Booknotes: To Address You as My Friend

New Arrival:
• To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln edited by Jonathan W. White (UNC Press, 2021).

Through his antislavery party affiliation as well as his own personal rhetoric and actions, Abraham Lincoln was a president that many African Americans felt comfortable enough with to petition directly and expect some kind of response to their concerns. From the description: "Their letters express the dilemmas, doubts, and dreams of both recently enslaved and free people in the throes of dramatic change. For many, writing Lincoln was a last resort. Yet their letters were often full of determination, making explicit claims to the rights of U.S. citizenship in a wide range of circumstances."

Jonathan White's To Address You as My Friend: African Americans' Letters to Abraham Lincoln "presents more than 120 letters from African Americans to Lincoln, most of which have never before been published. They offer unflinching, intimate, and often heart-wrenching portraits of Black soldiers' and civilians' experiences in wartime."

In guiding readers through this extensive compilation, White categorizes the letters in two ways, grouping them into collections addressing what was being asked of Lincoln and in what capacity as president he would have been expected to respond. As chief executive, Lincoln received letters asking for pardons and debating his views on colonization. In writing to Lincoln as Commander in Chief, African American soldiers and civilians addressed black armed forces recruitment, admonished the War Department over unequal pay, requested discharges, and asked the president to review court martial convictions. In appealing to Lincoln as "Chief Citizen," other writers pleaded for equal treatment, asked for aid to religious groups, sought employment and property protections, and offered the president gifts or mementos as tokens of appreciation.

Contextual details and analysis abound. For each letter, White provides background text (both in regard to its writer and the subject matter of the letter more generally) and discusses what, if anything, resulted from the exchange with the president. The volume is extensively researched and the material fully annotated. More from the description: "As readers continue to think critically about Lincoln's image as the "Great Emancipator," this book centers African Americans' own voices to explore how they felt about the president and how they understood the possibilities and limits of the power vested in the federal government."