Chapter Seventeen
To the White House
Two centuries before Barack Obama ran for President, slaves built the White House. They quarried stone in Virginia, made nails and baked bricks in Georgetown. West Africans by heritage, they had no last names or carried the names of their masters. The records tell us that they went by "Tom," "Peter," "Ben," "Harry," "Daniel," and so on. Three slaves at the White House construction site were on loan from its architect, an Irishman from Charleston named James Hoban. One of his slaves was designated "Negro Peter." Hoban designed the President's mansion to look like Leinster House, in Dublin, but there are echoes, too, of a Southern plantation house. Sometimes, the slaves were given the equivalent of a dollar a day, but nearly all of their wages were passed along to their owners. Working alongside free blacks and white European laborers, the slaves helped build Washington along the designs of Pierre-Charles L'Enfant and the architects of Europe. They built the Capitol dome. They cleared the woods and dug up the stumps near the Potomac. They drained swamps. And, not far from the building site of the White House, auctioneers from the Virginia-based firm of Franklin & Armfield sold new slaves. Cash changed hands as frightened young blacks, held in pens, shackled, dressed in rags, stared out at their new masters. Soon they would be boarded on steamships and sent to Natchez, Charleston, Mobile, and New Orleans.
There were many reasons that the founding generation finally voted to move the capital south to Washington. One was the requirements of construction, another the politics of slavery in the North. "Can one imagine a succession of twelve slaveholder presidents if the capital had remained in Philadelphia?" Garry Wills writes in his study of Jefferson, Negro President. "The southerners got what they wanted, a seat of government where slavery would be taken for granted, where it would not need perpetual apology, excuse, or palliation, where the most honored men in the nation were not to be criticized because they practiced and defended and gave privilege to the holding of slaves."
At the end of the eighteenth century, hundreds of slaves were working on federal buildings in the new capital. "To the Southern-born, the district now presented the reassuringly familiar panorama of a plantation work site," the historian Fergus M. Bordewich writes, "with white overseers directing black workmen grubbing stumps, hauling timber, dragging sledges, digging foundations, toting baskets of stone, bushels of lime, and kegs of nails, chiseling stone, stirring mortar, and tending brick kilns. Wherever buildings were under construction, including the Capitol and the President's House, teams of enslaved sawyers in broad-brimmed hats could be seen sweating at their work in the sawpits beneath cascades of sawdust, slicing logs into boards, with the rhythmic, angled, back-breaking strokes of a six-foot blade."
Construction had begun on the White House in 1792, and, by 1798, around ninety black men were working at the site and on the Capitol. On a given day, about five or six slaves were out sick, laid up in a makeshift clinic. The commissioners employed one Dr. May to care for them. They spent fifty cents a day on treatment.
Twelve Presidents owned slaves, eight of them while in office. John and Abigail Adams, the first inhabitants of the White House, were, by the standards of the day, abolitionists, and, at the White House, they kept only two servants, a white farm couple. Their idealism was rewarded by the many guests who mocked their food, their housekeeping, and their hospitality. Thomas Jefferson brought to the White House members of his considerable household staff, including a few slaves. James and Dolley Madison brought more. The most famous of Madison's slaves was his "body servant," Paul Jennings, who was born on Madison's estate, in Montpelier, Virginia. Jennings's father was an English trader, his mother a slave. At the White House, Jennings was in constant contact with the President and became the executive mansion's first tell-all memoirist, leaving behind a short manuscript titled "A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison." He was a young man when he served Madison and saw the British attack the White House. Jennings recalled Dolley Madison grabbing what valuables she could and stuffing them in her reticule before fleeing the White House; he recalled the "rabble" that raided the mansion soon afterward and "stole lots of silver and whatever they could lay their hands on." Although Jennings was, like jewelry or a horse, Madison's property, a commodity, he wrote with tender and forgiving affection for the President. "Mr. Madison, I think, was one of the best men that ever lived," he wrote, and went on:
I never saw him in a passion, and never knew him to strike a slave, although he had over one hundred; neither would he allow an overseer to do it. Whenever any slaves were reported as stealing or "cutting up" badly, he would send for them and admonish them privately, and never mortify them before others. They generally served him very faithfully....
He often told the story, that one day riding home from court with old Tom Barbour (father of Governor Barbour), they met a colored man who took off his hat. Mr. M. raised his, to the surprise of old Tom; to whom Mr. M. replied, "I never allow a Negro to excel me in politeness."
Jennings was a loyal servant, who stayed with Madison in his retirement, deteriorating health, and, finally, his death. As in so many slave manuscripts, the narrator asserts his own selfhood, his dignity, through the power of loyalty and his sympathy for the "family" that owns him:
I was always with Mr. Madison till he died, and shaved him every other day for sixteen years. For six months before his death, he was unable to walk, and spent most of his time reclined on a couch; but his mind was bright, and with his numerous visitors he talked with as much animation and strength of voice as I ever heard him in his best days. I was present when he died. That morning Sukey brought him his breakfast, as usual. He could not swallow. His niece, Mrs. Willis, said, "What is the matter, Uncle James?" "Nothing more than a change of mind, my dear."
His head instantly dropped, and he ceased breathing as quietly as the snuff of a candle goes out. He was about eighty-four years old, and was followed to the grave by an immense procession of white and colored people.
Jennings died in 1874, when he was seventy-five. In his lifetime, he took part in an abolitionist plot to free slaves on a Washington schooner, worked for Daniel Webster (from whom he bought his freedom), and, toward the end of his life, served in the Department of the Interior.
Nearly all of the hundreds of slaves who followed Jennings in service at the White House worked in livery and died in anonymity. They wrote no memoirs and left barely a trace in the archives. Andrew Jackson brought his slaves to Washington, D.C., from his estate in Tennessee but little is known about the "body servant" who shared his bedroom in the White House. We do know that James Polk bought slaves even while President, paying, on July 20, 1846, a total of $1,436 for "Hartwell & his wife & her child nine years old." In the eighteen-fifties, slaves were eliminated from the White House staff not because of any doubts about the morality of chattel slavery, but, rather, because James Buchanan thought that white British servants would better preserve his daily privacy.
Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln had no slaves in the White House. Their servants were either from their household in Illinois or white Europeans inherited from the previous Administration. They did, however, employ a black dressmaker, a modiste, named Lizzy--Elizabeth Keckley--who was born a slave in Dinwiddie Courthouse, Virginia, near Petersburg. No black man or woman, not even Paul Jennings, ever knew such intimacy with a First Family, and what is most remarkable about Keckley is that she left behind a memoir called Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, which, in its way, stands with the slave narratives and memoirs that make up the core of early African-American literature. Like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and other slaves who gained their freedom and became the authors of narratives of their lives, Keckley wrote to assert her literacy, her history, her status as a thinking, feeling being. She was not as profound a memoirist as Harriet Jacobs, or Booker T. Washington, or W. E. B. DuBois, but her view of the world was unlike any other. Her testimony came from the living quarters of the White House, from within the confidence and embrace of the Lincoln family.
Keckley's mother was a slave named Agnes. Her father was her mother's master, an Army colonel named Armistead Burwell. Elizabeth learned her father's identity many years later when her mother was on her deathbed. As a child of four, she started working in the Burwell household. Keckley called slavery a "cruel custom" by which "I was robbed of my dearest right" and yet, much like Jennings before her, she displayed an understanding of the predicament of the slave master that, to us, seems shockingly sympathetic. She expresses an empathy for her owners--owners who did not hesitate to torture her--simply because they, too, had been born into the social and economic system of slavery.
Considering the cruelties Keckley endured, her equanimity seems beyond the capacities of a saint. When she was living in Hillsboro, North Carolina, where Burwell was in charge of a Presbyterian church, a Mr. Bingham ran the school and often visited the parsonage. One day, without evident reason Bingham demanded that she lower her dress to receive a whipping. Keckley relates that she feared most for her sense of modesty. She was, she tells us, eighteen "and fully developed." Bingham binds her hands, tears her dress, and picks up a rawhide, "the instrument of torture":
I can feel the torture now--the terrible, excruciating agony of those moments. I did not scream; I was too proud to let my tormentor know what I was suffering.
Even in this unnervingly balanced narrative--a narrative without the hint of rebellion or abolitionist fervor--there is no doubting the extent of the slave master's depravity. Some slaves, Keckley reports, preferred to die rather than suffer any longer. When her uncle makes an absent-minded mistake on the farm, losing a pair of plow lines, he so fears the result, the thrashing and humiliation that will surely be his, that he hangs himself from a willow tree "rather than meet the displeasure of his master."
The dominion of the slave master was limitless. The slave enjoyed no private realm, no right of family or sexual protection. For four years, Keckley worked in North Carolina for a man named Alexander Kirkland, who raped her at his whim. The resulting pregnancy "brought me suffering and deep mortification" and the unbearable thought that she was bearing a son who could not possibly escape the fate of his mother and every other slave.
Keckley understood well the outrageous hypocrisy of her masters, "who preached the love of Heaven, who glorified the precepts and examples of Christ, who expounded the Holy Scriptures Sabbath after Sabbath from the pulpit," and yet treated her with no more regard than a dog. And still, like Booker T. Washington in his memoirs a half-century later, Keckley writes of slavery as a "school" in which she learned her humanity.
Eventually, she made her way to St. Louis and, by 1855, had bought her freedom. She married but refused to have any more children--"I could not bear the thought of ... adding one single recruit to the millions bound to hopeless servitude." Instead, she developed her skills as a seamstress and moved on to Washington, D.C., where she developed a business as a dressmaker; she came to work for the wives of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and admitted to a "great desire to work for the ladies of the White House."
On the day of Lincoln's first inauguration, Keckley was summoned to Willard's Hotel for a private interview with Mary Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln had spilled coffee on the dress she was going to wear that evening after the swearing-in ceremonies; the stain, Keckley realized, had "rendered it necessary that she should have a new one for the occasion." Keckley set to work on a dress for the new First Lady. While she worked, the Lincolns talked amiably.
"You seem to be in a poetical mood to-night," said his wife.
"Yes, mother, these are poetical times" was his pleasant reply. "I declare, you look charming in that dress. Mrs. Keckley has met with great success."
Then, Keckley recalls, "Mrs. Lincoln took the President's arm, and with smiling face led the train below. I was surprised at her grace and composure. I had heard so much, in current and malicious report, of her low life, of her ignorance and vulgarity, that I expected to see her embarrassed on this occasion. Report, I soon saw, was wrong. No queen, accustomed to the usages of royalty all her life, could have comported herself with more calmness and dignity than did the wife of the President."
The Lincolns allowed Lizzy a remarkable intimacy with the household. She seems to have been in the living quarters much more frequently than dressmaking would have required. "I consider you my best living friend," Mrs. Lincoln later wrote to her. On the evening of a White House reception, she was in Mrs. Lincoln's bedroom attending to her hair and dress ("White satin, trimmed with black lace") while eleven-year-old Willie lay ill. His parents were terribly worried and considered canceling the reception, but the doctor told them that there was no immediate cause for alarm. The Lincolns went downstairs, and Keckley, sitting in the sickroom with Willie, could hear the "rich notes" of the Marine Band in the apartments below--the "subdued murmurs, like the wild, faint sobbing of far-off spirits." Mrs. Lincoln came upstairs several times to check on Willie. The boy's fever grew worse through the night. Days later, his condition became grave, and then he died. Almost immediately, the Lincolns summoned Keckley to the White House to deal with the gruesome and heartbreaking details: "I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed, when Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief. He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, 'My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home.'"
Keckley describes Lincoln sobbing as he spoke, his head buried in his hands, his tall frame "convulsed with emotion." She watches, crying. "His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved. I shall never forget those solemn moments--genius and greatness weeping over love's idol lost."
Mrs. Lincoln was even more overcome than her husband. And in a scene of gothic strangeness, Keckley recalls how, "in one of her paroxysms of grief, the President kindly bent over his wife, took her by the arm and gently led her to the window. With a stately, solemn gesture, he pointed to the lunatic asylum.
"Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad and we may have to send you there."
Elizabeth had a kind of access to the private lives of the Lincolns denied to many of his aides and friends. There is no end to the disturbing proximity of their relationship--the closeness between master and servant, the contradictory moral universe that allowed even the greatest leader in his nation's history to consider repatriating blacks to Africa, considering them the physical and mental inferior of the white man, and yet trust a woman born a slave as an intimate and a witness.
When Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre and died, on April 15, 1865, Keckley was summoned to the White House. First, she was taken to a darkened room where Mrs. Lincoln was "tossing uneasily about upon a bed" and then to the Guest's Room where the President lay in state: "When I crossed the threshold of the room, I could not help recalling the day on which I had seen little Willie lying in his coffin where the body of his father now lay." Cabinet members were there. Dignitaries milled around. "They made room for me, and, approaching the body, I lifted the white cloth from the white face of the man that I had worshipped as an idol--looked upon as a demi-god."
After paying her respects to Lincoln, she returned to her charge, to carry out the duties that she knew were expected of her: "I shall never forget the scene--the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief from the soul. I bathed Mrs. Lincoln's head with cold water, and soothed the terrible tornado as best I could."
The tragedy of Elizabeth Keckley was that a serious person--a woman who not only served the First Lady, but ran a successful business, created a freed-people's relief society in Washington, and even played a small role in bringing both Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to the White House for conversations with President Lincoln--was met with such vicious mockery when, in 1868, she published her memoir.
Just the year before, Mrs. Lincoln, living in a modest Chicago hotel and desperate for money, had arranged to meet Keckley in New York to ask her to help sell her old gowns and jewelry. Disdained by many whites as an imperious provincial, Mrs. Lincoln could rely on her as on no one else. But after the book appeared, Elizabeth Keckley was branded a "traitorous eavesdropper" in the press. A burlesque was produced entitled "'Behind the Seams,' by a Nigger Woman who took in work from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis." She had violated the codes of her era and threw a sense of fear into the slave-owning and servant-possessing classes. "Where will it end?" one reviewer said. "What family of eminence that employs a negro is safe from such desecration?" Mrs. Lincoln denounced the book and "the coloured historian." She cut off the seamstress she had once called her "best and kindest friend."
In a letter to the New York Citizen, Elizabeth Keckley asked if she was being denounced because "my skin is dark?" Was she not free to speak and write as a free woman? Toward the end of her life, she worked at Wilber-force University in Ohio, heading its Domestic Science Department. She died, in 1907, at the age of eighty-nine in Washington, D.C. She was a resident of the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children.
If Elizabeth Keckley was the most intimate African-American observer of the Lincoln White House, Frederick Douglass was surely its most important black visitor. Douglass had few illusions about Lincoln, realizing that the President had committed the North to civil war with the Confederacy to bring the South back into the Union with slavery in place. It was only as the war progressed that Lincoln came to see the untenable nature of fighting a slave power without attacking slavery itself. Lincoln came from Illinois, where racist feeling was strong and intact, and, as a political creature, he could not easily ignore the ingrained power of that prejudice. He needed to retain the loyalty of the border states of Maryland, Missouri, Delaware, and Kentucky, all of which were crucial to military strategy against the Confederacy and opposed any anti-slavery rhetoric from Washington.
Douglass, like so many other Americans, black and white, tried to make sense of the contradictory nature of Lincoln's statements and actions when it came to slavery and the history of black men and women in America. "To become President," Richard Hofstadter writes in The American Political Tradition, "Lincoln had to talk more radically on occasion than he actually felt; to be an effective President he was compelled to act more conservatively than he wanted." Lincoln had to cope with the extremes of violent racists, both in the North and the South, and the abolitionist tendency among a small, liberal intelligentsia. As a calculating politician, he could not act the revolutionary; he could not outpace the abolitionists. If Lincoln grew, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips said, "it was because we have watered him." For Lincoln, the Union came first. As he wrote to Horace Greeley, "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could do it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it." It was only late in 1862 that Lincoln determined that military necessity demanded that he put forward a proclamation of emancipation. But he neither denounced slavery as a moral travesty nor liberated the slaves in states loyal to the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation was the cagiest of historical acts. The resulting document, Hofstadter notes, "had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading."
Even in August, 1863, nearly a year after Emancipation, Douglass remained deeply distrustful of Lincoln, calling him a "genuine representative of American prejudice"--and with reason. In the early summer, there were draft riots in New York. White protesters, many of them of Irish ancestry, were furious that they were made to fight for the rights of "niggers," as they invariably put it, and hundreds of men rampaged through the city, torching black-owned houses and charities and lynching blacks from city lampposts. It took four days for Union troops to quell the rioting. In the end, there were a hundred dead and hundreds more injured. To Douglass's dismay, Lincoln so feared any further insurrection from whites angry at conscription that he refused to declare martial law or even prosecute the rioters. Nor could Douglass countenance Lincoln's earlier support for separation of the races. The President had raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to colonize American blacks abroad. He signed a contract with a firm called the Chiriqui Improvement Company to repatriate five hundred freed slaves to Panama. He urged them to move abroad and work in the coal mines. "Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," he told a group of blacks from the District at a White House reception. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race."
Lincoln's plan to send former slaves to Central America stalled--blacks were not interested in going, and the countries involved showed no sign of wanting them--but it was plain to Douglass that the President, despite his signature on the Emancipation documents and his evident moral probity, did not consider the Negro equal in his capacities to the white man.
Douglass had been working to recruit black soldiers for Union regiments. For him, there was no greater immediate cause and no greater sign of equal rights. The rolls of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Volunteers, the first black regiment from a free state, were filled thanks largely to his efforts. And yet black soldiers in the Union Army were paid a pittance, half, at best, what their white counterparts received, and, if captured by Confederate forces, they were routinely tortured, imprisoned, or made to work as slaves--all with barely a word of protest from the Lincoln White House.
Douglass, who was now forty-five years old and, in the abolitionist ranks, a comrade of William Lloyd Garrison, had come to Washington to appeal to the President. How he would reach him he did not know. He traveled for several days on sleeper trains from his home in Rochester, New York, alighting, filthy with soot, at the B&O Station on New Jersey Avenue, near the Capitol. It was August 10, 1863, a shatteringly hot morning. Washington had long been a city of slaves and slave auctions, but now the capital was home to eleven thousand freedmen. They were a marked, even dominant, presence in the city that summer, many of them walking the streets dirty, poorly dressed, jobless, as a large proportion of the moneyed white population and much of the government had fled the city to the countryside to avoid Washington's swampy heat and the many diseases--diphtheria, typhoid, and measles--that had become so common there.
Douglass had no appointment at the White House. His only hope of gaining access lay in a letter of introduction from a wealthy Boston abolitionist named George Stearns, a connection to an anti-slavery senator from Kansas named Samuel Pomeroy, and the national renown he had won for his anti-slavery speeches and editorials and for the first of three autobiographies, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.
In middle age, Douglass had a distinctive physical presence: he was smartly dressed, confident in his bearing, and wore his hair in a graying nimbus. As one of his biographers, John Stauffer, writes, above Douglass's right eye "a streak of white shot out from his scalp, tincturing the symmetry until it diffused into gray at the back of his head."
Washington in the mid-nineteenth century was not the capital of an imperial power; it was small and sleepy; its habits of appointment were extraordinarily casual. Douglass set off on foot for the highest American offices. Accompanied by Senator Pomeroy, he called on the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, at the War Department, where his petition for higher pay and better treatment of black soldiers met with unclear results. In Douglass's mind, Stanton was full of disdain for him. His glance, Douglass recalled, said, "Well, what do you want? I have no time to waste upon you or anybody else, and I shall waste none. Speak quick, or I shall leave you." And yet by the end of the session, Stanton had offered Douglass a job as an "assistant adjutant" to the Army to help recruit troops in the South. As Douglass went from one government office to the next that morning, from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, his persistence and his eloquence gained him an ever-longer roster of signatures on his "letter of safe passage."
With his letter in hand, Douglass walked with Pomeroy to the White House. The two men expected to have to wait many hours, even days, to see the President, and yet, just moments after Douglass's calling card was relayed to the inner offices of the White House, an assistant came to bring him to Lincoln. This flash of credibility and access did not come without incidental insult. As Douglass went up the stairs, he heard someone mutter, "Yes, damn it, I knew they would let the nigger through."
Writing many years later in his third and final autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Douglass brushed past the accustomed libel--the sort he had been hearing all his life--and concentrated on the astonishing encounter he was about to experience: "I was an ex-slave, identified with a despised race, and yet I was to meet the most exalted person in this great republic." Douglass encountered a shambling, homely man, six feet four in height, surrounded by scurrying aides and piles of documents:
Long lines of care were already deeply written on Mr. Lincoln's brow, and his strong face, full of earnestness, lighted up as soon as my name was mentioned. As I approached and was introduced to him he arose and extended his hand, and bade me welcome. I at once felt myself in the presence of an honest man--one whom I could love, honor, and trust without reserve or doubt. Proceeding to tell him who I was and what I was doing, he promptly, but kindly, stopped me, saying, "I know who you are, Mr. Douglass; Mr. Seward has told me all about you. Sit down. I am glad to see you."
Douglass laid out his list of complaints about the unequal payment and treatment of black Union recruits. Lincoln listened intently and, to Douglass's satisfaction, with sincere concentration. There was none of Stanton's disdain or impatience. ("I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or my unpopular color.") Douglass was impressed by Lincoln's evident ease, his naturalness with a black man, something that was not always the case even with the white abolitionists of Douglass's acquaintance. Lincoln hardly satisfied Douglass's political demands, however, insisting that the mere enlistment of black men into the Union Army "was a serious offense to popular prejudice." Lincoln said that black men "ought to be willing to enter the service upon any condition" and accept lower pay and inferior treatment as a "necessary concession." Lincoln, Douglass discovered, was foremost a politician, careful not to get ahead of his white majority in his treatment of a race that he himself still regarded as inferior. Douglass soon conceded to himself that the radicals, the abolitionists, still had a role to play after Emancipation. He could not rely on even a relatively enlightened President to blaze the trail of political equality.
Finally, at the end of the meeting, Douglass told Lincoln that Secretary Stanton had offered him the task of recruiting freed blacks in the South. Lincoln took from him the pass admitting him into the executive mansion and wrote, "I concur. A. Lincoln. Aug. 10, 1863."
Douglass left Washington for home "in the full belief that the true course to the black man's freedom and citizenship was over the battlefield, and that my business was to get every black man I could into the Union armies." Two of Douglass's sons were already fighting with Union regiments. The father would help add to the contingent.
Douglass waited at home for his official papers of commission. Week followed week. The papers did not arrive. It was never clear if he had been forgotten in the fog of the capital's bureaucracy or if he had been deliberately seduced, mollified, and then ignored. It seemed of little consequence to him at the time that the most important aspect of his meeting with Abraham Lincoln was the very fact that it had occurred--a black man had entered the White House to petition and counsel the President of the United States.
In the decades that followed, such meetings took place only occasionally. As late as four decades after Lincoln's assassination, Grover Cleveland quashed any rumors that he had met with a Negro at the White House, proudly declaring, "It just so happens that I have never in my official position, either when sleeping or waking, alive or dead, on my head or on my heels, dined, lunched, or supped, or invited to a wedding reception, any colored man, woman, or child." And in 1904, after Theodore Roosevelt had met at the White House with Booker T. Washington, Senator Benjamin Tillman, of South Carolina, remarked, "Now that Roosevelt has eaten with that nigger Washington, we shall have to kill a thousand niggers to get them back to their places."
In the days before Barack Obama was inaugurated, he received a series of intelligence briefings about a potential terrorist plot to take place on the day of the ceremonies in Washington. More than a million people were expected to gather on the Mall. Bush Administration officials and intelligence analysts, working in consultation with Obama's national security team, reviewed a series of top secret reports that Somali extremists were planning to cross the Canadian border and detonate explosives in the crowd while the nation watched. During a gathering in the Situation Room that included Condoleezza Rice, Stephen Hadley, and Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, Obama's designated Secretary of State, said, "Is the Secret Service going to whisk him off the podium so the American people see their incoming President disappear in the middle of the inaugural address? I don't think so." Obama decided to go forward with the ceremony, but it was determined that Robert Gates, who was remaining as Secretary of Defense, would stay away from the ceremony. If the absolute worst happened, a catastrophe on the steps of the Capitol, Gates would be in line to assume the Presidency.
As Obama emerged into the noonday light on January 20, 2009, to receive the oath of office, his mood was somber. "You know, the actual moment of being sworn in and speaking to the crowd is one that can't be separated from all the stuff that had gone on the days before," he told me later. "So, us traveling from Pennsylvania on a train and seeing the crowds, and then the wonderful concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial, and the service activities that Michelle and I did in the days prior to the inauguration--all that, I think, spoke to a sense of hopefulness and possibility that was expressed on inauguration day, which was very powerful to me. I have to tell you that you feel a little disembodied from it. Never during that week did I somehow feel that this was a celebration of me and my accomplishments. I felt very much that it was a celebration of America and how far we had traveled. And that people were reaffirming our capacity to overcome all the old wounds and old divisions, but also new wounds and new divisions. And in that sense, you know, I was along for the ride. And it was a wonderful spirit. It's interesting, though, that when I hear stories from people who participated in it, in some ways their experiences were more powerful, because they talked about getting on the trains very early in the mornings, and it's packed, and it's festive, and they're people from all different walks of life. Having that lens to see the inauguration would have been special."
Despite everything going on in his mind at the moment he walked through the door, Obama said he was not anxious or frightened. "I wasn't scared," he said. "I think at that point I had a pretty firm grasp on what the moment required.... There is no doubt that between Election Day and my first night in the White House, there is an escalating sense of responsibility that comes over you, a certain soberness about all that the office entails. That's especially true after having gone through a month and a half of briefings in which you realize that the economy's on the verge of collapse. But it's interesting: I do think that two years of campaigning under some pretty high-pressure situations in a perverse way does prepare you for the pressures involved in the office, because you're used to being on the high-wire, you're used to people scrutinizing you, you're used to--in some ways--a lot of folks depending on you. This is just at a different level. It's not politics, it's governance, so there's an added weight there. But it didn't feel--there was not a moment where I suddenly said, Whoa, what have I gotten myself into?"
After absorbing the blast of cold and the thudding roar from the Mall, Obama glanced to his right. He spotted on the steps, a few feet away, John Lewis--squat, bald, hatless--the eleven-term representative of Georgia's Fifth Congressional District and the only one of the speakers at the 1963 March on Washington still alive. Obama bent to embrace him.
"Congratulations, Mr. President," Lewis whispered in his ear.
Obama smiled at the sound of that and said, "Thank you, John. I'll need your prayers."
"You'll have them, Mr. President. That, and all my support."
At the March on Washington, King's speech was the most eloquent, John Lewis's the most radical. Lewis was just twenty-three at the time, the leader of SNCC. In the original draft of his speech, his demand for racial justice and "serious revolution" was so fearless that, in the last minutes before the program began, Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and other movement organizers negotiated with him to remove any phrases that might offend the Kennedy Administration. Lewis planned to say, "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We shall pursue our own 'scorched earth' policy and burn Jim Crow to the ground--nonviolently. We shall fragment the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy." He had to lose the bit about Sherman's army, but the rest of the text, capped by its final warning--"We will not be patient!"--left no doubt about Lewis or about the audacious generation that he represented.
Two years later, in Selma, Lewis led the march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge straight into a blockade set up by Alabama state troopers. The first nightstick wielded in anger landed on his skull. At the White House that night, Lyndon Johnson watched it all on television and deepened his resolve to push the Voting Rights Act. The day before Obama's inauguration, which came just after what would have been King's eightieth birthday, Lewis told me at his office, in the Cannon House Office Building, "Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma."
Inaugural weekend had been "bewildering" to John Lewis. "It is almost too much, too emotional," he said. Preaching at the Shiloh Baptist Church on Ninth Street N.W., Lewis had told parishioners that he would have thought that only a "crazy" person would predict the election of an African-American President in his lifetime, but now he was sure that the masses on the Mall would be joined by the "saints and angels": by Harriet Tubman and Carter G. Woodson, Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. DuBois, Nat Turner and Frederick Douglass, John Brown and Sojourner Truth.
For hours, Lewis greeted constituents at his office and handed out inaugural tickets. When he shook people's hands, he could feel that they were still freezing from the hours they had spent in long lines outside. He offered them coffee, hot chocolate, sandwiches, and donuts. After a while, he set off to visit the Mall, moving, it seemed, in a daze of unreality. He could scarcely believe the size of the crowds gathering so early--especially the great numbers of African-Americans, young and old, many of them from distant places.
As Lewis walked around the Mall, greeting people, posing for hundreds of photographs, a young man introduced himself as the police chief of Rock Hill, South Carolina. Lewis smiled incredulously. "Imagine that," he said. "I was beaten near to death at the Rock Hill Greyhound bus terminal during the Freedom Rides in 1961. Now the police chief is black."
One teenage boy sweetly asked, "Mr. Lewis, my mama says you marched with Dr. King. Is that true?" Like an old fighter who is not displeased to recount tales of ancient battle, Lewis nodded and said, well, yes he had, and perhaps for the five-thousandth time he sketched the journey from Selma to Montgomery.
"Barack was born long after he could experience or understand the movement," Lewis said, heading back to the Capitol. "He had to move toward it in his own time, but it is so clear that he digested it, the spirit and the language of the movement. The way he made it his own reminds me of a trip I made to South Africa in March, 1994, before the post-apartheid elections. We met with a few leaders of the African National Congress--young people--and despite their age they knew everything about the late fifties and sixties in the American South, the birth of the civil-rights movement. They were using the same rhetoric, they had the same emotional force. One young South African actor got up and recited a poem by a black slave woman from Georgia! And that is the way it is with Barack. He has absorbed the lessons and spirit of the civil-rights movement. But, at the same time, he doesn't have the scars of the movement. He has not been knocked around as much by the past."
Obama's promise to shut down Guantanamo, to outlaw torture and begin reversing immediately some of the most egregious policies of the Bush era, to start the march toward universal health care and end the long war in Iraq, gave Lewis hope that the idealism of "the movement" had finally come to the White House. In these inaugural days, it was hard for him--for anyone--to acknowledge that governing would be far different from campaigning, a switch from poetry to prose, from celebration and adulation to battle and compromise, even defeat. Obama's popularity would plummet soon enough. One of the qualities that he valued most in himself--the capacity for pragmatic conciliation--would inevitably run up against a range of opponents and forces that resisted his charms. A supremely self-confident politician whose first closely contested ballot was the Iowa caucus, who was four years out of the Illinois legislature, would be tested beyond description. He would soon encounter his own limitations, and the public would see the gulf between romance and accomplishment. But for a few days at least, John Lewis and millions of others cherished the moment of promise.
"People have been afraid to hope again, to believe again," Lewis said. "We have lost great leaders: John F. Kennedy, Martin, Robert Kennedy. And so people might have questioned whether or not to place their full faith in a symbol and a leader. The danger of disappointment is immense, the problems are so big. None of them can be solved in a day or a year. And that's the way it was with the civil-rights movement. This is the struggle of a lifetime. We play our part and fulfill our role."
For the inaugural ceremony, Obama had invited Rick Warren to give the invocation, a gesture to mainstream evangelicals, but surely the most moving performance on the podium, besides Obama's own somber address, was the final benediction. A few weeks before the ceremony, Obama had called the Reverend Joseph Lowery, Dr. King's comrade in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who was now eighty-seven years old. Obama left a message and asked him to call him on his cell phone. Lowery had campaigned with Obama in Iowa and Georgia. He had introduced him in Selma with his speech about all the "good crazy" things going on in the country. He had been with Obama from the start. Lowery returned the call, saying, "I am looking for the fellow who is going to be the forty-fourth President."
"Well, I believe that would be me, Brother Lowery," Obama replied.
When Obama asked him to do the benediction on January 20th, Lowery said, "Let me check my calendar." Then, after a long pause, he said, "Hmmm, I do believe I am free that day." The news spread quickly and some of Lowery's friends questioned why Rick Warren had been given the honor of giving the invocation.
"Don't worry," he answered them. "This way I get the last word."
Lowery sat near the Supreme Court justices. He thought that the justices in their robes looked like elders in a church choir. ("Are you going to sing?" he asked the Chief Justice. John Roberts smiled and said, "God forbid." Then Lowery poked Clarence Thomas in the ribs and said, "When are you gonna retire and come home to Georgia?")
When his turn came to speak, Lowery stepped slowly to the microphone and, as he looked out at the vast crowd, he could see the monuments, blurry in the distance. For a second or two, he was overwhelmed by a powerful thought, a kind of hallucination: "When you have eighty-seven-year-old eyes, there is always a haze. But the eyes of my soul at that moment could see the Lincoln Memorial and the ears of my soul could hear Martin's voice on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial summoning the nation to move out of the low land of race and color to the higher ground of the content of our character. And I thought the nation had finally responded to the summons, nearly forty-six years later, by inaugurating a black man as the forty-fourth President of the United States."
Lowery gathered himself and then, in a worn growly whisper, he began his benediction with James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice and Sing." The principal of a segregated school in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson wrote the poem in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln's birthday. By the nineteen-twenties, the hymn, with music written by Johnson's brother, was known as the Negro national anthem and was sung in black churches and schools as a form of protest against Jim Crow and as a sign of faith in a higher American ideal. Johnson spoke of the "exquisite anguish" that he felt whenever he heard the lines "sung by Negro children." Now Lowery, standing a few feet from the first African-American President, read the final verse:
God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far along the way,
Thou who has by Thy might led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to thee oh God, and
True to our native land.
The weather was bitter cold. For months Lowery had been suffering from severe back and leg pain. His voice was not as strong as it was in Selma when he helped ignite Obama's campaign in Brown Chapel, but he had come prepared with a prayer crafted to the historical moment. In closing, he was both sly and full of feeling, refusing self-satisfaction or sentimentality:
Lord, in the memory of all the saints, who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.
Obama, who had bowed his head in prayer, broke into a broad smile. Lowery said he was improvising on the familiar Sunday-school song "Jesus Loves the Little Children," but the language he was playing with was really an old saying taken up by, among others, Big Bill Broonzy in "Black, Brown, and White," a blues lament about the Jim Crow South. The riff seemed to almost everyone a gesture both joyful and wary, a celebration of historic progress and a reminder that the day of post-racial America had yet to come. Lowery, one of the titans of the Moses generation, had paid obeisance to the fallen "saints," and then had all the millions who were watching say amen. Three times we all said amen. An incredible moment, and yet some commentators, including Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, two of Obama's most hysterical antagonists, could see only anti-white malice in Lowery's words. "Even at the inauguration of a black President," Beck said, "it seems white America is being called racist." Lowery, though, was unfazed. "The only second thought I have," he said, "is that, with more than a million people there, I didn't find a way to take up an offering."
The ceremony was over. On the east front of the Capitol, George W. Bush's helicopter rose into the air, hovered a moment, and headed for Andrews Air Force Base and the flight home to Texas. People began waving derisively and singing, "Nah, nah, nah, nah, hey, hey, goodbye!" Then they cheered as the new President and his guests left the grandstand.
Obama had kept a wall of heroes at the Hart Senate Office Building down the street: a portrait of Gandhi at his spinning wheel; Thurgood Marshall in his judicial robes; Nelson Mandela reclining in a gold armchair, his cane at his side; Martin Luther King, Jr., at the microphone; Alexander Gardner's photograph of a war-weary Lincoln. Obama also displayed a framed cover of Life magazine from March, 1965; it showed a long line of demonstrators, led by John Lewis, about to confront the Alabama state troopers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Lewis had signed and framed the cover and had given it to Obama as a gift. Now, at the luncheon following the swearing-in ceremony, Lewis approached Obama with a sheet of paper and, to mark the occasion, he asked him to sign it. The forty-fourth President of the United States wrote, "Because of you, John. Barack Obama."