Brightwood honors a local Civil War legend buried in lore

Two simple wreaths at Fort Stevens are all that comprise the grandest memorial that stands today for Elizabeth Proctor Thomas, a Brightwood resident who became a local Civil War legend and a symbol of sacrifice for black Washingtonians.

On Oct. 6, the Military Road School Preservation Trust and National Park Service held the intimate wreath-laying ceremony at Fort Stevens to commemorate Lincoln-Thomas Day. The annual event celebrates President Abraham Lincoln and Thomas, a free African-American woman known as Aunt Betty whose house was demolished to make room for the expansion of the fort in 1861.

“I’m sure Mrs. Thomas never thought the community would still be honoring her,” said Patricia Tyson, who organized the event with the Preservation Trust. “This was a lady who made her life count not only for her neighborhood, but for her nation. I’m very thankful to be a part of telling her story.”

According to lore handed down by generations of Brightwood residents, the federal government had promised to repay Thomas for her losses. According to Thomas’ own account, that pledge came from President Lincoln himself. As Union soldiers tore apart her house and farm, Lincoln is reported to have told a distraught Thomas, “It is hard, but you shall reap a great reward.”

That anecdote is not just part of an oral history; it’s now been incorporated into the markers along Brightwood’s African American Heritage Trail. But while it’s true that Thomas owned the property at the site and lost her home during the war, other details about her life straddle the line between history and folklore.

Through its research of Thomas, the National Park Service has found some of those tales are apocryphal, said Steve T. Phan, a park ranger and historian at the Civil War Defenses of Washington. When some veterans and other participants in the Civil War began to write their histories 30 years after the war, they tended to place themselves closer to central characters such as Lincoln, he said.

“It’s the 1890s, so you have to understand the context here,” Phan said. “This is when the first battlefields start being preserved. The veterans are starting to pass away so it’s about memory and legacy. So [Thomas is] not the only one who wants to be connected to Abraham Lincoln.”

There is conflicting evidence over whether Thomas was ever compensated for the damages to her property during the war. The dominating narrative is that she never received payment for her losses, a story that also serves as a microcosm for the larger African-American struggle for reparations.

Thomas died a local legend in 1917, but a few years later her connection to Lincoln was cemented for generations to come. In 1924, the National Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs of America designated Lincoln-Thomas a national day of remembrance. The holiday came at a time of rising racial tensions across the United States and a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, which would march on Washington the following year.

It wasn’t until 1952, in the early days of the civil rights movement, that a local newspaper spread the Aunt Betty story, as it’s known today. On Aug. 26, 1952, The Washington Afro-American published an article that placed Thomas in one of the most well-known tales about Fort Stevens.

During Confederate Gen. Jubal Early’s siege on the city on July 12, 1864, Lincoln surveyed the battle from Fort Stevens’ parapet. Confederate sharpshooters took advantage of their target, who was standing high above the trenches, and shot at the president. Oliver Wendell Holmes, then a young lieutenant colonel in the Union Army, was reported to have shouted, “Get down, you fool!” before ripping Lincoln from the line of fire.

The Afro-American article, “The Only Woman in Washington Who Called President Lincoln a Fool,” claims Thomas also played a role in whisking the president away from danger. According to the writer of the piece, Thomas was grabbing ammunition in her basement during the battle when she spotted Lincoln from her window.

“Dropping everything, she yelled to the soldiers standing near him, ‘My God, make that fool get down off that hill and come in here,’” the author wrote.

Following an archaeological assessment of the grounds at the nearby Emory United Methodist Church in 2009, Matthew Palus started digging into Thomas’ history.

“What I see a lot in sort of histories of the Brightwood neighborhood is that they’re so starved for historical details and facts that anything they find goes into their record,” said Palus, a senior archaeologist with the Ottery Group, a company providing archaeology and preservation services.

Palus is doubtful that Lincoln and Thomas shared a robust friendship, as the Afro-American article depicts. But it’s more important to focus on the context around these tales, rather than their veracity, he said.

“The stories have importance beyond that,” he added. “For Elizabeth Thomas’ story to be spelled out — and it was an African-American newspaper published in Washington, DC, early in the civil rights movement — they assert this linkage between Elizabeth Thomas and Abraham Lincoln and the defense of Washington. That’s not an accident.”

With a push from the Military Road School Preservation Trust and the National Park Service, the community revived Lincoln-Thomas Day seven years ago. While the 2017 celebration included speeches recounting Thomas’ life and performances from the Montgomery Blair High School Chamber Choir, Hurricane Florence scuttled plans for a larger fete that had been planned for this year.

For the dozen people attending last weekend’s abbreviated Lincoln-Thomas Day ceremony, the oral history passed down about Thomas often matters more than the written word. Carolivia Herron, a classics professor at Howard University, moved to Brightwood in 1961 and became fascinated with Fort Stevens shortly after settling there.

“One of the first things we did was visit Fort Stevens and find out Lincoln was shot [at] here, and that was my beginning of being curious about it,” she said. “Part of my heart is here, part of my soul. There are also stories that are part of our oral tradition.”