Visits With Lincoln

Abolitionists Meet The President at the White House

By (author) Barbara A. White

Publication date:

22 August 2011

Length of book:

180 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

240x161mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739164167

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.
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.