In June of 1864, in the midst of the Civil War, a small group of Black men knocked on the door of the White House and asked for permission to present a petition to President Abraham Lincoln. They were ushered in. The petition undoubtedly must have surprised the president. The men were Catholic, and they were asking to have the consent of the President to hold a lawn party on the White House grounds on July 4 for the purpose of raising funds to build the first Catholic church for the Black community of Washington.

It was a request much easier to grant than many coming in from the battlefields. The meeting with these men enabled Lincoln to forget the war for a brief moment. He immediately granted the request. "Certainly you have my permission. Go over to General French's office and tell him so."

General D.B. French was the Commissioner of Public Buildings. Nearly all of his time was spent in helping to plan the military defense of Washington against possible invasion by the Confederate army.

Gabriel Coakley, the chairman of the group that met with Lincoln, was aware that General French was extremely busy with war work. Mr. Coakley therefore decided to write a short letter to Gen. French, telling of the President's permission and asking for a written permit to use the White House grounds. He then went to Gen. French's headquarters, and handed the letter to an office messenger, who promised to deliver it. That was on June 27, 1864, and on the morning of June 30, the messenger gave Mr. Coakley the written permit.

However, the permit required the President's signature. Mr. Coakley returned to the White House, and camped on a chair outside the executive offices. The cabinet was in session, and there was a wait of several hours before the President appeared in the hallway, rushing from the cabinet meeting to a military conference.

Lincoln noticed Mr. Coakley and asked if the permit had been issued. Mr. Coakley responded that it had, "but it must have your signature." Upon hearing this, Mr. Lincoln took the permit, returned to the cabinet room to sign it, and a few moments later, handed it back to Mr. Coakley with a simple handwritten authorization: "I assent. A. Lincoln, June 30, 1864", and expressed the hope that the event would be a success.

The lawn party took place, as planned, on the Fourth of July 1864, on the White House grounds, with the President and Mrs. Lincoln honoring the occasion by attending the event, and bringing along most of the members of the cabinet, to help contribute to the construction of Saint Augustine Catholic Church in Washington. The substantial proceeds of the lawn party, together with donations that had already been raised by the black Catholic community of the city, enabled the new church to be built within a fairly short time.

In 1874, less than ten years after its construction, this church had more than 2,000 members, including a large number of whites. This striking example of racial harmony in an often divided community was a very fitting tribute to the role of President Lincoln in the founding of Saint Augustine Catholic Church.

Yet, many anti-Catholics have tried to claim Mr. Lincoln as one of their own. Nothing could be further from the truth.

In his speeches and letters, and in his inaugural addresses, Lincoln's outlook is plainly expressed. Taken as a whole, they clearly show his rugged honesty, his love of justice and fair play, and his hatred of bigotry and hypocrisy.

It should be noted that, during much of Lincoln's adult life, there was a very large anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant political party in the United States -- the Native American Party, commonly nicknamed the "Know Nothing" party. Lincoln strongly opposed this movement, and repeatedly denounced it, regardless of any risk of election loss there might be to him.

At a political meeting in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1844, Lincoln introduced and supported a resolution defending the rights of Catholics:

"The guarantee of the rights of conscience, as found in our Constitution, is most sacred and inviolable, and one that belongs no less to the Catholic, than to the Protestant; and that all attempts to abridge or interfere with these rights, either of Catholic or Protestant, directly or indirectly, have our decided disapprobation, and shall ever have our most effective opposition."

A decade later, in a letter to his friend, Joshua Speed, written August 24, 1855, Lincoln stated the same opinion, even more strongly:

"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy."

Lincoln believed that "civil and religious liberty" was an "inestimable boon" to the people of the United States. However, there is a very old myth that Lincoln was hostile to the Catholic Church, and wanted it outlawed in America. The original source of this vile fabrication was the anti-Catholic book Fifty Years in the Church of Rome, published in 1885 by Charles Chiniquy. In this book, Chiniquy claimed that Lincoln believed that the Civil War had started as a result of a sinister conspiracy by the Catholic Church to put all of North America under the rule of the pope. Chiniquy also claimed that Lincoln advocated the enactment of a constitutional amendment excluding Catholics from citizenship, and called for the Catholic Church to be "forever swept away from our country."

There is absolutely no factual basis for these claims. If any of these assertions were true, then why on earth did Lincoln send a personal representative to Rome to urge Pope Pius IX to appoint an American Cardinal? [John McKnight, The Papacy: A New Appraisal, Rinehart & Co., 1952, p. 334.]

In reality, there is not a shred of evidence that Lincoln ever had an antagonistic attitude towards the Catholic church. Hence, when the black Catholics of Washington D.C. asked him for his help, he had no qualms about helping them. If it were true that Lincoln was an enemy of the Catholic Church, he certainly would not have provided the friendly and generous assistance which he gave.

It is noteworthy that in the many thousands of books and articles there are have been written about the life and times of Abraham Lincoln, there are very few which make any mention of his key role in helping to establish the first Catholic Church within the Black community of Washington. A detailed history (including photographic reproductions of the Lincoln correspondence), can be found in the magazine America, volume 38 (Feb. 11, 1928), pp. 432-33. A shorter account is contained in the book God's Men of Color, by Albert S. Foley, New York, Farrar, Straus & Co. (1955), pp. 115-16.