Abraham Lincoln's Forgotten Walk Through Richmond

One hundred sixty years ago, on 4 April 1865, President Abraham Lincoln and his young son Tad, guarded by a detachment of 12 sailors armed with carbines and bayonets and commanded by Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, walked through the city of Richmond. Less than 48 hours earlier, Confederate President Jefferson Davis, along with his cabinet and military forces, had fled, abandoning and setting fire to the capital city.

In the grand literature of Lincoln biography and histories of the Civil War, Lincoln’s walk through Richmond gets somewhat sidelined by the several momentous events occurring just before and after it as the great conflict came to a close: Three weeks earlier, Lincoln had delivered his famous second inaugural address, well remembered for its evocation of biblical imagery, justification of the war as a form of national vindication for slavery, and spirit of reconciliation and national healing. And not long after Lincoln’s walk through Richmond, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to U.S. Army General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on 9 April. Finally, the President’s life was tragically cut down by an assassin’s bullet on 15 April. The lack of scholarly attention to the event in Richmond caused one recent historian to write, “Lincoln’s walk through the rebel capital appears to be almost completely forgotten.”¹

Lincoln’s walk through Richmond represents several broad themes. The President’s visit to the city reflected the United States’ victory over the Confederacy, the economic devastation of the South, and the new social kinetics of a divided nation weary from civil war. The event showcases a convergence of human emotions: the resentment, defeat, and hopelessness of white Southerners; the contrasting jubilance, euphoria, and gratitude of freed slaves; and the mixed feelings of relief, uneasiness, and apprehension of the sailors and naval officers, guardians and followers of their Commander-in-Chief, walking forward into an uncertain future replete with challenges. 

The President’s escort of sailors reflects the Navy’s role, including the service of thousands of African Americans, in winning the Civil War: its long, effective blockade, numerous riverine operations, and assaults on vital Southern ports. Finally, the emotional imagery of hundreds, if not thousands, of recently freed African Americans thronging those sailors to cheer, thank, and touch their President reflects the culmination of Lincoln’s efforts to end slavery, and a new birth of freedom. Moreover, the genuine story of the President, holding the hand of his son and walking through the streets of the enemy capital, transposes national myth and refines the image of Lincoln’s legendary status as the great emancipator.

On the morning of 4 April Lincoln—dressed in his long black overcoat and high silk hat—his son Tad, who was celebrating his 12th birthday, and a small company of two Army officers and a Navy captain, made their way up the James River along the Richmond shoreline in a barge rowed by 12 Navy sailors. All along the river and surrounding embankments were signs of devastation: wrecked Confederate vessels, sunken merchant boats, dead horses, and broken ordnance. Next to the President, Rear Admiral Porter kept a swiveling eye on the occasional live floating torpedo passing precariously close by.²

The son of an American naval family, Porter had entered the U.S. Navy in 1829 and would go on to make an impressive record in the Civil War. A lieutenant in 1861, he quickly rose through the ranks, seeing action during the 1862 capture of New Orleans. Advancing north, Porter and General Grant led the joint Army-Navy operation that captured Vicksburg, breaking rebel control of the Mississippi River, in July 1863. The second officer promoted to admiral after his adoptive brother, David Glasgow Farragut, Porter received three congressional votes of thanks during the war.³ 

Porter, born in Pennsylvania, and Farragut, a Southerner from Virginia who remained loyal to the Union, led the highest echelons of the Navy’s officer corps, the service’s cadre of commissioned officers. Less than five years earlier, Lincoln’s election in November 1860 shook the foundations of that officer corps. Of the approximately 1,200 officers in the Navy in 1860, nearly 400 of them, representing almost half of those of Southern origins, resigned over the next year.⁴ 

On 28 March 1865, Porter, along with Grant and U.S. Army General William T. Sherman, met on board the steamboat River Queen at City Point, Virginia. During the impromptu meeting, the trio discussed their final strategy for ending the War. The Navy had played a decisive role in defeating the Confederacy. Executing the “Anaconda Plan” to blockade Southern ports and seize control of the Mississippi River, the Navy had disrupted Confederate trade and supply lines, effectively carving the South apart, and supported land campaigns in pivotal engagements along the Gulf coast and western rivers, and the Atlantic ports along the Carolina shores. While Grant bogged down General Lee’s forces at Petersburg, Virginia, in January 1865, Porter had commanded the largest attack fleet ever assembled in naval history in a bombardment and successful land assault on Fort Fisher, one of the Confederacy’s last open ports, at Wilmington, North Carolina. Meanwhile, Sherman’s army had infamously devastated much of Georgia the previous fall, before cutting north, pursuing the remnants of Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of the Tennessee through the Carolinas. Together, the trio were tying the noose around the Southern rebellion’s last remaining military forces and centers of economic and political power.⁵

That aligned with Lincoln’s overall political strategy for winning the war. Lincoln initially endorsed a restrained approach to fighting the Southern rebellion, rejecting harsh reprisals, resisting radical calls for vengeance, and deferring the issue of immediate abolition. By 1864, the conflict had devolved into savagery, with Lincoln supporting the successful passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in February 1865, rejecting Confederate appeals for peace without union, and endorsing more destructive methods on the point of military necessity. More than anything, at the 28 March meeting with Porter, Grant, and Sherman, Lincoln emphasized leniency toward the defeated Confederates, urging his commanders to send them back to their homes without vengeance and malice, even hinting that he wanted Jefferson Davis and the Confederate leaders to flee the country, rather than face execution.⁶  

Davis and the Confederate government had indeed fled Richmond. As the sailors pulled Porter’s barge up the wreck-ridden James River on 4 April, billowing smoke plumes rose from Richmond’s skyline. Before he fled his capital, Davis had supported the “last resort” to induct slaves into the Confederate Army in March and publicly intended to carry on the war as long as possible, despite defeats and the loss of strategic Southern cities and ports. While attending church on Sunday morning, 2 April, Davis received the message about the fall of Petersburg. That night, he and his cabinet hastily fled Richmond by the last train, even as Confederate forces set the city’s buildings and factories aflame behind him.⁷

The city’s harbor and business districts were nightmarish scenes of utter desolation on 4 April. Between 800 to 1,200 buildings lay in ruins. Tottering walls, piles of rubble, broken bridges, emptied factories, demolished mills, wrecked warehouses, and crumbling stores lined the city’s many streets and riverbanks. Richmond’s ruins represented the economic and social devastation suffered by the South over the previous six months, with nearly 260,000 men perishing in the Southern army from combat and disease, a staggering loss of life in a region comprising only 9 million people.⁸ During the night of 2–3 April, evacuating Confederate forces also set timed charges to destroy the city’s gunpowder magazines. The explosions shattered windows. Flames rapidly engulfed block after block, and terrified civilians took to their rooftops. Raising the American flag over the Virginia state capitol the next day, U.S. Army occupation forces, led by General Godfrey Weitzel, faced the difficult task of controlling fires, arresting escaped prisoners, arsonists and looters, and assisting the city’s devastated civilians.⁹  

Twenty-five miles down the James River at City Point, where the President had stayed with Porter since their conference on 28 March, Lincoln awoke at 0430 on 3 April to the far-off sounds of exploding ironclads, destroyed by Confederate naval officers in support of their armies’ retreats from Petersburg and Richmond. Later that day, Lincoln took a train to Petersburg to meet with Grant and survey the Army’s victory. “Thank God I have lived to see this,” Lincoln told Porter on board the River Queen that day. “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.” Porter noted the cloud of rising smoke from the city, visible dozens of miles to the north. “If there is any of it left,” Porter replied.¹⁰ 

The next morning, Porter steamed his flagship Malvern up the James River as far as she could draw water. Navy tugs and other ships had spent the morning and the previous night clearing the river’s approach to Richmond’s harbor of all types of obstructions. Unable to go farther in the Malvern, Porter and the sailor escort rowed Lincoln the final seven miles to a berth in the city. It was not the way Porter had wanted to land the President of the United States at the conquered capital. He had envisioned doing this from the Malvern, escorted by a grand procession of U.S. warships, all flying national flags from their peaks, with cannons booming a national salute. Sensing his frustration, Lincoln quipped with one of his anecdotal witticisms about a prominent citizen who had asked him for an appointment as a minister. Finding it unavailable, he inquired for a lowlier position as a maritime customs officer. “When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers,” Lincoln said, adding “But it is well to be humble.” The sky was filled with smoke, and a hot, stifling haze filled the dockside streets where the party disembarked, on the northside of the rocky whitewater called the Falls of the James. Grasping Tad’s hand, Lincoln and the party went ashore.¹¹

Almost immediately, a detail of about 50 African American Richmonders working nearby recognized Lincoln’s conspicuously tall figure. They started shouting, running down the embankment. As the sailors tried to surround the president, the approaching people became ecstatic. “It was not an hurrah that they gave,” wrote Charles Coffin, a prominent war correspondent who happened to be standing nearby, “but a wild, jubilant cry of inexpressible joy.” Porter worried about the President’s safety and could not help but notice their excitement. “It was such joy as never kills,” the admiral later wrote of the ecstasy of the crowd, many of whom had only enjoyed freedom for less than 24 hours.¹² 

Lincoln’s role in securing the freedom of these people was the zenith of a long history of American slavery. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention had permitted slave imports for two decades, with upwards of 120,000 Africans brought to the United States between 1790 and 1808. Congress later banned slave trading as piracy, and by 1842, a U.S.-British naval patrol, including the Africa Squadron, targeted the Atlantic slave trade. The number of slaves in America grew from 700,000 (17 percent of the U.S. population) in 1790 to nearly 4 million (12.6 percent) of the nation’s 31 million people by 1860. Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation aimed to free more than 3 million of them in Confederate areas, although the order directly liberated only 20,000–50,000 through the presence of Union forces. The United States’ victory in the war and congressional passage of the 13th Amendment for state ratification eventually freed 3.9 million, over 86 percent of the 4.5 million African Americans living in the country. More than 11,000 slaves comprised 37 percent of the population of Richmond in 1860.¹³

Porter assembled the dozen sailors around the President, his son, his retinue of four officers, and Coffin, the war correspondent. “Six sailors, wearing their round blue caps and short jackets and bagging pants, with navy carbines,” took the lead of the group, with another six in the rear, wrote Coffin. They stepped off in the direction of General Wietzel’s headquarters—the former residence of Jefferson Davis—three-quarters of a mile northeast up Richmond’s Governor Street. Minutes later, Lieutenant Commander John S. Barnes, an officer on Porter’s staff, landed at the harbor, having followed the party in a ship’s cutter.

“When I got ashore Mr. Lincoln was with the admiral and a few sailors, armed with carbines, several hundred yards ahead of me, surrounded by a dense mass of men, women, and children, mostly negroes,” wrote Barnes, who struggled to reach the party. “They had learned that the man in the high hat was President Lincoln.” People ran, shouted, danced, swung, and waved and tossed their caps, bonnets, and handkerchiefs. “Thank you, dear Jesus, for this! Thank you Jesus!” one African American lady, tears streaming from her eyes, cried from her doorway. “Thank you, dear Jesus, that I behold President Linkum [sic],” exclaimed another woman, clasping her hands. One lady jumped with ecstasy, shouting with all her might: “Bless the Lord! Bless the Lord! Bless the Lord!”¹⁴

A surging mass of humanity now descended on Lincoln behind the small party of sailors. Of the Navy’s wartime manpower of 80,000–100,000 volunteers and officers, 18,000–30,000 African Americans wore the same uniform of the sailors, 82 percent of them serving in roles such as landsman or cook. Between 190,000 and 210,000 African Americans served during the Civil War, averaging 8 percent of the 2 million sailors and troops that defended the Union. Of 110,000 combat deaths, 10,000–20,000 were African American. “They looked upon him as belonging to them,” Porter wrote of the jubilant crowds thronging Lincoln. “The streets seemed to be suddenly alive with the colored race. They seemed to spring from the earth.”¹⁵

For more than four years, white Richmonders had despised and cursed the man who now received the praise and blessings of thousands, Coffin reported. Shocking many of those white Southerners, Lincoln acknowledged the salutations given him. On reaching the base of the hill of the Virginia state capitol building, the party took a rest from the heat. One elderly black man, dressed in rags, approached Lincoln from the crowd, removed his hat and bowed with tears of happiness streaming down his face. “May the good Lord bless you, President Linkum [sic],” he said. Lincoln removed his tall hat and bowed silently back, a significant gesture. “It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries,” wrote Coffin. “It was a death shock to chivalry, and a mortal wound to caste.” Standing beside the President, surrounded by sailors and black Richmonders, Porter struggled to describe the scene that day. “Though a simple and humble affair, it impressed me more than anything of the kind I ever witnessed,” Porter later wrote, “it would be necessary to photograph it to understand it.” Others had different opinions of the scene. Coffin observed one white woman living nearby that beheld Lincoln removing his hat and bowing to the crowd, turn her head away “in unspeakable disgust.”¹⁶

Porter, the sailors, and the other officers trying to catch up to Lincoln’s party focused on the safety of the President. “There were men in the crowd who had daggers in their eyes,” wrote Coffin, who noted many suspicious and threatening white Southerners throughout the short walk. “Nothing could have been easier than the destruction of the entire party,” wrote Barnes, who, packed closely among the crowd, tried to drift toward the President. “I saw they were pushed, hustled, and elbowed along without any regard to their persons.” William H. Crook, one of the President’s plainclothes bodyguards, remembered that Lincoln “hated being on his guard and the fact that it was necessary to distrust his fellow Americans saddened him.” Porter, despite the anxiety, moved the party north toward the executive mansion. “I got the 12 seamen with fixed bayonets around the President to keep him from being crushed,” he wrote, noting, however, that “it seemed to me that he had an army of supporters there who could and would defend him against all the world.”¹⁷

With the assistance of a group of U.S. Army cavalry, the party finally trekked the last few yards to the former residence of Jefferson Davis, a simple gray stucco neoclassical mansion. Among the fine furnishings and Victorian decorations in Davis’s former reception room and office, a few of the naval officers in Lincoln’s party noticed paintings of Confederate ironclads and cruisers. The president appeared exhausted.

“Mr. Lincoln walked across the room to the easy chair and sank down in it,” wrote Barnes. “He was pale and haggard, and seemed utterly worn out with fatigue and the excitement of the past hour.” Seated in Davis’s chair, Lincoln made a simple request to no one in particular. “I wonder if I could get a drink of water,” he asked. “He lay back in the chair like a tired man whose nerves had carried him beyond his strength,” noted the naval officer. “There was no triumph in his gesture or attitude,” he wrote of the victorious Commander-in-Chief in the home of the Confederate president. “All he wanted was rest and a drink of water.”¹⁸ 

Soon General Weitzel, along with his chief of staff, General George Foster Shepley, and their retinue joined them. One of the officers procured Davis’s old rye whiskey and fine applejack brandy, which was served by the  Confederate President’s former servants. Toasts were made to the absent owner of the fine house and to President Lincoln. “No wonder the rebels fought so well when they could get such stuff to drink,” noted one of the Army officers. While the officers drank brandy, David Farragut, Porter’s adoptive brother and the Navy’s first admiral, walked into the room to congratulate the President.¹⁹ 

The party then moved to the rear balcony of the mansion. Lincoln, surrounded by Admirals Farragut, Porter, other naval and military officers, looked down at the immense crowd loudly cheering for the liberators. “Owing to great weakness and exhaustion, Mr. Lincoln was unable to give utterance to his feelings and simply bowed his acknowledgement for their kindness,” wrote one sailor. “He came among them unheralded, without pomp or parade,” wrote war correspondent Coffin. “He came not as a conqueror, not with bitterness in his heart, but with kindness.”

Writing years later, Porter reflected on the event. “The time will come,” he wrote, when “the name of Abraham Lincoln—who of his own will struck the shackles from the limbs of four million people—will be honored thousands of years from now as man’s name was never honored before.”²⁰