The American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia once had a statue depicting Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad sitting on a park bench. As of this writing it is no longer there, and hasn’t been since 2023. So, where is it?
I discussed Lincoln’s trip into Richmond in a previous post, which you can read here. In a nutshell, Lincoln had been visiting Ulysses S. Grant and the troops at City Point, a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Appomattox and James Rivers. When Richmond fell and Jefferson Davis’s government fled south, Lincoln decided to take Tad and visit the city. There he walked from the river to what had been the White House of the Confederacy. Shortly after his visit, Lincoln made his way back to Washington, and Lee surrendered to Grant by the time he got there.
The White House of the Confederacy, along with Tredegar Iron Works and the Appomattox Courthouse building where Lee surrendered, is now the American Civil War Museum (next door to the main location is the Tredegar Pattern Building, still run by the National Park Service as part of its Richmond National Battlefield). The statue of Lincoln and Tad commemorating Lincoln’s visit was installed at the Tredegar site in 2003. Not everyone was happy. In a post on the Lincoln Group of DC’s website, Lincolnian.org, Wendy Swanson noted that:
However, despite this peaceful theme the atmosphere at the statue’s actual dedication, almost twenty years ago on April 5, 2003, was anything but serene. Protestors with pro-Confederate leanings did their best to disrupt the dedication ceremony. Garbed in clothing from the era as well as modern t-shirts containing themes derogatory to the Sixteenth President, the protestors’ presence at the dedication was quite evident. They greeted ceremony attendees with chants and anti-Lincoln signs and slogans. During the ceremony a small plane flew over the crowd, displaying a banner containing words made infamous by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, “Sic semper tyrannis.” There also was a second event held that day to counter the tribute to Lincoln. At Hollywood Cemetery there was a protest vigil at the grave of Jefferson Davis.
While many people were in Gettysburg this week commemorating the Battle of Gettysburg, which occurred July 1-3, 1863, I was in Richmond visiting Tredegar and the Confederate White House. Two and a half years ago the statue of Lincoln and Tad was moved “temporarily” to The Valentine, a Richmond-themed Museum two blocks away. 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.
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, lays – 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 Viriginia State Capitol (you walk past them as you proceed from the equestrian statue of George Washington to the Governor’s Mansion). 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 off after this fall’s election.
There was much more to my trip to Richmond, so expect future posts on the area.
[Photos by David J. Kent, 2025]
Coming in February 2026: Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours
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David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
A major auction of Abraham Lincoln artifacts held May 21, 2025, brought in nearly $8 million dollars. The largest amount for any single item was over $1.5 million (including auction fees) for a pair of blood-stained gloves that Lincoln wore the night of the assassination.
Abraham Lincoln was not happy. He had worked hard to get Zachary Taylor elected as president as a Whig, and yet he was being passed over for the lucrative General Land Office job. Worse, he was being ignored, something the man who had been Whig leader in the Illinois legislature and recent representative to Congress. On May 16, 1849, he made his dissatisfaction with Taylor’s appointment of Justin Butterfield to the Land Office in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln traveled through upstate New York in early 1861 on his way to Washington, DC for his inauguration, stopping in Westfield, Buffalo, Albany, Peekskill, and New York City. Twelve years before, in 1848, he stopped in Buffalo and saw Niagara Falls on his way home between sessions of congress after he toured around eastern Massachusetts giving speeches in support of Zachary Taylor as the Whig nominee for president [Spoiler: Taylor won] In late April of this year, traveled much the same route in northern New York on my way to the Lincoln Forum spring conference at Hildene in Manchester, Vermont.
In 1828, nineteen-year-old Abraham Lincoln and neighbor Allen Gentry made what was the first of Lincoln’s two flatboat trips to New Orleans. Gentry’s father funded the trip. A typical investment required about $75 (over $2000 today) for the flatboat alone. The cargo could be worth over $3000 ($82,000 today). A successful trip could be immensely profitable; an unsuccessful one financially devastating.
On April 10, 1861, two days before the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, Ambrose W. Thompson met with Lincoln to gain support for a coal mining project in the Chiriqui region of the Granadian Confederation (now Panama near the border with Costa Rica). Thompson headed a corporation that had been created to provide coal to the U.S. Navy. Lincoln again relied on Smithsonian Secretary Joseph Henry for scientific advice. Henry wrote to John Peter Lesley, one of the leading geologists in the United States and an expert on coal. In his confidential letter he said he was writing on behalf of President Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward to get Lesley’s opinion on the value of the coal deposit in the Chiriqui district. Interest in the coal was two-fold. It was needed for coal-fired boilers for steam ships and railroad locomotives, but it also offered itself as a possible solution to the likely emancipation of enslaved people. Lincoln and others had hoped that freed slaves (and other free blacks) could be relocated to avoid the problems of a racially mixed society. Should the Chiriqui coal be viable, it could serve as an economic basis for such a colony. Henry asked Lesley to give him “in addition to your opinion derived from general scientific principles any reliable information you may possess relative to this matter.”
The dean of all Abraham Lincoln scholars passed away on March 31, 2025. He was 101. Wayne Calhoun Temple, known to everyone as “Doc,” celebrated his 101st birthday on February 5th.
