White, a professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University, provides a granular study of Abraham Lincoln’s practice of welcoming African Americans to the White House. Pushing back against historians who have questioned Lincoln’s commitment to “racial egalitarianism,” White documents the president’s meetings with Daniel Payne, a leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church; former slaves who joined the Union Army; and abolitionists including Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass.... this is a rich and comprehensive account of a groundbreaking aspect of Lincoln’s presidency.

Publishers Weekly

White, the author and editor of several books on Abraham Lincoln, extends his recent work on Black Americans’ engagement with Lincoln to include their visits to Lincoln’s White House. Drawing heavily on the letters, speeches, memoirs, and newspaper accounts of such meetings, White shows that Black people were welcome visitors, both as invited guests and uninvited drop-ins. That Lincoln extended his hand in greeting them and treated them with dignity and respect spoke volumes about his attitudes toward Black people and gave lie to arguments then, and later by some historians, that Lincoln regarded Black people as inferior and unworthy of serious attention. Rather, as White tells it, Lincoln took Black leaders into his confidence, sought their advice, and encouraged them to promote his policies, especially those securing emancipation and raising Black troops. Lincoln’s unassuming nature in dealing with Black people earned him the respect of Black leaders, but it also cost him politically among northern whites who worried Lincoln’s practices opened the door to social and political equality. White argues these visits did much to move Lincoln toward ever stronger commitments to civil rights. An original and revealing book on a subject heretofore surprisingly missing from the large Lincoln literature.

Library Journal

White does not write about the enslaved people who helped build the White House but rather capably documents the experiences of African Americans who came to see President Lincoln. White shows Lincoln zigging and zagging in words and actions on race relations, and one key event is Lincoln's 1862 meeting with five African American leaders, during which he avidly pushed for them to leave the U.S. But White asserts that this meeting is the exception to Lincoln’s otherwise substantive, empathetic, and respectful discussions with African Americans thereafter. Using a format that is partly chronological and partly organized by subject, White describes, movingly, Lincoln’s meetings with many African Americans of all backgrounds, providing brief biographies of each participant and describing the conversation and its aftermath. Readers will perceive the sacred and the profane in White’s accounts of the historical context for these encounters. During this era, politicians, journalists, and the public often used biblical references in framing their opinions, yet their commentary was also laced with racial epithets. Images of 20 African Americans who met with Lincoln complete this unusual history.

Booklist

Jonathan W. White's A House Built by Slaves steps into the debate about Abraham Lincoln’s attitudes and policies toward African Americans.... White, an important participant in the recent disputes over removing Lincoln statues and Lincoln’s name from public schools, brings impressive credentials to this pathbreaking book about Lincoln’s engagement with African Americans during his four years as president from 1861 to 1865. From the beginning, he pulls no historical punches.... Many historians have tried to understand Lincoln’s journey with slavery. How were Lincoln’s ideas about slavery affected by his 1828 journey to New Orleans, where, at 19 years old, he first encountered the horrors of slave markets? When the Kansas-Nebraska Act made it possible for slavery to extend west into the territories, how did it restart the political career of Lincoln the lawyer? What did he say about African Americans in his 1858 debates with Stephen A. Douglas, the Illinois senator who attacked Lincoln as the ‘Black Republican’? Recently, some have emphasized Lincoln’s advocacy for colonization right up to the moment when he first drafted an emancipation proclamation in 1862. Did he craft the final proclamation simply as a shrewd political or military act without any real feeling for African Americans? White references all these questions in Lincoln’s journey with African Americans, but this is not the story he has chosen to tell. By mining diaries, letters, and memoirs, he has uncovered the White House visits of multiple African Americans, either at Lincoln’s invitation or on their own initiatives. White’s analyses of the nature of those engagements are the depth and breadth of this impressive book.... White’s accessible book puts a human face — many human faces — on the story of Lincoln’s attitudes toward and engagement with African Americans.”

Los Angeles Review of Books

White shows how the Lincoln White House, in becoming an unprecedented venue for numerous black audiences with the president, served as a daring symbol of their prospects for social and political elevation at a time when sympathy for black Americans was not a majority sentiment even in the North.... A signal contribution of White’s book is his account of the manifold ways that black Americans did not wait to be treated with equal dignity and respect but constantly pressed for their rights as citizens and took the opportunity of social functions and private audiences provided by Lincoln to make their presence and demands known as American citizens.

Claremont Review of Books

A fascinating look at how our 16th president welcomed Black guests…. With his new book, White, a history professor at Christopher Newport University and a Lincoln scholar, has given me a fuller, more nuanced view of the Great Emancipator and his legacy. And shouldn’t that be the goal of all good historical writing?.... By chronicling the visits of Black guests to the White House — and Lincoln’s warm reception of them in an era that all but forbade it — Jonathan White has produced in A House Built by Slaves a valuable addition to the Lincoln canon. It’s one that captures not an infallible man, perhaps, but one who grappled to overcome his flaws and rise to the level of greatness later assigned to him.

Washington Independent Review of Books