The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama

by David Remnick

  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 noonda
y 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?"