Differ We Must at Ford's Theater
On writing about the women and people of color who met Lincoln.
I spoke this morning at the Abraham Lincoln Symposium—an event held each year on the stage of Ford’s Theater, where Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. Of the many opportunities to come my way after writing Differ We Must, this ranked among the most surprising and special.
(I write this note at midday Saturday, before heading back to the stage, which I will share in a joint discussion with Lincoln scholars this afternoon.)
Differ We Must tells Lincoln’s life story through his face-to-face meetings with people who differed with him. Usually that difference was a disagreement. Sometimes it was also a difference of class, background, gender, or race.
With that in mind, I focused my Ford’s Theater talk on some challenges of writing about the women and people of color in the book. Their stories add immeasurably to my understanding of Lincoln and his America—as well as ours.
William Florville was Lincoln’s barber, a Haitian immigrant who helped to sculpt the beard he grew in 1860, one of the most famous political symbols in history.
Jessie Benton Frémont was a writer and a senator’s daughter, who met with Lincoln as an emissary from her husband, John C. Frémont, a Civil War general.
Lean Bear was a Cheyenne leader, who joined a delegation of Plains nations who visited the White House in 1863 in a bid to avoid a war with white settlers.
Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, became a great orator and writer, and visited Lincoln in 1863 to protest the unequal treatment of Black soldiers in the Union army.
Mary Ellen Wise was one of several hundred women who apparently cut off their hair, put on men’s clothes, and joined the army during the war.
Mary Todd Lincoln was the president’s advisor, fierce advocate, and life partner in an often difficult marriage.
Several factors make women and people of color harder to write about then white men in history. The first is a relative lack of primary sources. The letters, memoirs and other artifacts of nineteenth-century women and people of color (and “common” people of all descriptions!) were not preserved with the same rigor or reverence as those of the “great men” of the era. A lot of material survives! But you have to look harder for it, and accept in some cases that it won’t exist.
A particular frustration of mine involves Lincoln’s barber, Florville. Unlike many other people who knew Lincoln, no interview with him is preserved. There should have been one. After the president’s assassination in 1865, William Herndon, Lincoln’s friend and law partner in Springfield, Illinois, solicited letters and interviews from hundreds of people who knew Lincoln. But he seems never to have spoken with the Black man who was Lincoln’s friend and occasional law client in Springfield for twenty years.
The sole letter of Florville’s that I found was one that he wrote to Lincoln while in office. The only other source of his words was newspaper ads he placed for his barbershop. Fortunately both the letter and the ads have much personality, and give some sense of their author. But it takes a lot of extrapolation and deduction to figure out what’s missing.
When sources do exist, they often have a white male filter. This is especially true of people from native nations, who commonly were not literate. The records of their words and actions come from native traditions or from white observers who wrote accounts of them. Each of these sources can be valuable, and each has limitations. The white observers often seem patronizing or off-key, even when they are sympathetic to Indians. It becomes necessary to reverse-engineer such accounts, trying to separate out distortions and make a judgment about which bits are most likely true.
This is one reason why, when writing about Indian removal for my earlier book Jacksonland, I focused on the Cherokee chief John Ross. He was literate, and left behind hundreds of letters, which allowed me to tell parts of his story in his own words.
This also explains why my book Imperfect Union focused on Jessie Benton Frémont, who made a return engagement in Differ We Must. She was a writer, who left behind many letters, memoirs and articles that helped me to try to see the world from her perspective.
There are other challenges to writing a book with a diverse cast. Some people may feel that I myself am an inappropriate narrator for the stories of women and people of color. Some writers have been criticized for their efforts to represent characters whose experiences differ from their own.
Writers should try this anyway, regardless of their backgrounds. If I’m going to write history—or journalism, for that matter—it’s my job to take on the risk of reaching out to people who differ from myself. It’s my job to try to understand other people’s points of view and represent them as well as possible. If I do the job well, I will find things that are accurate, as well as universal and human. The experience enriches me, and hopefully readers too. And really, a well-done job would be the answer to any criticism. My books would be far more boring, and less accurate, if I didn’t try.
Thanks for reading Differ We Must, my companion to the book of the same name. And with that I’m ducking back into the Symposium.