They Knew Lincoln

New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc, 1942. 2nd printing. Hardcover. Very Good/Fair. frontis portrait, photos, 244p. plus an unnumbered appendix of 21 pages. Original blue cloth. dj. 22 cm. Spine lightly sloped. Worn jacket with backstrip heavily chipped and also split along front panel. The author, an African American, was a dentist and teacher, and a collector of Lincolniana. This scarce book, which is partly autobiographical, is mostly focused on the lives and recollections of African Americans who knew or remembered Abraham Lincoln or his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. The last part of the book is devoted to Elizabeth Keckly, whose veracity and very existence had been challenged, mostly by various Southern whites, including David Rankin Barbee, a Texas-born writer on Southern history. As whether she wrote or had help in writing her "Behind the Scenes," Washington argued persuasively that James Redpath, the Northern abolitionist, helped, based partly on the recollections of Hannah Brooks, an elderly African American. This book was reprinted in 2018 by Oxford University Press with a carefully researched and extensively footnoted Introduction by Kate Masur (found at pages ix-lxxx).