earlier opposed. Former slave and leading abolitionist Frederick Douglass unequivocally regarded Lincoln as sharing "the prejudices of his white fellow-countrymen against the Negro", but also observed of Lincoln that "in his company, I was never reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color." According to Douglass, Lincoln "was preeminently the white man's President" and also, "emphatically the black man’s President: the first to show any respect to their rights as men". Douglass attested to Lincoln's genuine respect for him and other blacks, and to the wisdom of Lincoln's course of action in obtaining both the preservation of the Union (his sworn duty as president) and the freeing of the slaves. In an 1876 speech at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln (later renamed the Emancipation Memorial), he defended Lincoln's actions: In his past, Lincoln lived in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood of Springfield, Illinois; one of his long-time neighbors, Jameson Jenkins (who may have been born a slave), had come from North Carolina and was publicly implicated in the 1850s as a Springfield conductor on the Underground Railroad, sheltering fugitive slaves. In 1861, President-elect Lincoln called on Jenkins to give him a ride to the train depot, where Lincoln delivered his farewell address before leaving Springfield for the last time. Accompanying Lincoln to Washington was a free African American, William Johnson, who acted during the trip as valet, messenger, and bodyguard. Johnson was afterward employed by the White House and then as messenger in the Treasury Department. The two men called on each other for favors. When Johnson contracted fever, probably from Lincoln, and died in 1864, Lincoln satisfied Johnson's family debts and paid for his burial and tombstone in Arlington. When Lincoln arrived at the White House, for the first time in his life he lived within a large community of free African Americans employed there. Many had previously been enslaved or were descendants of slaves, and their success as free people may have influenced Lincoln's own thinking. Lincoln is said to have showed these employees "a peculiar care and solicitude," and it was, perhaps surprisingly, noted that Lincoln treated them "like people". "He 'sympathized with us colored folks,' one former servant said, 'and we loved him.'" White House Usher, William Slade, who became an "intimate friend," was often the first person Lincoln asked to review parts of his writings and speeches,