Case 002: The Real Odyssey

Exhibit A · Folio 1 of 5

The Long Sea

Odysseus spent ten years at war and ten more getting home. Lincoln compressed the whole voyage into four: a storm that never broke, navigated nightly from a cramped room in the War Department's telegraph office, where he read casualty reports the way a captain reads weather.

He practically lived in that room. It was quiet, it had the wires, and it was where, in the summer of 1862, between dispatches, he drafted much of the Emancipation Proclamation, writing a few lines at a time and locking the pages in a desk drawer between visits. The clerks watched the most consequential document of the century assembled like a ship in a bottle.

★ American Oddity

Homer's first word for Odysseus is polytropos, "the man of many turns." Ask anyone who ever tried to out-argue Lincoln, the storytelling prairie lawyer with a joke for every ambush: the epithet was already taken, and it fit.

Exhibit B · Folio 2 of 5

The Siren Ledge

July 1864. Confederate general Jubal Early's raiders reached the outskirts of Washington itself, and the President rode out to Fort Stevens to watch the fighting. Then, like a sailor leaning toward the sirens, he stood up on the parapet. In the tall hat. In range.

Bullets were striking the earthworks; an officer standing near him was hit. Tradition holds that a young Union captain, later Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., yelled at the silhouetted Commander-in-Chief words to the effect of "Get down, you fool!" Lincoln got down. He remains the only sitting American president to come under direct enemy fire in combat.

Exhibit C · Folio 3 of 5

Into Fallen Troy

April 4, 1865. Richmond, the Confederate capital, had fallen two days earlier and was still smoking. Odysseus entered Troy hidden in a wooden horse. Lincoln entered Richmond on foot, escorted by a handful of sailors, holding the hand of his twelve-year-old son Tad, whose birthday it was.

Freedpeople crowded the streets to touch him; he asked them not to kneel. Then he walked into the Confederate White House, sat down quietly in Jefferson Davis's own chair and asked for a glass of water. No speech. No trophy. The most understated sacking of an enemy capital in the history of war.

Exhibit D · Folio 4 of 5

What the Wanderer Carried

Every sailor's pockets tell the voyage. On the night of April 14, 1865, at Ford's Theatre, Lincoln's pockets held: two pairs of spectacles, a lens polisher, a pocketknife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, and a brown leather wallet containing a Confederate five-dollar note and nine newspaper clippings.

The clippings all praised him. The most powerful man in America, days after winning the war, still carried paper proof that somebody, somewhere, thought he was doing a good job. The contents survive at the Library of Congress, the humblest treasure any epic hero ever carried home.

Flat lay of Lincoln's pocket contents: two pairs of spectacles, a pocketknife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, a brown leather wallet, a Confederate five-dollar note, and nine folded newspaper clippings — Exhibit DWhat the wanderer carried

Exhibit E · Folio 5 of 5

The Homecoming Denied

Here the two stories part. Odysseus, after twenty years, made it home. Lincoln was killed five days after Appomattox, the sailor shot in sight of the harbor. The epic he lived got the crueler ending, which may be why America keeps retelling it.

That is the man on the Lincoln The Odyssey design: the prairie captain in the bronze helmet. Not a costume; a citation. He earned the epithet the hard way: many turns, one course.

"With malice toward none, with charity for all... let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds." — Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865

The Full Record

Abraham Lincoln's Civil War Odyssey: Fort Stevens, Richmond, and the Contents of His Pockets

Abraham Lincoln's presidency (1861–1865) spanned the whole of the American Civil War, and three episodes from its final year give it the shape of a classical epic: his exposure to enemy fire at the Battle of Fort Stevens, his walk through the fallen Confederate capital of Richmond, and the personal effects he carried on the night of his assassination, objects that survive today in the Library of Congress.

The telegraph office and the Emancipation Proclamation

Lincoln spent more of his presidency in the War Department's telegraph office, adjacent to the White House, than in almost any other workplace. According to the memoir of cipher-operator David Homer Bates (Lincoln in the Telegraph Office, 1907), Lincoln drafted much of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation there during the summer of 1862, writing incrementally and leaving the manuscript in the telegraph office desk between sessions.

Under fire at Fort Stevens (July 11–12, 1864)

During Confederate general Jubal A. Early's raid on Washington, Lincoln visited Fort Stevens, part of the capital's ring of defenses, while it was under attack. Standing on the parapet in full view of Confederate sharpshooters, an officer near him wounded, he became the only sitting U.S. president to come under direct enemy fire in combat. A long-standing tradition attributes to Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, the shout of "Get down, you fool!" The quotation is traditional rather than documented, but Lincoln's presence under fire is well attested.

Richmond, April 4, 1865

Two days after Confederate forces evacuated Richmond, Lincoln toured the burning city accompanied by his son Thomas ("Tad"), on the boy's twelfth birthday, and a small naval escort from the USS Malvern. Crowds of newly freed African Americans surrounded him; eyewitness accounts record Lincoln telling those who knelt to kneel only to God. At the Confederate executive mansion he sat briefly at Jefferson Davis's desk and requested a glass of water. He was assassinated ten days later, on April 14, 1865, five days after Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

The pocket contents at the Library of Congress

The items Lincoln carried at Ford's Theatre were kept by his family and given to the Library of Congress in 1937: two pairs of spectacles, a lens polisher, a pocketknife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, and a brown leather wallet containing a five-dollar Confederate note and nine newspaper clippings, several of which comment favorably on Lincoln and his policies. The Library first exhibited the collection in 1976.

Why "Odyssey"?

Homer's Odyssey opens by calling its hero polytropos, "the man of many turns." Lincoln's contemporaries described the same quality: the storyteller's indirection, the tactician's patience, the sailor's endurance of a storm he could not shorten. The parallel breaks only at the end. Odysseus reached Ithaca; Lincoln was denied the homecoming, killed within days of the war's effective end.

Sources & further reading

Bates, D. H. (1907). Lincoln in the Telegraph Office. The Century Co.
Library of Congress: "Contents of Abraham Lincoln's Pockets on the Evening of His Assassination" (Manuscript Division).
National Park Service: Fort Stevens, Civil War Defenses of Washington.
Cooling, B. F. (1989). Jubal Early's Raid on Washington.
Goodwin, D. K. (2005). Team of Rivals. Richmond visit, April 1865.
Lincoln, A. (1865). Second Inaugural Address.

The Real Odyssey