Book Reviews
your race is made the equal of a single man of ours…. See our present condition—the country engaged in war!—our white men cutting one another’s throats…. But for your race among us there could not be war…. I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated….
The Black Man’s President: Abraham Lincoln, African Americans, & the Pursuit of Racial Equality By Michael Burlingame Pegasus Books, Ltd., 2021 313 pages; $29.95
A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House By Jonathan W. White Rowman & Littlefield, 2022 251 pages; $26.00
Reviewed by Henry Cohen
On Aug. 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln became the first U.S. president to invite a group of African Americans to the White House for an interview. Then he proceeded to lecture his guests—five men who “were all well-educated members of Washington’s black elite,” as Jonathan W. White describes them in A House Built by Slaves—telling them that African
Americans were to blame for the Civil War, and that it would be better for both Black and white people if the former would agree to colonization in Africa or Central America. Yet Michael Burlingame, in The Black Man’s President, writes that “Lincoln felt a degree of compassion and empathy for Black Americans unusual for his time and place.” White adds that, apart from this instance, “Lincoln warmly welcomed black visitors into his home and office” in the White House, in ways that “would have been simply unthinkable to most mid-nineteenth-century white people.” So, what happened on Aug. 14? Let’s first look more closely at what Lincoln said to his five guests. Here are three excerpts from early in his remarks: I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated…. Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people…. [N]ot a single man of
Michael Burlingame quotes all three of these excerpts and reads them in a favorable light. He does not comment on the first, but he calls the second “remarkably empathetic.” As to the third, he writes, "Lincoln was stating an obvious truth: the Civil War was caused by the South's desire to maintain slavery and White supremacy at all costs. If no African Americans had been in the country, no fierce devotion to White supremacy would exist and hence no war would have occurred.” This statement is literally true, but Burlingame does not consider that it suggests that Black people were the cause of the war. Moreover, the first excerpt above would be difficult to read in the benign way that Burlingame reads the third. Perhaps “ours suffer from your presence” in the first excerpt could be read as stating the obvious truth that, without Black people, there would be no slavery and hence no war. The difficulty with that interpretation, however, is that Lincoln seems to equate the suffering of the two races (although he does say that Black people suffer “very greatly” and does not use those words to describe white people’s suffering) and also to make the blame for that suffering reciprocal. Lincoln also fails to note that white people cause Black people’s suffering (by enslaving them and otherwise mistreating them and discriminating against them), whereas Black people do not cause white people’s suffering; white people cause their own suffering by killing one another. Although white people would not suffer in a war if there were no Black people in the country, Black people are not causing their suffering.
March/April 2022 • THE FEDERAL LAWYER • 65
