"What Shall We Do with the Negro?": Lincoln, White Racism, and Civil War America
"Paul D. Escott’s well-written, interesting, important, and revisionist ‘What Shall We Do with the Negro?’ urges general readers and historians not to romanticize and decontextualize historical events in general, and the Civil War, emancipation, and President Abraham Lincoln’s role as ‘the great emancipator’ in particular."--John David Smith, author of An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918" 'What Shall We Do with the Negro?’ is the work of a veteran scholar who knows the primary and secondary sources of the Civil War era. This book will make a mark in the crowded field of Lincoln scholarship."--Joseph P. Reidy, Howard University, author of From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800-1880This is not a happy account of crusading abolitionist heroes; instead it is a serious attempt to understand what white people thought about race and how that affected their actions...There is probably no other book that gives so well-rounded and unsentimental a picture of the racial thinking that drove decisions both in the North and the South.(Thomas JacksonAmerican Renaissance)