A House Built by Slaves by Jonathan W. White

Author:Jonathan W. White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2021-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

10

“A TESTIMONIAL OF HER APPRECIATION”

Americans have sent gifts to presidents since George Washington first took office in 1789. Some of the most bizarre presents have become famous. In the summer of 1801, a group of Massachusetts Baptists sent Thomas Jefferson a 1,238-pound “Mammoth Cheese.” The giant dairy product traveled from New England to Washington by boat, sled, and a wagon pulled by six horses. Accompanying the gift was an “Ode to the Mammoth Cheese,” which included the lines, “No traitor to his country’s cause” would ever “have a bite of thee between his jaws.” For a year, Jefferson enjoyed cutting the cheese for guests at the White House. What was left of the stinky mass in 1803 was dumped into the Potomac River. Three decades later, a dairy farmer from New York sent Andrew Jackson an even larger cheese wheel, weighing in at 1,400 pounds.1

During his time in office, Abraham Lincoln also received some unusual gifts. In 1862, he politely declined a shipment of elephants from the King of Siam because, as Lincoln explained, “so generous an offer” could not “be made practically useful in the present condition of the United States.” White Northerners sent him butter, fresh fruits, salmon, and other foods. One upstate New Yorker even sent a live “American Eagle” that had lost a foot in a trap. “But,” the man assured him, “he is yet an Eagle and perhaps no more cripled [sic] than the Nation whose banner he represented; his wings are sound and will extend seven feet.”2 When the sculptor John Rogers sent Lincoln a statuette of his work, “Wounded Scout,” which depicts a formerly enslaved man helping a wounded Union soldier, Lincoln replied that it “is very pretty and suggestive, and, I should think, excellent as a piece of art. Thank you for it.”3

Throughout the war, African Americans wanted to express their gratitude to him as well. Countless free and enslaved black people included Lincoln in their nightly prayers. In Maryland, for example, a white woman observed that her slave named Jim “offers up a special prayer for Abraham Lincoln,” while a black woman in New York told Lincoln that “the people of Color are praying day & night for your hands to be supported untill this great struggle proves victorious on the side of the Union.” Hearing prayers said for “the Great Emancipator” could make an indelible mark on a young child’s mind. Many years after the war, Booker T. Washington said his “first recollection of Abraham Lincoln” was waking up one morning on the dirt floor of his cabin to the sound of his mother “kneeling over my body earnestly praying that Abraham Lincoln might succeed and that one day she and her boy might be free.”4

Some freedpeople sent Lincoln letters to communicate their appreciation. In April 1863, one South Carolinian who had escaped bondage and joined the Union Army wrote Lincoln that he “had the onner of righting to you these fue lines hoping that tha may find you in A most Perfic state of helte as it left me the saim.

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