Not, alas a
National Holiday, and perhaps not in the interest of national unity, but I may go out and get a bottle of Rebel Yell today.
Even before Lee's surrender at Appomattox, it was clear that the Confederacy had been beaten. A few days earlier, Lincoln himself had visited the vacated Confederate capital and performed an act that cemented the rebellion's absolute defeat, if only symbolically: On April 4, 1865, Lincoln calmly strolled through the streets of the recently captured city and proceeded to sit at the desk of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, who had fled the city just days before....
Confederate forces had evacuated their capital two days prior to Lincoln's visit. Ignoring the danger of possible assassins hiding in the city, Lincoln headed directly to Richmond to prove to the Confederates that their capital had fallen and to show that law and order would be re-established in southern cities brought back into the Union fold.
He received a hero's welcome: As soon as Lincoln landed in Richmond, mobs of "negroes and poor whites" rushed towards the president, according to accompanying Union Admiral David D. Porter. "They all wanted to shake hands with Mr. Lincoln or his coat tail or even to kneel down and kiss his boots!"
Pushing through the crush, Lincoln and his entourage made their way to the Confederate White House. The house was empty except for an elderly caretaker.
Inside the house, Lincoln "took a seat in the reception room that also had served as the office of the Confederate president," William C. Harris writes in his biography Lincoln's Last Months.
There's little in warfare that's more humiliating than an enemy leader marching into a vanquished rival's seat of power, literally, in this case. But Lincoln was already thinking about how he could heal the deep national scar that the war had opened.