When Lincoln Returned to Richmond, Part II

No one knows why Lincoln came to Richmond. On April 4, 1865, the correspondent from the New York Herald, William Merriam, filed a report with a Richmond dateline.

“No incident of all this drama”–he meant the four years of civil war–“will so attract and fix the attention of the American people and the civilized world as the appearance to-day in the city of Richmond–erased capital of the infernal traitors–of Abraham Lincoln.”

Unlike most journalists’ predictions, this one proved to be almost accurate. Other memorable episodes from the war are more packed with incident, more gripping in their violence or pathos. In most full-dress histories, however, Lincoln’s visit to Richmond stands as the perfect punctuation at the close of the grand narrative, a lingering grace note in the coda of the war, a final eloquent gesture made by the martyr before he leaves the stage. Lincoln in Richmond, wrote James McPherson in “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “produced the most unforgettable scenes of this unforgettable war.”

Yet why did he come? In their ten-volume biography of Lincoln, his secretaries Nicolay and Hay described the visit in the grandest terms: “Never in the history of the world did the head of a mighty nation enter the chief city of the insurgents in such humbleness.” But even they didn’t hazard a guess to explain why Lincoln would risk his own safety, and that of his son, in such an excursion. Mere curiosity is a plausible motive; Lincoln always had a fascination with military maneuvers, and the prospect of seeing the vanquished capital might have proved too much to resist.

The war was in its final hours. He had left Washington a week before to visit Ulysses S. Grant at City Point, Virginia, a river port 30 miles downstream of the Confederate capital, from which vantage he could watch at close range the final progress of federal forces. Dislodged from their defenses at Petersburg, south of Richmond, Robert E. Lee’s ragged troops zigzagged their way west, in a final attempt to twist free of the enemy. On Sunday, April 2, Jefferson Davis ordered the government to evacuate the capital. That night detonation squads spread along the waterfront, torching warehouses filled with tobacco and munitions. From across the James River a northerly wind picked up the flames and carried them beyond the warehouses. By daybreak, when Union troops arrived to extinguish the blaze, more than half the business district was gone.

From City Point the next evening, Lincoln telegraphed Edwin Stanton, his secretary of war: “It is certain now that Richmond is in our hands. I think I will go there tomorrow.” And to calm the skittish Stanton, who fretted always for Lincoln’s safety, he added: “I will take care of myself.”

Dozens of armed guards were assigned to make sure that he did. Early Tuesday morning they loaded onto a flotilla that included the River Queen, the steamer carrying the presidential party of Lincoln, Tad, and his guide, the naval commander David Porter. They quickly ran into trouble. The Confederates had sown the James with mines and other snares, and one by one the boats ran aground or were abandoned. By the time they reached Richmond, Lincoln and his party had transferred to a scow, with fewer than a dozen marines to row them ashore. They made landfall at Rocketts Landing, on the east end of the charred city, a couple of miles from the Capitol grounds.

For an event so freighted with history, whose symbolic importance was grasped by its witnesses even as it happened, we know for certain remarkably little about Lincoln’s time in Richmond. That hasn’t kept later generations from speaking about it with great conviction. For Lincoln’s admirers the visit is further evidence of their man’s large-heartedness. For his detractors it demonstrates a conqueror’s arrogance.

No photographs were taken of Lincoln in Richmond, and no sketches made from life by the magazine artists who sometimes appeared serendipitously at key moments of the Civil War, and the most complete eyewitness accounts are from the embellishing and unreliable pens of Northern newspapermen, like Merriam, who followed the Union troops into the Confederate capital. Their accounts differ in specifics and vary in plausibility. They disagree even on what time of day Lincoln came ashore. One episode, first put on paper by Admiral Porter in a memoir published 20 years later, is invariably included in histories that mention the visit, in both plain and enhanced versions. Lincoln steps off the barge at Rocketts and is spotted at once by an “aged Negro.”

“Bress de Lord, dere is the great messiah!” the old man is quoted as saying, kneeling before his savior, sounding suspiciously like a dispatcher for the Amos and Andy cab company. “He’s bin in my heart fo’ long years an’ he’s cum at las’ to free his children from bondage! I know dat I am free, for I seen Father Abraham. Glory, Hallelujah!”

Lincoln’s response is a mouthful, but it’s worth quoting entire, if only to show how quickly the unlikely congeals into fact, when circumstances are right, and then fact into myth.

“Don’t kneel to me,” Lincoln is said to have said. “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 citizen of this Republic.”

We do not climb out on a limb, historiographically, if we conclude that this incident, recorded with stenographic precision, is baloney. The same can be said of several other episodes reported then and later in the Yankee newspapers. No military escort or even a carriage greeted Lincoln at Rocketts–it’s unclear why–and so he set off by foot, with his son in hand, on a two mile trek to the White House of the Confederacy, which now served as Occupation Headquarters but had also, only 36 hours before, been Davis’s home. Along the route Lincoln stopped at the notorious Libby Prison, emptied at last of the Union officers who had suffered there for half the war. One correspondent told his readers he’d seen Lincoln linger at the building with “tears pouring down his cheeks,” though he must have been the only witness, since no other account mentions this moving detail.

Rising up the hill from the wharves, acre after acre of the city still guttered and smoked. And as Lincoln and his party picked their way through the blackened timbers of the business district, word of his presence spread and a crowd gathered around him–jubilant blacks, mostly, freedmen who were now freshly minted citizens of liberated Richmond. On some facts, all accounts agree. The president’s bodyguard–the dozen blue-coated marines from the barge–walked with him in a phalanx, alert to sniperfire or violence from the crowd. There was neither. Only women and children and the elderly were left among the city’s white residents, and they stayed shuttered in their houses, watching Lincoln pass from behind parted curtains. When he reached the White House just beyond the hill where the Capitol sits, the president found a crowd of Union officers spilling out from the mansion onto the front porch and into the back garden. Much of their elation was traceable to the wine and spirits cellar they had discovered below the house. Lincoln climbed onto the porch and moved into the cool of the parlor. Ever the teetotaler, he asked for a glass of water.

After lunch the president received callers. The most significant was Judge John Campbell, the highest ranking civilian left in Richmond, who presented Lincoln with an offer to call the Virginia legislature back to session, whereupon, Judge Campbell said, it would vote to rejoin the Union. Lincoln liked the idea but nothing ever came of it, since Lee’s surrender a few days later made it moot. After his meetings, the president and Tad embarked on a carriage ride around town, then returned to spend the night in a boat at anchor in the James. The next day they sailed down to City Point, and from there to Washington. “He seemed the very personification of supreme satisfaction,” a friend remarked when Lincoln returned to his own White House. Ten days later he belonged to the ages.

WHERE THE CARRIAGE TOOK THEM isn’t known, though some accounts record a tour of the Capitol, and Lincoln wandering the chambers through drifts of Confederate currency, now worthless. Two accounts suggest he gave a speech to the freedmen on the Capitol grounds, at the foot of a statue of Washington on horseback, though if he did no one reported what he said.

What we know of this momentous visit is laced with such empty spaces, and into them later generations poured their own views of the great warrior-statesman who had spent a handful of hours in the capital of his vanquished enemy. The visit with Judge Campbell is taken as the primary evidence that Lincoln traveled to Richmond to hasten the end of the war. But it was Campbell, not Lincoln, who requested the meeting, and Lincoln did little to follow through on its implications. “He came as a friend,” wrote an early historian, “to alleviate sorrow and suffering–to rebuild what had been destroyed.” There’s not much evidence for or against this proposition. The wife of George Pickett, the major general who had led his men in the charge at Gettysburg two years before, later wrote that Lincoln interrupted his tour to stop at her townhouse. Lincoln had been a distant acquaintance of Pickett before the war. Mrs. Pickett greeted the president at the door, she said in her account, and Lincoln admired her new baby, even planted it with a kiss, and briefly exchanged pleasantries about friends in common. No one knows whether this is true either.

As a final instance of history’s endless refractions, I tried to trace the origin of something Brag Bowling had told me–a colorful quote he repeated for many reporters: “Lincoln didn’t come as a healer. He walked into the White House of the Confederacy and plopped down in Jeff Davis’s chair and propped his muddy boots up on Jeff Davis’s desk and said, ‘Hey, we won!’ Some healer.”

It is a vivid detail that you find often in narratives sympathetic to the South, presented as proof of Lincoln’s contempt for his adversaries, a symbol of his desire for their humiliation. Yet no eyewitness account mentions Davis’s chair, or Lincoln’s sitting in it. The detail was first recorded by someone who wasn’t there: the humorist David Locke, who wrote a satirical version of Lincoln’s visit in the voice of his character Petroleum V. Nasby. The chronicles of Nasby were published in Republican newspapers throughout the North. They were also, as it happens, Abraham Lincoln’s favorite reading. In Locke’s columns Nasby is a Southern sympathizer and all-purpose figure of fun; Locke’s audience took Nasby’s every pronouncement ironically, as a mockery of the rebels.

After newspapers boomed word of the president’s visit to Richmond, Locke wrote an account in which his character was appalled by the news. “Lincoln rides into Richmond!” Nasby sputtered in illiterate outrage. “A Illinois rail-splitter, a buffoon, a ape, a goriller, a smutty-joker, sets himself down in President Davis’s cheer!”

Though the fact was often repeated in subsequent accounts, this is the only contemporaneous mention of Lincoln’s sitting in Davis’s chair. It was a fancy detail, a bit of comic invention, meant to mock the Lincoln haters. That it’s now used by them to buttress their case for Lincoln’s arrogance proves that the joke is still on them–but not only on them.

“Victors write the history,” Brag Bowling was telling me, “and when you’ve got a dumbed-down country like we do now, it’s not so hard to make this man appear to be something he clearly wasn’t. But we’re going to start to correct the record right here, right now.”

We were standing in the lobby of the John Marshall Hotel on a Saturday morning a few days after my visit with Mr. Kline, greeting guests as they arrived for the “Lincoln Reconsidered” conference. The Marshall was put up not long after World War One, and it’s still the tallest building in Richmond’s old downtown, though of course there’s not much competition. Within days of the conflagration in April 1865, downtown was on the mend, and before too long terraced rows of shops and townhouses were spreading across the hilltops above the James. Recent decades have been unkind, however, and the Marshall stands now at the edge of a vast acreage of empty storefronts and parking lots, enlivened here and there by random glimmers of commercial life–a hot dog stand, a shoe repair shop, a check cashing service. Especially on a Saturday morning, downtown gives off a defeated air. If someone decided to burn it down again I don’t think anybody would mind.

The Marshall struggles to keep business up. A hardy band of civic-minded entrepreneurs undertook a bottom-to-top renovation a few years ago, working their way up, story by story, and from what I could see, snooping around, they had decided to catch their breath after the third or fourth floor. Our Lincoln conference took place on the mezzanine, in the old ballroom, site of generations of Richmond cotillions and comings-out. It had been freshly painted in a cheerless taupe, and the hotel itself was weirdly quiet. The conference was its only activity. Bowling told me that roughly 300 people had registered for the conference, drawn from more than a dozen states, and none seemed to mind the drowsy, languid air of the setting. For even with modernity’s depredations downtown Richmond is hallowed ground, rich beyond price with associations from the sacred past. Sitting in the Marshall we were only two blocks from Robert E. Lee’s townhouse, where Mrs. Lee had paced the floor in worry over her absent husband and sons, and eight blocks from the White House of the Confederacy, where Lincoln had met with Judge Campbell, and three blocks from the Capitol, where Davis had struggled in vain to staunch his country’s bleeding, and just around the corner from the Presbyterian church where Stonewall Jackson himself had once served as an elder, before his martyrdom at Chancellorsville.

Folding tables had been set out in the lobby, a long one for registration, many others covered in white linen and heaped with stuff for sale. One booklet (“Arm Yourself with the Truth”) had conveniently assembled in a single, at-the-ready volume all of Lincoln’s least attractive remarks on the subject of race, such as his outburst in the Lincoln-Douglas debates: “Negro equality, fudge!”–a comment famous among the Sons and their compatriots, less frequently quoted elsewhere. Next to this stack was a poster for another Lincoln book: “You think our problems began in the Sixties? You’re right: The 1860s!” Said another poster: “What if everything you knew about Lincoln were false?”

The long arm of multiculturalism had extended its reach even into Confederate ranks; I thumbed through such ethnocentric volumes as “The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia” and “The Jewish Confederates.” A man in a dark suit, grinning mysteriously, handed me a card that read: “Who Killed James Forrestal?” Order forms were available for anyone who might want to buy a videotape of the day’s conference: “To change the minds of those filled with misinformation,” read the come-on, “you must be prepared with the truth. Preparation requires study and repetitive ingestion of the facts as presented today.”

There were stacks of rare videos and audio tapes. “‘The Real Lincoln’ Home Study Program” had been designed for home schoolers and college students. “You read a chapter of Dr. DiLorenzo’s groundbreaking book,” the man at the booth said, “then you watch this video in which Dr. DiLorenzo goes over the key points and expands his discussion in new and surprising ways. When you’re done with this aspect, you turn to our ‘Real Lincoln’ home workbook.” He ran his hand over a cream-colored folder from which Lincoln’s face stared out, looking unhappy. “The workbook is where you test and hone your knowledge, with questions prepared especially for that purpose,” the man went on. “Then you return to the book, then the video lecture, and back to the workbook. And so on. It’s a system,” he said, “and we do grant discounts for multiple orders.”

ROUND TABLES FILLED THE BALLROOM. At each seat was a pad of paper and a pen, for note-taking. These got heavy use as the day wore on. The conference-goers were a studious, earnest group, hungry for information. In certain respects, people who really, really hate Abraham Lincoln get a bad rap. The general view of them–when they are acknowledged at all–is of grizzled hillbillies, a few steps out from the hills and hollers, chewing straw and chain-smoking ‘boro Reds. This is inaccurate, in the main. The conference-goers gathered at the Marshall were almost exclusively male, of course, and white, but with their affable demeanor and dress–the suburban weekender’s uniform of expensive sneakers, pastel polo shirts stretched smooth across the belly, khaki trousers pleated in front and cut generously at the rear–they could have been airlifted from the clubhouse of any community golf course in America.

Together they bowed their heads when, only a few minutes behind schedule, an Anglican priest rose to give the invocation. “We ask your aid, oh Heavenly Father,” he said, in a buttery voice, “in prevailing over the liberal historians who would distort our history and destroy our heritage.” Then Bowling introduced himself. He explained to the audience, as he had to me, how appalled he’d been to learn of the Lincoln statue, and how it had inspired him to organize the conference. “So I turned to Dr. DiLorenzo and asked for his help in taking an objective look at Abraham Lincoln,” he said. “In the face of so many facts, we cannot allow this myth to continue.”

Bowling’s remarks were followed, unexpectedly, by a musical interlude, the national debut of a music video made just a week before, as a public protest against Lincoln’s uninvited return to the capital of the Confederacy. “Goin’ Back to Richmond” is a lament in a minor key, written and recorded by a man from Ft. Myers, Florida, named Robert Lloyd. The lights came down and in the front of the ballroom a TV screen brightened to a silver glow. From the speakers came Lloyd’s baritone, trembling with anger and regret. “I hear the voice of Jackson,” Lloyd sang, “calling out my name / ‘Don’t let ole Dixie writhe in shame / Don’t let our children go on wonderin’ / Did their fathers die in vain?'”

The video was filmed in sepia tones, with a herky-jerky handheld camera, the better to suggest antiquity. There were no slithery dancers in it, as in other music videos, no preening guitar players; just old photos of Richmond before and after the fire, along with dour images of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and John C. Calhoun. These bled into one another, then faded in and out, in the tempo of a dirge. Occasionally footage of Civil War reenactors filled the screen. They fired their long-guns, scampered in mock panic across open fields, and pretended to get shot, crumpling horribly before the camera and rolling their eyes heavenward.

“I’ll join hands with my brothers,” Lloyd continued, “And guard this precious land / To you, Mr. Lincoln, we take our stand / You’re still not welcome, now or ever / At least to this loyal Southern man.”

WHEN IT WAS OVER, the man sitting next to me shook his head, much moved, and said, “Whoa.” His first name was Robert. He asked that I not use his last name, because he works for the federal government in Washington. “There’s a lot of political correctness up there,” he said. “They don’t need to know about my interest in Mr. Lincoln.”

He was a small man and very friendly, with thinning, mouse-colored hair and a neatly trimmed mustache and a quick, energetic manner. Before long it became clear that he, like every other Son I’ve spoken to, had read deeply, if not widely, in the nearly limitless literature of the Civil War and its aftermath. During breaks in the conference Robert explained some of what he’d most recently learned. “Objective historians,” he told me, now realized that racism had played a much smaller role in Southern history than previously thought.

“You know why Southern legislators enacted Jim Crow laws after the war?” he asked.

I said I could guess.

“Well,” he said with a friendly smile, “you’d be wrong.”

Southerners accepted Jim Crow only with the greatest reluctance, he told me. Segregation was a response to demands from Northern businessmen following the Civil War.

“The South desperately needed their commerce,” Robert explained, “but the Yankees wouldn’t do any business down here unless the African Americans were kept segregated. The Yankees wouldn’t have anything to do with the black man. And they call the Southerners racist?”

He sat back and folded his arms, case closed. Lincoln haters are touchy on the subject of race; most of them, in my experience, don’t want their Abephobia tied in any way to negrophobia, and in fact they are delighted, for this reason and for reasons of general perversity, to confound expectations by condemning Lincoln as a racist. In the same way, it is important for them to assert that the war Lincoln won was not about slavery. During another break, Robert grabbed a fresh piece of notepaper and diagrammed an econometric model that he had lately unearthed from an academic journal of political economy. It demonstrated, he told me, an ironclad law of social relations: When disparities in income and productivity levels between one region of a nation and another region grow too great, the inequality becomes unsustainable, and the result, as night follows day, is civil war.

“It’s happened time and again throughout world history, to small countries and big countries and young countries and old countries,” he said. Just such a disequilibrium had developed in the United States in the 1850s. He tapped the diagram with the extrasharp point of his pencil. “Right here is the cause of your War Between the States.”

I don’t know how many of the conference-goers would have agreed with Robert on the specifics, but the thrust of his argument–that the war was about brute economic arrangements and the allocation of political spoils–is a common theme among his fellows; so common indeed that it should lay to rest another misconception about the Lincoln haters–that they are romantics, pie-eyed with nostalgia for the lost agrarian South. It’s true that under the gruff exterior of many a Son beats a heart softened by imagined memories of moonbeams and magnolias; but beneath that tearful, nostalgic heart you will find another, even gruffer interior. The despisers see themselves as hard-headed realists, proud to have shaken off the self-serving myths of American history. It is the rest of the country that has succumbed to sentimental delusions, specifically the syrupy legend of Father Abraham, kindly hero to the downtrodden, emancipator of the enslaved. “All the Father Abraham stuff–it’s a fraud,” Robert told me. “You know who’s a big Lincoln buff? Mario Cuomo. All the left-wingers are. Tells you all you need to know.”

THE THEME OF FRAUDULENCE, of a comprehensive scam spanning decades, deluding even most contemporary southerners, is the theme of “The Real Lincoln,” and Thomas DiLorenzo’s clean, uncomplicated articulation of it has ensured his place at the head of what the Lincoln haters call “our movement.” “The Real Lincoln” was one of the top-selling selections of the Conservative Book Club over the last ten years–which is more impressive than it sounds, since this club does know how to move units. A professor at Loyola College in Maryland, DiLorenzo is an economist by training and a libertarian by inclination.

“I’d read a lot of economic history, of course, and I started to read a lot about Lincoln as sort of a hobby,” he told me. “And it became clear to me how deeply Lincoln was involved in the Whig economic program of the early 19th century. The agenda was to centralize political and economic power–government subsidies for big business like the railroads and banks, tariffs for favored industries, what we call ‘corporate welfare’ today. It was really all Lincoln cared about. It’s what he built his political career around. He was a railroad lawyer, a rich one. Certainly he wasn’t interested in slavery. By his own admission, he didn’t even make it an issue till 1854.”

The more DiLorenzo learned about Lincoln–and discovered, for example, that Lincoln was never an abolitionist, and that he was skeptical of enfranchising freed slaves, and that he had in fact advocated colonization of blacks to Central America or to the remotest territories of the American Southwest–the more he realized “there’s this huge con job at the heart of our history.”

“This man was not the saint I was taught about when I was going to public school in western Pennsylvania,” he said. “And it started to dawn on me, the whole Whig platform, all these centralized policies that they hadn’t been able to implement by democratic means in the first 70 years of our history–they were all implemented within the first six months of the war.

“And then, once the war began, it was about consolidating and using that power. Lincoln shut down hundreds of newspapers that dared to criticize him. He suspended habeas corpus. He had at least 18,000 Americans–the estimates vary–he had them thrown into jail on the flimsiest pretexts, or with no pretext at all.”

DiLorenzo’s book isn’t original, but it usefully collects and paraphrases a century’s worth of anti-Lincoln arguments in a brief, up-to-date volume. Its 10 chapters carry such titles as “Lincoln’s Opposition to Racial Equality,” “Was Lincoln a Dictator?” and “The Great Centralizer: Lincoln’s Economic Legacy.” His method of gathering evidence is highly selective; in fact, to tell the truth, the book is a bit of a hatchet job. Every datum is meticulously extracted from its context and then positioned to reflect as poorly on Lincoln as possible. Radical abolitionists, southern racists, political rivals–all are accepted as authoritative sources on Lincoln, so long as their comments are sufficiently hostile; comments the same men may have made to the contrary, or in mitigation, go unmentioned. When Lincoln himself is quoted disparaging blacks, as in the Lincoln-Douglas debate in Charleston, Illinois, DiLorenzo takes him at his word; Lincoln’s comments in the same debate in favor of black equality, or against slavery, DiLorenzo dismisses as cynical posturing.

The Lincoln who emerges from this carefully assembled collage is a figure of almost unimaginable depravity. And while the portrait lacks the richness and complexity of good history it is undoubtedly compelling, as grotesques often are. Even for DiLorenzo’s philosophical allies, however, the book’s weaknesses are hard to ignore. Not long after its publication, Richard M. Gamble, a historian at Palm Beach Atlantic University, wrote a blistering notice in the Independent Review, a libertarian journal written, edited, and read by Lincoln skeptics. Calling DiLorenzo “an author of evident courage and ability,” Gamble went on to list, in the course of a few paragraphs, more than 20 errors of fact and citation in the book. “Sad to say,” Gamble wrote, “this catalog of errors is only a sampling. . . . As it stands, ‘The Real Lincoln’ is a travesty of historical method and documentation: exasperating, maddening, and deeply disappointing.” And these are his friends.

HIS FRIENDS IN RICHMOND WERE KINDER. In the ballroom, during breaks, admirers formed queues to grab a word with him. “One of the purposes of a conference like this,” he said, “is to explain how we got to where we are today.” The audience was eager to learn about the past not for the past’s sake, but to better understand what was happening to them and the country today. For a paid-up Lincoln despiser, history is a living thing. And they were not disappointed. The list of horribles rooted in the 1860s was very long: urbanization and the death of agrarian communities, the income tax, the erosion of local authority in the face of federal power, the dissolution of family ties, affirmative action–these are for starters. Donald Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and a well-known scholar in the work of David Hume, gave a dazzling presentation tracing Lincoln’s corrosive effects through our history. “Americans are morally deficient for never having considered the evil of launching the bloodiest war of the 19th century merely to preserve Northern political and economic domination of the continent,” he said. “That failure has kept us from moral and political maturity.”

Clyde Wilson, another star of the movement and a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, worked in an ad hominem mode. National myths, said Wilson, are a necessary part of history and its instruction. When Parson Weems published his fairy tale about George Washington and the cherry tree, he was illustrating a truth for the consumption of children–that Washington’s life was motivated by a commitment to telling the truth. “But the Lincoln myth,” Wilson said, “fails to make a solid connection with what really happened, to draw a connection between what he did and what his supporters say he did.”

The real story of Lincoln’s life, Wilson said, was “shabby and tawdry.” The illegitimate son of a servant girl and a shiftless, no-account father whom he despised, Lincoln grew up to be a terrible father himself, spoiling his children and ignoring their mother. Some evidence–Mary Todd’s accelerating mental deterioration, for example–suggested he might have given his wife syphilis. He had no intellectual interests other than winning legal cases and amassing personal wealth. He sought office primarily to reward political cronies and Big Business clients. Clearly he had a messiah complex, but he was a messiah with no purpose beyond his own aggrandizement; he told smutty jokes. When at last he died, one of his pallbearers bragged that no blacks or Jews were allowed at his funeral. By contrast, it’s just a simple fact that at the funerals of the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Stephens, and of the great Southern general Nathan Bedford Forrest, hundreds of blacks were welcomed . . .

THE VENTILATION in the ballroom was very poor. At lunchtime sandwiches were laid out for the guests in an adjoining meeting room. Politely as I could I turned aside Robert’s invitation to eat with him and went out to get some air. Downtown was deserted. I walked several blocks past empty storefronts looking for someplace to eat. After a while I stumbled on an indoor food court, tucked next to the new convention center, recently opened on the outskirts of downtown.

That Saturday, I quickly discovered, the convention center was playing host to the annual meeting of the Virginia Association for Early Childhood Education. It’s a teachers’ union, and the members were noisily queuing up at Sbarro’s Pizza, Subway, TCBY Yogurt, Taco Bell, Great Steak & Potato Company–America’s great groaning board of starch, sugar, fat, and salt. Looking at them bustling from one counter to the other you might have thought they’d stepped out of a Benetton ad. Nearly all of them were women, and they formed a near-perfect racial mix, a demographer’s dream, an ethnic rainbow, a gorgeous mosaic–whatever the going metaphor is. Everyone wore a name badge decorated with tiny handprints and silhouettes of somersaulting toddlers. Their lunchhour had followed a morning of breakout sessions, workshops, and seminars, with titles like “Banning Superhero Play: Fiddlesticks or Chopsticks,” and “Being a Guide by the Side, Not a Sage on the Stage.” They looked very busy and very happy.

I got a sandwich from Subway and took a seat at one of the round metal tables. Normally I don’t like crowds and noise but for the moment I didn’t mind. Brilliant sunshine flooded into the food court through a skylight far overhead. Rainbow arcs of balloons had been set out, left to sway in the breeze from the air conditioning vents, lending color to the commotion. The tables filled up quickly, and two women asked if they could join me. They told me they were “educators,” which is, of course, the new word for “teachers.” I said I was in Richmond writing an article about history, and the odd ways Americans react to it and use it, and they did their best to look interested.

“History!” one of them said. “Isn’t that fascinating!”

Her friend nodded and chewed her slice of pizza thoughtfully. “History can be such a learning experience,” she said.

We had a nice chat. It was only with some trouble that I forced myself to get up and walk back to the Marshall, and not merely because the sole of my sneaker was stuck in a puddle of old Dr. Pepper.

I didn’t want to go back because I was thinking, “Those guys say they don’t like Lincoln, and they don’t, but this is what they really hate, this right here. The country turned into something they don’t like, and they think Lincoln’s responsible, and they’ll never forgive him for it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” Brag Bowling said later that afternoon, as we stood in the lobby of the John Marshall, watching the conference empty out. “You go down the hill there, down to Tredegar, you’ll see exactly what we’re talking about. Right now they’re down there at the visitor center patting themselves on the back for demonizing the Confederate soldier.”

What’s left of the Tredegar Iron Works, “Mother Arsenal of the South,” sits in a park on the banks of the James, at the foot of downtown, alongside a railroad trestle built long ago to carry numberless tons of ordnance from Tredegar to all points of the Confederacy. Trains still rumble by several times a day, hauling less spectacular cargo. The site chosen for the Lincoln statue lies almost in the trestle’s shadow, at the entrance to the National Battlefield Park Civil War Visitor Center, which is housed in one of a handful of mill buildings to have survived since the foundry’s shuttering in 1957.

Cynthia MacLeod, supervisor of the park, showed me around. The works has been prettified in the park service manner. The brick buildings, long since swept clean of their rusting debris, have been sand-blasted to a rosy brilliance, their windows weatherized, the trim painted a creamy white, and where the beams are exposed they’ve been lacquered till they gleam. The lawns are emerald green and neatly trimmed. As caretaker of our historical resources, the National Park Service is in the business of presenting a tidy past, tricked out as attractively as possible in the ruthless competition for the tourist dollar. Only here and there can you see, as if it were an oversight, some relic suggesting genuine decrepitude and ancient use. There’s an old sluice gate with a creaky wooden wheel that’s set spinning every once in a while, ceremonially. Back beyond the buildings are the tumbledown brick ruins of a water channel, safely fenced off from the tourists, who might hurt themselves if left free to wander near.

I asked MacLeod whether she was surprised by the volume and vehemence of the objections to the Lincoln statue. “Not really,” she said. She’s a mild, imperturbable woman, and seemed quite resolute. “This is an ongoing thing. Something like this is happening lots of places.” For the park service, the Lincoln imbroglio was merely a tributary of a much larger, more comprehensive argument about how to present the Civil War to its visitors. Almost every significant battlefield from the war is in park service custody, along with many other sites, like Tredegar, that are dear to the heart of a buff.

It is a delicate responsibility. For most of its history the park service has reflected an unspoken agreement about the war that has held since the end of Reconstruction. In this social compact the gallantry of the fighting men of both sides was universally stipulated to, while touchier questions about the war’s origin and larger meaning were passed over or left to the disputations of historians and hobbyists.

“There was an implicit pact to let bygones be bygones,” says Harold Holzer, a Lincoln historian who helped bring the Lincoln statue to Richmond. “Both sides agreed not to interfere in one another’s memories.” Was the war a successful struggle against slavery or a futile defense of state sovereignty and limited government? Better to dwell on the human cost, which all could agree was more than the country should ever have borne. Carl Sandburg, in his biography of Lincoln, tells of a Kentucky father who lost two sons in the war, one fighting for the South, the other for the North. He buried them together. Over their graves he placed a marble slab incised with the words: “God knows which was right.”

“When Reconstruction came to an end the movement toward reconciliation commenced,” Allen Sullivant, the Sons’ chief of heritage defense, wrote recently. “The North chose to be magnanimous in victory, content with their success in maintaining the Union. Without their objection, the citizens of the South were able to venerate and remember the heroic actions of their men-at-arms. . . . With the establishment of the national battlefield parks system, parks chose to present the events which took place on those hallowed grounds in a military context which honored the valor of both sides and did not advance (or denigrate) the political or social position of either.”

The veneration of Lincoln, in North and South, was part of the deal, too. But the questions about the war are too large to be forever answered with a sentimental shrug or an averted gaze. Certainly the consensus could not withstand the withering scrutiny of people for whom the particulars of history are too vital to be glossed over. The social compact of a century began to crack 40 years ago, when the centenary celebrations of the war coincided with the civil rights movement, and the breakdown has only accelerated since. A landmark was reached in 1999, when Congress approved a bill, introduced by Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., requiring the park service “to encourage Civil War battle sites to recognize and include in all their public displays . . . the unique role that the institution of slavery played in causing the Civil War.”

MacLeod, not surprisingly, paraphrases the requirement more delicately: “Congress encouraged us to be more inclusive in our presentation of the causes of the war.”

And Brag Bowling, also not surprisingly, puts it less delicately: “What we’ve got now, for the first time in history, is an agency of the federal government decreeing that this one factor, slavery, was the sole, unique cause of the war. The whole point is to make the Confederates look like the bad guys. And if you have another opinion–like, the war had several important causes? You’re out of luck.”

Exhibits at Tredegar are exemplary of the park service’s new method for presenting the war to interested (and more to the point, not-so-interested) visitors. Service historians and curators have imbibed deeply of “social history,” valuing the everyday experience of ordinary people at the expense of the heroic, the martial, or the exciting. Though the Richmond park is one of the world’s largest collections of battlefields–an archipelago of well-preserved woods and fields ranged around an 80-mile circuit–there is remarkably little in the exhibits about combat. The displays are interesting almost despite themselves: homey artifacts like pipes and playing cards, old bottles and cakes of soap, set against panels crowded with clouds of explanatory text. The tone of the text isn’t didactic, certainly not propagandistic. But it is eerily mild. On the introductory placard a visitor reads: “The Confederacy mounted an impressive defense of Richmond and Virginia in the face of enormous obstacles. Always outnumbered, and frequently suffering from shortages of material goods, they nonetheless maintained enviable morale.”

“We’re trying to expand the interpretation beyond the usual who-won, who-lost, who-shot-whom interpretation,” MacLeod told me, walking the broad-plank floor of the old foundry. “We want the human connections, the letters home, the voices of real people.”

She meant “voices” literally. They’re inescapable, floating out from miniature speakers skillfully hidden from view. At every point in the exhibit you hear, or half-hear, the voices of actors reading old letters and diaries, playing again and again on a tape loop. It’s as though a handful of your fellow tourists have finally gone mad and are following you around, repeating themselves endlessly and refusing to shut up. Creepier still, from beneath the murmured words drift up those doleful tunes, played on creaky violins and pitiful flutes–those manic-depressive melodies that the documentarian Ken Burns, through his PBS TV shows, has now made the official soundtrack of American history.

DESPITE WHAT BRAG BOWLING SAID, no one is demonized at Tredegar. The center’s displays are fastidiously inoffensive–history from which the drama has been pressed out, history planed down and smoothed over, made to keep the attention, if at all possible, of people who really don’t care much for history. Only someone for whom history is urgent and personal, a matter of the living present as well as the long ago, will find the exhibits gimmicky and shallow and, in a way hard to explain, disrespectful.

Back outside the foundry, MacLeod showed me where the statue would be placed two weeks later. The statue itself hadn’t yet arrived, but already workmen were paving a little plaza with old stones dug from a nearby canal. It was to sit at ground level, and behind it, MacLeod said, a marble half-wall would curve in a semicircle, bearing the phrase from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds.”

“That, for me, conveys the whole idea,” MacLeod said. “It’s about healing. How could anyone object to healing?”