Visits With Lincoln

Visits with Lincoln provides a balanced and readable discussion of ten abolitionists, male and female, black and white, to visit President Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War. It paints a portrait of Lincoln through the eyes of the visitors, who include a variety of important historical figures-Jessie Fremont, Carl Schurz, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass, Anna Dickinson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Sojourner Truth. Through their accounts, White traces changes in Lincoln's ideas and attitudes over the course of the war.

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., 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., Visits with Lincoln does deliver a well-written collection of historical vignettes, centered on Lincoln’s 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 Lincoln’s meetings with abolitionists, and it is very easy to delight in the first-hand visitor accounts of their impressions of our most iconic president.