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Jonathan White and Lucas Morel, "Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln" (Reedy Press, 2025)
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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to New Books in African American Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Omari Averitt Phillips, your host of the channel. Today we'll be talking to Dr. Jonathan White about his new book, Measuring the the Writing of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Jonathan White, welcome back to the show.
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D
Hey, it's so great to be with you again. Thanks for having me.
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C
Of course, of course. We love having you. You're one of our favorite guests on the show. So I wonder if you could just begin the interview for people that don't know just by telling us a little bit about yourself.
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D
Sure. So I teach American Studies at Christopher Newport University, which is in the Tidewater part of Virginia. If people can kind of envision Colonial Williamsburg or Virginia Beach, I'm halfway in between those. I've been teaching here since 2009, and I study Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, and a lot of my recent books have focused on Lincoln's relationship with African Americans during the war. So I think we've talked in the past about two of those books. I did a book on black correspondence with Lincoln where I found 125 letters that black men and women wrote to Lincoln during the war. That one's called To Address yous as My Friend. And then I did a book called A House Built by African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House. And that book really traced the story of the black men and women who claimed the rights of citizenship by going to the White House and saying, we have a right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Lincoln is our president, too. The White House is our people's house, too. And it was a really incredible story that had been forgotten for a century and a half.
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C
Yes. And you are incredibly prolific. It seems like we're having these interviews every single year about a new book that you put out. And so what brought you to this specific project?
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D
Yeah, it's a great question. So Frederick Douglass crops up in both of those two books. He wrote two letters to Lincoln on the same day, but two different letters to Lincoln. And he met Lincoln three times. And so I'd been thinking about Frederick Douglass a lot over the last few years. And then I teach a number of speeches that Douglass gave. In one of my classes, I do the very famous speech, what to the Slave is the Fourth of July. And then in another one of my classes, I assign his very important speech on the US Constitution that he delivered in Glasgow in 1860. And then I do some of his writings on women's rights. You know, he was at the Seneca falls Convention in 1848. So I've been introducing my students to a lot of different writings of Douglass over the years. And I had this thought of doing a book that would present everything, or not everything, but some of the highlights of what Frederick Douglass said about Lincoln. And as many of your listeners know, Douglas was very critical of Lincoln early in the presidency. He thought Lincoln would be a terrible president for enslaved people because he wasn't going to act quickly enough to free them. And over the course of the Civil War, Lincoln and Douglass become friends. They see each other as friends. And so I wanted to do a short book of a couple of documents that would sort of trace, you know, here was Douglass's thinking on Lincoln from 1858 or 1860 up through the years after the war. And I reached out to a friend of mine named Lucas Morel, who is a professor of political science at Washington and Lee University. And Lucas is a Lincoln scholar. He's done a lot of work on Ralph Ellison and Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. In fact, his Twitter handle is Lincoln Douglas. And I figure if I'm going to partner with anyone, it would be a guy who has Lincoln Douglas as his handle on social media. So I reached out to Lucas and I said, would you want to work on this with me? And he loved the idea. And so we set out to do it. And again, the original conception was that it was going to be a pretty short book, like maybe 40,000 words. But in the course of our research, we uncovered a dozen documents that people haven't seen for 160 years. And at that point we thought, okay, we've got to broaden this thing. And we made it sort of a comprehensive look at Frederick Douglass's views of Abraham Lincoln. And it grew to about 107,000 words. But it's really an extraordinary portrait of these two great leaders.
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C
It absolutely is. And I want to get to talking about some of the research and the letters that you uncovered. First though, I want to sort of go back. We were just talking a little bit before we started the interview here about teaching. Teaching and students. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the reaction that some of your students have to these letters that you're sort of putting before them.
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D
Yeah, so my students haven't seen the letters yet then the new ones because the book is just coming out now. But my students always love reading Frederick Douglass I think because he sort of, he's not what they expect him to be. So when you teach his views of the Constitution, they run counter to how most of us think about the Constitution. And to be honest, I don't agree with everything Frederick Douglass thought about the Constitution. For him, he believed the Constitution was an anti slavery document. His view was if you read the Constitution and only look at the words and don't try to divine any secret intentions of the framers, that you'll see that it's an anti slavery document and that all you needed was an anti slavery president in place. And once you had an anti slavery president, then slavery could be gotten rid of. My view is more like Lincoln's. My view is that the Constitution was a compromise and that it embodied both pro slavery elements and anti slavery elements. And so, you know, when Frederick Douglass read the fugitive slave clause, he said, well, this isn't about slavery because it never uses the word slave or slavery. He says it's really about indentured servants. I'm not persuaded by that. But you know, students love to see that sort of argument because they've never encountered it before. And so when I teach any reading, I want students to understand the writer on his or her own terms. And so I want students to understand where Douglass is coming from and what he's saying. And then I have my students read other things that, that conflict with Douglass and they can kind of engage with these ideas and try to make sense of them and decide for themselves what they find persuasive. So, yeah, Douglass is just such, and he's such a powerful writer. You know, when students read what to the slave is the 4th of July, Douglass is bringing the experience of black men and women to life in a way that you see and hear and smell the sights and smells and visions of what slavery was like. And here's a man who had risen out of it and he wants to bring that experience home to his listeners when he's giving that speech and then also to future readers. I mean, he had it published as a pamphlet immediately and he was having it circulated because he wanted white Americans in the north who never saw or experienced slavery to know what it was like so that they would then understand why it needed to be abolished. And so when students read those things, I think they're drawn in by the power of Douglass's words, which I think is just so important for students to read today, because I think the further you get away from it, the easier it is to write it off or ignore it or ignore the lasting impacts of it. And Douglass wants Americans to remember where we've come from so that we take equality seriously.
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C
Absolutely. So getting back to this work, what was your research like for this work?
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D
So when we started out, we mainly just thought, well, we're going to use Douglass's July 1865 eulogy at the Cooper Union, and we'll use his very famous 1876 speech from the Washington, D.C. dedication of the Freedmen's Memorial. We'll use some of his editorials and letters from the Civil War years. And you know that that'll be it. And as we were doing our research, you know, I was reminded that Douglass was writing to abolitionists in England during the Civil War. And so for listeners who don't know when, when Douglass fled from Maryland and made his way to New Bedford, he then writes his first of three autobiographies. And in narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he names names and he talks about where he had come from. And now he's a famous, well known abolitionist and a speaker, or he's rising in fame, I should say. And you know, this is an era where you have a Fugitive Slave Law on the books and you've got a guy who says, my property has run away and I'll want to get my property back. And Douglas knows now that he's in danger. And so he exiles himself to the UK for about two and a half, three years. And while he's there, he makes friends with a number of abolitionists. And these British abolitionists actually raise money to purchase his freedom so that he can return back to the United States and no longer be under, you know, fear of being recaptured and re enslaved. And those relationships that he developed with those abolitionists he retains for the rest of his life. I mean, one of them, a woman named Julia Griffiths crofts, they meet 1846, 1847. They correspond until 1894, which is a year before he dies. And you know, a few of the letters that Douglass wrote to her and to another married couple named the Carpenters, Russell and Mary Carpenter, a few of those letters that Douglas had written to them, those recipients leaked to the British press. And then the editors of the Douglass papers, John Blasingame and others, they had found them in the British newspapers and published, published them in the Frederick Douglass papers, which are by Yale University Press. And you know, last summer I was sitting in my office and I thought, I wonder if there are more. And the beauty of being a historian now is that we have access to digitized newspapers that no one had 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. So I came back into my office and I had this revelation as I was walking around campus. It was a beautiful day and I was walking. I thought, I wonder if there's more. So I, I hurried back to my office and I got onto newspapers.com and some other databases and I began to search for every iteration of Douglass's name. So spelling Douglas with a K at the end or without a K at the end, spelling it with 1s or 2s, 2s's, because I knew that in that era people were going to be misspelling. And I began to uncover these letters that Douglass had written to British abolitionists that appeared in British newspapers that, that the editors of the Douglass papers had not discovered. One of these letters David Blight actually writes about in his incredible prize winning biography of Douglass and writes about how the letter doesn't seem to survive. And there it was. I found it. And then I found some extracts of some letters that were not available in digitized newspapers in their entirety. They appeared in a newspaper called the London Inquirer. And So I found a company in London that for $400, would digitize the microfilm for me and send it back to me. And it was the best 400 bucks I ever spent, and I should credit Christopher. Newport University provided professional development funds to reimburse me. So that was a wonderful thing, too. But I was then able to find more letters in their entirety in the London Inquirer. And so we found nine new letters and then a couple of other documents that were in. In newspapers that are going to transform the way we think about the relationship between these two men.
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C
And in what ways will these new documents that you found transform that relationship and help we understand that relationship?
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D
Yeah, there are. So these letters span the war years, and which is incredible, because what you see is Frederick Douglass knew that these letters were being leaked to the British press. So. And the way we know these letters are authentic is that when the British abolitionists forget them, they would write back and say, oh, I took your letter and gave an extract of it to this editor. And those letters are in the net in the Library of Congress. So I. You know, the letters are so extraordinary that some British readers didn't think they were real. And I found an editorial where an editor says, oh, you know, these letters, you know, we know some of you don't think these are real. Here's why we think they're real. And I was able to confirm they were real by. By finding the return correspondence. And what you see is that Douglass is willing to say things to a British audience that he's not willing to say to an American audience. And so in 1862, or I'll jump ahead to 1863, I suppose he begins to reflect on the effects of emancipation, the effects of the fact that there are Union soldiers in the Confederacy who are bringing freedom and expanding opportunities and rights for black Americans. And Douglass knows that these opportunities are available because the army is there. And very early 1863, Douglass begins to think about Reconstruction and what is that going to look like? And Douglass shares with these British audiences that he doesn't want the war to end because he understands that when the war ends, the army will be removed. The Emancipation Proclamation is a war measure. It may no longer be applicable to the Confederacy. And then what happens for all of these black Americans who have begun to gain freedom and in some cases, begun to gain some rights? Is that all going to disappear? And so he very candidly says he doesn't want the war to end because he fears for what those implications will be for black Americans. He hints at that in some things to white audiences in the Union during the Civil War. But he never says that as starkly. The most incredible discovery was a letter from April 20, 1865. So this is five days after Abraham Lincoln has been assassinated, and publicly at this point, Douglass has given a couple of speeches where he's talked about how, how horrible this is that Lincoln has been assassinated. In a letter to a British audience, though, he takes a very different position. He starts off by saying how terrible it is because again, Lincoln and Douglass had become friends. But he then pivots and says, as terrible as it is that Lincoln has been assassinated, it might actually be best for black people, because Douglass believes that Andrew Johnson is going to be a radical and that Johnson is going to punish the south and Johnson is going to make treason odious. Johnson had said in October of 64 to a black audience in Nashville, I will be your Moses. And so Douglass had reason to hope that Johnson would be radical and zealous and swift in punishing the Confederates and in bringing political rights to freed people. And Douglass looked at Lincoln, and as much as he admired Lincoln, he thought, you know, Lincoln was too kind and too moderate. And Douglass has this incredible line where he says, you know, both Lincoln and Johnson were self made men and they were both born in slave states, but Lincoln moved to a free state when he was pretty young, but Johnson stayed in the slave state. So he understands better than Lincoln how much not only slavery, but the slave power, meaning these wealthy planters, they need to be destroyed. Well, of course, you know, Douglass is going to realize very quickly how wrongheaded those views were. And I do want to say, to Douglass's credit, he had reason to believe that Johnson would be a protector of rights for African Americans. But early in the summer of 1865, and especially into the fall, Johnson begins showing that he cares more about rights for ex confederates than for ex slaves. And then In February of 1866, Johnson actually meets with Douglas and other black leaders at the White House. And Douglas pushes for the right to vote, and Johnson is not having it at all. And after Douglas and the other black men leave, Johnson turns to someone and says, you know, Douglas is just like any other N word. He would slit a white man's throat if he got the chance. And a week later, Douglass gives a speech in the US Capitol in the House of Representatives chamber. And likening back to, or hearkening back to that line that Johnson had said, where he said, I will be your Moses. Douglass says that unlike Johnson, Lincoln didn't begin as a Moses and end as a pharaoh. And it's just this extraordinary line where Douglass is saying, you know, Johnson wasn't what we'd hoped he'd be. But we never knew that Douglass felt this way before until finding this letter. And what's really incredible is later in his life, Douglass would claim that he always knew Johnson would be a bad president. And now we know that wasn't probably accurate. Yeah.
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C
And you touched on it a little bit earlier, but I wonder if you could expand on it. What were some of the main points of disagreement that existed between Douglass and Lincoln, and how are these differences also highlighted in some of the letters and the work?
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D
Yeah, so the. The primary difference for them, I believe, has to do with their view of the Constitution. And I alluded to this earlier, that Lincoln believed the Constitution was a compromise. He didn't see it as pro or anti slavery. He believed that it had. It had principles of both pro and anti slavery. John, or Douglass believed that it was an anti slavery document. And so when Lincoln gets elected as an anti slavery president and then says, you know, I believe the Fugitive Slave act is constitutional and needs to be enforced, Douglass looks at that and is furious. Because Douglass believes, no, this is unconstitutional and the federal government should not be in the business of returning fugitive slaves. And to be fair to Lincoln, he also made the argument that the Fugitive Slave act should be amended to protect the rights of black people who are accused of being fugitives. And also to be fair to Lincoln, he really didn't enforce it. So once the war begins, even though he said he would enforce it, there's very little actual enforcement. And Lincoln eventually signs a law repealing it. But in 1861, Douglass hears Lincoln say, I'm going to enforce the Fugitive Slave act. And he's furious about that. So he issues several editorial statements where he says, abraham Lincoln is the South's greatest slave hound and abolitionism's worst enemy. And he says, the south has no reason to secede. Like, there's nothing to be afraid of if you're a slaveholder in the Confederacy, because Lincoln's going to enforce your rights. Now, over time, Douglass comes to see that, you know, Lincoln isn't going to do the things that Douglas was afraid of. But Douglas was still frustrated that Lincoln was slow on emancipation. Lincoln doesn't issue the emancipation proclamation till 1863. Now, when Lincoln finally does that, Douglass is elated. And he actually says that January 1, 1863, will eclipse July 4, 1776, in the national memory in terms of importance. And Douglass gets fully on board with the arming of black men. He becomes a recruiter of black soldiers. He sends two of his sons off to fight, but then black soldiers are not given equality in the army. And so, you know, Douglas again, is justifiably furious. He's angry that black men are not getting the same pay as white soldiers. He's angry that black soldiers are not getting the same equipment and that they're being put on fatigue duty rather than the opportunity to serve in actual combat. And to top it all off, the Confederates have said that they will. They. When they capture black men in uniform, they will be treated as slaves in insurrection and either executed or re. Enslaved. Or I should say just enslaved, because they might have been freeborn and they'll be sold into bondage. And so again, Douglass is. Is very angry. And In August of 1863, he goes to the White House and he confronts Lincoln about these. These issues. And it's an extraordinary moment because Douglass has not traversed the soil of Maryland since 1838, when he escaped from bondage. And so he is taking great risk to go through a slave state to come to Washington, D.C. he goes to the White House uninvited, unannounced, doesn't know if he'll be welcomed in, and he ends up getting welcomed into the White House. And he goes to introduce himself in Lincoln's office. And Lincoln says, oh, I know who you are. And Lincoln takes him by the hand and they sit down and they discuss these issues. And on the issue of unequal pay and unequal treatment, Lincoln says, essentially, black men will eventually get equal pay, but I can't do it right now. Political realities won't allow for it. And black men who are in bondage should consider freedom as some sort of compensation. So eventually they'll get full pay, but I can't do it right now. On the issue of Confederate atrocities, Lincoln says if he could capture people who committed an atrocity on the battlefield, he would have them punished. But he didn't want to punish Confederate POWs for something that someone else had done. He said, there's enough blood being shed now. Douglas went away from this meeting with mixed feelings. I think on the one hand, he understood the. He wasn't fully satisfied with Lincoln's answers, but he began to understand the political constraints that Lincoln was acting upon. On the other hand, Douglass went away astounded by the fact that he had been welcomed into the White House, that Lincoln had taken him by the hand and listened to him and engaged with him in conversation. And for the rest of his life, Douglass would tell the stories of meeting Abraham Lincoln at the White House, then again a year later in August of 1864, and then again at Lincoln and second inauguration. And Douglass was struck by the fact that for the first time in his life, maybe not for the exact first time, but a. A white leader of such great stature, the President of the United States, Douglas said, had treated him in no way different than any than. Than a black man would have treated him. Treated him differently on account of the color of his skin. And Douglass was really moved by that. And, you know, again, like, Lincoln still isn't doing everything Douglass wanted. And so you asked about, you know, how does this come out in the letters? One of the letters I found was from. Was from September 1, 1864. And this has not been seen in 160 years. And in it, Douglass describes how, you know, Lincoln isn't everything he wants. Like Douglass wants a radical leader. And so if Douglas could have his way, he would have John C. Fremont as president in 1864. But Douglass wrote something extraordinary here. He says he recognizes that you need votes to win an election. And he says, in any event, the contest lies between Lincoln and McClellan. McClellan was the Democrat candidate, and Douglas says Fremont can get no votes and will, I think, be withdrawn from the canvas by his friends. He is the fittest man, but has the fewest supporters. And though one man in the right is a majority against the whole world, wrong at the polls, numbers rule. A candidate without a party may be sublime, but he cannot be successful. And then the next line is just extraordinary for Douglas. He says, I am nowadays taking a more practical view of things than formerly, and hence I shall be found doing all I can to promote the election of Mr. Lincoln or the defeat of McClellan. Like that is a side of Frederick Douglass that you don't see a lot early in his life and in his middle years where he says, you know, I wish I could get my way. Like, I wish I could get the ideal candidate who's going to be radical, but I gotta go for the guy who can win.
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C
Absolutely. And you've created, I think, with this work, a amazing sort of teaching tool. And so I wonder what sort of audience, as you were sort of constructing this work, did you imagine for it?
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D
Well, you know, it's a great question. My original audience, when I was envisioning the shorter book, was, I'm going to use this in my classes, and, you know, students will be able to get. Here are the criticisms of Lincoln. Here is the praise of Lincoln. And I should say we titled the book Measuring the Man. And that was a phrase that Douglass used a lot. He said, throughout the war, black men and women measured Lincoln like we took the measure of him. We sometimes he was found wanting, sometimes he did what we were hoping he would do. And we didn't want the title to convey either all criticism or a hagiography. We didn't want people to think like, oh, this is just going to be Douglass praising Lincoln. And so the title, we think, really captures that well. And my hope is that general readers, but also students will be able to read this book and evaluate. How did you know? Not only how did Lincoln change through the war, but how did Douglas change through the war? And how did Douglass's views evolve? We often talk about, well, Lincoln changed or Lincoln evolved, and we neglect to think about that. We all change and we all evolve. And Douglas's views changed and evolved not only from 1860 to 1865, but for the rest of his life, for the next 30 years. So my hope is that college faculty will find a lot in this book that they can really dig into it with students and get students to think about the lens of the war through Douglass's eyes. I think opens it up in a way that you don't see through many other thinkers.
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C
And I think that's so true, what you touched on there, the way in which people sort of change over time. And I think that's such an important thing to also sort of teach the students as well, who think a lot of times a history can be extremely static, that these are complex relationships. People mature and sort of take in different information and change their positions on things over time. And so is that the main sort of takeaway that you want readers to have from this work?
- [29:09]
D
Yeah, I want people to be able to appreciate these two great leaders and the relationship that they developed. And I think it can be a model for our time as well. I mean, we are in such a politically divisive era where, you know, people don't even talk to each other if they disagree. And a college campus is supposed to be a place where we model civic disagreement and civil disagreement. And, you know, that is something that Douglass models for us. You know, Douglass had very fervent beliefs about the Constitution, about civil rights, about the Civil War. And he was willing to engage with Lincoln, someone with whom he disagreed pretty vehemently. He was willing. Willing to make arguments to challenge Lincoln, hoping, I suppose, that Lincoln would see them, and then to actually then go and meet with Lincoln and Talk to him and press Lincoln. And for his part, Lincoln was willing to listen. Like that is an extraordinary thing. One of the main insights of my book, A House Built by Slaves, is that I would argue that Lincoln met hundreds of black Americans in Washington, D.C. during the Civil War. And in every instance that is documented but one, Lincoln listened to his audience and was willing to engage with them. So I found three delegations of black men, some of whom had been born free, some of whom had been born enslaved. They were all from southern states. They were from Virginia, North Carolina, and Louisiana. I found three delegations that went to the White House and pushed Lincoln on the right of black suffrage. And, you know, this is an incredible story because as a young man in the 1840s, Lincoln had publicly mocked the idea of black men voting. Like that had been a cudgel to attack his political opponents with. Well, his views begin to change in the 1850s. He begins to see and say, in fact, that black people should have some rights of citizenship. But he still doesn't support black voting rights. Well, these three delegations go to the White House, they meet with Lincoln and they push him on this issue. And he actually says to them, you're right. And for the last year of his life, Lincoln works behind the scenes to push for black voting rights at the state level. In the last speech he ever gives, he comes out publicly and says that black men who have served in the military or who are educated should have the right to vote. John Wilkes Booth is in the audience. He hears that, says, that means n word, citizenship. By God, that'll be the last speech he ever gives. And four days later, Lincoln is dead. Now, let me bring that back to. Or bring that back to Douglas. So this shows how Lincoln was willing to engage with black people who otherwise would not have been listened to by white leaders. I mean, one of the guys from North Carolina who. Who met with Lincoln gave a speech afterwards, and he said, if we had been. If we had gone to the home of the lowest magistrate judge in Craven County, North Carolina, he said, we would have been told to go around to the back door because that was the place for the n words. But he said, at the White House, Lincoln welcomed us through the front door and into his office and shook his hand and listened and agreed with us that we should have the right to vote. Now, some people criticized Lincoln then and some people criticize Lincoln today for saying, well, okay, by 1865, there were no restrictions on white men voting, but Lincoln was saying only black men who were educated or who had served in the military should have the right to vote. Like, that's not right. And there's an argument to be said for that. You know who it didn't bother was Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass said, look, Abraham Lincoln learned his politics by splitting rails. And what Douglas said was, Lincoln understood that first you put the sharp edge of a wedge in and you begin to hit it with a maul, and eventually the thick edge gets in and the rail is split. And what Douglass said was, it doesn't bother me that Lincoln took this approach. In fact, Douglas came to appreciate it. Remember how Douglas said, like, I'm more practical now? What Douglas understood was, there are a heck of a lot of racist white northern voters who are never going to support black suffrage. But if you make the case, wait a second. These guys are serving on the battlefield. They are sacrificing their lives. If anyone deserves the right to vote, it's them. Okay, fine, we'll give them the right to vote. Well, once you get that wedge in, Douglas says it's only a matter of time until you have universal black manhood suffrage. And so, you know, this is a process. Lincoln changes his mind and changes the way he views this, and Douglas appreciates him for that. And readers are going to see how these two guys are giving a back and forth. And I think it's a really incredible picture.
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C
Absolutely is. Well, Dr. White, we've taken up a lot of your time. Thank you again. So I'll ask one final question that you've heard a bunch of times in these podcasts. What are you working on now?
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D
Yeah, so I am doing a couple books. I'm always doing a few things at once. So I'm doing a photographic history of Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, Illinois. And that should come out next summer with Arcadia. I'm very excited about that. I think it's one of the most magical places to visit. And so It'll have about 150 photographs of the home and of people who went there and the stories of people who went there, including Booker T. Washington. His name is in the register of visitors in 1903. I'm trying to find if Frederick Douglass went there. I know that Douglas visited Lincoln's tomb. I don't know if he went to the home. I haven't found any evidence yet, but I'm looking. I just finished a book of accounts written by people who met Lincoln and who wrote them down in letters or diaries. And so that is under review right now with the university press. And then my big project that I'm really excited about is about a formerly enslaved man from Arkansas who escaped into Memphis in 1862. But he had two daughters, teenage daughters who were stuck in bondage in Arkansas. And one night in 1863, he and five friends get on a skiff. They paddle across the Mississippi river, they rescue these girls and they take them to freedom in Tennessee. But in the middle of the night, the enslaver wakes up. He rushes down to the river. There's a firefight, there's a confrontation. The two black men fire him, and one of them mortally wounds the former slaveholder. And so within a couple of days, the slaveholder dies and the black men get arrested for murder and they get tried in a military court for murder. They get convicted and sentenced to be executed. And I'm going to spoil it here. It's such an incredible story. It won't be out for a few years. So your listeners will have to get the book in a few years when it's out. But because it was in a military court, they couldn't be executed without presidential approval. And Lincoln looks at their case file and he accepts the argument that a father has a right to rescue his daughters from illegal enslavement. The Emancipation Proclamation had declared these two girls free and that the enslaver was in the wrong. And so Lincoln saves these two guys lives. And it's just an incredible story and I'm really excited about getting it onto paper. I've written about 20,000 words, so I'm hoping to finish it by the end of next year.
- [36:40]
C
Wow. That's amazing. Yeah, we'll definitely keep an eye out for all of those works and welcome you back on to talk more about that work when it's actually done. And I just want to thank you again, Dr. Jonathan White, for being on the show today. And I really enjoyed it. I really enjoy the work. It's the sort of thing that I'm going to be using in my own teaching with students as well. And thank you so much for writing it. I hope all the listeners go out and get it. Thank you again and take care.
- [37:21]
D
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A
Only pay for what you need@liberty mutual.com.
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D
Liberty Liberty, Liberty Liberty Savings.
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A
Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company Affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.