Finding Abraham Lincoln in Richmond

By David J. Kent

Washington, DC

Monday, July 7, 2025

Lincoln and Tad

Abraham Lincoln went to Richmond, Virginia, once in his life.

In late March 1865, General Grant had invited Lincoln to City Point (near Petersburg), an offer which Lincoln immediately accepted. He was not alone; Mary insisted on joining him, so a party including Tad Lincoln, a maid, a bodyguard, and a military aide boarded the River Queen on March 23 for the trip. Son Robert, now an adjunct to Grant’s army, met them on their arrival the next evening. Lincoln took time to visit the troops and confer with Generals Grant and Sherman and Admiral David Porter. Overall, it was a restful but productive visit.

That changed when Mary Lincoln flew into a jealous rage at seeing General Ord’s wife riding “too close” to her husband, after which Lincoln sent Mary back to Washington. Soon after her departure, however, the Union captured Richmond, which the Confederate leadership had abandoned. She insisted on returning, this time bringing a large entourage that included her once-enslaved dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley, who had been born in nearby Petersburg.

During Mary’s absence, Lincoln took Tad into Richmond. After landing at the docks, Lincoln and Tad walked the mile or so to the Confederate White House that had served until a few days earlier as Jefferson Davis’s office. Surrounding him along the way were hundreds of formerly enslaved people who wanted to see the “Great Emancipator,” while anxious white southerners stared suspiciously from their windows.

Flash forward to April 5, 2003. The National Park Service (NPS) by this time was running the Tredegar Pattern Building and installed a statue by David Frech featuring Lincoln and Tad resting on a bench. The installation was controversial, which Wendy Swanson discussed in this excellent article last year. In that article, Wendy noted that the statue was being moved to a temporary location at The Valentine, a Richmond-centric museum in downtown Richmond. I decided to seek it out during the July 4th holiday week.

While the Pattern Building is part of NPS's Richmond National Battlefield Park, the main attraction is now the separately run American Civil War Museum next door. During my visit I saw a talk and demonstration of the history of muskets used in the Civil War. Interestingly, the same reenactor - Chuck Young - was my tour guide the next day at the White House of the Confederacy (also part of ACWM, along with the Appomattox site).

Two blocks away is The Valentine. At Tredegar, the statue had its own stone exedra bearing the words from Lincoln’s second inaugural address: To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds. At the Valentine, the statue sits in a small corner outside the building, where it is expected to sit for several years while the National Park Service builds an amphitheater at the Tredegar site. The amphitheater is apparently still under construction, although it looked largely finished and quite impressive during my visit this week.

Jefferson Davis

While at the Valentine, I also got to see another “Civil War President.” A statue of Jefferson Davis had stood for many decades along Monument Avenue in Richmond. During the 2020 protests over the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, the Davis statue was vandalized with paint, then pulled down. That statue now sits – or more accurately, lies – in the Valentine’s main gallery. Pink and yellow paint splatters the bronze, Davis’s head is bashed in from the fall off his pedestal, and his right arm is nearly severed.

The display symbolizes the city’s change in attitude over its prior adulation of Confederate figures. All of its many dozens of Confederate statues have now been removed, with the exception of a few remaining on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol (you walk past them as you proceed from the equestrian statue of George Washington to the Governor’s Mansion).

Barbara Johns

They are now joined by two large group statues, one featuring the many women who fought for voting rights and the other of Barbara Johns and others who fought the battle that would become Brown v. Board of Education. Johns is scheduled to replace Robert E. Lee in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Interestingly, it was Edward Virginius Valentine who had sculpted both the Lee statue (now removed from the hall and currently at Richmond’s Museum of History and Culture) and the one of Davis now at the Valentine Museum. Hopefully, Johns will make it into Statuary Hall soon, perhaps after the new governor takes office after this fall’s election.

(Photos by David J. Kent)