Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Abstract

White presents an engaging and convincing case that the surprisingly amenable relationship forged between President Lincoln and African American visitors to his White House is worthy of the sustained attention it receives across the book. White’s study relies on a variety of sources, such as diaries, letters, manuscripts, memoirs, and newspapers. Through these sources, White extracts a fuller picture of Lincoln’s relationship with the African American community and gains a deeper insight into both the level of Lincoln’s commitment to the cause of emancipation and his desire to improve their place in society. White’s deft approach to his sources is particularly apparent in his analysis of Lincoln’s conversation with Frederick Douglass about the unequal treatment and wages of Black and white soldiers during the Civil War as well as in his use of a passionate speech given by Lincoln at the culmination of the war wherein he explained that “If a person shared in the responsibility of citizenship by fighting for the nation, then he deserved to exercise the privileges of citizenship as well” (p. 185). These evident positives aside, White’s persistent use of the term “slave” to describe enslaved African Americans and Africans merited greater explanation. Over the past several years, many historians have dropped the noun “slave” and replaced it with “enslaved” to highlight their humanity and the injustice of their status. White never addresses the reasons for his use of the term “slave,” but doing so might have helped make his aims and purpose clearer. Despite this concern, A House Built by Slaves (or enslaved African Americans) remains highly recommendable. Its short chapters, many around ten pages, make this an extremely accessible title for the undergraduate classroom. And the book has a beautiful and effective collection of photos. Indeed, White was especially prudent to include among his images only one photo of Lincoln and to make it one where the foreground of the image is shared between him and Sojourner Truth. By not including individual prints of the president, White avoids shifting the focus away from the key characters in his story – the African American visitors to the White House – and instead evocatively buttresses the signal achievement of his book, which shows to a degree others have not how the White House became a space for Black Americans to both speak and be heard.