Day Three
Memorial Day weekend is probably always busy in Washington, D.C., but it was made more so by the presence of tens of thousands of bikers, who rode up and down the city streets–with no apparent single destination, from what I could tell–generating an incessant rumbling noise with their motorcycles. The major attractions would be doubly crowded because it was a Saturday. While Miriam got some important work done on the computer in the room, I left the hotel to run some important errands.
My first chore was to check on the car, parked in a garage on G Street. They had a sign indicating something to the effect that vehicles could not be left over the weekend, or that patrons had to pay every day. The fellow in the booth told me, however, that it was fine to leave it as long as I like and just pay on my way out.
From the garage I walked a few blocks down to try and get tickets to Ford’s Theater – not for a performance, but for the tour and museum. The line in front of the building was quite long, but it was full of people who already had tickets. I asked the National Park Service ranger what to do, and she told me I should see inside if anyone had returned tickets for the day. Luckily, someone had, and we had a scheduled tour of the theater and museum later that afternoon.
On my way back to the hotel I was walking behind a tourist family with three kids. Two girls were throwing a superball back and forth to each other. Not surprisingly, the ball got away from one of the girls and bounced out into the street, which sloped down so that the ball began rolling away. One of the girls, without even looking, began to run directly into the street. Her parents caught her, thank God. Her older brother took off down the sidewalk to grab the ball before it went into a drain, and he came back up with it. The second of the two girls, who had been watching him, began to cross the street after her parents, also without looking. I could not believe how foolishly the whole family was behaving. Though I know it wasn’t what Darwin had in mind, I could not help but think that the concept of natural selection was on display at that moment.
Abraham Lincoln had been on my mind a great deal throughout the summer, and especially on this trip. I was reading David Herbert Donald’s excellent biography at the time, and my former reverence for the great man was turning nearly to idolatry. I was desperate to see places and things associated with Lincoln, and that is what took us that afternoon to Ford’s Theater on 10th Street. Visitors are first led down a narrow staircase to a basement-level museum, which contains many Lincoln-era artifacts, and many items owned and used by the Lincoln family. A shaving mug, in particular, stood out to me as an object that Lincoln would have used on a daily basis.
As you might expect, a great deal of attention is paid at Ford’s Theater to the assassination of President Lincoln, and the exhibits thereto pertaining are both fascinating and disquieting. The conspirators who joined John Wilkes Booth were armed to the teeth, and only their cowardice and incompetence prevented the government from collapsing altogether. Lincoln wasn’t their only target: Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward were on the hit list, as well. Of course, Booth succeeded in killing the only man who mattered, and it is hardly any mystery how he did it. The presidential box in Ford’s Theater is amazingly accessible. It’s impossible to imagine this today, but to reach his box that night (and every previous night he had attended), Lincoln had to walk up a flight of very public stairs, across a very public balcony, and through a door visible to half the audience. He had one guard with him, though having more might not have kept Booth out. He was a famous actor whose work Lincoln knew. He would surely have been admitted. On the other hand, had General and Mrs. Grant accepted the Lincolns’ invitation that night, security would have been much tighter, with army guards stationed inside and outside the box. Alas, Mary Todd Lincoln’s jealous tirades had appalled Julia Grant, and she wanted nothing more to do with Mrs. Lincoln. In a glass case in the Ford’s Theater museum, the tiny single-shot pistol that took Abraham Lincoln’s life sits inanimate. No object so small ever caused more harm.
The most meaningful artifact at Ford’s Theater is not a gun, however. It’s a long, black Brooks Brothers overcoat. Abraham Lincoln wore it to Ford’s Theater the night he died, but, more importantly, he wore it a few weeks before, at his second inauguration, where he delivered the greatest address of all time – the speech in which he articulated his hope for “a just and lasting peace”. Stitched inside the silk lining of the frock coat are two embroidered eagles and the words “One Country, One Destiny”. It is amazingly poignant. In the rush to keep up with the museum tour, most visitor’s to Ford’s Theater probably miss seeing that coat in its display case in the lobby. It’s a shame, too, because it plainly symbolizes the beliefs of the man who single-handedly saved the Union. Many other men fought and died in the Civil War, but had anyone else on earth been president of the United States between 1861 and 1865, my visit to Washington, D.C. would have required a passport.
Miriam had a great deal of work to do back at the hotel that afternoon, so I took the opportunity to walk by the White House once again. I had never seen it in daylight. Pennsylvania Avenue is closed in front of the Executive Mansion now, and it is actually hard to imagine that cars were ever allowed to just drive right on by, since the pedestrian traffic alone makes that a bad idea, and the short distance from the road to the north portico formerly made an Oklahoma City-type bombing distinctly possible. (Note to Secret Service personnel reading this page because internet-crawling supercomputers flagged it for containing specific word combinations: I love America and am not threatening anything or anyone. Please don’t come to my house.)
Speaking of maniacs, just across the street from the White House is Blair House, a handsome building with a flag hanging from just above the second floor. That is where President Truman lived while the Executive Mansion was being renovated in the late-1940s. One day some crazy Puerto Rican nationalists attacked the house but were repulsed by police, one of whom, Leslie Coffelt, was killed. There is a plaque out front commemorating his sacrifice. Next to Blair House is Lee House, built in 1858. It’s neat to think that when Abraham Lincoln moved to Washington in 1861, he could look across the street from a White House window and see his neighbors’ brand new brick home.
And while standing in front of the White House I couldn’t help but think about the last speech Lincoln ever delivered. It was on 11 April, 1865, less than a week before he died. The War had just ended and the streets of Washington were full of revelers. The president spoke from a second story window to a large crowd assembled out in front of the mansion, which in those days was open to anyone.
He alluded to the presence of the band, and said that our adversary had always claimed one old good tune–”Dixie”–but that he held that on the 8th of April we fairly captured it – in fact, he said, he had submitted the question to the attorney general, who had decided that the tune was our lawful property; and he asked that the band play “Dixie”, which they did. The President then proposed three cheers for General Grant and the officers and men under him, then three for the navy, all of which were given heartily, and the crowd dispersed.
We see the White House on the news every day of our lives, and it is perhaps inevitable that it has mostly come to represent the idea of power, and even government itself. So it is easy, then, to forget that the White House is a physical place – a large house in the middle of a busy city where men both corrupt and incorruptible have lived and worked. Some of these men we think of only as two-dimensional faces on coins and currency; others we forget altogether. We will never forget Abraham Lincoln. He is, in a way, immortal – the embodiment of wisdom, virtue, honesty, and honor, and everything we wish America itself could be. But Lincoln was a living, breathing man who, like all of us, had his own flaws. We needn’t mythologize him. On the contrary, Lincoln’s greatness stems not from some inherent perfection, but from his capacity for personal growth. The man who had once said that he would let slavery be if it would save the Union later came to believe that the War must be about “a new birth of freedom”, and rejected Confederate proposals to rejoin the Union with slavery intact. He worked diligently to ensure the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. “I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views”, he said. And when his true views made him profoundly unpopular he said, “I desire so to conduct the affairs of this administration that if at the end, when I come to lay down the reins of power, I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall at least have one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside me”. Abraham Lincoln was a living, breathing man, and his last home was the large white house in the middle of a busy city.
Filed under: Dana Heritage Project, History, Travel on August 31st, 2010 | No Comments »
We checked in to the DoubleTree at dusk. If it wasn’t as opulent as the Willard, it was at least clean. It had the usual frills, like flowers in the lobby, but it also had an indoor pool right in the middle of the building. That was neat. Our room had two beds and a tidy bathroom. As was the case everywhere we went this trip, we barely stayed in our room five minutes–long enough to put our bags down and wash up–before heading back out to have fun.
Charlottesville is a university town, and it shares many of the traits common to university towns: a young population; a large, centrally-located campus; a small, charming downtown; abundant pizza restaurants; etc. We drove around just looking at stuff before parking the car and walking to the pedestrian-only Main Street. It was obviously once open to traffic, but now is an enchanting brick mall dotted with tables, benches, and planters, with shops and restaurants lining either side. We spotted two movie theaters, two ice cream shops, numerous bookstores and clothing shops. There was even a stationary store and a store for crazy cat ladies.
The campus of the University of Virginia is handsome, complete with the requisite number of statues, athletic facilities, and brick buildings to make it identifiably collegiate. But unlike any other campus in America, the University of Virginia is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was designed by Thomas Jefferson himself, and the older buildings and grounds are charming as can be. It was late in the evening, but we walked all around in spite of Miriam’s “tourist torture”-related foot injury. We came upon two lovers on the steps of the great rotunda. They dispersed when they perceived that I wanted to climb the stairs to see what was up there, and I thought they had run off to a dorm somewhere. But when we were walking back from the other side of the building–the side that faces the great lawn–we perceived that the lovers were, in fact, hiding down in a courtyard. We left them alone.
We went first to breakfast at Cavalier Diner, which was a total mom and pop sort of place. I ate many biscuits. Then Miriam explored a stand-alone Anthropolgie store she had spied the night before. It was huge. We had checked out of our hotel already, so all that was left to do was drive up to Monticello.
