Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [468]
No sooner had the presidential party reached the landing than Lincoln was surrounded by a small group of black laborers shouting, “Bress de Lord!…dere is de great Messiah!…Glory, Hallelujah!” First one and then several others fell on their knees. “Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln said, his voice full of emotion, “that is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The men stood up, joined hands, and began to sing a hymn. The streets, which had been “entirely deserted,” became “suddenly alive” with crowds of black people “tumbling and shouting, from over the hills and from the water-side.”
An ever-growing crowd trailed Lincoln as he walked up the street. “It was a warm day,” Admiral Porter noted, and Lincoln, whose tall figure “overtopped every man there,” was easily visible. From the windows of the houses along the two-mile route, hundreds of white faces looked on with curiosity at the lanky figure, “walking with his usual long, careless stride, and looking about with an interested air and taking in everything.”
Lincoln’s bodyguard was relieved when they finally reached the safety of General Weitzel’s headquarters, for he thought he had glimpsed a figure in Confederate uniform pointing a gun at Lincoln from a window along the route. Weitzel and his officers had occupied the stucco mansion that Jefferson Davis had abandoned only two days earlier. Captain Barnes recalled that when Lincoln walked into the “comfortably furnished” office of the Confederate president, he crossed the room “to the easy chair and sank down in it.” To all present, it seemed “a supreme moment,” but Lincoln betrayed no sense of exaltation or triumph. His first words, softly spoken, were simply to ask for a glass of water. The water was promptly supplied, along with a bottle of whiskey. An old black servant still at his post told them that “Mrs. Davis had ordered him to have the house in good condition for the Yankees.”
Lincoln had already toured the mansion, seeming “interested in everything,” and had met with the members of General Weitzel’s staff, when the Confederate assistant secretary of war, John Campbell, arrived to see him. Lincoln welcomed Campbell, whom he had met two months earlier at the Hampton Roads Conference. While the details of their conversation were later disputed, it appears that Lincoln, still fearing that Lee might engage in a final battle, agreed to allow the Virginia legislature to convene, on the understanding that they would repeal the order of secession and remove the state’s troops from the war.
Riding through the city that afternoon in an open carriage, the president and his entourage found the Confederate statehouse “in dreadful disorder, signs of a sudden and unexpected flight; members’ tables were upset, bales of Confederate scrip were lying about the floor, and many official documents of some value were scattered about.” When they finally returned to the flagship, both Admiral Porter and William Crook were greatly relieved. Having worried all day about Lincoln’s safety, Crook later wrote that it was “nothing short of miraculous that some attempt on [Lincoln’s] life was not made. It is to the everlasting glory of the South that he was permitted to come and go in peace.”
As Lincoln rested on the Malvern that night, all the public buildings in the nation’s capital were illuminated by order of the secretary of state. “The city was all alight with rockets, fireworks, and illuminations of every description,” observed Noah Brooks, “the streets being one blaze of glory.” It seemed “the entire population of Washington” had poured into the streets to share in the triumph and view the brilliant spectacle produced by “thousands of lighted candles.”
Though Seward joined in the glorious celebrations, he continued to