Visits with Lincoln provides a balanced and readable discussion of ten abolitionists, male and female, black and white, who visited President Lincoln in the White House during the Civil War in an attempt to advance their goal of ending slavery immediately. The book paints a portrait of Lincoln through the eyes of his visitors and traces changes in his ideas and attitudes over the course of the war. The visitors include Jessie Benton Fremont, wife of Major General John Charles Fremont, the famous explorer and commander of the Union army's Department of the West; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Isabella Beecher Hooker, and Henry Ward Beecher, three members of the distinguished Beecher family; Frederick Douglas, former slave and recruiter of black soldiers; Anna Dickenson, Republican orator; William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, leaders of the Boston abolitionist movement; and Sojourner Truth, ex-slave and itinerant anti-slavery speaker.
