Lincoln in Richmond, 142 years ago

[william42]

Caution Aside: Lincoln Made Postwar Pilgrimage to Still-Smoldering City

BOB DEANS
TIMES-DISPATCH GUEST COLUMNIST
Sunday, April 1, 2007

http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet...esdispatch.com



Washington. On April 4, 1865, President Lincoln journeyed up the James River to the still-smoldering city of Richmond, one day after Union troops occupied the Confederate capital. No security detail on earth could have assured his safety. His own war secretary begged him not to go.

Caution, though, had long since been brushed aside by a president determined to confront in the flesh the defeated seat of the struggle that had shattered the nation, defined his presi- dency, and would, with- in days, end his life.

Lincoln's dramatic visit to Richmond was no rally-around-the-commander whistle stop, no fleeting mission-accomplished moment in the sun. It was, for him, a pilgrimage.

After four years of civil war that had taken the lives of more than 600,000 Americans on both sides of the conflict, Lincoln was driven by a deep and almost spiritual yearning to stand before the altars of sacrifice and to witness for himself the new birth of American freedom he implored the country to embrace. Rarely, if ever, has the power of presidential symbolism been called upon more poignantly or to greater or more lasting effect.

He arrived not in the majesty of a conquering giant but aboard a small wooden boat rowed by a dozen sailors and marines, a craft better suited to a day of shad fishing than for the landing of a commander triumphant. On a finger of sand just downstream from the crackling carcass of Mayo's Bridge, out climbed the president of the United States, less like Caesar, it seemed to some, than like Christ.

"Bless the Lord, there comes the Messiah," exclaimed a black man who was repairing a bridge over the canal nearby. "There is Mister Abraham Lincoln, sure enough!"
Within minutes, Lincoln and his tiny entourage were descended upon by dozens of African-Americans who had been born into slavery and had, only that morning, awakened as free men and women for the first time in their lives.

"Thank you Jesus," a woman cried out. "Glory hallelujah!"
One man followed by several more bowed down.
"Don't kneel to me, that is not right," Lincoln told them. "You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy."

IF SOME Richmonders welcomed Lincoln as liberator, others thought him the devil incarnate, an unyielding tyrant blinded by hubris and intoxicated with the power of an imperial presidency, the man who drafted Americans and ordered them to invade, subdue, and impose his will upon sovereign people in independent states, most notably Virginia, the mother of the nation.

And yet, as Lincoln walked the city's charred and war-torn streets, shielded from vast throngs by his thin cordon of sailors wielding bayonets, no one tried to attack.

Little is recorded of what Lincoln said that day, as he wandered the halls of the former White House of the Confederacy, sat in the parlor occupied until just days before by his wartime nemesis, Jefferson Davis, or climbed the marble steps of the Virginia Capitol, where the stars and stripes flew for the first time in four years.

There's no doubt, though, what was on his mind.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations."
Those were Lincoln's words in his Second Inaugural Address before Congress just one month to the day before he stood on the Capitol steps at Richmond and looked out upon a people who were at once the oldest Americans and, suddenly, among its newest.

Ten days later, Lincoln was dead, shot through the head on Good Friday, his assassination on the day Christians mourn the crucifixion of Christ forming an almost biblical coda to the life of a man millions regarded as a secular, yet nearly sanctified, disciple of American democracy.
MARTYRDOM, though, was not on Lincoln's mind that April day in Richmond. Doggedly he had pressed a war that preserved the Union, freed the slaves, and reaffirmed American purpose at a horrifying cost to the nation, North and South. After so much grief and pain and loss, he felt the nation's best days surely lay ahead.

With malice toward none, Lincoln breathed in the warm air and dared at last to imagine the unbound possibilities of a new birth of freedom. "Not altogether for today," he had promised the Congress and the country in his State of the Union address four tortuous years and an eternity ago, but rather, "for a vast future also."


Bob Deans, a national correspondent for Cox Newspapers, is the author of 'The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James.'


Terry

[samgrant]

Typical Lincoln, not entering Richmond with the pomp and circumstance of a conqueror, but just as a 'tourist' hand in hand with his young son to survey the fallen capital.

[SpiritofPickett]

............Sam, if Abe had lived, how different would things have been?

[ole]

Spirit:
We can only let our personal attitudes carry out that thought. It would have been different.
Ole