To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln ed. by Jonathan W. White

Abstract

Reviewed by: To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln ed. by Jonathan W. White Janette Thomas Greenwood To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Jonathan W. White. Foreword by Edna Greene Medford. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xxiv, 280. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6507-8.) This outstanding volume of Black Americans’ letters to Abraham Lincoln, edited by Jonathan W. White, captures the voices of free Blacks and the newly emancipated at a pivotal moment in history. As private correspondence, “they offer intimate, uncensored, desperate, and often heart-wrenching portraits” of the writers’ wartime experiences (p. 4). They also offer new insights into how Black Americans viewed Lincoln, whom they deemed an advocate and a friend. White created this book with his students in mind, but general readers and scholars will greatly benefit from this volume as well. White expresses his hope that the experiences reflected in these letters will aid “Americans in the twenty-first century to reenter the tumultuous, uncertain, and compelling world of the Civil War” and to appreciate a “down-to-earth” president who “never lost . . . his interest in the lives of ordinary Americans” (p. xxiv). White more than succeeds in these admirable goals. White culled more than 120 letters to include in this volume, most of which are published here for the first time. The letters largely originated from two key sources: the Papers of Abraham Lincoln website—which includes more than 81,000 untranscribed documents from the National Archives and the Library of Congress—and the Library of Congress’s digitized Lincoln papers. Meticulous annotation provides both deep context and evidence to “humanize the writers” and to “illuminate their life circumstances” (p. xxii). While Lincoln probably read only a small portion of these letters, their authors “felt confident petitioning someone they considered their friend and their president” (p. 6). Their correspondence “speaks volumes about Lincoln’s reputation” among African Americans “as well as about their own place in American society” (p. 6). White argues that by writing to Lincoln, Black correspondents made “an explicit claim to the rights of citizenship” (p. 5). White effectively organizes the letters into three sections based on the type of correspondence that Lincoln would have handled as chief executive, as commander in chief, and as chief citizen, “an informal role in which a president works to ‘represent all of the people of the United States’” (p. xxii). Topics include a wide range of concerns from colonization, to protests over mistreatment and unequal pay in the military, to demands for political and economic rights, all presented with thorough introductions. This collection is especially effective in sketching out the story of Black women during the war, the inordinate sacrifices they bore, and their [End Page 148] politicization. Women’s experiences are captured in great detail. For example, White includes letters that show the consequences women experienced when their husbands and sons refused to accept unequal pay. Some women also claimed citizenship based on their sacrifices for the Union. A New Jersey wife wrote, “I have four children to support and I find this a great struggle. . . . I being a cold woman do not get any state pay. Yet my husband is fighting for the country” (p. 99). Appeals to Lincoln regarding the discharge of soldiers from the military—a topic that White notes has received little attention—provide even more detail about life on the home front for Black Americans. Letters also discuss the mistreatment of Black soldiers by white officers and the unscrupulous methods of recruiters who kidnapped Black men to force them into military service. Many correspondents compared this treatment to the slave trade; one kidnapped soldier related to the president, “I was fooled in to the Service and the way I was Sold” (p. 128). Read in the context of the ongoing Black freedom struggle, these letters are especially poignant, reminding us that the fundamental demand of Black Americans during the Civil War, for equal treatment under the law, remains unfulfilled despite their sacrifices and those of their descendants. As White concludes, “Lincoln and the black community had begun to...