If you go there today, and walk to the most desolate corner of the cemetery, and then descend the half-hidden, decaying black slate steps, past all the other graves, down toward Rock Creek and the trees, you will find the tomb, now long empty. No sign remains that he was ever here. His name was never chiseled into the stone arch above the entry. But here, during the Civil War, in the winter of 1862, eleven-year-old Willie Lincoln, his father’s best-beloved son, was laid to rest. Here his ever-mourning father returned to visit him, to remember, and to weep. And here, the boy waited patiently behind the iron gates, locked inside the marble vault that looked no bigger than a child’s playhouse, for his father to claim him and carry him home.
That appointment, like his tiny coffin, was set in stone: March 4, 1869, the day Abraham Lincoln would complete his second term as president of the United States, leave Washington, and undertake the long railroad journey west, to Illinois. But in the spring of 1865, in the first week of April, that homecoming seemed a long way off. President Lincoln still had so much more to do.
If you visit his home today, you will find no sign that he ever left. The exterior of the house looks almost exactly like it does in the Civil War–era photographs. In his private office, documents still lie on his desk, as if awaiting his signature. His presidential oil portrait hangs on a wall. Maps chart the once mighty territorial expanse of the antebellum South’s proud agricultural empire. Books line the shelves. Children’s toys lie scattered across the floor. The house is furnished as it was April 2, 1865, the day he last walked out the door, never to return.
In the spring of 1865, in the first week of April, he also had much to do. The future was uncertain. His capital city could no longer be defended and might fall to invading Union armies within days, even hours. To save his country, he had to abandon the president’s mansion and flee Richmond. He could take little with him. Soon he would leave behind almost all he loved, including his five-year-old son, Joseph, who had died in his White House in 1864 and now rested in the sacred grounds of the city’s Hollywood Cemetery, where many Confederate heroes, including General J. E. B. Stuart, were also buried. Perhaps one day Jefferson Davis would return to claim the boy, but for now, he had to go on ahead.