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bayonets, where, although nearly stifled with dust, she gracefully presented her bouquet to the President and made a neat little speech, while he held her hand…There was a card on the bouquet with these simple words: ‘From Eva to the Liberator of the slaves.’ ”
    Porter spotted a sole cavalryman and called out to him: “Go to the general, and tell him to send a military escort here to guard the president and get him through this crowd!”
    “Is that old Abe?” the trooper asked, before galloping off.
    Thomas Thatcher Graves, aide-de-camp on the staff of General Weitzel, approached the president and his group, and Lincoln asked him, “Is it far to President Davis’s house?”
    Graves accompanied the president to the Confederate White House. “At the Davis house, [Lincoln] was shown into a receptionroom, with the remark that the housekeeper had said that the room was President Davis’s office. [It was Davis’s first-floor study, not his second-floor office.] As he seated himself he remarked, ‘This must have been President Davis’s chair,’ and, crossing his legs, he looked far off with a serious, dreamy expression.”
    This was the closest Lincoln had ever come to Jefferson Davis during the war. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, and not Davis, had represented the Confederacy at the Hampton Roads peace conference in February 1865, where Stephens and Lincoln discussed how to end the war.
    Lincoln knew the Confederate president had been in this room no more than thirty-six hours earlier. As one witness remembered, Lincoln “lay back in the chair like a tired man whose nerves had carried him beyond his strength.” The journalist Charles C. Coffin observed on the president’s face a “look of unutterable weariness, as if his spirit, energy and animating force were wholly exhausted.” Sitting in the quiet study of the Confederate president, perhaps Lincoln weighed the cost—more than 620,000 American lives—paid to get there. He did not speak. Then he requested a glass of water.
    I t is not surprising that the paths of the two presidents had not crossed before the Civil War, even though they both had lived briefly in Washington, D.C., at the same time. Davis and Lincoln lived very different lives and moved in different circles. Lincoln became a giant, but in antebellum America he was considered inferior to Jefferson Davis in education, social status, military and political experience, national reputation, influence, fame, and prospects. Indeed, before Lincoln’s run for Senate and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, few Americans north or south knew anything about him. Many had never heard the name Abraham Lincoln. Most knew the name of Jefferson Davis, a man who many people expected would be a future president of the United States. Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, Lincoln’s fame obscures Jefferson Davis. Davis’s presidency of a slave empire that fought the deadliest war in American history has tainted, even swept away, the memory of anything that was good about him.
    Davis is often remembered as a grotesque caricature: a humorless, arrogant, inflexible, racist, slave-owning traitor who tried to overthrow the Constitution but failed to win Southern independence and who then vanished from history. In reputation, Lincoln and Davis stand as polar opposites, as emancipator and slave master, as two men who could not have been more different from each other. The truth is more complex. In some ways, Lincoln and Davis had nothing in common. In others, some profound, they shared striking similarities and experiences.
    Born in 1808, Jefferson Davis attended private academies and universities, and then, with the sponsorship of his prosperous older brother, Joseph, attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was a fine equestrian, and he cut a splendid, elegant figure in the saddle. Serving as an army officer on the western frontier, he undertook long and arduous