The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (176 page)

Their laughter was interrupted by a dispatch Lincoln passed along to Stanton at 8 o’clock: “Grant reports Petersburg evacuated, and he is confident Richmond also is. He is pushing forward to cut off, if possible, the retreating army. I start to join him in a few minutes.” Accompanied by Tad and a civilian White House guard, he also took Porter with him on the train ride to the outskirts of Petersburg, where Robert was waiting with an escort and horses for them to ride the rest of the way. Tightly shuttered, the town seemed deserted except for a few Negroes on the roam amid the wreckage; Robert explained that Meade had been told to leave only a single division in occupation while he pressed on after Lee with all the rest. Proceeding up Market Street, the riders came to a house where Grant was waiting on the porch. A staffer watched as the President “dismounted and came in through the gate with long and rapid strides, his face beaming.” Grant rose and met him on the steps. When they had shaken hands and exchanged congratulations, Lincoln said with a smile: “Do you know, General, I have had a sort of a sneaking idea for some days that you intended to do something like this.” Grant replied that, rather than wait for Sherman and his Westerners to come up from Goldsboro, he had thought it better to let the Armies of the Potomac and the James wind up, unassisted, their long-term struggle against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. That way, he believed a good deal of sectional jealousy and discord, East and West, would be avoided. Lincoln nodded. He could see that now, he said, but his anxiety had been so great that he had not cared what help was given, or by whom, so long as the job got done.

They talked for more than an hour, not only of the pursuit in progress but also of the peace to come, and it seemed to the staffer, listening while the President spoke, that “thoughts of mercy and magnanimity
were uppermost in his mind.” Before long the yard was crowded with former slaves, drawn by reports that Lincoln was there in the flesh: proof, if proof was needed, of their sudden deliverance from bondage. Round-eyed, they looked at him, and he at them, intently, neither saying a word to the other. Grant was eager to be off, yet he lingered in hope of hearing that Richmond had been taken before he set out to join the long blue columns toiling westward on this side of the Appomattox, intent on intercepting Lee when he turned south, as Grant felt sure he would try to do, for a link-up with Johnston in North Carolina. Finally he could wait no longer. He and Lincoln shook hands and parted; Lincoln stood on the porch and watched him ride off down the street.

Near Sutherland Station, eight miles out the Southside Railroad, a courier overtook the general and handed him a message. He read it with no change of expression, then said quietly: “Weitzel entered Richmond this morning at half past eight.” Word spread rapidly down the line of marchers, accompanied by cheers. “Stack muskets and go home!” some cried, although there was no slackening of the pace. At Sutherland, Grant stopped long enough to wire Sherman the news, adding that he was hard on the go for Burkeville, the railroad crossing where he would block the route to Danville. If Lee got there first, he told Sherman, “you will have to take care of him with the force you have for a while,” but if Lee lost the race and was thus obliged to keep moving west toward Lynchburg, “there will be no special use in you going any farther into the interior.” In other words, the Army of the Potomac would need no assistance in disposing of its four-year adversary, and two closing sentences reflected the pride Grant felt in what had been achieved these past two days. “This army has now won a most decisive victory and followed the enemy. This is all it ever wanted to make it as good an army as ever fought a battle.”

Back at City Point by sundown, Lincoln found a telegram Stanton had sent that morning in response to the one informing him that the President intended to visit Grant in Petersburg. “Allow me respectfully to ask you to consider whether you ought to expose the nation to the consequences of any disaster to yourself in the pursuit of a treacherous and dangerous enemy like the rebel army. If it was a question concerning yourself only I should not presume to say a word. Commanding Generals are in the line of their duty running such risks. But is the political head of a nation in the same condition?” Amused by the Secretary’s alarm, and no doubt even more amused by the thought of his reaction to what he now had in mind to do, Lincoln replied: “Yours received. Thanks for your caution, but I have already been to Petersburg, staid with Gen. Grant an hour & a half, and returned here. It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands, and I think I will go there tomorrow. I will take care of myself.”

He did “go there tomorrow,” Tuesday, April 4, but the added promise to “take care” went unkept — indeed, could scarcely
be
kept: partly because of the inherently dangerous nature of the expedition, which was risky in the extreme, and partly because of unforeseen developments, which included the subtraction of all but a handful of the men assigned to guard him on the trip upriver and into the fallen capital itself. Still he went, and apparently would not have it otherwise. Once he learned at breakfast that the fire and the mob had been brought under control by the force in occupation since about that time the day before, he was determined to be off. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” he told Porter. “It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to see Richmond.”

So they set out, Lincoln and Tad and the White House guard on board the flagship with Porter, escorted by the
Bat
, which brought along a complement of marines detailed to accompany the President ashore. Approaching Dutch Gap by noon, they cleared the farthest upstream Union installation within another hour and entered a more dangerous stretch of river. Swept by now of floating and underwater mines, which lay along the banks like stranded fish, the channel was littered with charred timbers, the bloated, stiff-legged carcasses of horses, and other wreckage that made for cautious navigation. Past Chaffin’s Bluff, under the spiked guns of Fort Darling, the admiral found the unremoved Confederate obstructions afforded too narrow passage for either the
Malvern
or the
Bat
, both sidewheelers. Accordingly, unwilling to wait on the tedious clearance operations, he unloaded a twelve-oared barge, commandeered a naval tug to tow him and his guests the rest of the way to Richmond, and put thirty of the marines aboard her to serve as guards when they arrived. Near the city, however, the tug ran hard aground, and Porter decided to proceed under oars, leaving the stuck vessel and the marines behind. Amused by this diminution of the flotilla, Lincoln told a story about “a fellow [who] once came to ask for an appointment as a minister abroad. Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked for an old pair of trousers. It is well to be humble.”

Porter was more amused by the joke than he was by a situation whose difficulty grew obvious when he put in at Rocketts, on the outskirts of the city, to find not a single Federal soldier anywhere in sight. Apparently the occupation did not extend this far from the hilltop Capitol, visible through rifts in the smoke from the burned-out district between the river and Capitol Square, an air-line mile and a half to the northwest. Perturbed — as well he might be, with who knew how many diehard rebels and wild-eyed fanatics on the prowl in the toppled citadel of secession, wanting nothing on earth so much as they did a shot or a swing at the hated Yankee leader in his charge — the admiral
landed ten of the twelve oarsmen, leaving two to secure the barge, and armed them with carbines to serve as presidential escorts, six in front and four behind, during the uphill walk toward the heart of town, where he hoped to find more adequate protection. They comprised a strange group in that setting, ten sailors in short jackets and baggy trousers, clutching their stubby, unfamiliar weapons; tall Abraham Lincoln in his familiar long black tailcoat, made even taller by contrast with the stocky Porter, whose flat-topped seaman’s cap was more than a foot lower than the crown of the high silk hat beside him; the civilian guard holding Tad by the hand, and Tad himself, twelve years old today and looking somewhat possessively around him, as if his father had just given him Richmond for a birthday present. Before they could start they were set upon by a dozen jubilant Negroes, including one old white-haired man who rushed toward Lincoln shouting, “Bless the Lord, the great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He’s been in my heart four long years, and he come at last to free his children from their bondage. Glory, hallelujah!” With that, he threw himself at the President’s feet, as did the rest, much to Lincoln’s embarrassment. “Don’t kneel to me,” he said. “That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will enjoy hereafter.” They responded with a hymn, “All Ye People, Clap Your Hands,” and Lincoln and the others waited through the singing before they set out on their climb toward Capitol Square.

Behind them, as they trudged, the dozen celebrants were joined by many dozens more, and up ahead, as news of the Emancipator’s coming spread, still larger clusters of people began to gather, practically all of them Negroes. The White House guard, whose name was William Crook, grew more apprehensive by the minute. “Wherever it was possible for a human being to gain a foothold there was some man or woman or boy straining his eyes after the President,” he would recall. “Every window was crowned with heads. Men were hanging from tree-boxes and telegraph poles. But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers, without a sound either of welcome or of hatred. I think we would have welcomed a yell of defiance. I stole a sideways look at Mr Lincoln. His face was set. It had the calm in it that comes over the face of a brave man when he is ready for whatever may come.” Within half an hour they passed Libby Prison, empty now, still with its old ship chandler’s sign attached. “We’ll pull it down!” someone offered, but Lincoln shook his head. “No; leave it as a monument,” he said. Skirting the burned district just ahead, the group began climbing Capitol Hill, and it occurred to Crook that he and his companions “were more like prisoners than anything else.” Presently they saw their first evidence of welcome from anyone not black. A young white woman stood on the gallery spanning the street in front of the Exchange Hotel, an American flag draped over her
shoulders. But she was the exception. A few blocks farther on, “one lady in a large and elegant building looked a while, then turned away her head as if from a disgusting sight.” For the most part, such houses were shuttered, curtains drawn across the windows; but there were watchers in them as well, peering out unseen. “I had a good look at Mr Lincoln,” one young matron wrote a friend next day. “He seemed tired and old — and I must say, with due respect to the President of the United States, I thought him the ugliest man I had ever seen.”

By now they had encountered their first Union soldier, a cavalryman idly sitting his horse and gawking like all the others in the crowd. “Is that Old Abe?” he asked Porter, who sent him to summon a mounted escort. Soon it came, and for the first time since the landing at Rocketts the group had adequate protection.

Lincoln continued to plod along with the shambling, flat-footed stride of a plowman, past the Governor’s Mansion, then three more blocks out 12th Street to Weitzel’s headquarters, the former Confederate White House. Sweaty and tired from his two-mile walk, he entered the study Davis had vacated two nights ago. Perhaps it was for this he had been willing to risk the danger — the likelihood, some would have said — of assassination in the just-fallen rebel capital: this moment of feeling, for the first time since his first inauguration, four years and one month ago today, that he now was President of the whole United States. One witness described him as “pale and haggard, utterly worn out,” while another saw “a serious, dreamy expression” on his face. In any case, exhausted or bemused, he crossed the cream-colored rug and sank wearily into the chair behind his fugitive rival’s desk. “I wonder if I could get a glass of water?” he inquired.

After a light midafternoon lunch, John A. Campbell, the only prominent member of the Confederate government remaining in Richmond, turned up to propose returning Virginia to the Union by means of an appeal to her elected officials, who knew as well as he did, he declared, that the war was lost and over. Lincoln had not been impressed by the Alabama jurist at Hampton Roads two months ago, but now that he came less as an envoy than as a supplicant, having reported his “submission to the military authorities,” his acceptability was considerably improved. “I speak for Virginia what would be more appropriate for a Virginian,” he said, and quoted: “When lenity and cruelty play for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest winner.” Lincoln liked the sound of that, along with the notion of Old Dominion soldiers — including, presumably, R. E. Lee — being removed, by authority of their own state government, from those rebel forces still arrayed against him. He told the former Assistant Secretary of War that he would be staying overnight in Richmond and would confer with him next morning on the matter. Just now, though, he was joining Weitzel for a carriage tour of the fallen capital.

He sat up front with one of the three division commanders Ord had left behind; Tad and Porter sat in back with Brigadier General George F. Shepley, Weitzel’s chief of staff and the newly appointed military governor of Richmond, a post for which he had been schooled by service as Ben Butler’s right-hand man in Louisiana. Weitzel himself — another Butler trainee, from New Orleans to Fort Fisher — rode alongside the carriage with a cavalcade of some two dozen officers, line and staff, who comprised a guard of honor for the sightseeing expedition. Their first stop was Capitol Square, where they pulled up east of Thomas Crawford’s equestrian statue of the first President, posed gazing west, with one bronze arm extended majestically southward. “Washington is looking at me and pointing at Jeff Davis,” Lincoln said. Refugees huddled about the Square, guarding the few household possessions they had managed to save from yesterday’s fire, and the Capitol had been looted by vandals and souvenir hunters, military and civilian. From there the carriage rolled through the burned district, whose streets were choked with toppled masonry and littered with broken glass, on down Cary Street to Libby Prison, which Lincoln had passed earlier on his way uptown. It held captive rebels now, and in fact had had no Federal inmates since last May, when they were transferred to a new prison down in Georgia; but the thought of what it once had been caused one horseman to remark that Jefferson Davis should be hanged. Lincoln turned and looked at him. “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” he said quietly. Soon afterwards Weitzel took the opportunity to ask if the President had any suggestions as to treatment of the conquered people in his charge. Lincoln replied that, while he did not want to issue orders on the subject, “If I were in your place I’d let ’em up easy; let ’em up easy.”