Lincolns Attend Parish Fundraiser on White House Lawn

In 1864, at the height of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary spent the Fourth of July at a parish fundraiser held on the White House lawn. A few weeks earlier Gabriel Coakley, an African-American Catholic, walked into the White House to see President about the picnic. Morris McGregor, the parish historian, writes: “What remains mysterious to modern Washingtonians is the relative ease with which an ordinary resident could approach an over-burdened and anxious Chief Executive in the darkest days of the Civil War.” Not only did the President approve, but he and his wife attended. (Coakley was not entirely unknown to the Lincolns; his wife was Mary Lincoln’s seamstress.) The event raised over $1,200, a sizeable sum in those days, and it was used to construct a two-story building named Blessed Martin DePorres Chapel. Within a few years it had two thousand parishioners, and in 1874 the chapel became a parish, St. Augustine Church (seen here), still a major center of African-American life in the nation’s capitol.