Transcript Now Available: Abe Lincoln's Enduring Legacy

What do we lose when we tear down the men who extended liberty further?

That's the question at the center of this conversation with historian Jonathan W. White. A prolific author and editor of more than 20 books, Jonathan White is the country’s leading scholar on Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, slavery and emancipation. In addition to teaching American Studies at Christopher Newport University, White is also a scholar at the Jack Miller Center, a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and a Director at the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the Abraham Lincoln Association. White joined Atlas Society CEO Jennifer Grossman for an interview to discuss his book A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House, as well as his very first children’s book, My Day with Abe Lincoln. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below.  

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JAG: JAG

JWW: Jonathan W. White

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JAG: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the 259th episode of Objectively Speaking. My name is JAG. I'm CEO of The Atlas Society. I am super excited to have Professor Jonathan White here to talk to us about his book, A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House, and also his children's book, My Day with Abe Lincoln. Of course, he is one of the foremost scholars on Abraham Lincoln, on slavery, emancipation, and the Civil War. We're going to get into all that. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us.

JWW: Thank you so much for having me.

JAG: I know we're going to dive into the history of Lincoln and the White House at the time, but I'd love to start with a little bit of your personal history. Where did you grow up, and how did you develop this fascination with your scholarly subjects?

JWW: Sure. Well, I grew up in the Philadelphia area, and my dad was a history major, and he worked for a retirement home. When I was a kid, we actually rented a farmhouse from the 1720s on the back of one of the retirement homes where he worked. Not only would he tell me stories because he was a history major, but I would go out in the woods in the back, dig up all sorts of stuff in the dirt and the trees. I found so many things from the 17- and 1800s, including a lot of bottles and things from the 1950s that are still in our garage, much to my wife's chagrin. But I think as a kid, being able to handle the things of history is what really gave me an appreciation for it. Then hearing stories that my dad would tell me also gave me a really great appreciation for storytelling.

JAG: Let's talk about the inspiration behind your book, A House Built by Slaves. Did Michelle Obama's 2016 DNC speech in which she referenced a house built by slaves play any role?

JWW: The speech itself actually didn't play a role. An editor at another publisher knew about the book, and she said, oh, you should call it A House Built by Slaves after Michelle Obama's DNC speech. I hadn't thought about it, but it's a good idea because in that speech she had talked about how every day she grows up in a house that was built by slaves. In my book, I try to tell a story of black visitors who came to the White House who met with Lincoln. This is the first time in the history of the country that something like that happens on a pretty regular basis. I figured, I'm going to tell a new story about that house that people don't know about. It's funny, though, because of the title. I've had some people say, oh, I thought it was an architecture book, since it's about the building of the house, but it's not really that.

JAG: In your preface to A House Built by Slaves, you run through the litany of many recent efforts to basically erase Abraham Lincoln from institutions and public spaces, whether the January 2021 vote by the San Francisco school board to try to rename the Abraham Lincoln High School, or the vandalization of statues of Abraham Lincoln around the country and even cities abroad. How do we understand such an impulse? Even if it's part of a broader attempt to deconstruct history through the lens of structural racism, and if that was the case, wouldn't Abraham Lincoln be hailed as a hero, the father of the Emancipation?

JWW: Yes, I think that's a great question. We have a lot of cynicism in our age and a lot of an impulse to want to tear down some of the great heroes of the past, whether it's founders like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or people like Abraham Lincoln. I think that's part of it. I think part of it in the summer of 2020 was also just a reaction to what was going on in the country. As groups of people took over city streets there were statues of all sorts of people who were torn down, not only Confederates, but also some Union soldiers. Lincoln came under fire. Lincoln often comes under fire for a lot of reasons. One of them has to do with his role with Native Americans during the Civil War. 

But then I think another thing is that people don't like the idea of giving credit to him because it seems to diminish the role that other people play in history. When I look at a lot of critics of Lincoln, they say, well if you call him the Great Emancipator, then it undermines the role that other people played. I think that when people take that approach, they're missing the bigger point that we can appreciate great things that Lincoln did, and we can also appreciate the other contributions that other people made. We don't need to just throw Lincoln out just because maybe you think he's had too much credit in the past.

JAG: These efforts to undermine Lincoln, do you think they're still underway or have they reached their high water mark?

JWW: Well, I'll say I hope they've reached their high water mark. But I think these things are cyclical. There have been studies that look at Lincoln's popularity at different times in American history since his assassination, and it ebbs and flows. There are times when Lincoln is really greatly appreciated, and then there are times when he's very heavily criticized. If you were to go back to the period right after he is killed, everyone who hated him all of a sudden loves him. Then over time, he begins to diminish. Then into the 20th century, after his centennial birthday, his reputation increases. 

Then in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, as black Americans are beginning to make great strides for increasing rights and equality and fighting for that, they begin to look back at Lincoln and say, well, maybe Lincoln didn't do as much for us as he's gotten credit for. Maybe we should give more credit to other leaders of that era. Lincoln's reputation went down. I think over time, it goes up and down. Right now I'm hoping we've moved past that moment for a while, but there will be more moments in the future when people come at him very hard, maybe more than they do now.

JAG: We'll take the long view, that is, of course, that people are still getting any education and retaining what they are being taught. I was really fascinated by your accounts of some of the early experiences that Lincoln had growing up, and as a young man, of his visits to New Orleans that may have shaped his view of the institution of slavery over time.

JWW: Yes. Lincoln grew up in a slave state. He spent his first few years in the state of Kentucky where he would have encountered slavery as a child. He would have seen slave coffles traveling on roads not far from his house. We don't know exactly what sort of impression those incidents made on him, but we know he would have experienced them then. When he was a young man in 1828 and 1831, he was asked to take some flatboat trips down to New Orleans. For a young boy, a young man who's growing up in rural America, who's lived in a very small area for his whole life, this is a chance for great adventure. You go 1,200 miles down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and you go to one of the most important and cosmopolitan cities in the country. He went with a friend and some relatives on these different trips down to New Orleans. But when he got there, he would then see the sites of slavery in a new way. New Orleans was a major slave-trading center in the country. You not only had slaves being sold in auction houses, but you had ships coming in from the coastal slave trade in the United States. Lincoln would have seen this firsthand. 

Now, there are accounts that come down to us about what these trips were like, and they come down directly and/or indirectly through people who were with him. One of the most famous stories involves Lincoln seeing the sale of a young girl who, according to the story, was very light skinned, but she was of African descent and she was brutally treated and sold. Lincoln turned to his friends and said something like: “Let's get out of here, boys. Someday I'm going to hit that thing and hit it hard.” Now, for years, that story was first told right after Lincoln died. The story dates to at least the 1860s. But that said, we don't know for sure if it's true. It seems like it may be a little too perfect for the future president to say something like that I'm going to hit slavery hard. On the other hand, there are several witnesses who were alive in the 1860s who said that they heard Lincoln say that or heard someone who heard Lincoln say that. So, I don't throw that story completely out. It may or may not be true. We'll never know for sure. But we do know for sure that Lincoln would have encountered slavery and slave sales in New Orleans and it would have had a profound effect on the way he viewed the injustice of that institution.

JAG: You recount a harrowing, near fatal experience that Lincoln had as he was making his way to New Orleans. You put it in perspective, thus: “How ironic that Louisiana slaves came so close to killing the man that some of them would later likely hail as the Great Emancipator.” What happened?

JWW: Yes, so this is one of these flatboat trips down to New Orleans and they get near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he and his friend Alan Gentry park their flatboat on the side of the Mississippi River for the night. At that point these two young guys are getting ready to go to sleep and seven slaves from a nearby plantation come and attack Lincoln and his friend Alan Gentry. Now, we don't know what their intentions were. Clearly, the slaves wanted to rob and take away from the flatboat, take things for themselves. We don't know if they intended to kill Lincoln and his friend or not.

But these guys attack Lincoln and Gentry and begin beating them with hickory sticks. Lincoln and Gentry are getting the worst end of this fight. Alan Gentry shouts, hey, Lincoln, get the guns and shoot. Now, they didn't have guns, but the seven slaves didn't know that. The slaves ran away, and Lincoln and Gentry got back in the boat and headed back onto the Mississippi River to safety. We know for sure that this happened because Lincoln and other people who were there wrote about it. I think Gentry's widow wrote about it after Lincoln died. There's evidence from multiple sources, including Lincoln himself. We know for sure that this happened. It's incredible to think. This is 1831, and Lincoln will issue the Emancipation Proclamation 32 years later. Some of those seven men were probably still alive 30 years later and became free because of the actions of the man that they almost killed. If they had killed him, we wouldn't know who Lincoln was. Things would have turned out completely differently. It's one of these just incredibly ironic moments in American history.

JAG: Yes, and yet another anecdote of the deterring effect of gun ownership, or at least imagine gun ownership in this case. All right, before I leave Louisiana and New Orleans, one more story you tell about Lincoln's encounter with a fortune teller. What did she say, and how reliable is that story?

JWW: Yes, so this is one of those stories that I included in the book because it was too good not to. But then I also included that the person who wrote it said, I have no corroborating evidence for this. I wanted to be clear to readers that this one's far less likely. But on one of these trips, Lincoln allegedly went to, I think the person was called a voodoo Negress, I think is what the original source called her. A black fortune teller, and that she saw Lincoln and had a visceral reaction to him and said one day you're going to be president and free the slaves, and the like. In the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination, I think a lot of people, and I've written about this in other books, too, a lot of people wanted to sort of impute some sort of supernatural power to Lincoln. I wrote a book about dreams during the Civil War and how people describe Lincoln's dreams. They try to make him prophetic in a lot of ways. I think in the aftermath of Lincoln's assassination, there may have been someone who thought, wouldn't it be a great story if a prophetess said that Lincoln was going to be president and free the slaves someday? I don't think it probably happened but it's part of that sort of overall story of Lincoln's time in New Orleans.

JAG: You describe circumstances that led to hundreds or even thousands of freed blacks being kidnapped and sold into slavery in the Deep South before the Civil War. What was going on? Did this surface in Lincoln's practice as a lawyer?

JWW: Yes, I think most Americans today are familiar with the Underground Railroad.The Underground Railroad is, of course, enslaved people escaping from the South into the North, and many of them upwards to Canada. What most Americans today, I think, don't know is that there was also what scholars have begun calling the reverse Underground Railroad. There was a whole kidnapping scheme that went on throughout the North where free black people would be kidnapped and then sold into the South. We don't know how many thousands of people this happened to because most of it was done by cover of night. It was done by drugging people and then imprisoning them when they were incapacitated. 

The most famous instance of this, probably one that many in the audience are familiar with, is a story of a man named Solomon Northup, who was a free black man from upstate New York. He was a very talented violinist. In the late 1840s, some people went to him and they said, hey, we're promoters for a musical show and we need a violinist. Will you come perform? He needed to make money and he needed gigs, and so he agreed. They took him to Washington, DC. They wined and dined him, they drugged him, and he woke up the next morning chained down in a slave jail, which was located near Capitol Hill, I think, pretty close to it. To either side were the Federal courthouses in DC or the Canadian Embassy. You're right in that area.

Northup is one of the lucky ones. He eventually became free. It took him 12 years, but he eventually became free and returned to New York. He wrote a book called Twelve Years a Slave, which became a movie that many have probably seen. It's an incredibly powerful story. Lincoln actually experienced that firsthand, too. He served one term in Congress in the late 1840s, and he lived in a boarding house near the US Capitol, where the Library of Congress now stands. The woman who owned the boarding house, Mrs. Spriggs, hired and rented some free black servants and some enslaved black servants. One of them was a slave who was very close to purchasing his own freedom. In the middle of the night in January of 1848, it was a Friday night, some men went in and kidnapped him and they took him to the slave port in Richmond, Virginia, to sell him to the South. 

Now, fortunately for him, and I think his name was Henry Wilson, if memory serves correctly, fortunately for Henry Wilson, he had been a servant in a boarding house with a bunch of congressmen living in it. Those congressmen went to the floor of the House of Representatives and brought this to national attention, and they were able to raise money and find him, and get him freed. But most of the people who that happened to were born free, were kidnapped and their stories are lost because they had their names changed, they were sold far away, and no one knew what happened to them.

JAG: Yes, next time you're having a bad day, you can remember that experience and put your own troubles into perspective. Now I thought your book did a really admirable job of showing how Lincoln's convictions evolved over time, as would be natural. What were some of the challenges when pursuing those convictions conflicted with political expediency, for example, in the Lincoln–Douglas debate?

JWW: Yes. Lincoln was a politician and I think that's something that we always have to keep in mind because I think a lot of times when we look back at historical figures, we wish they had done things differently. It's very easy for us to Monday-morning-quarterback and think, well, why didn't he do this? He could have done that. There's such better ways that he could have done things. We do this for our contemporary leaders as well. We often don't take into account the political realities in which they were working. Lincoln was a state-level politician for much of his career in the free state of Illinois. We often have these sort of simplistic views of that era. Was the free North against the slave South?

The North wanted free labor and extension of freedom and liberty and the South wanted to enslave 4 million people. You've got the good guys and the bad guys. That's a very simplistic and, I think, wrong-headed way of viewing things. When I talk to my students about this, and I included some of this in the book as well, I make the case that to understand the world in which Lincoln was operating, you have to understand that Illinois was a white supremacist state. By that, I mean that the politicians who governed Illinois believed that Illinois was a state for white men and white men only, and that that was it. If you look at the laws that they have in place, you can see this. Obviously, women have very little political rights, they can't serve on juries. Until the late 1840s, early 1850s, women can't own property. If they get married, their property automatically becomes the property of their husband. If he's a louse or a drunkard or a gambler, you're stuck. You lose everything. 

For black people, black men can't serve in the militia. They can't serve on juries. They can't testify in court against white people. They can testify against black people, but not white people. If all that is not enough, if you were a free black person in another state in 1853, Illinois passed a law that made it illegal for you to move into the state of Illinois. You want to better your life. You want to buy a bigger farm and leave an inheritance to your kids. You can do that by moving west. Now, Illinois says you're not allowed to move here. If you moved to Illinois, you were arrested under this law, you would be fined $50, which was a lot of money back then. You might not have $50. You get fined, you can't pay it off, you get put in jail, and then they auction off your labor to the highest bidder, and you have to work for that person without pay to pay off your debt to society. That's in the free state of Illinois. There's unfree labor. 

We often criticize Lincoln for maybe not being as enlightened as we wish he was on some things, but if you look at it within the context he was operating, he knew that most of the voters in Illinois supported these laws, and yet he tried to meet them where they were and draw them along. As he moved along, as you said, his views on certain issues progressed or changed as well. With all of that context, I think it's all the more remarkable that Lincoln was able to accomplish what he did. What Lincoln would do is he would point to our founding documents, he would point to the Declaration of Independence and to the Constitution, and he would say the Declaration says all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. He would say that really means what it says. All means all. He would try to get his constituents and audience members to live up to the principles that they profess to believe in.

JAG: All right, we're going to dip into a few audience questions and comments since there are a lot. First, Lock, Stock and Barrel says he's a big fan of your book. You've got a fan club brewing here. Okay. My Modern Galt says the Civil War is obviously a well-studied period, but it often seems like it is raised to an almost near mythical status. Do you think so?

JWW: Yes, I think that's true. I think, as a child learning about the Civil War through kids’ books or shows, a lot of these figures seem larger than life; at the same time, there was real heroism during the Civil War. There was real bravery. There was real courage by these people who were willing to sacrifice everything for what they believed in. Some, I would argue in the right, and some, I would argue in the wrong. But that said, they made great sacrifices. When you go to a place like Gettysburg or to a lesser extent, Fredericksburg, because it's so built up now, it's hard to envision as much. Or Antietam, the bloodiest day in American history. You walk those fields and you think about these thousands of men, given an order, charged across this field to sudden or almost certain death. There is something really extraordinary about the sacrifices that they made. 

I did a book a couple of years ago called Our Little Monitor: the Greatest Invention of the Civil War. It's about the USS Monitor fighting the CSS Virginia, which took place about 20 minutes that way from where I'm sitting right now. It's the first time in the history of the world that ironclad vessels fought each other. There are incredible letters that survived from the paymaster of the Monitor named William Keiller. Keillor described what it was like to go on the Monitor the first time it fought, being surrounded by what he said might be an iron coffin. His concern was that because they were surrounded by iron, he said, there isn't even danger in us enough to give us any glory. He was thinking, those guys on the battlefield, they're showing their bravery. They're getting noticed for it. We're fighting behind an iron shield. We might not get the glory we deserve. In the end, I think the sailors of the Monitor and the Merrimac did earn a lot of well-deserved renown, but they were thinking about it and I think there is a real sense of honor among a lot of those men.

JAG: All right, Jackson Sinclair asks, if Lincoln had not been assassinated, is there an idea of what plans he would have implemented for Reconstruction?

JWW: Yes, that's a very good question. Lincoln began thinking about Reconstruction very early in the war and he started putting a plan forward by the midpoint of the war. On December 8, 1863, he actually issued a proclamation, he called it a Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, where he said to the Confederates, if you come back and take an oath of loyalty, as long as you're not a high-ranking officer or a government official, we'll welcome you back into the Union. You just have to promise loyalty, future loyalty to the Union, and also promise to give up slavery. Those were Lincoln's conditions. He said when 10% of the voting population of a state had taken this oath, Lincoln would bring them back into the Union. That was a very forgiving way of thinking about reunion. He was not looking to punish the Confederates if they would come back. 

Lincoln said all along, from the very beginning of the war, he said, I'm fighting to show that democracy works and that we can have elections and when you win, you take over and when you lose, you relinquish power and we need to show that that works. His vision was to bring ex-Confederates back into the Union. Now at the beginning of the war, Lincoln opposed black men having the right to vote, but he was moving in that direction. I have a chapter in A House Built by Slaves where I describe several delegations of black men who come to Lincoln and say we should have the right to vote. They point out that actually black men had been able to vote in a lot of states in the time of the Founding. They said we should have that right again.

By the end of the war, as Lincoln's thinking about Reconstruction, I think his vision was not only will we restore ex-Confederates to their citizenship, but Southern states are going to have to give black men the right to vote as well. They've been loyal to the Union the whole time. They've served; 200,000 black men serving the Army and Navy to fight for the Union, to fight for liberty. They deserve the right to vote. In fact, in the very last speech Lincoln gave, John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and Lincoln advocated publicly for the first time for black voting rights. John Wilkes Booth was in the audience and heard that and said, that means N-word citizenship, by God, that'll be the last speech he ever gives. Four days later, Lincoln was dead. 

Now, one of the great ironies is that when Lincoln was killed, white Southerners, former Confederates, were some of the people who were most concerned because they knew that Lincoln had been talking about forgiveness publicly in his second inaugural address and in other statements. They also knew that Andrew Johnson hated the planter class and he was going to come in as president now. Johnson had said, “Treason must be made odious.” Confederate planters, Confederates must be punished. He even said, imprisoned. One of the extraordinary ironies is that former Confederates were some of the people who were most concerned when Lincoln was killed because they saw him as someone who would be forgiving towards them. Radical Republicans, Lincoln's supposed allies, were at times rejoicing that Lincoln had been killed because they said he was going to be too lenient. We need someone who's going to punish the Confederates, and Andrew Johnson's going to be that guy. Well, boy, were they wrong about that.

JAG: All right, Kingfisher21 says, I know Lincoln wasn't very popular for his criticism of the Mexican–American War. How did he bounce back from that?

JWW: Lincoln served one term in Congress, and it just happened to be from 1847 to 1849, which essentially lines up with America's involvement in the Mexican–American War. The Mexican–American War was, you could say it was, something of a land grab. There was a disputed territory between the Rio Grande River and the Nueces River in Texas. Both Mexico and the United States claimed this disputed territory, and American settlers began moving into this territory. Then the Mexican government sent their military in and shot and killed some of these settlers. President Polk went to Congress and he said, American blood has been spilled on American soil. He called for Congress to declare war, which they did. The army went in and sacked Mexico City. Within two years, the war is over. 

Now, Lincoln serves during that time. Lincoln was a very shrewd politician. Even though he opposed the war, he always voted for money for the troops. You could think back to 2004, where John Kerry said, I actually voted for the $86 billion before I voted against it. Lincoln didn't make that mistake. Even though Lincoln opposed the war, he supported the troops. But that said, he saw the war as an unconstitutional attempt to seize land from a foreign country. In other words, he sided with Mexico on that disputed territory and thought that the Nueces River and not the Rio Grande was the border of the United States. He went into Congress and issued a series of resolutions that are now known as the spot resolutions, where he essentially said, Mr. President, President Polk, point to a spot on the map where American blood was spilled on American soil. In other words, that is Mexico, not America.

For doing that, Lincoln was seen as a traitor. New Democratic newspapers back in Illinois likened him to Benedict Arnold. When he would give speeches, he would be heckled by Democrats who would just shout the word “spot” at him. In fact, he told his law partner, Billy Herndon, in a private letter that he had the spotted fever because of all this stuff that was being thrown at him. Now, to be fair, there's some dispute about this, but I think Lincoln only intended to serve one term in Congress anyway. He had a deal with other Whigs in Illinois that they would each take their turn, but because of his action, the next Whig who ran lost. Lincoln went back to Illinois, and he just decided, I'm done with politics. He practiced law, and for the next five years, that's what he does. 

But then in 1854, Congress passes a law called the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which totally changed the terms of slavery in this country, which I can explain if you want. But when Lincoln saw that law, he saw it as a betrayal of America's founding principles. He saw it as a betrayal of the Declaration of Independence. He saw it as a betrayal of the Constitution. That roused him back into politics. He gave such incredible speeches that I think people looked past the Mexican War. But an incredible irony is when Lincoln becomes president, he does things that are obviously unpopular. Democrats point back to his actions and speeches during the Mexican War and say, isn't Lincoln being a little hypocritical here? Isn't he doing some things that he criticized before? I think there's some fairness to that, but I think hopefully that explains how he took his positions and was able to get out of that hole he had dug himself into.

JAG: All right, I'm going to pause on some of our audience questions, but keep them coming. We will get back to them. I want to return to the book A House Built by Slaves. You write that Bishop Daniel Payne's visit in April 1862 marked the first recorded black visitor to the White House. Why was this a significant moment? Did it in any way set the tone for future interactions?

JWW: Yes. To understand this context, we have to realize the White House was very different back then. In Lincoln's time, anyone who wanted to could go to the White House, wait in line, and on days that the President had office hours, just go in and talk to him about anything they wanted to. If anyone in the audience has seen the Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln, there's this wonderful fictional scene, but it's a wonderful scene where these people come in and they're complaining to Lincoln like, hey, this guy's doing something to our bridge in Missouri and we need your help with it. That kind of thing happened. Like anyone who wanted to could talk to the president. For the first year of the war, as far as I could tell in my research, only white Americans, men and women, claimed that privilege or that right to go in and talk to Lincoln about whatever was on their mind. Give me a position or I need help with this or whatever. As early as April of 1862, you begin to now see black Americans claim this privilege as well. In a sense, I suggest that they were making a claim that they were citizens, that they have a First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The first person I could find that did this was a bishop from the AME Church named Daniel Payne. Now, Payne had been to the White House once before in 1843. There was an explosion on a ship in the Potomac River in 1843 that killed a bunch of the cabinet members. There was a funeral at the White House, and one of the people who had been killed in the explosion was a black servant. Daniel Payne delivered the funeral sermon at the White House. When he met John Tyler, the president, in 1843, Tyler was very rude and curt towards him. Payne came back to the White House in April of 1862 because Congress had just passed a law to abolish slavery in Washington, DC, and Lincoln had not yet signed it. 

Payne came to the White House to urge Lincoln to sign this bill into law. Lincoln was coy. Lincoln didn't say, I'm going to do it or I'm not going to do it. I think Lincoln had already decided he was going to do it, but he didn't want it leaking out yet. But Payne wanted to make sure Lincoln's going to sign this thing. He met with Lincoln, and afterwards he wrote about it and described, I think, they talked for 45 minutes and had a very courteous conversation. In Payne's mind, he saw a very big distinction between how John Tyler had treated him and how Lincoln treated him and for all the meetings that Lincoln had with black visitors. But one, I think that that really captures the way Lincoln treated them as guests. He listened to them, he interacted with them, and he showed them real courtesy.

JAG: Since you mentioned Spielberg's movie Lincoln, I've got to ask, what did you think of it? How accurate was it?

JWW: I thought it was great. I loved it. There were moments where I was seeing Daniel Day Lewis and I thought, wow, he really captures it. The voice I thought he captured very well. Daniel Day Lewis is a method actor, so when he gets into a role, he really is the role. I think he even insists that when you're off set or not being filmed, he requires you to talk to him as if he's the character. That said, I think there were some unforced errors that historians are the biggest killjoys when it comes to movies because we always love to point out the little things that just weren't real. I think there were some mistakes that the filmmakers made that actually cost them some Academy Awards. They got a lot of bad press because of how they depicted the voting on the 13th Amendment. I thought that was just an unforced error they didn't need to make. I also wish they might have incorporated a little bit more real dialogue from the Civil War into it. 

But all that said, I thought it was a phenomenal movie. But I'll give the audience, I think, one of these that is great trivia for people. If you're ever at a dinner party and it comes up and you want to really surprise your friends with a historical inaccuracy from the movie, there's a scene where Lincoln goes into a hospital to talk to convalescing soldiers. This is something Lincoln did all the time. He wanted to thank the troops. He wanted to show them his gratitude and respect, and he would go and spend lots of time with them. In the film, Lincoln meets a soldier, and the soldier's name is Kevin. The reason that really couldn't be accurate is that Kevin was not really a name in the United States in the Civil War era. If you really want to surprise your friends with something, some good historical trivia, there you have it.

JAG: Well, yes, that wasn't too bad. I thought you were going to say he was carrying a Diet Coke or something like that. All right, so, of the countless interactions you recount in your book that Lincoln had with black visitors, is there one that stands out for you as particularly poignant or revealing of Lincoln's inner convictions or character?

JWW: Yes, there's one that's really stuck with me. In the 1820s, there was a free black family in Norfolk, Virginia, not far from where I live, about 45 minutes that way. The son's name was Alexander Augusta. Augusta really wanted to be a doctor. He applied to a medical school in Philadelphia and was denied admission because he was black. He moved to Canada, where he attended medical school, became a doctor, and then ended up serving as a medical school professor in Canada, training other black doctors. After Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Augusta wrote to Lincoln and said, I'd like to be a surgeon in the army, he said, where I can be of some use to my race. Augusta came to Washington, DC, and was put under an examination to see if he could pass. At first, the War Department doctors said, we don't want to examine him. The Secretary of War insisted that he get the test. They gave him the hardest questions they could. Someone described it later as a squeezing process. 

Augusta passed with flying colors. But he continued to face racial discrimination. He was violently beaten up by a mob when he was riding a train in Baltimore in 1863. He was kicked off of a streetcar in Washington, DC, in 1864. He went public. He said, I have rights under the Constitution. You can't do this to me. The Senate debated it. It made national headlines. Some newspapers, Democratic newspapers . . . I should specify newspapers back then were partisan. You were either a Republican newspaper or a Democrat newspaper. You didn't hide it like they try to hide it sometimes today. They wore it on their lapels. Democratic newspapers were criticizing Augusta, saying, who is this guy to think he can be an army surgeon and to ride in streetcars with white people? He should take it up with the president.

Now, I don't know if Alexander Augusta ever saw any of those newspaper reports, but that's actually exactly what he did. In February of 1864, Lincoln was having a party at the White House. It was an evening party. Anyone who wanted to could go and greet the president. Augusta and another black doctor named Anderson Abbott decide, you know what? We are citizens. We are soldiers. Lincoln is our president, too. They went to the White House. They took off their coats. They went in, and Augusta went to shake Lincoln's hand. Abbott, the second doctor, later wrote about it. That's how we know what happened. Abbott said that Lincoln eagerly went up to them and shook Augusta's hand. At that point, Mary Lincoln looks over and sees her husband shaking this black man's hand. She sends her son Robert over. Robert says something like, are you really going to allow this innovation? Are you really going to allow black men into this party? Lincoln turns to his friend and says, why not? Robert goes back over to his mother, and Lincoln turns back to Augusta and shakes his hand and then turns to Abbott and shakes his hand. 

One of Lincoln's private secretaries was there and wrote about this in his diary or in something. He said it was a practical assertion of their citizenship that they were doing this. He said it was as good as a play, like watching this scene unfold was as good as Shakespeare. Whenever I think about these scenes at the White House, it was highly unpopular for Lincoln to do that. It didn't win him political points. Voters were not going to say, oh, yes, vote for this guy. Confederate newspapers reported on it. I've read at least two Confederate diaries where the diarists read about the scene in the newspapers and then wrote about it. They said, look, we're justified in seceding. Look at what Lincoln's doing. He's turning these black men into citizens. He's welcoming them in the White House. Why would we have stayed in the Union? That's one of my favorite moments to think about. In part, it's because photographs of both those men survived, too. It's really incredible to be able to see their faces and know what they experienced.

JAG: Lincoln's 1862 meeting with a black delegation on colonization is often seen as controversial. How do you interpret that meeting in the broader context of Lincoln's interactions with African Americans?

JWW: Yes, I saw someone had commented about that probably about 35 minutes ago, mentioning something about Panama. I'm glad that that has come up here. I mentioned a couple minutes ago that every link, every meeting but one, Lincoln really treats people with a listening ear. This is the one meeting that he doesn't. But we have to understand it in its context. 

There was an idea called colonization. It had been around for 60, 80 years, maybe more, before the Civil War. The idea was black people and white people aren't going to be able to live together in peace after freedom. Let's find a place to send black people when they become free. It could be Liberia in Africa, it could be Haiti. It could be Panama. It could be somewhere else. But Liberia, Haiti, and Panama were the three big places that people were talking about in the 1850s and ’60s. Lincoln, in the summer of 1862, was trying to find a constitutional way to end slavery. The way he was trying to do it was to get Congress to allocate money to convince the states to free their slaves. Congress would give money under the Fifth Amendment, you compensate people for the taking of property, so give money to the states. The states would pass laws that would free the slaves within their state. It would be perfectly legal and constitutional. The slaveholders then get compensation for their loss of property. 

Lincoln was trying to think about, how can I get slaveholders to voluntarily give up their property? Now, at the same time, Lincoln knows that most slaveholders don't want free black people living near them. He puts forward this idea of compensated emancipation at the same time that he puts forward colonization. He's trying to essentially get freedom to come, but he's trying to say to white Northerners and Southerners, hey, if freedom comes, you don't need to worry about a glut in the labor market from unskilled black laborers who are going to move into cities and take away jobs from, say, Irish immigrants. Lincoln's trying to balance a lot of these different political and legal and constitutional concerns.

Now, by July of 1862, the compensated emancipation thing is going nowhere. Southern states, border states are not having it, and the war is going very badly. Lincoln decides, I've got to issue an Emancipation Proclamation. I've got to arm the enslaved population against the Confederacy to fight for the Union and against the South. But he still knows that most white Northern voters are never going to go for something like this, not just if he throws it out there. He wants to find a way to get people on board. He issues a series of statements. He does one as a private letter or as a public letter to a New York editor named Horace First Greeley, and then he does another as a meeting with a black delegation from Washington, DC, and he brings five black leaders into his office, and he shakes their hands when they come in, which was a pretty remarkable statement for him to do that. He asks them a question or two. Then for 45 minutes, he tells them, you are the cause of the war. If your people weren't here, white men wouldn't be slitting each other's throats. You should go and lead your people somewhere else and you will get money to pay for it. Now, from our perspective, and for many black people in 1862, this was extraordinarily condescending. You're blaming slaves for slavery. What's wrong with you, Lincoln? Lincoln gets criticized for this a lot, and I think some of it's justified.

At the same time, we have to understand a couple of things. First, Lincoln never contemplated forced deportation. They used the word deportation back then, but it had a different connotation, and people misunderstand that today. For Lincoln, it was always voluntary. Second, the leader of that meeting, the black leader of that meeting, believe it or not, was persuaded by Lincoln and came back later and was like, this sounds great. Let me go around the North and try to get people on board. Third, what I think was really going on, Lincoln knew there was no way to free 4 million people at that time to leave the country. He knew that it just wouldn't be possible. But he was trying to get white Northerners to realize that if emancipation comes, don't worry, I'm at least trying to do things to soften the blow. What's really revealing about this, and this is something that I have in the book, is that Lincoln appears to have met with another black minister named Henry McNeill Turner in September of 1862. Right after this really controversial meeting in August. Turner wrote about it, and he basically intimated that Lincoln said, I needed somewhere to point to.

I love magicians like Penn and Teller. Fool Us is one of my favorite shows. What magicians do is something called misdirection. Look over here while I'm doing the trick over here, so you don't see what I'm doing here, and what Henry McNeil Turner's writing, this black minister's, writing tells us is when Lincoln said I needed somewhere to point to, I think he was saying, essentially, I'm going for freedom. I'm trying to extend liberty to as many people as possible. But I've got to do something over here to distract the American voters so that I can pull it off. That's that. There was a lot to that answer, so I hope it made sense. But it's a really complicated meeting. It's the one that's unlike every other meeting that Lincoln had. But I think it's because of the political context that Lincoln was working within.

JAG: All right, well, we only have about, wow, 13 more minutes. This hour has flown by, and I would hate to leave the interview without getting to his interactions with Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. But we've got some really great questions from the audience. Let's see if we can whip through some of these. Lock, Stock, and Barrel asks, can you talk about European involvement in the Civil War? Did Britain really spend a concerted effort to destabilize the union?

JWW: Yes, that's a great question. With European involvement, it's a very complicated story, and I'll just sort of give a broad overview. Lincoln's big concern with the powers of Europe was that they were going to offer diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy and that they would then be sending supplies and munitions and things to the Confederacy and offering trade and so forth. Lincoln does everything he can to try to keep the powers of Europe, mainly England and France, from recognizing the Confederacy. He almost gets into war with France in, I think, it's November of 1861, when an American warship seizes a British ship, I think, with two confederate emissaries on it. His administration had to essentially apologize for that because it was a major aggression against an independent foreign power. 

Ultimately, Lincoln was able to keep England and France from giving diplomatic aid to the Confederacy. The powers of Europe did have diplomats in the Confederacy, so there were consuls in major cities like Richmond and Charleston and I think Louisiana, in New Orleans, as well. But ultimately, once Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, Britain had abolished slavery 30 years earlier. Once he does that, it's very clear that England is not going to give the Confederacy the recognition that they wanted. The other thing the Confederacy thought they had going for them was they're the world's probably biggest supplier of cotton in 1860, and cotton mills in England are reliant on them. The Confederates really thought they had an ace in the hole. Like, we're going to be able to keep England beholden to us. Because of that connection, there was a lot of sympathy towards the Confederacy among certain classes of England. But the British ended up finding cotton in other places like Egypt. The Confederacy's hope that they could hold cotton over the heads of England didn't end up panning out for them.

JAG: All right. I Like Numbers asks if Sherman hadn't marched south, could McClellan have won in 1864 and we'd be two countries today?

JWW: Yes, I think it's very possible that McClellan could have won the election. In fact, Lincoln was convinced he would lose in August of 1864. Lincoln did two things that indicate clearly he thought he would lose. He wrote a private memorandum where he said, essentially, it's clear to me I'm going to lose, and I need to work with the incoming president to win the war and save the Union before I'm out of office, because once I'm out, he won't be able to do it. Lincoln folded that up and had his cabinet sign it without them knowing what they were signing, basically getting them to agree to work with their political opponents to save the Union before they were out of power. The other thing Lincoln did, and you mentioned Frederick Douglass before. 

Douglass met Lincoln a couple times. Douglass and Lincoln had a very fraught relationship early in the war. Douglass was very critical of Lincoln early in the war because they had very different views of the Constitution. But Douglass met Lincoln three times in person. Those personal interactions really transformed the way that Douglass thought about Lincoln. The second meeting they had was in August of ’64, and Lincoln invited Douglas to the White House, and they sat down together and concocted a plan to free as many people as possible before Lincoln was out of power. Lincoln freed the slaves through an executive order. The thing we know about executive orders is once the president's out of power, the next president can revoke an executive order. It's not like a law. Lincoln calls Douglass in and says, the slaves aren't running away as fast as I thought they would. These two guys come up with a plan to try to free as many people as possible. For Lincoln, it was about extending liberty to as many human beings as he could. It had nothing to do with winning the war. It was just about giving freedom to people. 

Fortunately, Sherman captures Atlanta at the very beginning of September of 1864, and that causes Northern morale to rise significantly. Then Sheridan rides through the Shenandoah in Virginia in October. There are some other movements that buoy the Union, and Lincoln sails to reelection. But if Sherman and Sheridan hadn't done what they'd done, I have very little doubt that McClellan could have won.

JAG: All right, Sojourner Truth interactions with Lincoln.

JWW: Yes, I'll try to keep this one short. I have a whole chapter on her in the book. Sojourner Truth is one of the most famous abolitionists of the 19th century. She'd been born into slavery in New York in the 1790s and became free in the 1820s and she would travel the circuit giving lectures, and she met him. She went to meet with Lincoln in October of 1864. We were talking a long time ago about how you have to look at sources. One of the most prominent sources about Sojourner Truth was written in the 1890s, after Sojourner Truth died and after Lincoln was long dead, by a woman, an abolitionist woman, who hated Lincoln. She made Lincoln out to be the biggest jerk to Sojourner Truth. 

For many years, that was the standard account. I did more digging and I found some things that people hadn't seen before, but I found some other sources, some of which I think had just been neglected, where Sojourner Truth and others wrote about this meeting right in the moment, like within days or weeks. Sojourner Truth said, I think her quote was, I felt as though I was in the presence of a friend. I think that's so telling that for generations, scholars wanted to bang Lincoln over the head and say, look at how he treated Sojourner Truth. The truth is, no pun intended, I think they were relying on a really bad source from 30 years later by a person who hated Lincoln and wanted to portray him in a bad light. 

Looking at what was written by Truth and others in the immediate aftermath tells a much different story. I will say, I've written a lot of books about Lincoln. I've written about Lincoln and civil liberties. I've done a couple books on Lincoln and habeas corpus. I don't see him as a perfect man. I criticize Lincoln in A House Built by Slaves. I criticize him over some of the habeas corpus actions he took. I don't want people in the audience to think, oh, well, he's just glorifying Lincoln as this larger-than-life mythical figure. That's not at all the case. But in writing A House Built by Slaves, I really tried to find sources close to the events to recapture what it was like to be in the White House at that time. It shows, I think, a much different picture than we would naturally assume had been the case in that era.

JAG: In his second inaugural, Lincoln, in referencing Northerners and Southerners, made the comment that they both read the same Bible. But you point out that that's not exactly true.

JWW: Yes, slaveholders in the 1800s would often cut out parts of the Bible that didn't really support the idea of chattel slavery as it was being practiced in the United States. A slave would have never heard about the Book of Philemon, where the apostle Paul tells Philemon, you should set your slave Onesimus free. Or a slaveholder would never allow slaves to hear about the parts of the Bible that had to do with years of jubilee in the Old Testament or about treating servants kindly in the New Testament. So, yes, both read the same Bible and Lincoln said, “and pray to the same God,” but there were very different conceptions of what that Bible meant, whether you were in the North or the South.

JAG: Tell us about your children's book, My Day with Abe Lincoln. What was the inspiration behind it, and what were some of the challenges and maybe even unexpected delights of working in such a radically different format?

JWW: I've been writing books about Lincoln for 15, 20 years, and now I've got two kids. I have two daughters, Charlotte and Clara. Charlotte's 12 and Clara's nine. For years I've been telling them stories at bedtime, and usually they'd be made up stories about talking animals and whatnot. Then I would also read them history books. I decided that I wanted to tell a story about Abraham Lincoln that would be interesting to kids. I didn't want to just do a straight biography of what happened day after day after day. I came up with an idea where the main character, Lucy, wakes up on a Monday morning. She doesn't want to go to school, and she figures if I dress in the silliest outfit possible (you can see her over there) . . . . She dresses up in the silliest outfit possible, and she figures if I dress like this, my parents won't let me go to school. To top off her outfit, she puts on her brother's hat from his magic kit. 

That sends her back to Indiana in the 1820s, where she meets a young Abe Lincoln. Not knowing what to do, she goes to school with him and his sister and spends the whole day with him. In the process of the day, she learns all these incredible stories about him, like that he was kicked in the head by a horse when he was 10, and knocked out, and bleeding, and almost killed. Or that he almost drowned in a creek and that a friend pulled him out. Two times when he was a kid, he almost died and if he hadn't survived, we wouldn't have him as president or known that Lincoln was a terrible speller. This is something that people don't know about Abraham Lincoln, that throughout his adult life he was a really bad speller. I think that's because he was self-taught for most of his education. They get to see the hurdles that he overcame or how he valued hard work and making something of himself and gaining an education and rising in society to be better, to have a better life for himself than his father had, and then for his son to have a better life than he had. That was Lincoln's dream for himself and his fellow countrymen. I wanted to convey that to kids. This girl travels back in time and learns these things as she goes through the day with him and then comes back to the present excited to go to school and learn more.

JAG: It was a lot of fun, and so I highly recommend it. It's also available on Audible. If you're looking for something to have your kids listen to while you're ferrying them around, then you might want to check it out. I'd like to close with this: I recently had the wonder of discovering the Jack Miller Center. In fact, I was just at their Teach for Freedom gala in Chicago celebrating the work that they do in revitalizing civic education. Maybe tell us a little bit about your role with them and the importance of their mission.

JWW: Yes, the Jack Miller Center is a great organization and I owe a debt of gratitude to them. When I first came to Christopher Newport University, they funded my postdoctoral fellowship and that turned into a tenure-track professorship. Now I'm still here 16 years later. They've been wonderful. They have a mission for instilling civic education in American youth and getting teachers to be more proficient at teaching America's founding principles and history. Getting people reading primary documents from throughout American history and discussing and understanding what they mean. I've had the great privilege of talking to teachers on their behalf and talking to high school students, and it's really a wonderful organization.

JAG: I couldn't agree more. As I mentioned to their president, I plan on having more of their scholars come on because this has been one of the most fascinating hours that we've spent here on Objectively Speaking. Thank you, John, so much for joining us and for the amazing work and insights that you give us.

JWW: Thank you.

JAG: All right, and thanks, all of you. Boy, you guys had a lot of great questions this week. Make sure to come back next week. We're going to be joined by author and former Objectivist Center editor Robert Bidinotto to talk about his new book, A Rebel in Eden: The War Between Individualism and Environmentalism. We'll see you then.

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