Presidents and First Ladies Trivia

[David Lockmiller]

(09-01-2020 10:48 AM)Gene C Wrote:  There is the great story about how Lincoln turned down the man who asked for the job as doorkeeper.

Which made me wonder, is that a true story?

Gene, is this the story to which you refer?

President Lincoln’s boat trip to Richmond on April 4, 1865:

Soon after leaving City Point the Lincolns found out, if they didn’t already know it, that their excursion carried real risks. The thirty-mile river trip proved surprisingly suspenseful in its own right, as the travelers dodged submerged boats and live “torpedoes” (mines). For the last leg of the journey, Admiral Porter, a renowned veteran of the Civil War Union navy, ended up piloting a narrow barge towed by a tug (so the tug would absorb any explosive hits). But after the tug ran aground, the little group continued in the exposed barge, rowed upstream by twelve sailors. Porter later said he had approved the voyage only after “the channel was reported clear of torpedoes.” He soon found out the report was mistaken. On the way back to City Point the next day he observed all the torpedoes removed from the river after the presidential party had passed by: “the gun-boat people . . . had laid them all out on the banks, where they looked like so many queer fish basking in the sun, of all sizes and shapes.”

In keeping with his usual nonchalance or obliviousness about threats to his own safety, Lincoln voiced no concern about the physical danger, quipping only (in Porter’s later reconstruction of his words) that the sequence of craft—first Porter’s flagship, then the towed barge, finally the rowed barge—reminded him of “a fellow who once came to me to ask for an appointment as minister abroad. Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.” We can bet that Tad found the torpedo threat exhilarating and that his father would have laughed it off, whatever his true feelings, to reassure his son.