THE BLACK MAN'S PRESIDENT

A look at Lincoln’s extensive affiliations with Black leaders, from his law practice to the White House, as key indications of his egalitarian thoughts and feelings.

Historian Burlingame, the chair in Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois, moves beyond Lincoln’s well-examined speeches and writings on African Americans to examine the personal relations he developed with Black leaders such as Frederick Douglass over time. “As a racial egalitarian,” writes the author, “Lincoln condemned the doctrine of White superiority.” Burlingame, whose last book explored the Lincolns’ marriage, sets out to chronicle examples through Lincoln’s defense of Blacks in his law practice and his welcoming of Black visitors to the White House as well as his deep repugnance of others’ expressions of White supremacy, including those by his own wife. He was a defender of the working people and the downtrodden, despite the color of their skin, and Black citizens in Springfield appreciated his personal touch. Studying details of Lincoln’s law practice and voting record, Burlingame surmises that he probably opposed the racist Black Code of Illinois. While he initially endorsed the Black colonization movement (to Liberia or Central America), mainly because he did not think White voters would endorse emancipation, later he was more muted in response to Black objections to the movement. Lincoln’s treatment of his Black staff—e.g., William H. Johnson, a servant who accompanied the family from Springfield to Washington, D.C., in 1861—is legendary, and Lincoln went out of his way to invite Douglass, his fiercest critic, to the White House and include Black guests at his inauguration (to the consternation of his wife). Burlingame addresses Lincoln’s use of the N-word and delight in minstrel shows as indicative of him being a man of his time rather than indicating a racist worldview, as other critics have maintained.

A moderate defense of Lincoln’s racial views that should invite further debate about the subject.