Embracing Lincoln on his 200th birthday

In his lifetime, Abraham Lincoln was vilified in Virginia as a tyrant, a fool and a madman. The Richmond Enquirer labeled him an "illiterate partizan" and a "fanatic." The Richmond Dispatch published a biographical sketch of him under the headline, "A history of the gorilla."

And one of Lincoln's own cousins in Virginia, John Lincoln, on seeing his crops burned by Union Gen. Philip H. Sheridan's troops in 1864, exclaimed in a rage that he would "go out and shoot Cousin Abe."

So the Virginians -- the white Virginians, anyway -- who watched Lincoln walk through a smoldering Richmond on April 4, 1865, two days after Jefferson Davis and his Confederate Cabinet fled by special train to Danville, would be shocked, horrified even, to hear Virginians praising Lincoln today.

And yet they are. Some, perhaps, grudgingly. Nevertheless, the merits of the long-boned man in the stovepipe hat no longer are overlooked in the commonwealth.

Wise, funny, humble, magnanimous -- these are the traits widely attributed to Lincoln as the nation today celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Illinois Rail-Splitter's birthday.

But in the dark days of the Civil War, Virginians conditioned by Southern propaganda and a wartime mind set were blind to those virtues.

His humble beginnings? Merely a disreputable background. His folksy speech? Uncouth. And his bottomless well of humorous anecdotes? Tiresome tales told to bore visitors to the White House.

Lincoln has not changed since then. Virginia has.

"If you look at what children are taught, you see only praise for Abraham Lincoln," said historian Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond. "I would think white Virginians think Abraham Lincoln was the greatest president."

"Virginia by the 100th anniversary of Lincoln's birth had already started coming around to a favorable view of Lincoln," said Phillip Stone, president of Bridgewater College and head of the Lincoln Society of Virginia, purportedly the only organization of its kind in the former Confederacy.

"They never have accepted [Union Gens.] Grant or Sheridan or Sherman, and they probably never will."

. . .

In April 1865, as Lincoln walked through Richmond's streets to the White House of the Confederacy along with his 12-year-old son, Tad, and a small escort of sailors, he experienced freed slaves crowding around him.

Some cried out "Bless the Lord!" and "Thank you, Jesus!"

Today, black Virginians continue to honor his memory. He was Father Abraham, the Great Emancipator. And, though his views on race were less than enlightened, he remains the deliverer from bondage, the bringer of jubilee.

"I know quite a few older [African-Americans] who have a picture of Lincoln, Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. on their wall," said Lauranett Lee, curator of African-American history at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. "He was the president who freed the slaves, very much revered in our schools, our churches and our homes."

Among Southern states, Virginia's relationship with Lincoln is unique. He was born in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, a state that until 1792 was part of the Old Dominion.

His great-grandparents and grandparents were settlers in the Shenandoah Valley, and his father, Thomas Lincoln, was born in a Rockingham County farmhouse on Linville Creek about 1778. The Lincoln Homestead Cemetery still is there.

Another kinsman, Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, was second-in-command to George Washington at Yorktown and received the surrender sword of Cornwallis from the British general's second-in-command.

It was a Virginian -- Robert E. Lee -- to whom Lincoln turned when he became president: Lincoln needed a general to lead a federal army to put down the growing rebellion of Southern states.

Lee, famously, turned down the offer and became the Confederate States of America's leading general, achieving nearly Old Testament status in Virginia.

The words supposedly uttered by John Wilkes Booth, "Sic semper tyrannis!" or, "Thus always to tyrants," after he shot Lincoln in Ford's Theatre, are Virginia's state motto.

And Virginia was the only Confederate state that Lincoln visited during the war. As Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's army pressed Lee and besieged Petersburg, Lincoln rode up the James River on the River Queen, a steamboat attached to Adm. David Porter's ship, the Malvern.

Stopping at City Point, in what today is Hopewell, Lincoln conferred with Grant and, looking forward to the imminent end of the war, told his general that "there must be no hangings; there must be no bloody work."

. . .

Days later, Lee rode to Appomattox to surrender his army, uncertain whether he would be executed as a traitor.

"That Grant would treat him with such tenderness and dignity, it's such a rich scene," historian Jay Winik, author of "April 1865: The Month That Saved America," once noted. "He was carrying out Lincoln's vision at City Point of no bloody work, no hangings."

Lincoln's character was on display again as he stopped in Richmond. After arriving at Rocketts Landing, Lincoln was rowed by 12 sailors to a wharf near Libby Prison, where he stepped out and found no reception committee, only a Northern reporter he recognized, Charles C. Coffin of the Boston Journal.

Coffin described a scene in which a party of 20 -- Lincoln and his boy, 12 sailors with carbines, four naval officers, Coffin and a black guide -- walked toward the house that Jefferson Davis had vacated recently.

As they stepped through the streets, Lincoln "manifested no signs of exultation," his face a mask of "indescribable sadness" as a great column of smoke rose above the destroyed city, Coffin wrote.

Crowds of freed slaves, meanwhile, swelled around him, praising God and blessing Lincoln, "running, shouting, dancing, swinging their caps, bonnets and handkerchiefs."

Lincoln walked in silence. "It was the man of the people among the people," Coffin wrote. "It was the great deliverer meeting the delivered. Yesterday morning the majority of the thousands who crowded the streets and hindered our advances were slaves. Now they were free, beholding him who had given them liberty."

Finally at Jefferson Davis' mansion, Lincoln sat in the Confederate president's chair and relaxed.

. . .

Five days later, April 9, the day Lee surrendered, Lincoln was back in Washington. Five days after that, April 14, he was mortally wounded at Ford's Theatre. He died the next day.

Then came Reconstruction, a harrowing affair for many Southerners who quickly realized they might have fared better if Lincoln had lived.

"In the long run, Virginians as well as everybody else begin to understand that," said William Miller, a scholar at the University of Virginia and author of "Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography."

Though Virginia may understand Lincoln's place in the pantheon of American presidents, the recognition was a long time coming. Not until 1970 did the state Senate salute Lincoln, adjourning on Feb. 12 that year in honor of his birthday. At the time, Virginia was led by A. Linwood Holton Jr., the first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

But if the sentiment toward Lincoln is warm, it's not unanimous. In 2003, as Richmond dedicated a life-size bronze statue of the 16th president and his son on a spot near the James River, protesters on the edges of the ceremony booed and howled.

One placard read, "Long live John Wilkes Booth," and a small plane flying overhead trailed a banner that read, "Sic Semper Tyrannis."

"I was pretty much taken aback by the jeers and hollers and screaming," said Stone, who was there. Stone said it was then that he decided to form the Lincoln Society of Virginia.

The Virginia General Assembly elected not to create a bicentennial commission to honor Lincoln's birthday. But legislators on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Commission plan to deliver floor speeches today to commemorate his 200th birthday.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, meanwhile, has issued a statement extolling Lincoln's courage, hospitality and compassion. "We in Virginia," Kaine wrote, "claim him as a brother."

Today, Stone plans to lead a memorial ceremony at the Lincoln Homestead Cemetery, the 34th consecutive memorial at the Rockingham gravesites that he has organized.

Stone said people in the Shenandoah Valley, once put to the torch by Union troops, are almost unanimously supportive of recognizing Lincoln. In the end, he said, Lincoln's strength of character is greater than any regional hatred.

"We admire in America a person who works out of poverty and becomes something," Stone said. "Lincoln was a rags-to-riches story. And he's also the martyr president -- people don't like trampling on a man who's been shot in the back."

Contact Rex Bowman at (540) 344-3612 or .