In 1965, a senator introduced the first African American aide in the history of the U. S. Senate. That was a mistake.
The first actual aide had been appointed a century earlier, and by 1965, the Senate had lost track of him. The story begins in the winter of 1861 in Cleveland, Ohio. A family in a good house prepared to leave for war. They did not have to go.
The census taker who came the previous year recorded what they owned. Four thousand dollars in real estate and another two thousand in personal property. The wife, Josephine, worked as a schoolteacher. Two of the daughters were old enough to consider higher education.
In Cleveland, they were free, comfortable, and safe. But Washington in that January was not. Horatio Nelson Taft, a clerk in the Patent Office, wrote in his diary on the ninth that fires and robberies occurred every night. He had begun sleeping with a loaded pistol within reach.
The 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 demanded to produce papers proving he belonged to no one. 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. And the men who carried their bags heard everything. He was a porter at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue.
It was the kind of establishment where a senator and a cabinet officer could settle a matter before it reached the floor. The porter in that room was like a piece of furniture. He was also, if he paid attention, the best-informed man in it. One of the men Slade got to know there was Salmon P.
Chase of Ohio. By 1861, Chase had become Secretary of the Treasury. Slade wrote a recommendation, and Slade became a messenger in the Treasury Department. He did not stay there 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 11 servants living in the house. Two were English, one was Welsh, one was Belgian, six were Irish, and one was American-born. President Buchanan preferred a European staff, and in a city where nearly one in five residents was Black, he kept a home where no Black person lived or worked.
Within a year of Lincoln taking the oath, William Slade held the keys to every room in it. The job title was “usher. ” In the domestic hierarchy of a large 19th-century household, only the steward ranked above this position, and for almost the entire Lincoln presidency, no one held that title at all. So Slade did both jobs.
He ordered and paid for everything the family ate. He decided what time meals were served. He directed the maids and the footmen. He was the first person the doorkeeper saw in the morning and the last one to check the lamps at night.
He kept the account books. He paid the staff their wages. When the president’s oldest son, Robert, came home from Harvard, it was Slade who signed the receipt for his luggage. When the Lincolns needed a new carriage, Slade was the one who priced the horses.
He was, by any measure, the man who ran the household. And he was also the man who kept its secrets. Mary Todd Lincoln trusted him. She trusted him so completely that she handed over the most sensitive document she possessed: her own private letters, tied with ribbon and hidden away from the President’s political enemies.
When the Lincolns left the White House for the last time, they left behind a trunk filled with her correspondence. Slade took it, stored it safely, and returned it to her only after her husband’s assassination. The President also trusted him. Lincoln, who often walked the halls at night unable to sleep, would stop and talk with Slade for hours.
The doorkeeper listened as the President worried aloud about the war, about the soldiers, about the letters from widows and mothers that arrived every day. Slade was present at the most consequential moments of the presidency. He stood near the door when Frederick Douglass came to visit, when the great abolitionist came to thank the President for the Emancipation Proclamation. He was there when Douglass was turned away at the gate by a guard who did not recognize him, and he was the one who went to Lincoln and said, “That is Frederick Douglass, sir.
” Lincoln went out himself to bring the visitor in. During the dark days of the war, when Lincoln’s own cabinet plotted against him, Slade knew. He heard the whispers in the corridors. He saw the notes passed between men who smiled to the President’s face.
He kept a record of everything he heard, but he never told a soul. He was with Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865. He had been at the theater with the President and his wife, but he had left early to walk home. The next morning, he heard the news that Lincoln had been shot.
He ran to the house where the President lay dying and stayed until the end. After Lincoln’s death, Slade stayed on at the White House. Andrew Johnson promoted him. He attended Johnson’s funeral during the impeachment trial.
When Slade died, he left an estate valued at $100,000—a considerable fortune for a Black man in the 19th century. For four years beside the President, only one letter of his survives. In it, he asks a friend to send him some fresh peaches. The story of William Slade is the story of the men and women who were invisible in the official record.
They were the ones who carried the bags, poured the drinks, and listened at the doors. They were the ones who knew the secrets that shaped the nation. And they were the ones history almost forgot. The senator who made the mistake in 1965 was not the first to hold that distinction.
He was simply the first to admit it.