African Americans at White House Receptions During Lincoln’s Administration. Part I

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt famously sparked an outcry when he invited a black man, Booker T. Washington, to a White House dinner.[1] More than a generation earlier, Abraham Lincoln less famously created a similar outcry when he greeted African Americans during Executive Mansion receptions, at least five of which were attended by blacks.[2]

Historians writing about Lincoln and race have focused on policies and pronouncements but have paid little attention to his interaction with African Americans at those receptions.[3] One scholar, Nell Irvin Painter, asserted erroneously: “Throughout Lincoln’s two administrations, such receptions remained off limits to blacks.”[4] Professor Painter may have been misled by Frederick Douglass’s account of his experiences on March 4, 1865, when he tried to attend the reception following Lincoln’s inauguration. In his autobiography, the eminent black orator described how police denied him entrance to the Executive Mansion; how the president at once overruled them; and how Lincoln heartily welcomed him.[5] That account from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is familiar but not as richly detailed as the one Douglass gave in an 1894 speech in which he explained why he decided to attend that event. The following passage from that speech may have been the source of Professor Painter’s mistake:

Douglass’s statement that “no man of my race, color or previous condition had ever attended such a reception, except as a servant or waiter” is accurate only if he meant “inauguration receptions.” But if he meant “White House receptions in general,” he was wrong.[6]

The best-known of the receptions attended by blacks is the one Douglass described in his 1894 speech:

Elizabeth Keckly, a black modiste who served as Mrs. Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidante, recalled that Douglass “was very proud of the manner in which Mr. Lincoln received him. On leaving the White House he came to a friend’s house where a reception was being held, and he related the incident with great pleasure to myself and others.”[8]

Press accounts indicate that other blacks were admitted to the White House that day, though Douglass did not mention them. The New York Herald reported that “Douglass, another negro [man], and two negro women were in the East room and marched about with the rest of the company.”[9] The pro-administration Washington Chronicle ran a similar account: “Many colored persons appeared to pay their respects to the President and his lady, among whom were Frederick Douglass and his wife [actually Mrs. Dorsey].”[10] A Washington correspondent of the Democratic New York News wrote that in addition to Douglass, “[s]everal other negroes called during the evening and paid their respects to the President. It was a strange spectacle to see black and white elbowing each other for an opportunity to crook the pregnant hinges of the knee before the throne of the new-fashioned royalty.”[11]

More African Americans might have been received had it not been for the First Lady, who, according to the New York Evening Express, “was very indignant at the intrusion of a number of negroes” and “gave directions to admit no more, and eject those who were admitted.”[12] That story prompted the Columbus Ohio Statesman to remark: “Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln are tenants at the White House upon the strength of the negro’s popularity, and now they turn around and exclude him from its precincts.”[13]

(The ban may have been crossed several times earlier by light-skinned blacks, including a Haitian diplomat. An African American physician wrote that he had once asked “an attaché of the Haitian Embassy whom I met in Washington if he had visited any of those [White House] levees and he replied that he had done so frequently, without any embarrassment. But I can understand that in his case, as he was so light complexioned, that he would pass unnoticed in a throng like that.”)[14]

An examination of those four receptions indicates that there was no consistent policy regarding black guests at public functions. It also suggests that the president favored admitting African Americans but that Mrs. Lincoln did not.

It is not entirely clear what rules were in force during the 1860s regarding the admission of African Americans to White House receptions. After his inauguration-day confrontation in 1865, Douglass learned that “the officers at the White House had received no orders from Mr. Lincoln, or from any one else. They were simply complying with an old custom, the outgrowth of slavery, as dogs will sometimes rub their necks, long after their collars are removed, thinking they are still there.”[15]

Between 1864 and 1866, there seems to have been at least an informal understanding that blacks might be admitted after white callers had left. On January 1, 1866, Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin Brown French recorded in his journal that at the White House reception that day “a constant crowd of humanity poured along for two hours, closed up by 15 minutes devoted to ‘our colored brethren,’ who seemed delighted at having a chance to take their places among men.”[16] The Washington Evening Star reported that when the general reception ended at 2 p.m., “such of the colored people who were in waiting outside, were admitted.”[17]

It is not certain that President Johnson greeted those black callers. According to the Boston Commonwealth, some journalists “say that the colored people were not ‘received’ by the President on New Years’ Day—when they were admitted, half an hour after the other guests had retired, the President was in his private apartments, and the blacks had the public rooms alone to look at.”[18] One such account appeared in the Baltimore Sun: “The colored visitors yesterday [January 1] at the White House were disappointed at not seeing the President, who had retired previous to their admission. Many mistook [Supreme Court] Marshal [David S.] Gooding for him, and put him through a course of handshaking. The police, in excluding the colored people pending the reception of the whites, stated that they were carrying out their orders.” Evidently those police were replying to some blacks “who expressed displeasure at the discrimination.”[19] Those African Americans apparently thought they should have been allowed to enter with the whites, as had happened at the 1864 and 1865 New Year’s Day receptions. Several other press accounts, however, indicate that Johnson did receive black callers.[20]

After hosting a contentious meeting with African American leaders in February 1866, Johnson re-imposed the color line.[21] The following month, a newspaper reported that “the most profound excitement exists in Washington with reference to the course which President Johnson has determined to pursue. He has excluded negroes from the receptions at the White House, at which they have been admitted for three years hitherto.”[22] It is entirely possible that Johnson absented himself before the black callers were admitted. The president had summarized his racial views in the fall of 1865, when he told Commissioner French that “every one would, and must admit, that the white race was superior to the black.”[23]

Johnson’s successor, Ulysses S. Grant, evidently followed his example. During his presidency (1869–1877), police turned back all African American would-be visitors at the White House gates.[24] The same had been true during the antebellum administrations and would remain true for decades after 1866. According to a historian of the White House, “in the last quarter of the 19th century, as a policy, blacks were not admitted to the receptions.”[25]

During Lincoln’s administration, it is uncertain just when the color line at receptions was first breached (and reported in the press). As noted above, one newspaper indicated that the racial bar had been taken down starting in 1863; others suggested it was initially lowered three years later. Echoing several other papers, the New York Observer asserted that on January 1, 1866, “colored citizens were admitted, for the first time in our history.”[26]

In reality, the first known crossing of the color line took place two years earlier. According to a widely copied account in the Washington Chronicle, on January 1, 1864, “a few of the freed Africans” were among those outside the White House watching diplomats and other invited eminenti pass by en route to the traditional reception.[27] Of that handful of African American onlookers, four men “of genteel exterior and with the manners of gentlemen” entered the Executive Mansion and were presented to Lincoln.[28] Two of them were Massachusetts abolitionists, Charles Lenox Remond and Joshua Bean Smith. Remond was a celebrated antislavery lecturer who helped raise black troops. Smith, who also recruited African Americans for the army, was known as “the Prince of Caterers” in Boston, where he was befriended by Senator Charles Sumner. Allegedly he once refused to cater an event for Daniel Webster because that senator supported passage of the infamous Fugitive Slave Act.[29] Smith had at one time worked for the family of Robert Gould Shaw, the colonel who in July 1863 died leading the black troops of the storied 54th Massachusetts Infantry in its heroic, unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. A diarist noted that Remond and Bean “with 2 other colored gentlemen called on the President New Years & were received just like the others.”[30] Reportedly, one of those other two was the Haitian consul general and chargé d’affaires, Colonel Ernest Roumain.[31] The final member of that intrepid quartet was Henry J. Johnson, minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church in Ithaca, N.Y. He described Lincoln as “a gentleman, straight and tall, modest, with pleasing features” who looked “firm and determined.” Johnson reported that “the President received him as one gentleman ought to receive another.” Johnson was also introduced to Secretary of State Seward, who in turn introduced him to his daughter and other women nearby. “As great as the crowd was of gentle and noble men, these privileges were granted me without molestation or insult,” Johnson wrote. A journalist described Johnson as a former slave who, “after being dogged by bloodhounds, shot at and wounded by his master, and enduring great hardships,” had managed to escape, “bringing away four buckshot [pellets] in his leg, as mementos of the tender mercies of the ‘patriarchal institution.’” The journalist speculated that “had such a thing been attempted three years ago, they [the four black guests] would have got their heads broke for their presumption, and I suppose the bare statement of the fact now may throw some negrophobes into convulsions, nevertheless, the White House stood firmly on its foundations through it all as far as is known.”[32]

Negrophobes were indeed convulsed, though the Washington Chronicle approved heartily: “We are neither amalgamationists nor advocates of the leveling of all social distinctions, but we rejoice that we have a President who is a democrat by fact as well as by nature.”[33] A Democratic paper in Maine fulminated: “What a hideous travestie this is—what an abject and shameful truckling to the shocking and unnatural doctrine of negro equality—what a terrible humiliation at any time—and what a shameless boast at a period when the nation is undergoing the horrors of civil war, engendered by this same insane craving for negro equality, forbidden by the decrees of the Almighty.”[34] In Indiana, a Democratic editor tut-tutted: “There could be no possible objection to Mr. Lincoln’s course as a private individual in associating with negroes,” but “when as the representative of a great nation, he chooses to inaugurate a reign of social equality between the white and black races, democrats, and old time gentlemen generally, we think, have the right to enter their emphatic protest.”[35] Another Indiana paper sneered: “Four niggers were among the throng that visited the White House on New Year’s Day, and presented to the President, who was, no doubt, highly pleased to make their acquaintance.”[36] Yet another Indiana paper ran an article headlined: “Nigger at the White House! Ah! Never Before Has Cuffee’s Long Heel Trod the White House Floor.”[37] Alluding to the black guests at the New Year’s reception, the Dayton, Ohio, Empire snidely noted that on February 3, 1864, a “negro Major, in full uniform, was put off the street-cars, in Washington . . . and made to walk. Let him go to the White House for consolation. There he will be received as ‘one gentleman receives another.’”[38]

On February 23, 1864, that major—Alexander T. Augusta, director of the Freedmen’s Hospital—took up the Empire’s sarcastic challenge. Along with his assistant and protégé, Dr. Anderson R. Abbott (also black), he attended a White House reception, where, according to a Connecticut newspaper, they “were received by Mr. Lincoln with marked attention.”[39] (The Washington Evening Star reported that they “were kindly received.”)[40] Dr. Abbott wrote that Benjamin Brown French, acting as the official greeter, treated them with “with all the urbanity imaginable” and conducted them to the president. Upon catching sight of Major Augusta, Lincoln “advanced eagerly a few paces” and “grasped his hand.” As they exchanged greetings, Lincoln’s son Robert, who had been standing nearby next to his mother, approached and, as Dr. Abbott remembered, “asked a question very hastily, the purport of which I took to be, ‘Are you going to allow this invasion?’ referring, doubtless, to our presence there!” (Robert was almost certainly acting at the behest of his mother.) Lincoln responded: “Why not?” Without a further word, Robert retreated to the First Lady’s side. The president then heartily shook hands with both Dr. Augusta and Dr. Abbott.[41]

The author of an 1864 biography of Lincoln described that scene: “When two or three colored gentlemen availed themselves of the privilege to call upon him,” the president gave no sign that he regarded them as different from other guests at the reception. “They were greeted with the same cordiality and freedom that he had bestowed upon white men.” Though it was highly unusual for blacks to appear at such events, “yet Mr. Lincoln treated the affair as of ordinary occurrence, much to his credit and renown.”[42] (The author, unaware that four blacks had attended the New Year’s reception the previous month, thought this was the first time that African Americans had been admitted to a White House levee.)

Two years later, a presidential secretary recalled that same occasion: “I shall never forget the sensation produced at a levee by the appearance of two tall and very well dressed Africans among the crowd of those who came to pay their respects. It was a practical assertion of negro citizenship, for which few were prepared. The President received them with marked kindness, and they behaved with strict propriety, not seeming to court attention, but went on their way with great self-possession.”[43]

The two black physicians may not have courted attention, but they received a great deal of it when they proceeded to the huge East Room. There, Abbott remembered, the

Thus was the color line at White House receptions breached a second time, although Dr. Abbott thought it was probably the first.

Soon thereafter, a correspondent of the Chicago Times, the Midwest’s leading Democratic newspaper, complained that “[f]ilthy buck niggers, greasy, sweating, and disgusting, now jostle white people and even ladies everywhere, even at the President’s levees.” (The writer was evidently referring to Drs. Augusta and Abbott as well as Charles Lenox Remond, Joshua Bean Smith, Colonel Ernest Roumain, and the Rev. Mr. Henry J. Johnson—the four African Americans who had attended the White House levee on New Year’s Day.) Worse still, the Times correspondent observed, “the beastly doctrine of the intermarriage of black men with white women [is] openly avowed and indorsed and encouraged by the President of the United States.”[45]

It is not entirely clear what prompted the two black physicians to attend the February 23 reception, though it seems likely that Elizabeth Keckly may have encouraged them. She was a close friend of Major Augusta’s wife (the former Mary Burgoin), a “dressmaker of note” who had owned a shop in Toronto which advertised itself as an emporium where there “will at all times be found the latest Paris and London patterns.”[46]

Major Augusta may not have needed any encouragement, for he was that month conducting a one-man equal rights campaign. Born in Virginia and educated in Toronto, Canada, he had volunteered for military service a few days after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. At first he was denied an army appointment because of his race and (supposed) Canadian citizenship, but he managed to demonstrate that he was an American and a knowledgeable, well-trained, experienced physician. Shortly after receiving his Union army commission, and while wearing his full dress uniform, he was assaulted by Baltimore thugs who tore off his shoulder straps. A mob then attacked him; one of its members struck him in the face. Bleeding copiously, he was rescued by provost marshals and armed detectives.

Dr. Augusta experienced less violent but nonetheless galling discrimination at the hands of the War Department, which removed him from a responsible position running a hospital and reassigned him to routine duties (recruiting volunteers and administering physical exams). In addition, he received much less pay than white majors. A determined, ambitious, and assertive man, he protested against such mistreatment. He became a public figure when he wrote a letter denouncing a streetcar conductor who had denied him admission to the interior of his vehicle. When newspapers published the letter, it was read aloud on the floor of the Senate, which authorized an investigation into the matter that led to the abolition of segregation on Washington’s streetcars a year later. Also that February, before attending the White House reception, Major Augusta attracted newspaper coverage when he tried in vain to attend sessions of the Supreme Court and he successfully took a seat in the visitors gallery of the Senate chamber. Evidently the same impulse which led him break color barriers on streetcars, at the Senate gallery, and at the Supreme Court room in the Capitol earlier that month also led him to challenge the color barrier at the White House.

A third breach of that barrier occurred at the New Year’s Day reception on January 2, 1865 (January 1 fell on a Sunday). That morning, the Washington Chronicle, widely viewed as an organ of the Lincoln administration, announced that “all the people present [in the District of Columbia], of every creed, clime, color and sex, are invited by the President to call upon him” at the traditional reception that day.[47] Perhaps as a result of this invitation, many more blacks attended the 1865 New Year’s reception than had attended the one in 1864.

African Americans were admitted that 1865 day only briefly, however. According to a report in a Democratic newspaper, a large crowd gathered near the portico of the White House, including several hundred well-dressed blacks. Among them were some clergy and a few soldiers, as well as “the bon ton of negro society in Washington.” When the front door opened, members of both races surged forward, much to the astonishment of the whites, who had expected the blacks to wait until the Caucasian guests had left. Alerted by jeers and curses, police quickly moved to stop the African Americans, who nonetheless persisted in their attempts to enter. Despite the constabulary’s best efforts, at least twenty blacks managed to gain admission.[48] (An abolitionist guest noted in her diary: “I saw a few colored persons. Such had a hard time to get in, but when once in all were treated alike.”)[49]

The Lincolns greeted some of them, but not many. A second-hand account of the affair described how the African American guests were received: when “a colored woman presented herself, Mr. Lincoln shook hands with her, and Mrs. Lincoln gave the invariable bow; on the passage of the second one Mrs. Lincoln looked aghast; and when the third colored woman appeared, Mrs. Lincoln sent word to the door that no more colored persons would be admitted to mingle with the whites. But if they would come at the conclusion of the levee, they should receive the same admittance.” The author of this piece added that “I was told that quite a number availed themselves of the privilege to constitute a colored levee at the close of the white one.”[50]

This account is corroborated in part by coverage in the Washington National Intelligencer:

A reporter for New York Independent, edited by antislavery stalwarts Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton, noted that after the white crowd departed, the blacks who had been waiting outside “summoned up courage, and began timidly to approach the door.” The president “welcomed this motley crowd with a heartiness that made them wild with exceeding joy. They laughed and wept, and wept and laughed, exclaiming, through their blinding tears, ‘God bless you!’ ‘God bless Abraham Lincoln!’ ‘God bress Massa Linkum!’”[52]

In Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, a scandalized Democratic editor asked rhetorically: “Are not such scenes at the White House disgusting? When will the white people of this country awake to the sense of shame that the dominant party is bringing upon us by the practical establishment of the social equality of the negro?”[53] The Milwaukee Daily News deplored “the fact that negroes flock to the outer rooms of the white house!”[54]

On February 6, the color line was again breached, according to an African American who sent the following account to the New York Anglo-African; the report is dated February 12.

Later that month, however, the ban on black guests was reinstituted at Mrs. Lincoln’s White House levees; Sojourner Truth was turned away from the First Lady’s reception on February 25.[56] A white woman present at that event described in her diary how the famous African American grandmother-abolitionist

If she had informed Lincoln, he may well have done then what he did a week later, when he insisted that Frederick Douglass be admitted to the post-inauguration reception. On February 27, a British journalist told Lincoln that Sojourner Truth had been denied admittance to the Executive Mansion two days earlier. The president “expressed his sorrow, and said he had often seen her, that it should not occur again, and that she should see him the first opportunity: a promise which he kept by sending for her a few days afterward.”[58]

(On October 29, 1864, Sojourner Truth had made her only documented White House visit, which she described to a friend: “It was about 8 o’clock in the morning when I called on the President, in company with Mrs. [Lucy N.] C[olman]. On entering his reception room, we found about a dozen persons waiting to see him; amongst them two colored women, some white women also.” Lincoln “showed as much respect and kindness to the colored persons present as to the whites.” When she praised him as “the best President who has ever taken the seat,” he demurred, modestly speculating that his predecessors would have done just as he had done if their circumstances had resembled his. She added that she “never was treated by any one with more kindness and cordiality” than “by that great and good man.” As she was about to leave, Lincoln shook her hand and said he “would be pleased” to have her call again. She felt as if she were “in the presence of a friend.”)[59]

As mentioned above, Frederick Douglass and other African Americans broke the color line on March 4, 1865, which angered some Democrats. The Cincinnati Enquirer asked rhetorically: “With negro officers in the army, negro lawyers in the Supreme Court, and negroes at the White House receptions, who can doubt that the negro race is ‘looking up,’ or rather looking down on the white race from the elevated place it has attained under this Administration?”[60]

Two days later, however, the color line was once again enforced, this time at the inaugural ball. Shortly before that gala event, Forney’s Washington Chronicle announced:

After the ball, the New York Herald observed: “The absence of negroes was much remarked. They were so conspicuous during the [March 4] inauguration ceremonies at the Capitol, and the reception and in the procession that every one expected to see them dance the Juba or Virginia reel before the President. Nobody could have objected, probably, had they been present, for this was a thoroughly abolition ball, all of the old Washington aristocracy refusing to attend. But either the inclination or the ten dollars [fee for a ticket of admission] was wanting, and the colored race was unrepresented.”[62] Contemptuously, the Democratic Cleveland Plain Dealer remarked: “Now is not this the coolest example of impudent hypocrisy that was ever perpetrated—so eminently worthy of [John W.] Forney and the men he serves? These are the people, it must be remembered, who gloat with lavish delight over the admission of a negro—described in their journals as of the blackest species—to the Bar of the Supreme Court; who have succeeded in commissioning negroes as officers in the army to mess [i.e., eat] and associate with white officers and exercise the authority of their rank over white soldiers; who are patronizing orating negresses, and the like. Oh shame, where is thy blush?”[63] Tongue in cheek, the New York World protested “against this shameful attempt by Mr. Lincoln to keep negroes away from the inauguration ball.” Of the Republican organizers of that event, the World said: “To seek any sense of shame in them were like pelting a rhinoceros with roses.”[64]

The historian Kate Masur has criticized the Lincolns for enforcing the White House color line, but that seems hardly fair to the president (if not to his wife).[65] The inaugural ball committee, not Lincoln, imposed the ban at the March 6 event. The president regretted that Sojourner Truth had been turned away on February 25 and vowed that it would not happen again. He overruled the guards who attempted to block Frederick Douglass on March 4. Through the Washington Chronicle, he heartily invited all Washingtonians, regardless of color, to attend the 1865 New Year’s Day reception. Apropos of that gesture, Professor Masur wrote: “The paper attributed the invitation to ‘the President’ himself, but there is no evidence that Lincoln was behind it; the source may well have been the paper’s editor, John Forney, a Lincoln ally who was often somewhat more progressive on matters of emancipation and race than the president.”[66] But by the same token, there is no evidence to prove that Lincoln was not behind the invitation. It is quite telling that a newspaper known as his administration’s organ announced that the president himself invited people of all colors to attend the reception. Possibly editor Forney did so without Lincoln’s approval, but it seems more plausible to conclude that the Chronicle was simply expressing the president’s wish that all Washingtonians, regardless of color, would be welcome at the reception, as they had been on at least two earlier occasions.

In January 1866, the Washington correspondent Benjamin Perley Poore reviewed the history of White House receptions and concluded thus:

Lincoln’s unfailing cordiality to African Americans at White House receptions was part of a larger pattern that included his willingness as president to meet with blacks in his office, to honor their requests, to invite them to consult on public policy, to treat them with respect and kindness whether they were kitchen servants or leaders of the black community, to extend them invitations to attend receptions and tea, to sing and pray with them on their turf, and to authorize them to hold events on the White House grounds.[68] All of those manifestations of an egalitarian spirit fully justify the tributes paid to him by many African Americans, among them Frederick Douglass, who deemed Lincoln “emphatically the black man’s president, the first to show any respect for their rights as men . . . . He was the first American President who . . . rose above the prejudice of his times, and country.”[69]

1. Deborah Davis, Guest of Honor: Booker T. Washington, Theodore Roosevelt, and the White House Dinner That Shocked a Nation (New York: Atria Books, 2012).

2. Kate Masur, “Color Was a Bar to the Entrance: African American Activism and the Question of Social Equality in Lincoln’s White House,” American Quarterly 69 (2017): 1–22.

3. Conspicuous exceptions are Benjamin Quarles, Lincoln and the Negro (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), and The Negro in the Civil War (New York: Russell & Russell, 1953); Clarence Lusane, The Black History of the White House (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2011); and Richard N. Current, co-author of Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955).

4. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 203.

5. Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park, 1882), 443–445.

6. Cf. his statement in his autobiography: “no colored persons had ever ventured to present themselves on such occasions.” Life and Times of Douglass, 444.

7. Speech to the Union League of Brooklyn, 13 February 1894, John W. Blassingame et al., eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979–92), 5:544–545.

8. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868), 160.

9. Washington correspondence, 4 March 1865, New York Herald, 5 March 1865.

10. Washington Chronicle, 5 March 1865, copied in the Boston Daily Advertiser, 6 March 1865.

11. Washington correspondence, n.d., New York News, n.d., copied in the Cambridge (Ohio) Jeffersonian, 24 March 1865.

12. Washington correspondence, 5 March, New York Evening Express, 7 March 1865.

13. Ohio Statesman (Columbus), 17 March 1865.

14. Anderson Abbott, “Civil War Memoirs from Dr. Anderson Abbott,” from the Abbott Collection, Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, in Catherine Slaney, Family Secrets: Crossing the Colour Line (Toronto: Natural Heritage Books, 2003), 202. That attaché could have been Demosthenes Bruno, secretary of the legation and assistant chargé d’affaires.

15. Life and Times of Douglass, 445.

16. Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee’s Journal, 1828–1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989), 496.

17. Washington Evening Star, 1 January 1866.

18. Boston Commonwealth, n.d., copied in the Washington National Republican, 8 January 1866.

19. Washington correspondence by “Potomac,” 2 January 1866, Baltimore Sun, 3 January 1866.

20. Washington Evening Star, 2 January 1866; Washington correspondence, 1 January 1866, New York Herald, 2 January 1866; Boston American Traveler, 6 January 1866; Washington correspondence, 1 January 1866, Boston Daily Advertiser, 2 January 1866; Washington correspondence, 1 January 1866, Philadelphia Inquirer, 2 January 1866; Washington National Intelligencer, 2 January 1866.

21. On January 12, Johnson was reported to have stopped participating in formal receptions. Pittsburgh Daily Commercial, 12 January 1866.

22. Pall Mall Gazette (London), n.d., copied in the London Guardian, 2 March 1866.

23. Johnson’s remarks paraphrased in French to Johnson, Washington, 8 February 1866, The Papers of Andrew Johnson, ed. LeRoy P. Graf, Paul Bergeron, et al., 16 vols. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967–2000), 8:57. See also David Warren Bowen, Andrew Johnson and the Negro (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989).

24. William Seale, The President’s House: A History, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1:455–456.

25. Seale, The President’s House, 2:653.

26. New York Observer, 4 January 1866.

27. Washington correspondence, 3 January, Newark Daily Advertiser, 5 January 1864.

28. Washington Chronicle, 2 January 1864, copied in The Liberator (Boston), 22 January 1864.

29. “Convention of the Colored Citizens of Massachusetts, August 1, 1858,” New Bedford, Massachusetts “Colored Conventions” website, transcription, p. 107n14.

30. Diary of Julia Wilbur, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College (entry for 3 January 1864). The night of January 1, Remond spoke at the Israel Bethel Church in Washington. Julia Wilbur had met with him in the preceding week.

31. Washington correspondence, n.d., Greencastle, Indiana, Press, 13 January 1864, copied in the Sullivan, Indiana, Democrat, 21 January 1864. He may have entered the White House with the diplomatic corps before the general public was admitted.

32. Washington correspondence, n.d., London Morning Star, n.d., copied in the New York Anglo-African, 23 January 1864; Henry Johnson to the editor, Washington, 6 January 1864, New York Anglo-African, 23 January 1864.

33. Washington Morning Chronicle, 2 January 1864, in J.G. Randall and Richard N. Current, Lincoln the President: Last Full Measure (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1955), 317–18.

34. Belfast, Maine, Republican Journal, 8 January 1864.

35. Plymouth, Indiana, Democrat, 14 January 1864.

36. Huntington, Indiana, Democrat, 7 January 1864.

37. Washington correspondence, n.d., Greencastle, Indiana, Press, 13 January 1864, copied in the Sullivan, Indiana, Democrat, 21 January 1864.

38. Dayton Empire, 4 February 1864. The quotation marks around “gentleman is received” passage refers to Frederick Douglass’s description of how the president greeted him in August 1863. Major Alexander Augusta was hastening to testify at a court martial hearing when he boarded a streetcar from which he was ejected. His mistreatment eventually led authorities to abolish segregation on Washington streetcars. Washington correspondence, 8 February 1864, New York Weekly Anglo-African, 13 February 1864; Kenneth J. Winkle, Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in Washington (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 397–398; Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 95–125. Also in 1864, Augusta had caused a stir when he tried to attend a session of the U.S. Supreme court. Ibid., 99.

39. New Haven Columbian Register, 12 March 1864.

40. Washington Evening Star, 24 February 1864.

41. “Civil War Memoirs from Dr. Anderson Abbott,” in Slaney, Family Secrets, 202.

42. William M. Thayer, Character and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States (Boston: Dinsmoor, 1864), 22.

43. William O. Stoddard, “White House Sketches, no. 7,” New York Citizen, 29 September 1866, in Stoddard, Inside the White House in War Times: Memoirs and Reports of Lincoln’s Secretary, ed. Michael Burlingame (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 172.

44. “Civil War Memoirs from Dr. Anderson Abbott,” in Slaney, Family Secrets, 202.

45. Washington correspondence, 24 March 1864, Chicago Times, n.d., copied in the Indianapolis Indiana State Sentinel, 4 April 1864.

46. M. Dalyce Newby, Anderson Ruffin Abbott: First Afro-Canadian Doctor (Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1998), 78; Slaney, Family Secrets, 54.

47. Ford Risley, “The President’s Editor: John W. Forney of the Press and Morning Chronicle,” American Journalism 26 (2009): 63–85.

48. Washington correspondence, n.d., Missouri Republican (St. Louis), 7 January 1865, copied in the Milwaukee Daily News, 16 January 1865.

49. Diary of Julia Wilbur, Quaker and Special Collections, Haverford College (entry for 2 January 1865).

50. Washington correspondence by “Puritan,” 18 February 1865, Boston Recorder, 24 February 1865.

51. Washington National Intelligencer, 3 January 1865. Benjamin Brown French noted in his journal that he was on duty at the White House that day, introducing the guests—“such as desired it”—to the First Lady, who withdrew at about 2 p.m. French, Witness to the Young Republic, ed. Cole and McDonough, 462 (entry for 2 January 1865).

52. Washington correspondence by H. R. G., 3 January 1865, New York Independent, n.d., copied in the Boston Traveler, 14 January 1865.

53. Illinois State Register (Springfield), 8 January 1865.

54. Milwaukee Daily News, 16 January 1865.

55. Washington correspondence by “an old pen,” 12 February, New York Anglo-African, 25 February 1865.

56. Fred Tomkins, Jewels in Ebony (London: British and Foreign Freedmen’s Aid Society, [1865]), 1. “The receptions of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. [Kate Chase] Sprague yesterday [February 25] were the largest of any given this winter.” Washington correspondence, 26 February 1865, Philadelphia Inquirer, 27 February 1865.

57. Julia Wilbur Small Diary, entry for 25 February 1865, Julia Wilbur Papers, Haverford College Special Collections, accessed online, 23 May 2017.

58. Tomkins, Jewels in Ebony, 2. There is no evidence that Sojourner Truth met more than once with Lincoln. Carleton Mabee, Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 124.

59. Sojourner Truth to Rowland Johnson, Freedmen’s Village, Virginia, 17 November 1864, National Antislavery Standard (New York), 17 December 1864, and same to same, The Liberator (Boston), 24 December 1864. Lucy N. Colman gave two different accounts of this interview, one a letter written three days after the event and the other a memoir written twenty-seven years later. In the former, she quotes Lincoln at length and says he received his guests with “pleasing cordiality.” In her 1891 reminiscences she offers a different version, indicating that Lincoln was rude and patronizing. Letter by Colman, 1 November 1864, Rochester, N.Y., Express, 10 November 1864, copied in the Sacramento Union, 14 December 1864; Colman, Reminiscences (Buffalo: H. L. Green, 1891), 67. For an extensive, thoughtful discussion of these two versions of the interview as well as several later versions, see Mabee, Sojourner Truth, 118–128. See also Barbara Anne White, Visits with Lincoln: Abolitionists Meet the President at the White House (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2011), 120–124.

60. Cincinnati Enquirer, 10 March 1865.

61. Washington Chronicle, [2 March 1865], copied in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 March 1865.

62. Washington correspondence, 7 March 1865, New York Herald, 8 March 1865.

63. Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6 March 1865.

64. New York World, 4 March 1865.

65. Masur, “Color Was a Bar to the Entrance,” 15–18.

66. Ibid., 11.

67. Washington National Republican, 6 January 1866.

68. The story of these interactions will be the subject of another article by the author in the next issue of this journal.

69. Frederick Douglass, eulogy on Lincoln, 1 June 1865, For the People: A Newsletter of the Abraham Lincoln Association, vol. 16:4 (Winter 2014).