CHAPTER TWO
“In the Days of Our Youth”
On April 4, Abraham Lincoln experienced one of the most thrilling days of his life, one that was a culmination of his work and his presidency. But he did not gloat. “Thank God that I have lived to see this! It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to go to Richmond.”
Admiral Porter agreed to take him there on the River Queen, “if there is any of [Richmond] left. There is black smoke over the city.” Porter told the president that before they could go up the river, he must order all the “torpedoes” (mines) removed from the water so that they did not blow up the River Queen. Her sister ship had already struck a mine and been blown up. The admiral described the journey: “Here we were in a solitary boat, after having set out with a number of vessels flying flags at every mast-head, hoping to enter the conquered capital in a manner befitting the rank of the President of the United States, with a further intention of firing a national salute in honor of the happy result.”
Porter was embarrassed that he could not deliver his commander in chief to the captive city in style. Lincoln said not to worry, and he told a funny story to make the admiral feel better. “Admiral, this brings to mind a fellow who once came to me to ask for an appointment as 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 me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.”
The river leading into Richmond had become too shallow for big boats, and as they got close to the city, Porter transferred the president, Tad, and Captain Penrose to his personal craft, the “admiral’s barge.” Despite the fancy name, it was no more than a spacious, glorified rowboat Porter used to travel between his flagship and other U.S. Navy warships, or between ship and shore. When they reached the riverfront, Porter and his crew had trouble spotting a landing and they had to continue along the edge. The city looked eerie. Lincoln and Porter peered at the rebel capital but saw no one—only smoke from the fires. The only sound was the creaking of the oars. “The street along the river-front was as deserted,” Porter observed, “as if this had been a city of the dead.” The Union army had occupied the city for a day, but “not a soldier was to be seen.”
Then the current lodged the barge on a rock, and the oarsmen rowed for the first landing they saw. Lincoln stepped onto the wharf. They had landed at Rocketts, a shady waterfront district. Admiral Porter described what happened next:
There was a small house on this landing, and behind it were some twelve negroes digging with spades. The leader of them was an old man sixty years of age. He raised himself to an upright position as we landed, and put his hands up to his eyes. Then he dropped his spade and sprang forward. “Bress de Lord,” he said, “dere is de great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He’s bin in my heart fo’ long yeah, an’ he’s cum at las’ to free his chillum from deir bondage? Glory, Hallelujah!” And he fell upon his knees before the President and kissed his feet. The others followed his example, and in a minute Mr. Lincoln was surrounded by these people, who had treasured up the recollection of him from a photograph, and had looked up to him for four years as the one who was to lead them out of captivity.
The adulation embarrassed Lincoln. He was a simple man with plain tastes who had, during his entire presidency, eschewed pomp and circumstance. He had no patience for politicians who behaved like royalty. He did not want to enter Richmond like a king. He spoke to the throng of slaves. “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument; but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle on your limbs, and you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this Republic.”
Before allowing Lincoln to leave them and proceed on foot into Richmond, the freed slaves burst into joyous song:
Oh, all ye people clap your hands,
And with triumphant voices sing;
No force the mighty power withstands
Of God, the universal King.
The hymn drew hundreds of blacks to the landing. They surrounded Lincoln, making it impossible for him to move. Admiral Porter recognized how foolish he had been to bring the president ashore without a proper military escort. “The crowd immediately became very oppressive. We needed our marines to keep them off. I ordered twelve of the boat’s crew to fix bayonets and surround the President…but the crowd poured in so fearfully that I thought we all stood a chance of being crushed to death. I now realized the imprudence of landing without a large body of marines; and yet this seemed to me…the fittest way for Mr. Lincoln to come upon the people he had redeemed from bondage.”
The crowd became increasingly wild. Some rushed forward, laid their hands upon the president, and collapsed in ecstatic paroxysms. Some, too awed to approach Father Abraham, kept their distance and just stared at him. Others yelled for joy and performed acrobatic somersaults. Admiral Porter said the people were so excited that some of them appeared “demented.” Lincoln spoke to them: “My poor friends, you are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it…Liberty is your birthright…But you must try to deserve this priceless boon. Let the world see that you merit it, and are able to maintain it by your good works. Don’t let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them…There, now, let me pass on; I have but little time to spare. I want to see the capital.”
Porter ordered six men to march ahead of the president and Tad, and six behind them, and with that the landing party walked toward downtown Richmond. Lincoln stopped briefly to look at the notorious Libby Prison, a place of suffering for thousands of Union prisoners of war. “We will pull it down!” screamed voices in the crowd. But Lincoln said no, that they should “leave it as a monument.” The streets were dusty and smoke from the fires still hung in the air. Lincoln could smell Richmond burning as he walked through it. By now thousands of people, blacks and whites, crowded the sidewalks.
A beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, carrying a bouquet of roses, stepped into the street and advanced toward the president. Porter watched her struggle through the crowd. “The mass of people endeavored to open to let her pass, but she had a hard time in reaching him. Her clothes were very much disarranged in making the journey across the street. I reached out and helped her within the circle of the sailors’ bayonets, where, although nearly stifled with dust, she gracefully presented her bouquet to the President and made a neat little speech, while he held her hand…There was a card on the bouquet with these simple words: ‘From Eva to the Liberator of the slaves.’ ”
Porter spotted a sole cavalryman and called out to him: “Go to the general, and tell him to send a military escort here to guard the president and get him through this crowd!”
“Is that old Abe?” the trooper asked, before galloping off.
Thomas Thatcher Graves, aide-de-camp on the staff of General Weitzel, approached the president and his group, and Lincoln asked him, “Is it far to President Davis’s house?”
Graves accompanied the president to the Confederate White House. “At the Davis house, [Lincoln] was shown into a receptionroom, with the remark that the housekeeper had said that the room was President Davis’s office. [It was Davis’s first-floor study, not his second-floor office.] As he seated himself he remarked, ‘This must have been President Davis’s chair,’ and, crossing his legs, he looked far off with a serious, dreamy expression.”
This was the closest Lincoln had ever come to Jefferson Davis during the war. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, and not Davis, had represented the Confederacy at the Hampton Roads peace conference in February 1865, where Stephens and Lincoln discussed how to end the war.
Lincoln knew the Confederate president had been in this room no more than thirty-six hours earlier. As one witness remembered, Lincoln “lay back in the chair like a tired man whose nerves had carried him beyond his strength.” The journalist Charles C. Coffin observed on the president’s face a “look of unutterable weariness, as if his spirit, energy and animating force were wholly exhausted.” Sitting in the quiet study of the Confederate president, perhaps Lincoln weighed the cost—more than 620,000 American lives—paid to get there. He did not speak. Then he requested a glass of water.
It is not surprising that the paths of the two presidents had not crossed before the Civil War, even though they both had lived briefly in Washington, D.C., at the same time. Davis and Lincoln lived very different lives and moved in different circles. Lincoln became a giant, but in antebellum America he was considered inferior to Jefferson Davis in education, social status, military and political experience, national reputation, influence, fame, and prospects. Indeed, before Lincoln’s run for Senate and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, few Americans north or south knew anything about him. Many had never heard the name Abraham Lincoln. Most knew the name of Jefferson Davis, a man who many people expected would be a future president of the United States. Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, Lincoln’s fame obscures Jefferson Davis. Davis’s presidency of a slave empire that fought the deadliest war in American history has tainted, even swept away, the memory of anything that was good about him.
Davis is often remembered as a grotesque caricature: a humorless, arrogant, inflexible, racist, slave-owning traitor who tried to overthrow the Constitution but failed to win Southern independence and who then vanished from history. In reputation, Lincoln and Davis stand as polar opposites, as emancipator and slave master, as two men who could not have been more different from each other. The truth is more complex. In some ways, Lincoln and Davis had nothing in common. In others, some profound, they shared striking similarities and experiences.
Born in 1808, Jefferson Davis attended private academies and universities, and then, with the sponsorship of his prosperous older brother, Joseph, attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was a fine equestrian, and he cut a splendid, elegant figure in the saddle. Serving as an army officer on the western frontier, he undertook long and arduous cross-country journeys that gave him great knowledge of the American continent. In Mississippi, his brother set him up as a planter. He was elected to the U.S. Congress; fought gallantly in the Mexican War as colonel of an infantry regiment, the Mississippi Rifles; was wounded in battle but refused to leave the field; and then came home a hero. He was a fervent nationalist who believed that North and South, by working together, could conquer the continent.
Serving in President Franklin Pierce’s administration, he became one of the greatest secretaries of war in American history. Highly innovative, he pursued advanced weapons systems, tried to modernize the command structure of the army, and, in a little-remembered program, introduced military camels into the vast, parched Western territories. He was instrumental in founding the Smithsonian Institution, and he supervised the expansion of the U.S. Capitol building. He revered the Revolutionary generation, the founders, and the Constitution, and, as a planter and slave owner, he believed that the founders, as part of the great compromise to create the new nation, had embedded and protected the “peculiar institution” in American law forever.
Like the framers of the Constitution, like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans in the South and the North, like almost every previous president of the United States, and like many antislavery leaders and abolitionists, Davis believed in white racial superiority. He admired the North and praised its industry, traveled there often, sought to know its mind, and developed many friends in New England and the Northeast. He even vacationed there. He gave well-received speeches in several of the great cities of the North. And, as the political crisis over slavery and the admission of new states into the Union grew more divisive through the 1850s, he refused to join the shrill ranks of the Southern fire-eaters and rabid secessionists. As a U.S. senator, he admonished radical hotheads in both parties and abhorred the idea of disunion. He favored comity, not confrontation.
In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, in his seventh and final debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Alton, Illinois, referred to Davis as “that able and eloquent statesman.” Davis had earned a reputation as one of the first men of the South and as one of the chief spokesmen not only for his home state of Mississippi but for half the nation. He was a friend to many of the great statesmen of his age, the widower son-in-law of President Zachary Taylor, and a confidant and counselor to other presidents. At his Washington, D.C., town house, he and his sparkling second wife, Varina Howell Davis, presided over a brilliant salon that welcomed leaders from North and South. Harper’s Weekly published a front-page woodcut portrait of him. He looked like a statesman. Some said he resembled an eagle, and many viewed him as a plausible Democratic candidate for the presidential election of 1860. He favored logic and reason over undisciplined passion, and his beautiful speaking voice was one of his most powerful political attributes.
By any measure, Jefferson Davis was one of the most well-known, respected, admired, and influential political leaders of pre–Civil War America. His achievements were all the more remarkable because, beneath this shining surface of privilege, talent, and success, he had suffered through all of his adult life from a collection of serious, chronic, and sometimes disabling illnesses, which had brought him near death more than once. He was plagued by, among other things, malaria, neuralgia, and progressive blindness in one eye. But his resilient body and will to live had kept him alive. Indeed, his unconquerable life force suggested that perhaps fate and destiny had preserved him for some great task.
After secession began, he neither campaigned for, nor even desired, the presidency of the new Confederate States of America. Only after his adopted state of Mississippi seceded on January 9, 1861, did Davis resign his Senate seat. His farewell speech from the Senate floor on January 21 moved observers to tears, caused a sensation, and won him praise from both Southerners and Northerners. Davis was chosen by acclamation as the provisional president of the Confederate States of America on February 9, 1861. Later, he was elected to a six-year term as president and was inaugurated on February 22, 1862, George Washington’s birthday.
Lincoln and Davis were both born in rustic Kentucky cabins, one year and one hundred miles apart, but their early years could not have been more different. Born February 12, 1809, Lincoln lacked family sponsors. His father, Thomas, an uneducated, illiterate, restless manual laborer who seemed proud of his limitations, made no effort to educate his son. Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Kentucky to Indiana and then to Illinois, but wherever he lived, success and prosperity eluded him. After young Abe’s mother died when he was nine years old, he lived in the squalor of his father’s cabin like a wild, feral child. When Thomas brought home a new wife, Sarah Bush Johnson, the rough, downtrodden state of Abe and his siblings horrified her. But she grew to love them and, though uneducated herself, took a special interest in her tall, awkward stepson. Abe had less than a year of formal schooling, but he learned to read and write and perform elementary mathematics. “Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen, he will be good, but God knows when,” he inscribed in his boyhood sum book. While his indifferent father exploited him as a manual laborer—Abe had a rail-splitting axe thrust into his hands at age nine—his stepmother encouraged his learning. Years later, after being elected president, Lincoln would not leave Illinois without paying her an emotional—and perhaps final, he thought—visit.
When young Abe Lincoln reached maturity he had no connections, no money, no proper education, and no prospects beyond following his father’s footsteps into a lifetime of physical toil. But he was driven by ambition for a better life. He widened his world through a variety of occupations: flatboat river pilot, surveyor, storekeeper, and postmaster. He studied law on his own, became a member of the Illinois bar, and joined a two-man firm. He prospered in that trade, earning a reputation for honesty and ability while he rode the circuit from courthouse to courthouse. Unlike Jefferson Davis, who possessed a large private library and who studied all manner of subjects, Lincoln owned few books, but he read narrowly and deeply in politics, Shakespeare, the Bible, and history.
Elected to Congress for a single term in 1846, Lincoln made little impression on official life in the nation’s capital. When war broke out between the United States and Mexico, President James K. Polk and Senator Thomas Hart Benton viewed the conflict as an opportunity to pursue America’s Manifest Destiny and create an empire that stretched from sea to sea. Congressman Abraham Lincoln opposed the war, said so on the floor of the House, and quibbled with President Polk about whether hostilities had begun on American or Mexican soil. Lincoln implied that the president had provoked the war to justify an unlawful land grab. In stark contrast, Jefferson Davis resigned his seat in Congress, led Mississippi troops in combat against superior numbers of enemy infantry and deadly cavalry lancers, and distinguished himself in the Battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista. Had Davis not left Washington on July 4, 1846, he would likely have met Lincoln there in 1847. Lincoln and Davis were in Washington at the same time in December 1848, and also in early 1849, after Davis had been elected to the Senate, but they did not meet then.
At the end of Lincoln’s undistinguished single term, he went home to Illinois and rose to prominence in the Illinois bar. Never a lawyer of national renown, like Daniel Webster, William Wirt, or the other great Supreme Court and constitutional advocates of his day, Lincoln practiced in the local, state, and federal courts and handled a diverse mix of criminal and civil cases, with collections work occupying a significant portion of his practice. He did not travel widely beyond Illinois, possessed little firsthand knowledge of the South, and did not cultivate friendships with influential Southerners.
He was headed for a life of local celebrity, prosperity, and respectability—and national obscurity—until he was aroused in 1854 by the repeal of the Missouri Compromise and the possibility of admitting new slave states to the Union. Between his famous Peoria speech in 1854 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates during the Illinois Senate campaign of 1858, he emerged as a major antislavery voice. Lincoln lost that election but the debates, published in book form for the presidential campaign of 1860, made him a national political figure and helped him capture the nomination and then the White House.
When Lincoln took the presidential oath of office on March 4, 1861, he was, on paper, one of the least-qualified chief executives in the nation’s history. Of his fifteen predecessors, any comparison to the first five—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—would have been considered absurd. Of the following ten, not all enjoyed successful presidencies, but every one surpassed Lincoln in raw qualifications for the office. Perpetually disorganized, Lincoln had never administered anything bigger than a two-man law office, and he had done a poor job of that, often unable to keep track of essential paperwork. And the myth is true—he often stuffed important documents into his stovepipe hat.
Davis, in addition to his other military and political merits, had held an important cabinet post and had overseen the administration of the U.S. Army. In November 1860, a majority of Americans would have said that Jefferson Davis was far more qualified than Abraham Lincoln to occupy the White House. If the Democratic Party had not split and produced two rival candidates, Stephen A. Douglas and John C. Breckinridge, and if Jefferson Davis had been nominated in 1860 as the sole Democrat to run against Lincoln, Davis might have been elected the sixteenth president of the United States. Indeed, Lincoln won the race with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. He may have secured an electoral majority, but 60 percent of the country voted for someone other than him.
Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist, agreed with Jefferson Davis that the Constitution protected slavery. Thus, the federal government had no power to interfere with it wherever it existed. And like Davis, Lincoln—at least the Lincoln of the 1840s and 1850s—accepted white racial superiority. But Lincoln parted ways with Davis and the South over the morality of slavery and the right to introduce it into new states and territories.
Lincoln believed that slavery was a moral crime—“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” He argued that even if blacks were not “equal” to whites, they should enjoy the equal right to liberty and the fruit of their labor. Lincoln insisted that the founders had allowed slavery with the uncomfortable understanding that it was an unholy compromise necessary to create the new nation, and that the founders had envisioned, at some future time, slavery’s natural and ultimate extinction. Lincoln also opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and states, fearing that its spread would give it a second wind, thus perverting the intentions of the founders and the true meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
Davis and his fellow Southerners rejected that ideology, insisting that slavery was not a necessary evil but something good that benefited both masters and slaves. The “peculiar institution,” they argued, civilized, westernized, and Christianized a primitive, heathen African people. Southern leaders resented the accusation that slavery was a moral evil and not a positive good, and they interpreted the rising antislavery movement in the North as part of a conspiracy to outnumber the slave states with new free states to strip the South of its political power in Congress, especially in the Senate.
Despite their differences, Davis and Lincoln had many things in common. They possessed striking physical similarities. Both were tall, thin—even cadaverous-looking—men. At six feet, four inches, Lincoln was the bigger man, but Davis’s erect military bearing, a disciplined posture drilled into him at West Point and that he maintained into old age, made him appear taller than his five feet, eleven inches. Both had angular, craggy faces, and both men looked underfed. Lincoln and Davis were sparse eaters and indifferent to the pleasures of the table.
Both men had lean builds, but they had been strong as young men. When Davis was a boy, he learned to wrestle with slaves, and as a young man he possessed quickness and strength, gaining the better of several men in fights. Lincoln was a spectacular wrestler, contending in legendary matches with the Clary’s Grove Boys in New Salem, Illinois. Years of manual labor with the axe and the maul had given him prodigious strength. In their later years, both men displayed astonishing moments of physical power.
Neither man was distracted by luxuries. Yes, Davis cherished his fine and extensive library—it was one of his proudest possessions—but, like Lincoln, he had no taste for fine antiques, furniture, or artworks. Neither man was a Beau Brummell, but Lincoln’s indifference to his personal appearance—wrinkled, ill-fitting shirts and suits and wild, uncombed hair—outdid Davis’s, who had at least learned during military service how to dress. Each man possessed an inner confidence, a belief that he was, somehow, different from other men. Both men shared memorable appearances. When Davis or Lincoln appeared in public, people noticed them and talked about it. Frozen nineteenth-century photographic daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, albumens, or tintypes failed to capture it, but in person Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln were charismatic, captivating, and unforgettable.
In youth, Davis and Lincoln could be fun-loving, high-spirited, and undisciplined. More than once, Davis was almost expelled from West Point for carousing, drinking, and other forbidden behavior. Lincoln was not a drinker, but he possessed a natural talent for jokes and storytelling, many of them dirty. They were also young men of mirth and love, and sorrow and longing.
Davis met her in August 1832, when she was eighteen years old and he twenty-four. Sarah Knox Taylor was the daughter of General Zachary Taylor. Jefferson and Knox, the name she went by, fell in love, but her parents, seeking to protect her from the hard life of an army officer’s wife, and due to a possible misunderstanding between Davis and the general, denied permission to marry. Undeterred, the young lovers persisted for more than two years until Jeff won the Taylors over. They married on June 17, 1835, and journeyed by steamboat to Davis Bend, the site of brother Joseph Davis’s plantation on the Mississippi River. In August, Jefferson and Knox traveled south to visit his sister Anna Smith at Locust Grove, in Louisiana. There, just three months later, Jefferson endured an unspeakable loss that nearly killed him and changed his life forever.
It was the hot season, when the mosquitoes reigned over the plantation fields of the Deep South. They spread a dangerous form of malaria that the first generations of slaves had brought over from Africa almost two centuries earlier. Jeff and Knox contracted the disease. He almost died, but then, after suffering days of fever, chills, delirium, and nausea, he rallied to live. But Knox, her new husband beside her, succumbed. On September 15, 1835, Jefferson Davis surrendered to the grave the body of his twenty-one-year-old bride of twelve weeks. He was a lost man. When she died, something in him died too. He retreated into a private inner world, a “great seclusion,” he once called it, with slaves and crops and books and his protective mentor Joseph. When Jefferson Davis emerged from that selfimposed isolation several years later, he was a different, reserved, harder, more mysterious man. Knox survives in a single letter to her family, in one to her from Jefferson, and in a lone image, a portrait painted in oils. She was a gorgeous, spirited girl with dark hair and generous eyes. Jefferson Davis cherished the memory of her for the rest of his life.
Abraham Lincoln met Ann Rutledge, four years his junior, in 1831 in the small village of New Salem, Illinois, where he worked as a surveyor, storekeeper, and postmaster. Ann, engaged to a ne’er-do-well sharp operator who left town and never returned to claim her, grew close to the awkward but interesting Lincoln. He exhibited little of the confidence and extraordinary powers that would reveal themselves later, but the core of his character had already formed. What happened next has been mostly suppressed by historians and belittled by Mary Lincoln apologists for the past one hundred and seventy-five years, but its truth can no longer be denied. In that tiny, isolated village on the Illinois frontier, Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge formed a deep emotional bond. “Ann M. Rutledge is now learning grammar,” reads Lincoln’s affectionate handwritten inscription in an ancient, tattered book on that subject. Family and neighbors noticed the connection, heard the talk, and observed, by 1834 and early 1835, the familiar, age-old rituals of courtship. No documents survive to prove their love. No letters between them exist. But decades later, after Lincoln’s assassination, his last law partner, William Herndon, collected evidence of Lincoln’s early life from people who knew him, including the old villagers from the New Salem ghost town. They remembered everything.
They told Herndon that it was common knowledge that Abraham and Ann were in love, and that friends and family had expected them to marry until Ann became ill, probably from typhoid fever, and died on August 25, 1835. They could not forget how her death shattered Lincoln, how he visited her grave during thunderstorms and collapsed upon it, embracing her in death, how they feared for his mind and suspected that he might take his own life. In time, he walked in the world again. But after he left New Salem, he never, as far as anyone can tell, spoke or wrote of their bond or her death. Three decades later, when he was president of the United States, no one heard him mention her name. He possessed no portrait of her but for the one locked in his memory. Her death predated the introduction of photography, and anyway who would have thought to make a photograph or paint a portrait of a simple, poor young girl who lived in a little river town on the Illinois frontier? A physical description of her survives. Years later, one of her brothers described to William Herndon the girl Lincoln once knew: “She had light hair, and blue eyes.”
Lincoln served as a volunteer captain in the Black Hawk Indian war in Illinois and Wisconsin in the early 1830s but never faced the enemy. Still, his election by the men of his company as their leader gave him immense pleasure. Later, while serving in Congress, Lincoln made light of his brief military career, joking that he had fought many bloody battles with the mosquitoes. This was to be Lincoln’s only military experience—until nineteen years later, when he commanded great armies and navies.
Davis also served in the Black Hawk War, holding a superior and more prestigious rank as an officer in the regular army. He earned a singular honor. On a journey from Fort Crawford, Wisconsin, to St. Louis, he was placed in charge of the captured Native American warrior Black Hawk. When a group of white visitors taunted the shackled captive in his cell, Davis rebuked their lack of respect toward his prisoner. Impressed, Black Hawk praised Jefferson Davis as a great warrior and man of honor.
Davis and Lincoln each revered the federal union, but Davis, who had traveled the country and territories more extensively than had Lincoln, possessed far more personal knowledge of its varied geography and vast territorial expanse. Both honored the law, Lincoln pursued it as a calling and Davis thought of doing the same. He wrote a letter saying that he might purchase the books, read law, and become an attorney. Law was a well-established route to political advancement. As young men, each feared that he might amount to nothing. Lincoln wrote that if he failed to make something of himself, it would be as though he had never lived. Davis, on his twenty-second birthday, expressed similar fears. Both yearned to be remembered.
In time, both men rediscovered love. Ten years after the death of Sarah Knox Taylor, Jefferson Davis, thirty-seven years old, married Varina Howell, an eighteen-year-old, educated, savvy, and independent daughter of a fine Mississippi family. When Joseph Davis decided that his long-mourning brother should end his brooding and rejoin society, he introduced Jefferson to Varina. Their first meeting did not go well. She wrote a letter to her mother about it the next day. Mr. Davis, she confided, had an “uncertain temper, and…a way of taking for granted that everybody agrees with him when he expresses an opinion, which offends me.” And then there was the age difference: “He is old, from what I hear he is only two years younger than you are.” But Varina also recognized his qualities and was intrigued. Jefferson had an “agreeable manner” and possessed “a peculiarly sweet voice and winning manner of asserting himself.” Her parents did not favor the match, knowing how deeply Knox’s death had hurt—and changed—him. They feared that he would never recover from the loss and that no woman, even their daughter, could win his love. But Jefferson made peace with Knox Taylor’s ghost and married Varina Howell on February 26, 1845. Theirs was an adoring marriage, a passionate and intellectual union that produced six children. For the rest of his life Jefferson depended upon Varina’s love, advice, support, and loyalty. Indeed, two decades later, during his greatest trial and most profound despair, Varina rallied to save her husband, and she rose to the historic occasion.
Abraham Lincoln was not as lucky in marriage. After a few bungled attempts at courting other women, he married Mary Todd of Lexington, Kentucky, on November 4, 1842. They had met in Springfield, Illinois, when Lincoln was a young, hungry lawyer on the rise and Mary was a well-educated, politically savvy woman searching for a husband. It was an ill-starred union that plagued Abraham’s peace of mind and domestic happiness for much of his life, and it climaxed finally in epic conflicts during his presidency.
Mary possessed few of the qualities that defined Varina Davis, who was everything—honest, dignified, courteous, and brave—that Mary Lincoln was not. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was a dressmaker, a free black woman, Elizabeth Keckly, who made frocks for Varina in antebellum Washington and later for Mary during her White House years, and who went on to write a controversial book about her strange wartime role as Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante.
During the war Varina sold many of her fine garments for the sake of the cause, while Mary’s extravagant purchases, the trademark of a compulsive shopper, failed to satisfy her unquenchable taste for luxury. The real Mary Lincoln was mercurial, jealous, insulting, rude, selfish, deceitful, paranoid, financially dishonest, and, without doubt, mentally unbalanced. During the Civil War, Jefferson Davis’s White House was a sanctuary for the beleaguered president. For Abraham Lincoln, his White House was often a place of unrest and unpredictable marital discord.
During the Civil War both presidents had trouble with several of their general officers who sought to embarrass, defy, and undermine them. Both men mourned their losses in battle, and each experienced death in his White House. Jefferson Davis had lost one son in infancy, and in 1864, another son fell to his death at the Richmond White House. Lincoln too lost a young son long before the war, and his favorite boy, Willie, had succumbed to illness in the Washington White House in 1862.
Neither president enjoyed the universal love and support of his people. Both Davis and Lincoln experienced savage attacks by opponents who criticized their every decision. Mocked, lampooned, caricatured, second-guessed, and despised by segments of their own electorate throughout the war, Davis and Lincoln persevered for four years, each seeking to win his war.
Both men loved books. Davis enjoyed the privilege of a man of his class and built an extensive library. Better educated than Lincoln, he read politics, history, literature, and science, and after Knox’s death it was the companionship of his brother—and a rigorous reading program—that kept him sane. Books were rare in the world of Lincoln’s youth. He did not come from a family of readers—he once wrote that his father could only “bunglingly” sign his own name. Lincoln treasured the few he could obtain. As an adult, he never read as widely as Davis, but he read his favorite texts—Shakespeare, the Bible, and others—deeply and many times to enjoy their language and decode their meaning.
On the nature of man, Lincoln and Davis would never agree. Davis believed that one race of people was fitted by nature for slavery and was destined to remain the inferior race for all future time. Blacks would never enjoy the same legal rights as white men. Lincoln rejected that cruel fatalism and came to believe that the institution of bondage itself, and not nature, had temporarily “clouded” the minds of its victims. Once freed, the former slaves, Lincoln believed, would rise through work, ambition, and talent as they enjoyed equal rights under the law.
Lincoln accepted mankind with all its faults. His years as a lawyer had schooled him in the book of human behavior. He had sued—and defended—liars, cheats, thieves, deadbeats, adulterers, slanderers, and murderers. For nearly a quarter of a century, he had immersed himself in a world of vexatious disputes. Lincoln’s experiences had made him resigned and forgiving, not callous and bitter. He rarely held a grudge. He was a skeptic who believed that, with the possible exceptions of his heroes George Washington and Henry Clay, there were no perfect men. Of the first president, Lincoln had once said: “Let us believe, as in the days of our youth, that Washington was spotless. It makes human nature better to believe that one human being was perfect—that human perfection is possible.” When Lincoln was president, he was willing to do business with imperfect men if they could serve his purpose. Lincoln employed and trusted men despite their high opinions of themselves.
Davis lived by a different code and judged men more harshly than Lincoln did. He defined himself as a man of integrity who had conducted himself in politics and on the battlefield in principled ways. Davis tried to be a courteous, loyal, honest man who never stole, accepted graft, or sold his office for personal gain. He was a gentleman proud of the fact that he had never raised the whip to or been cruel to a slave. He could not abide men who failed to live up to the standards he set for himself. As president of the Confederacy, his commitment to the cause was total. He sacrificed all he had—his mind, body, health, and wealth, and the life of one of his sons—to the South, and it was by those benchmarks that he judged others. Because he acted without self-interest, so should others, he believed, including his generals, his cabinet officers, and the state governors. To disagree with him was to question his integrity and devotion and to risk his wrath. Often, to his disadvantage, Davis interpreted criticism or even helpful advice as an attack on his personal integrity, or as evidence of disloyalty. In turn, critics accused him of being remote, stubborn, and proud. He could be all of those things, but he also brought to his office many superb talents, and a total and relentless commitment to Southern independence. Many men criticized Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee once noted, but no man, he said, could have done better.
These, then, are the stories that made the two men who would, in the spring of 1865, preside over the destiny of two nations. Both were fifty-six years old—born ten months apart—and for most of the Civil War, they had laid their heads on their pillows each night in mansions less than one hundred miles apart, each dreaming of saving his cause and country.
Abraham Lincoln told Thomas Graves that he wanted to see the rest of Jefferson Davis’s mansion. “At length he asked me if the housekeeper was in the house. Upon learning that she had left he jumped up and said, with a boyish manner, ‘Come, let’s look at the house!’ We went pretty much over it; I retailed all that the housekeeper had told me, and he seemed interested in everything. As we came down the staircase General Weitzel came, in breathless haste, and at once President Lincoln’s face lost its boyish expression as he realized that duty must be resumed.”
Lincoln quickly put Davis’s home to official use and conducted a meeting there with John Archibald Campbell, a former justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, and Joseph Reid Anderson, two leading Confederate citizens who arrived to see him.
Admiral Porter admired the mansion but judged it less grand than its Washington counterpart. It was “quite a small affair compared with the White House, and modest in all its appointments, showing that while President Davis was engaged heart and soul in endeavoring to effect the division of the States, he was not, at least, surrounding himself with regal style, but was living in a modest, comfortable way, like any other citizen.”
With the fall of the city, Richmond’s photographers had lost their prime business—portrait photographs of Confederate political leaders, government officials, generals, officers, and soldiers. Those customers had fled. But George O. Ennis, an enterprising photographer, figured out a way to make money under the Union occupation. Ennis set up his camera and photographed the White House of the Confederacy, and his publisher, Selden & Co., “news and book agents, dealers in photographic and stereoscopic views, fancy articles, & etc.,” located at no. 836 Main Street, packaged it as a carte de visite with a caption sure to attract Union buyers. Selden promoted the former home of Jefferson Davis as the new headquarters of the Yankee occupiers: “JEFF. DAVIS MANSION. This building is beautifully situated, on the corner of Clay and 12th streets, and is noted as being the residence of the late Chief Magistrate of the Confederate States. It is now, and has been since the evacuation, the residence and headquarters of the General commanding this Department.”
On this day, General Weitzel, who was now in command of the former Confederate capital, asked Lincoln what policies he should adopt in dealing with the conquered rebels. Thomas Graves overheard the conversation, and Lincoln’s answer became an American legend. “President Lincoln replied that he did not want to give any orders on that subject, but, as he expressed it, ‘If I were in your place I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.’ ”
This was one of the most remarkable statements ever spoken by a commander in chief. During his time in Richmond, Lincoln did not order the arrests of any rebel leaders who remained there, nor did he order their property seized. And he uttered no words of vengeance or punishment. Even while he sat in Jefferson Davis’s own home, he did not disparage or defame the Confederate president. Nor did he order an urgent manhunt for Davis and the cabinet officers who had evacuated the city less than two days before. It was a moment of singular greatness. It was Abraham Lincoln at his best.
After Lincoln left the Confederate White House, he toured Richmond in a buggy. Blacks flocked to him and rejoiced, just as they had at the river landing and during his walk to Davis’s mansion. His triumphant tour complete, he returned to the wharf for the journey back to City Point. As he left a black woman warned him to be careful. “Don’t drown, Massa Abe, for God’s sake!” If he had heard her, any man possessing Abraham Lincoln’s sense of humor would have enjoyed laughing at that heartfelt, urgent, yet comical plea.
Death by drowning was not the greatest threat Lincoln faced that day. Not all of Richmond welcomed him to the ruined capital. Most whites stayed in their homes behind locked doors and closed shutters, with some glaring at the unwelcome conqueror through their windows. It was a miracle that not one embittered Confederate—not a single one—poked a rifle or a pistol through an open window and opened fire on the despised Yankee president. No one even shouted epithets. Lincoln knew the risk: “I walked alone on the street, and anyone could have shot me from a second-story window.” The Richmond tour was one of Lincoln’s most triumphant days—certainly the most important day of his presidency. But it was also one of the most dangerous days of his life. No American president before or since has ever placed himself in such a volatile and dangerous environment.
Lincoln left no written account of his journey to Richmond. He was a splendid writer with a fine analytical mind and keen powers of observation, but he did not possess a diarist’s temperament nor had he ever kept a journal. It was unlikely that he would have written his memoirs after he left office in March 1869. With less than a year of formal schooling, he came to writing as a utilitarian, employing it to plead a legal case, convey information, make an argument, reply to an inquiry, propose a policy, justify an action, or persuade the reader. Only a few times in his life did he write to reminisce, to entertain, to regale, or to amuse with a story or a joke. His storytelling art was oral and ephemeral. Lincoln was a superb and—when the occasion demanded—eloquent writer, and an equally talented narrative speaker.