_Flight of Jeff. Davis from Richmond.--Visit of President Lincoln to the
Rebel Capital.--Welcome by the Blacks.--Surrender of Gen. Lee.--Death of
Abraham Lincoln.--The Nation in Tears._
Jefferson Davis and his cabinet had hastily quitted Richmond, on
Sunday, the third day of April, 1865; the Union troops had taken
possession the day following; and Abraham Lincoln, President of the
United States, and the best-hated man by the rebels, entered the city a
short time after. For the following account of the President’s visit, I
am indebted to a correspondent of “The Boston Journal:”
“I was standing upon the bank of the river, viewing the scene of
desolation, when a boat, pulled by twelve sailors, came up stream. It
contained President Lincoln and his son, Admiral Porter, Capt. Penrose
of the army, Capt. A. H. Adams of the navy, Lieut. W. W. Clements of the
signal corps. Somehow the negroes on the bank of the river ascertained
that the tall man wearing the black hat was President Lincoln. There was
a sudden shout. An officer who had just picked up fifty negroes to do
work on the dock found himself alone. They left work, and crowded round
the President. As he approached, I said to a colored woman,--
“‘There is the man who made you free.’
“‘What, massa?’
“‘That is President Lincoln.’
“‘Dat President Linkum?’
“‘Yes.’
“She gazed at him a moment, clapped her hands, and jumped straight up
and down, shouting, ‘Glory, glory, glory!’ till her voice was lost in a
universal cheer.
“There was no carriage near; so the President, leading his son, walked
three-quarters of a mile up to Gen. Weitzel’s headquarters,--Jeff.
Davis’s mansion. What a spectacle it was! Such a hurly-burly, such wild,
indescribable, ecstatic joy I never witnessed. A colored man acted as
guide. Six sailors, wearing their round blue caps and short jackets and
bagging pants, with navy carbines, were the advance-guard. Then came the
President and Admiral Porter, flanked by the officers accompanying
him, and the correspondent of ‘The Journal;’ then six more sailors with
carbines,--twenty of us all told,--amid a surging mass of men, women,
and children, black, white, and yellow, running, shouting, dancing,
swinging their caps, bonnets, and handkerchiefs. The soldiers saw him,
and swelled the crowd, cheering in wild enthusiasm. All could see him,
he was so tall, so conspicuous.
“One colored woman, standing in a doorway as the president passed along
the sidewalk, shouted, ‘Thank you, dear Jesus, for this! thank you,
Jesus!’ Another standing by her side was clapping her hands, and
shouting, ‘Bless de Lord!’
“A colored woman snatched her bonnet from her head, and whirled it in
the air, screaming with all her might, ‘God bless you, Massa Linkum!’
“A few white women looking out from the houses waved their
handkerchiefs. One lady in a large and elegant building looked a while,
and turned away her head as if it was a disgusting sight.
“President Lincoln walked in silence, acknowledging the salutes of
officers and soldiers, and of the citizens, black and white. It was the
man of the people among the people. It was the great deliverer meeting
the delivered. Yesterday morning the majority of the thousands who
crowded the streets and hindered our advance were slaves: now they were
free, and beholding him who had given them their liberty.”
On the 9th of the same month, Gen. Lee, with his whole army, surrendered
to Gen. Grant; and thus fell the Southern Confederacy, the enemy of the
negro and of Republican government. The people of the North, already
tired of the war, at once gave themselves up to rejoicing all over the
free States.
But the time of merry-making was doomed to be short; for slavery, the
cause of the Rebellion, was dying hard. The tyrants of the South, so
long accustomed to rule, were now determined to ruin. Slavery must have
its victim. If it could not conquer, it must at least die an honorable
death; and nothing could give it more satisfaction than to commit some
great crime in its last struggles.
Therefore the death of Abraham Lincoln by the hand of an assassin
was but the work of slavery. It murdered Lovejoy at Alton, it slowly
assassinated Torrey in a Maryland prison, it struck down Sumner in the
Senate, it had taken the lives, by starvation, of hundreds at Anderson,
Richmond, and Salisbury; why spare the great liberator?
President Lincoln fell a sacrifice to his country’s salvation as
absolutely and palpably, as though he had been struck down while leading
an assault on the ramparts of Petersburg. The wretch who killed him was
impelled by no private malice, but imagined himself an avenger of that
downcast idol, which, disliking to be known simply as slavery, styles
itself “The South.” He was murdered, not that slavery might live; but
that it might bring down its most conspicuous enemy in its fall.
The tears of four millions of slaves whom he had liberated, five hundred
thousand free blacks whose future condition he had made better, and the
twenty millions of whites in the free States, stricken as they never had
been before by the death of a single individual, followed his body to
the grave. No nation ever mourned more sincerely the loss of its head
than did the people of the United States that of President Lincoln. We
all love his memory still.
“His name is not a sculptured thing, where old Renown has reared
Her marble in the wilderness, by smoke of battle seared;
But graven on life-leaping hearts, where _Freedom’s_ banners wave,
It gleams to bid the tyrant back, and _loose the fettered slave_.”
Faults he had; but we forget them all in his death. It seemed to us that
God had raised this man up to do a great work; and when he had finished
his mission, flushed with success over the enemies of his country, while
the peals of exultation for the accomplishment of the noble deed were
yet ringing in his ears, and while our hearts were palpitating more
generously for him, he permitted him to fall, that we should be humbled,
and learn our own weakness, and be taught to put more dependence in the
ruler of the universe than in man.
‘So sleep the good, who sink to rest
By all their country’s wishes blest.
When Spring with dewy fingers cold
Returns to deck their hallowed mould,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy’s feet have ever trod:
By forms unseen, their dirge is sung;
By fairy hands, their knell is rung;
There Honor comes, a pilgrim gray,
To bless the turf that wraps their clay;
And Freedom shall a while repair,
To dwell a weeping hermit there.”