Visits With Lincoln: Abolitionists Meet The President at the White House

(Paperback)

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Visits with Lincoln provides a balanced and readable discussion of ten abolitionists, male and female, black and white, who visited President Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War in an attempt to advance their goal of ending slavery immediately. The book paints a portrait of Lincoln through the eyes of his visitors and traces changes in his ideas and attitudes over the course of the war. The visitors include Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of Major General John Charles Fremont, the famous explorer and commander of the Union army's Department of the West; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Henry Ward Beecher, three members of the distinguished Beecher family; Frederick Douglas, former slave and recruiter of black soldiers; Anna Dickenson, Republican orator; William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, leaders of the Boston abolitionist movement; and Sojourner Truth, ex-slave and itinerant anti-slavery speaker.

Reviews

Abraham Lincoln's reputation as the "Great Emancipator" tends to obscure the work of the many who worked tirelessly to secure the abolition of slavery. Visits with Lincoln places the embattled and conflicted president among some of the most prominent of those abolitionists, and thus helps us to trace the difficult development of Lincoln's views. In this informative, unsettling, and always engaging book, Barbara White breaks through some enduring legends and myths about Lincoln by providing a valuable introduction to the most prominent men and women of the anti-slavery movement. -- John Ernest
A fresh, fascinating, up close look inside the Lincoln White House by an eminent scholar. Meticulously researched and engagingly written, this study shows a side of Lincoln rarely seen-not as a fixed icon but in process-as he interacts personally and politically with the major abolitionists. -- Josephine Donovan, University of Maine, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love, and Co-editor of The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics and Animals and Women
Visits with Lincoln does deliver a well-written collection of historical vignettes, centered on Lincolns interactions with a myriad of fascinating individuals whose primary goal was the abolition of slavery. The author engages the reader by offering interesting details about Lincolns meetings with abolitionists, and it is very easy to delight in the first-hand visitor accounts of their impressions of our most iconic president. * Journal Of The Illinois State Historical Society *

Author Bio

Barbara A. White is professor emerita of women's studies at the University of New Hampshire.