In 1960, the city of Washington emptied a cemetery on Rhode Island Avenue. Thirty-seven thousand graves were moved to a field in Maryland. The headstones were not moved with them. A newspaper offered them as free stones. A farmer in Virginia hauled them by truck and dumped them along two miles of riverbank to stop erosion. Every stone had a name carved into it. One of those names was William Slade.
He had carried the keys to Abraham Lincoln's house. He spent thirty years making sure Black people in Washington were buried under stones like these. He bought every item of food that entered the presidential mansion. He knew every general and diplomat by face. Frederick Douglass wrote to him asking for information. Andrew Johnson promoted him and attended his funeral during his own impeachment trial. He died leaving an estate worth $100,000. During four years beside the president, only one letter from him survives.
In 1965, a senator introduced the first African American aide in the history of the United States Senate. That was a mistake. The first real aide had been appointed a hundred years earlier, and by 1965 the Senate had lost track of him. To understand how that happened, you first have to understand why a prosperous free Black family moved toward a war.
It began in the winter of 1861 in Cleveland, Ohio. In the Fourth Ward, a family in a good house was preparing to leave for the war. They did not have to go. The census taker who had come the year before recorded what they owned: $4,000 in real estate and another $2,000 in personal property. The wife, Josephine, was a schoolteacher. Two of the daughters were old enough to think about higher education. In Cleveland, they were free, comfortable, and safe.
But Washington that January was not safe at all. Horatio Nelson Taft, a patent office clerk, wrote in his diary on the ninth that fires and robberies were happening every night. He had begun sleeping with a loaded pistol within reach. Southern states were leaving the Union. Troops were filling the streets, and for a free Black family, the capital was a city where a man could be stopped on the sidewalk and ordered to prove he belonged to no one. And yet they went.
The husband's name was William Slade. He had lived in Washington before, and he knew something about the city that the diaries of frightened white clerks never recorded. The men who ran the United States government took their meals in hotels. The people who carried their bags heard everything. He had been a porter at the Brown's Indian Queen hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was the kind of establishment where a senator and a cabinet secretary could settle a matter before it reached the floor. The porter in that room was treated as a piece of furniture. He was also, if he paid attention, the best-informed man in it.
One of the men Slade met there was Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. By 1861, Chase was secretary of the treasury. Slade wrote a recommendation, and Slade became a messenger at the Treasury Department. He did not stay long.
To understand what happened next, it helps to know what the presidential mansion looked like from the inside in the year before Lincoln arrived. The 1860 census counted eleven servants living in the house. Two were English, one Welsh, one Belgian, six Irish, and one American-born. President Buchanan preferred a staff of European origin, and in a city where nearly one in five residents was Black, he assembled a household in which no Black person lived or worked.
Within a year of Lincoln taking the oath, William Slade was carrying a set of keys to every room in it. His job title was steward. In the domestic hierarchy of a large nineteenth-century household, only the manager ranked above that position, and for almost the entire Lincoln presidency, no one held that position at all. So Slade did both jobs. He ordered and paid for everything the family ate. He set the hour at which meals were served. He directed the maids and the servants. A look, a finger, and the thing was done without any member of the family noticing it had needed doing. He kept his own room in the house. He was a cook and caterer by trade, and on evenings when Lincoln had a few friends for dinner, he prepared some of the dishes himself.
He also became Lincoln's personal attendant, which meant tending to the president's clothes, the president's grooming, and the president's person. By any measure of the time, it was one of the highest positions available to a Black man in Washington. He got the job partly because of how he looked.
This is the part of the story no one enjoys. When Lincoln came east from Illinois, he brought his own personal servant with him. His name was William Johnson. He had worked for Lincoln in Springfield and had traveled with him to the inauguration. The White House staff refused to accept him. Lincoln wrote letters trying to find Johnson another government post, and in one of them he explained the reason plainly. The problem was Johnson's skin color. It was too dark for the other servants. William Slade's was not.
He was of medium height, olive-skinned, with light eyes and straight chestnut-brown hair, and he wore a small beard. In nineteenth-century servant accounts, that face was an advantage. Employers of the period believed that servants who came out of slavery carrying the features of their masters had inherited their ambition along with their skin color. John Washington recorded that belief in his 1942 writings without softening it. Two Black men, one position. The man the president chose for himself was turned away at the door. The man who came through that door stayed for seven years.
What the house got in return was not merely a competent servant. Edward Duffield Neill, one of Lincoln's secretaries, described him as a faithful, sober, and dignified man. Then, as if it were part of the same sentence, Neill added that he was an elder in the Fifteenth Street Colored Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the president's house. Rosetta Wells, who worked in the mansion, remembered him more bluntly. She said he was the man who controlled all the servants.
But the thing Lincoln seemed to value most in him was hard to put in a job description. Slade was funny. He was a collector of jokes and stories, and those who knew him said he had stories that could make a horse laugh. He did not panic. In a house that spent four years receiving casualty lists, he was the man who could find the bright side out loud. He could do it at the exact moment the president had lost the ability to do it himself.
What happened next had nothing to do with politics. In February 1862, Willie Lincoln, the president's eleven-year-old son, died inside the house. Tad, the surviving son, became unmanageable. Grief at that age comes in the form of noise and destruction, and no one on staff could absorb it. Slade solved it with his own children. He owned a carriage he used for the president's letters and for getting himself back and forth across the city. Now he began loading it with Andrew, Josephine, and Katherine and bringing them to work with him. They spent whole days in the mansion, the basement, the yards, and whatever part of the house the president's surviving son wanted to use that morning. Sometimes Tad came the other way, to Slade's house on Massachusetts Avenue between Fourth and Sixth Streets. Katherine remembered sixty years later that Tad would become difficult again if he was not allowed to.
This is the arrangement history has mostly chosen to remember. A friendly man with keys, three children, and a grieving boy in a basement. It is accurate. It is also about a fifth of the truth, because the man who spent his days inside that house spent his evenings four blocks away in a church on Fifteenth Street doing work the president knew almost nothing about.
During four years of daily proximity, only one letter from William Slade to Abraham Lincoln survives. One. It is dated April 28, 1863, and it is held today in the Abraham Lincoln papers at the Library of Congress. It is not a request for a raise. It is not a note about household accounts. It is not, in any sense, a servant's letter.
Six days before it was written, a petition had been delivered to Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war. It was signed by leading Black men of Washington. The name at the top of the list was William Slade. The petition was about officers. The War Department had begun raising colored regiments in the District of Columbia and in Alexandria. The men who would lead them were being chosen by white officials from among white candidates, with no input from the community whose sons would do the fighting.
The petitioners did not object to the regiments. They congratulated Stanton on authorizing them. They said they were fully convinced that more than one regiment could be formed. Then they demanded the one thing that mattered to them: that the officers leading those men be selected by the people to whom those men belonged. The wording was precise to the point of diplomacy. The petitioners wrote that service would place their men under an organized system, provide them with work, and ensure they were cared for, provided for, and educated in a very important sense. Every phrase was calculated to sound like a modest request. Every phrase was, in fact, a claim of rightful standing.
Slade did not simply add his signature and let the document circulate. He wrote a second letter privately to the president. He apologized for the shortness of the list. He explained that he could have gathered more names, and more prominent ones, except that we deemed it of the utmost importance that it should reach your Excellency as early as possible. He was telling Lincoln that a window of opportunity had opened and would not stay open forever. Then he closed with a sentence that reveals what he believed he was. I believe, to the best of my knowledge, that these men are the universal choice of our people, and if necessary we will enlarge the list. Our people. Not the colored people, not those in my care. Our people. It was written by the man who laid out the president's clothes, in a letter carried through the president's own house. He had earned the right to use that pronoun over time and the hard way.
Within nine months of arriving in Washington, Slade was leaking information out of the city to a newspaper in another state. In December 1861, readers of the Cleveland Morning Leader, which noted that he was known in your city, learned what was happening inside the capital's prisons. Fugitives who had reached Union lines were being held in a building that housed more than 200 people. Among them were thirty or forty escaped slaves. Slade reported that another sixty or seventy men were being held in the workhouse. Ten more days passed before the National Illustrated Weekly published the story for a white readership.
He was an elder in the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, where most of the mansion's Black staff worshipped. He presided over the Colored Citizens' Convention of the District. That was the body where churches and benefit societies met to discuss, as one announcement put it, matters of the gravest importance to the general welfare of the colored people. He was also president of an organization with a name that suggests nothing at all: the Social, Civil and Statistical Association. Statistical. That is the word to hold onto.
The association's work was numerical accounting. Its members went out into Washington's neighborhoods and counted things. How many Black children were in schools, how many Black adults wanted to be, what the community owned, what it earned, and what it had built with what it earned. Then they published the numbers. It sounds like routine office work. It was an argument, the only argument in 1862 that could not be shouted down.
The question on the mind of every Black family in the capital was not whether slavery would end. It was what would happen to them afterward, and whether white America intended to give them any role in the country at all. Slade's employer had already answered that question out loud. In August 1862, in the house whose keys Slade kept, Lincoln received a delegation of Black men and told them the races could not live together. You and we are different races, he said. The physical difference between us was a great obstacle to all of us. He acknowledged that their people had suffered the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. He also told them the war itself would not have happened without your race among us. And so it was better for us both to be separated. He was suggesting they leave the country.
Historians have spent a long time with that speech, and the fairest thing that can be said about it is that it was not Lincoln's last word. By the spring of 1865, he was speaking publicly in favor of voting rights for Black men who had served in the army, and for what one of his secretaries called the very intelligent, impartial suffrage. Something moved him during those three years. At least one historian has argued that part of what moved him was the example standing in the room every day holding his coat.
Because that is what William Slade did after August 1862. He did not resign. He did not confront the president. He did not write a reply, leak a complaint, or deliver a speech in a hall that a reporter might carry back to the mansion. He went back to the counting. Somewhere in Washington that autumn, a man in a good coat is walking through a neighborhood with a notebook, asking a family how many of their children can read.
How does a man end up in that position, trusted with the keys to the most powerful house in America by day and walking his neighborhood with a notebook by night? The answer does not begin at the White House. It begins in Virginia in 1814 with a woman whose name no one wrote down.
William Slade was born free. That fact is the center of his entire life, and it was a coincidence of timing. His mother had been enslaved by the Foote family in Virginia before he was born. By the time he was born, she was not. Nothing else about her survives. No first name, no birth year, no place. But William believed he knew one thing about her, and he told his family. He believed she was the half-sister of a white man named Henry Foote. Henry Foote went on to represent Mississippi in the United States Senate.
Consider the arithmetic of that for a moment. If what Slade believed was true, then a United States senator and the man who would one day lay out Abraham Lincoln's clothes shared a single father. One of them inherited a name, a state, and a seat in the capital. The other inherited nothing and had to be granted his freedom. When William Slade had a son, he named him Andrew Foote Slade. He gave his child the family name of the family that had enslaved his mother. We do not know why. No letter explains it, no remark was passed down. Perhaps it was pride in a lineage he could not claim openly. Perhaps it was something closer to a hand placed on a table. This is our origin, and I will not pretend otherwise.
What we do know for certain is what became of the boy. In December 1869, nine months after burying his father, twelve-year-old Andrew Foote Slade entered the United States Capitol and began work. He was the first African American page in the history of the United States Senate. We will come back to him, because the Senate did not remember him. What happened to that boy is the second half of this story. The first half is about a piece of land.
To understand it, you have to meet the woman William Slade married. Her name was Josephine Park, and she was born free in 1818. She was educated and worked as a schoolteacher. She and her husband owned and ran a boarding house on Massachusetts Avenue, and her family name, like her husband's children's, was not really hers. Josephine's mother was enslaved on a Virginia plantation owned by a man named George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George Washington's own wife. The plantation was called Arlington.
Today it is Arlington National Cemetery, and the United States buries its honored dead there on ground where Josephine Slade's mother was held as property. That is not a metaphor someone invented later. It is simply what happened to the land.
That brings us to what William Slade did with his own money eleven years before the war, and thirty years before anyone thought of turning Arlington into a cemetery. In 1850s Washington, there was no real legal protection for free Black families. But there was one institution the community had built for itself, and it was older than most of the churches. The Columbian Harmony Society was founded in 1825, and it may have been the first relief organization in the city of Washington founded and run by African Americans. Its purpose was burial, not charity, not politics, not education. Burial.
The society existed to guarantee that any Black citizen of Washington would be laid to rest properly, whether free or not, rich or poor. The plot of ground would belong to the community, not to the goodwill of a white landowner. The mechanism was subscriptions. Members paid small amounts month after month for years, in anticipation of a day none of them could schedule in advance. It was a kind of insurance decades before most Americans had any insurance at all. And what it insured against was not death. Every family expects death. It insured against the potter's field, the unmarked trench at the edge of town where the city threw the bodies of people it had decided were no one.
William Slade was its treasurer. He managed the money. In 1857, the society needed new ground, and Slade was the one who closed the deal. He signed the deed. Then in 1858 came the part that is hard to read. The graves already in the old burial site had to be moved to the newly purchased ground. There was no budget for it, so the members did it themselves. One newspaper of the period recorded that they participated at their own expense in moving the remains of their dead to the site they had recently purchased at their own expense as well. Men in work clothes paying out of their own pockets and carrying their mothers and children across the city to safer ground.
Some of those graves were more than thirty years old. Someone had to know the identity of every grave, go find it, and lift it. You have to understand what a marked grave meant to people who had originally been property. A person could be sold as goods. A family could be scattered across counties in an afternoon. A name could be changed by whoever held the paper. But a stone with your name carved into it, standing on ground your people owned, was the one address no one could evict you from. That was the promise. That is what the money was spent for.
The cemetery they bought was on Rhode Island Avenue in the northeast section of Washington. William Slade was buried there in 1868, and his wife was buried there four years later. If you go looking for it now, you will not find it. There is a subway station on that ground.
Of course, he never saw that subway station. When he signed for that land in 1857, William Slade had eleven years left to live, seven of which he spent inside the executive mansion. He spent what remained of them preserving something he appeared to believe in: that white and Black Washington could work as one city.
In September 1864, that belief was tested in a church hall four blocks from his home. The draft was coming. Neighborhoods were pooling money so that a man whose name was drawn could pay for a substitute instead of leaving his family. Slade's ward, the Fourth, called its meetings by street address rather than by color, and appointed him one of three men to collect contributions. Then the Black residents of the ward held their own meeting, and Slade ran it. He told them plainly that they had not given enough.
A white speaker from Ohio stood up to remind those present what they owed the man before them. The speaker said he had fought slavery his whole life and had nearly suffered hell for the colored race. Three hundred dollars was raised in the basket that night. The following evening, the mood of those present changed. Someone proposed that the money be divided only among the Black people who had contributed to it. Slade objected. He argued that the money should go to the common fund at city hall. He believed everyone would benefit from it regardless of skin color. So they sent two men to city hall to inquire. The answer came back. Anyone who had contributed less than twenty-five dollars was not entitled to a fair share.
Almost no one in the ward's Black community could pay twenty-five dollars. Slade withdrew his objection. His people kept their own fund. That was in September.
At noon on April 14, 1865, he was standing in the president's office when the vice president walked in. Andrew Johnson spoke of Lincoln with respect. Then he said that if he were president, he would not make things easy for the rebels. Slade, a man with African blood in his veins as he described himself, nodded. Then he said the thing he could not take back. He told Andrew Johnson that he hoped he would become president someday.
That night, Slade was at his home. When the news came, he headed toward the theater but could not get near it. The crowds in the street were too thick to break through. He reached the Petersen house in the early hours of the morning and was told what everyone there had been told. The president would not survive the night. So he turned around and went back to the White House, because he knew what would be required there.
On the morning of the fifteenth, the task that fell to him was the work no one else in that house could do. He prepared everything before the body arrived. For the burial clothes, he chose the suit Lincoln had worn at his second inauguration six weeks earlier. He washed him. He dressed him. He stood beside him while his hair was cut. Then, according to the account his daughter gave years later, he took a pair of scissors and cut one lock for himself and his family.
Mary Lincoln, through Elizabeth Keckley, sent Josephine Slade a piece of the dress she had worn at Ford's Theatre. A lock of hair and a scrap of silk. The two entered the Slade house on Massachusetts Avenue and stayed there. Sixty years later, one of his daughters was still showing them to schoolchildren.
But the thing Slade did that day, before all of it, was go looking for Edward Duffield Neill. Neill was one of Lincoln's secretaries. He remembered Slade arriving in distress and asking a strange question. Had Neill noticed, the previous afternoon, that Slade was talking with the vice president? Neill answered that he had. What I said to Mr. Johnson is what makes me miserable. He had wished the presidency on a man, and eighteen hours later the wish had come true. Neill told him there was no grounds for his misery. Slade, Neill later wrote, seemed somewhat relieved.
Four months later, Andrew Johnson promoted him. In August 1865, Slade was appointed steward of the White House. It was the highest position in the entire domestic establishment. The household's finances, the staff's wages, and all purchasing came under his personal control. The Evening Star announced it warmly. The paper said he was impressively qualified and would run the mansion's internal economy with the same efficiency he had shown in everything else.
The man who promoted him was a man Frederick Douglass described as no friend of our race. Slade used the position anyway. In the summer of 1867, as Johnson's presidency collapsed toward impeachment, he wrote secretly to Douglass. Would Douglass accept the leadership of the Freedmen's Bureau if Slade could arrange it? He could think of no man, white or Black, better suited to the post. Douglass declined and suspected, correctly, that the White House might be behind the offer, but he wanted the correspondence to continue. Douglass replied that your position gives you a decided advantage with respect to information, and that I would be very glad at any time to know the drift of events.
The most famous Black man in America was writing to the White House steward asking for information.
That brings us back to that single letter, because it was never that Slade had nothing to say to Abraham Lincoln. His daughter Katherine explained it decades later in the only account we have. She said Lincoln had a habit of tearing off a small piece of paper while reading, writing something on it, and putting it in a desk drawer or a coat pocket. Her father kept finding those scraps around the house and saving them for the president. Then she said: he destroyed many old papers that had notes on them.
Two serious historians have refused to ignore that sentence. Matthew Pinsker cited it. Alan Guelzo went further and raised in print the possibility that the papers Slade burned may have included a missing draft of the Emancipation Proclamation. John Nicolay, Lincoln's private secretary, rejected a related story flatly. No one knows. No one ever will. What we know is that the man who held the keys to that house kept its secrets so well that he took most of them with him.
He had three years left, and almost everything that happened to William Slade happened after he was in the ground. He died on March 16, 1868. The coroner recorded the cause as disease of the heart and dropsy. He was fifty-three years old.
Two days later, the funeral was held in the front room of the boarding house on Massachusetts Avenue. What happened in that room deserves to be described precisely. It is the last time the records treat William Slade as a man of consequence. The coffin was yellow pine, perfectly plain, covered in black cloth, like a workingman's box. The walls were surrounded by flowers sent by distinguished guests. On the lid of the coffin was a bouquet of Japanese camellias sent by the president of the United States.
Andrew Johnson did not merely send flowers and stay away. He came himself and brought his two daughters with him. They understood what week it was. Twenty-one days earlier, the House of Representatives had voted to impeach him. In those same days, the United States Senate was sitting to try his presidency. And still he came across the city to a Black family's home to stand in a front room with a coffin.
The funeral was conducted by Byron Sunderland, president of Howard University and former chaplain of the United States Senate. Beside him stood the Reverend Leonard Grimes, who had come from Boston, whose church there was known across the country for what it had done for people fleeing slavery. Outside, the men of the Columbian Harmony Society were waiting. They had voted to wear black badges on their arms for thirty days. Their president had been authorized to buy the proper crepe and black silk gloves for the society's members. They placed three carriages at Josephine Slade's disposal, even though she owned a carriage of her own, and everyone knew it. The carriages were not merely transportation. They were a message in the street where neighbors could count them.
Then men, white and Black, carried the coffin out together. Newspapers as far away as Nashville, in what had been the Confederate States three years earlier, published the news, and the detail they focused on was the guest list. One paper noted the presence of prominent local figures, including the mayor and the president, and added, as if slightly astonished, that Slade had been very wealthy. A Vermont paper was more specific. It reported that he had been a successful real estate speculator and that at his death his fortune amounted to at least $100,000. Both papers agreed on something else. He died with his reputation unblemished.
One hundred thousand dollars in 1868. It was left by a man born free in Virginia to a mother who had been someone's property. They buried him in the cemetery he had purchased. Nine months later, in December 1869, his son went to work.
Andrew Foote Slade was twelve years old. His appointment as a page in the Senate came through John French, the sergeant at arms, who had been a friend of his father. The Baltimore Sun published the news in a single line. A bright mulatto boy, son of the late colored steward of the White House. Isaac Bassett, an assistant doorkeeper, wrote in memoirs he never published that the boy was the first colored page. He was not allowed on the Senate floor at first. Another correspondent explained why, and it may be the most honest sentence anyone wrote about the capital in 1869. He wrote: such is the prejudice against color. Even the color of milk and honey. It was decided best to introduce him gradually to the Senate chamber, lest the white pages leave en masse. So the twelve-year-old walked the corridors instead, carrying messages, while the institution got used to him.
His pay was three dollars a day. It was handed over to his mother. Three years later, Josephine Slade died and Andrew was an orphan at fifteen. He went to Ohio to study for a year, then returned and was appointed a page a second time. Senate records now list him as a clerk to the assistant doorkeeper at a salary of $345 a day. He was a page who wrote and carried messages across the District. Later he worked in the Senate post office. In 1875, he was among those who accompanied Vice President Henry Wilson in his office across the corridor from the chamber while Wilson lay dying. He stayed there until November 1881. He was twenty-four years old. Senator George Pendleton wrote him a letter of recommendation saying he had always performed his duties faithfully and promptly.
By 1886, he was in Philadelphia working at the city's Black newspaper. A visiting correspondent described him as a man of kind heart and quiet manner, well known in Washington. The 1899 Philadelphia city directory lists his occupation as driver. He died that year at the age of forty-two, leaving behind a wife named Laura.
Now stop all of that. The camellias, the armbands, the mayor, the $100,000, the boy in the corridor, and come back to the story. In 1960, the city of Washington cleared the cemetery on Rhode Island Avenue for commercial purposes. Thirty-seven thousand graves were disinterred and moved to a field in Landover, Maryland. The bodies were moved. The headstones were not.
Instead, the headstones were sold. Between 1960 and 1967, they were taken for use in erosion control, as stones to shore up riverbanks, broken stones thrown along the shore to keep water from washing the land away. An advertisement ran in a Washington newspaper offering them free to anyone who came to collect them. A farmer in King George County, Virginia, answered the ad. Over two years, he trucked loads of the stones out of the city and dumped them along two miles of his own riverbank.
Today, in that field in Maryland, hardly any of those thirty-seven thousand graves carries a marker. The man who signed for the land, the man who paid out of his own pocket to move his neighbors' dead to a place where they could rest under their names, his grave went to Maryland with the rest. What had stood above it did not go with him.
And there is one more thing left to tell you. In April 1965 in the capital, Senator Jacob Javits of New York introduced a young man named Lawrence Bradford as the first African American page in the history of the United States Senate. It was a real achievement, and Bradford deserved it. The New York Times published the story on April 14. It was ninety-six years late.
The Senate had simply forgotten. Its historians would say so plainly decades later. The Senate had lost the Slade story by the 1960s. The boy they should have named the place after had been underground for sixty-six years. His father's headstone was at the bottom of a river.
There is a field in Landover, Maryland, about ten miles from the Capitol dome. You can drive to it this evening. It is quiet, well maintained, and mostly green, and thirty-seven thousand people lie beneath it. If you walk to the middle of it and turn around slowly, you will notice how little there is to read. Ten miles in the other direction, at Arlington, the headstones stand in rows you can see from the air. Here there is only grass. This is where they were all sent in 1960. William Slade is somewhere under that ground. So is Josephine. And most likely, so are many of the people whose graves he paid to move at his own expense in 1858.
For fifty-six years, that was all there was. Then in 2016, a Virginia state senator, Richard Stuart, was walking the water's edge on his property in King George County. He looked down to see what was holding his land together. Letters, dates, and parts of names. He was standing on a shoreline built out of headstones, and they had been there since before he owned the place.
What followed was slow and unglamorous, and it is still going on. Volunteers went down into the mud along the riverbank and began lifting the stones one at a time, washing them, reading them, and carrying them north. By 2021, 158 of them had been recovered from the mud and returned to the field where the bodies had been buried without them sixty years earlier. One hundred fifty-eight out of thirty-seven thousand. This is not restoration. Against a loss that size, it is barely a gesture. But every one of those stones had a name carved into it, and someone had paid money for years to have it carved. No one has said whether any of them was his. His stone was probably broken up for paving, or is still underwater somewhere, or was never lifted at all. That is the honest answer, and it is likely to remain the answer.
Meanwhile, William Slade briefly reappeared in the largest venue America has. In 2012, a major motion picture about Abraham Lincoln put him on screens around the world. His character is portrayed warmly. He is an enjoyable character to watch. What he does throughout the film is chase the president around trying to convince him to wear his gloves. The historian Kate Masur wrote about it in the New York Times. Her objection was not that the character was unkind. It was that a stronger Black presence in the film, even at the margins, would have shown audiences something that actually existed. A world of Black political debate, civic engagement, and enormous effort that was happening outside the frame of the film. She was describing the church on Fifteenth Street. She was describing the notebook and the corridor and the collection basket. She was describing the man who signed for the land.
Then in February 2021, the Senate did something about its own record. Its historians published a correction. The first African American aide in the history of the United States Senate was not appointed in 1965. They wrote that he was appointed in December 1869. That his name was Andrew Foote Slade, and that his father had been Abraham Lincoln's doorkeeper. They presented pay records, census data, and newspaper notices. They had looked carefully, 152 years late.
Under the article, where his picture should be, there is a photograph of his father instead. And beneath it, one line. Unfortunately, no photograph of Andrew Slade has been found.
So there is no face for him. No grave with his name on it. There is a hundred-year gap in the Senate's memory, and it has now been filled. And a film in which he hands over a pair of gloves.
But there is something else, which is what he actually did. In 1857, a man born free by nothing more than a coincidence of timing put his name on a deed. It was for a piece of ground in the northeast section of Washington. He bought it so that people who had been treated as property could be buried under their real names. And the following year, in his work clothes, he paid to move them there himself. One hundred fifty-eight of those stones have come back up out of the water. They are still looking for the rest.