telling the summer of 1864 was a very bad time for the Union Army Ulysses S. Grant had suffered tens of thousands of casualties in the Overland Campaign moving from Fredericksburg down towards Richmond and then getting stuck in a siege outside of Petersburg and William Tecumseh Sherman was stuck outside of Atlanta and with the two main Union forces stuck unable to make forward progress Union morale was plummeting and by August of 1864 Abraham Lincoln is convinced that he will lose in his bid for reelection and so he calls Frederick Douglass to the White House remember the first time Douglass goes he's been invited this time Lincoln calls him to the White House and they talk for a little while about the Emancipation Issue in the election of 1864 and then Douglass Lincoln pivots the conversation and Lincoln says Douglass I hate slavery as much as you do but he points out to Douglass that the slaves are not running away in as large of numbers and Douglass says well the truth is the slave owners keep their enslaved populations from finding out about the Emancipation Proclamation and so many of them don't know to run away to get to Union lines to become free and what Lincoln is concerned about in this moment is that if he loses reelection he's going to be out of office he's going to be defeated by a Democrat most likely George McClellan not yet been nominated but that when McClellan gets into office he will repeal or rescind the Emancipation Proclamation and the chance for freedom will be over so Lincoln and Douglass sit down together and then Douglass later writes a letter to Lincoln laying out a plan and the two men hatch a plan kind of modeled after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry where they will send bands of scouts into the Confederacy basically shouting from the rooftops run away now while Lincoln is in office run away while you still can because by March 4th 1865 your golden opportunity will be over now fortunately Sherman captured Atlanta and shared and rode through the Shenandoah Valley and Mobile Bay fell and Union morale skyrocketed and Lincoln sailed into a significant electoral victory on November 8th 1864 but this meeting is still tremendously important when most of us think about Emancipation and the Emancipation Proclamation we say well Lincoln did it as a military necessity he only did it to free the slaves to save the Union he didn't really do it maybe because his heart was in it but this moment shows just how much Lincoln's heart was in Emancipation freeing the slaves in this way at this time had nothing to do with military necessity it had nothing to do with saving the Union it had everything to do with making freedom as broad and as permanent as possible and Frederick Douglass recognized this he recognized how much Lincoln's heart was in Emancipation and Douglass's views of Lincoln really change as a result of this meeting he comes to see Lincoln as a friend and he grows to have great admiration and I would say even affection for Abraham Lincoln in the lead up to the election of 1864 Lincoln would have a couple of other high profile meetings with African Americans and I want to point out that Lincoln had nothing to gain politically well Frederick Douglass said this that nothing could be more calculated to heat down scorn upon a politician than to treat African Americans with dignity and respect and yet Douglass said that's precisely what Lincoln did in September of 1864 the black community of Baltimore presented a beautiful pulpit Bible to Lincoln and a few ministers from Baltimore went to the white house to present it this Bible cost well over $550 and it had gold plates on it what you see on the left hand side of the screen here is the gold plate that was featured on the front cover of the Bible and they went to the white house and they presented it to Lincoln and they thanked him for all he had done to help free the slaves and in not so subtle language they urged him to support black citizenship rights Lincoln prized this gift it stayed in his family down to his son Robert and in the early 19th century around 1916 Robert still had it in his possession and Fisk University and HBCU in Nashville wrote to Robert and said wouldn't it be fitting if this Bible was back in the hands of African Americans so that we can use it to remember our connection with Abraham Lincoln and Robert molded over and decided to donate it to Fisk and I went down there during the course of my research for this book and took this photograph of the front cover and I would say to anyone go to the John Hope and Aurelia Franklin Library at Fisk University and you can behold this incredible piece of history Lincoln was proud of this Bible and when Sojourner Truth visited him on October 29th 1864 they sat down together in Lincoln's office and he showed her the Bible and they looked through it and Sojourner Truth and Lincoln had a, I think a really wonderful, interesting conversation at this point right before the election of 1864 and Sojourner Truth later said I felt I was in the presence of a friend now for my last few minutes I want to take you outside of the White House into the streets of Washington D.C. Throughout the Civil War Lincoln traveled around the streets of Washington meeting people and among them were fugitive slaves who had fled to Washington D.C. to get away from slavery in Maryland or Virginia or even further away and they settled in contraband camps some worked in hospitals and Lincoln interacted with them and all of the accounts that survived show us that he treated them with dignity and respect in the same way that he did anyone else he met in May of 1862 he went to a hospital and a white nurse there introduced him to three black cooks one of whom was a slave who had run away from Kentucky and was now in Washington and according to the nurse he took him kindly he went up to the first one to the woman and said how do you do Lucy and he put out his hand and shook her hand he then went up to the next one and said how do you do Garner and he shook his hand and then to the third how do you do Brown and shook his hand Lincoln took the time to learn their names to shake their hands and the three black cooks stood there the nurse later said their amazement and joy for all time but there were some white convalescing Union soldiers who were watching this and they were furious that the commander in chief was treating black people this way they called it a mean contemptible trick to introduce those damned N words to the president but Lincoln ignored them he didn't pay them any mind Lincoln would often ride out to the soldiers home in northwest Washington DC and when he would do this he would stop at the contraband camp which is near which was near where present day Howard University is and what you see here is a photograph of these black refugees at the contraband camp and if you look carefully at this image you'll notice they are all holding little books they're preparing to sing for Abraham Lincoln and there are accounts that come down to us through a young woman who was young at the time a black refugee from Maryland named Mary Dines and Mary Dines described what it was like to sing for the president of the United States at this contraband camp the first time that Lincoln came that she was asked to sing she stumbled as her knees trembled when she went in front of the people and she began singing nobody knows what trouble I see but Jesus she later said that the thought of singing for the president nearly killed her and as she sang the first verse of this hymn she constantly looked over at Lincoln to see how he was reacting and after the first verse then the other contraband joined in and she said they sang for an hour and she saw Mary Mary saw the president wiped tears away from his eyes and she said the singers began to sing and shout very loudly and yell and what she remembered all those years later when she recollected this moment was that the president didn't laugh at how this black congregation was singing in a very different way than Lincoln would have been used to in his growing up in churches in Kentucky and Mary believed that the Holy Ghost was working on him they sang together, they sang John Brown's body and by the end of John Brown's body Lincoln had joined in and was singing as loud as anyone and you can imagine him glory, glory, hallelujah his soul goes marching on and Mary Dines later said that Lincoln had a sweet voice and it sounded so sad she said it sounded so sad to follow her in the first tune and he really choked up and Lincoln would go back to the contraband camp and ask Mary to sing what songs are you going to sing for me today and you can just imagine this interaction with Lincoln and these very poor destitute people and what I think this captures for us is that Lincoln treated people with a real humility what we today would call authenticity he was genuine in his interactions with African Americans in a way that had never before happened in United States history black people come to see Lincoln as their president they come to see themselves as citizens who have a right to go to him to write to him with things that they want to read or to go to the White House and meet with him to ask for a redress of grievances in Frederick Douglass's case or for assistance if they are in a difficult financial situation and the White House in a very real sense became their people's house too for a brief period of time and I don't want to make the case that the color line was completely broken down in the White House of Lincoln's day but it was a moment that was very different from any other that had come before it and it would take decades and decades and decades for it to ever get to that point again I think there's nothing in the chat so I'll say one more thing if you have any questions or I'll just wrap up with this actually with a quote from Lincoln's secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells because Gideon Wells really captured something right after Lincoln died April 15th, 1865 that captures I think the relationship that developed between Lincoln and African-Americans. On April 15th, 1865 and again this is the day Lincoln dies Gideon Wells is outside of the White House and he sees hundreds of men, women and children out there mourning and Wells then wrote in his diary he said sorry I lost my spot he said several hundred colored people mostly women and children were weeping and wailing their loss on the avenue outside of the White House he said this crowd did not appear to diminish throughout the whole cold wet day they seemed not to know what was to be their fate since their great benefactor was dead and their hopeless grief affected me more than almost anything else those strong and brave men wept when I met them I hope that this book can reshape the way we think about Lincoln and race and emancipation in the 19th century Lincoln's legacy has been one that changes over time and it's one that rises and falls in different times as we encounter different problems in our own society we of course are going to read back through our own lens to Lincoln and view him in different ways and I hope that in this book I've been able to show a side of Lincoln an aspect of his character and his personality and his presidency that has not been known before and that can give us a new appreciation of his greatness as a president and as a statesman thank you so much for joining me it's really been a pleasure and an honor to be able to speak with an audience from the National Archives and I look forward to joining you again at some point in the future