The Most Magnificent Face And Eye

It is not often I come across a story about Abraham Lincoln I've not heard before, but it happened this morning while reading Barton Swaim's book review column in the WSJ.  Here it is, recounted in full:

On April 8, 1865, Lincoln visited Gen. Grant's headquarters near Richmond and consoled wounded Union soldiers in a field hospital.  When he began walking toward a tent separated from the others, a doctor tried to stop him.  Those, the doctor said, were for wounded Confederates. "That", Lincoln replied, "is just where I do want to go".

There, too, the president spoke peaceably to the wounded.  Years later one of the sick rebels, Col. Henry L. Benbow, recalled Lincoln extending his hand. "Mr President, I said, do you know to whom you offer your hand? 'I do not,' he replied.  Well, I said, you offer it to a Confederate colonel, who has fought you as hard as he could for four years.  'Well', said he, 'I hope a Confederate colonel will not refuse me his hand.'  No sir, I replied, I will not, and I clasped his hand in both mine.  I tell you, sir, he had the most magnificent face and eye that I have ever gazed into.  He had me whipped from the time he first opened his mouth."

Henry Benbow enlisted at the start of the war as captain in the 23rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment which spent most of the war with the Army of Northern Virginia.  Promoted to Colonel in 1862, he was wounded at Second Manassas later that year and again at the Battle of the Crater in July 1864.  Returning to action he was shot through both thighs and captured at Five Forks on April 1, 1865.  The hospital was located at City Point which is where Lincoln met him before returning to Washington later that day.  Released on June 15, Benbow returned to South Carolina where he died in 1907.

While researching Benbow, I came across a clipping from the February 24, 1909 edition of The Manning Times of Manning, South Carolina which is clearly the source of the anecdote recounted in the WSJ column.  In turn, the Times cites Youth's Companion magazine as the original source.  Youth's Companion was a popular children's magazine, published in Boston from 1827 to 1929.  The newspaper goes on report it also heard from a fellow veteran that Benbow had recounted the same story to him.  A couple of other details from the newspaper account:

If he had every walked up and down a Confederate line of battle, there would never have been a battle . . . Not long afterward the news came to us that he was dead, and I turned my face to the wall and wept.