"The Colored Side of Lincolniana"

"Working many decades after Herndon, Washington had a harder time obtaining first person interviews. He exploited archival sources whenever possible. He also turned to his own recollections of stories told by his grandmothers’ friends, whom he had known as a child growing up near Ford's Theatre. He interviewed very elderly people who recalled the Civil War era, and he spoke to descendants of that generation, soliciting their memories of relatives and friends.
"Washington figured such interviews had value despite how much time had passed, and historians have largely agreed. Many of the vignettes he recorded must be used with caution because they are the products of people's memories, stories told many years after the events themselves. Yet Washington's accounts of African American employees in Lincoln's White House, in particular, have become indispensable to historians because there is virtually no other documentation of those employees' lives."

Kate Masur at History News Network writes about the 1942 book They Knew Lincoln.