Touch the Elbow - Blogging the Civil War

It was real and not imagined. Feet shifted and there was obvious surprise registered on nearly everyone’s face. Mine included. No one seemed quite able what to make of our tour guide. Having averaged over two hundred tours a year for the past seven years, Abdur Ali-Haymes, a retired Army veteran, understands people are going to be puzzled by the fact that an African-American would lead them through the former Executive Mansion of the Confederacy.

Abdur grew up in Richmond. He was 11 years of age when he first walked up the steps and through the doors of the mansion. He remembered the docents seated behind a table in the foyer sat in silence and simply stared at him. This was Richmond, 1961. Blacks didn’t visit the Museum of the Confederacy. Finally, one woman rose and asked if he wanted to take a tour. He said yes and, taking him by the hand, the woman guided him through the exhibits, pointing out and giving him a detailed explanation of each relic. He was back the next Saturday, and the next, and the next, and every Saturday thereafter until graduating from high school. During each visit the same woman would guide him around the house, quizzing him about each object until he knew them all by heart. That same woman, the granddaughter of Robert E. Lee, would be in the audience when he received his high school diploma.

Children may be drawn by curiosity and the notion of acceptance, but Abdur’s story, as he tells it, is part of his lineage and heritage. His great-great grandfather was Colonel William Haymes, a veteran of the Confederate army and a man who fathered six children by Abdur’s great-grandmother. Curiosity drove me to research the Colonel and not to cast doubt or disparage Abdur’s genealogy, the only William Haymes I could find with a record of Confederate service was a Captain with Co. E of the 23rd Virginia Infantry, who after being taken prisoner at Carrick’s Ford, West Virginia on July 13, 1861, was paroled three days later and “sent home.” He was dropped from the Regimental rolls on April 21, 1862. Whether Haymes is Abdur’s ancestor remains to be seen, but if so, then the rank of Colonel may have been honorary, or he may have engaged in partisan warfare against local Unionists or Union troops.

Those facts aside, it was obvious to all that Abdur had a deep abiding affection and reverence for the mansion. He presided over the most dynamic, informative, and passionate presentation of a historical site that I have ever experienced. Quite simply, people left smiling and made a point of shaking his hand as they exited out the front door. In spite of the number of tours he leads each year, which probably involves answering the same questions over and over, it’s equally obvious that each tour is like a new journey for him and he’s eager to share his wealth of information with each visitor.

Each room of the mansion has been meticulously and faithfully restored to the time when the Jefferson Davis family occupied it, including original pieces of furniture and artwork. Even within the last ten years paintings and chairs are still making their way back to the house, donated by private citizens who had those objects in their possession for generations. The dining room, which used to be the Virginia room when the mansion housed the Museum of the Confederacy, recreates a meeting of Davis and Confederate generals around the table, replete with maps and documents. The first floor library houses fewer books than would have been present during the war, as Union troops who occupied the house removed many of the volumes as souvenirs. Abdur is quick to point out, though, that Union troops were respectful of the house during their five year stay. Even Lincoln, who toured the home after the fall of Richmond, showed respect by declining an invitation to the second floor living quarters. It’s interesting to note that Davis and his wife Varina broke with Victorian convention and slept in the same bed. This was in part due to Varina’s desire to be close by and attend to her husband when he experienced one of the blinding headaches that plagued him throughout his life, the result of an infection that left an impaired left eye.

Both White Houses were visited by the tragic deaths of children that catapulted their parents into prolonged periods of mourning. Willie Lincoln succumbed to typhoid fever on February 12, 1862, while perhaps even more tragically five-year-old Joe Davis died on April 30, 1864 after falling through a railing on the second floor portico.

Varina Davis was instrumental in helping to re-open the Executive Mansion as the Museum of the Confederacy in 1896. Davis himself would return to Richmond for a brief period after his 1868 release from Ft. Monroe before removing to Memphis, Tennessee and in 1878 settled in Biloxi, Mississippi. He remained unbowed and unrepentant to the time of his death in New Orleans in 1889.

Its once spacious grounds now having been swallowed up by the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center, there was recent talk of moving the building to another site three miles away. This plan was abandoned, largely due to the prohibitive cost, with estimates for the relocation reaching into the millions, as well as the fear the building would lose its historical designation.

Outside on the front steps of the mansion, I waited to speak to Abdur. When the moment came I shook his hand and thanked him for the tour. He was gracious and thanked me for coming to visit “my house.”