THIRTY-SEVEN
Fire, Fire

Tom Conolly, MP, crosses the bar—Welly!—The last train out—Richmond burns—Grant breaks Lee’s line

Henry Feilden reluctantly accompanied General Hardee as the Confederate army abandoned Charleston on February 17, 1865. “I cannot bear to think of leaving this dear old city which has been defended so long and gloriously,” he wrote sadly to Julia. “I have given our house to an English family who will endeavour to save it for me.” But he warned her, “We are going to see hard times.”¹ His last view of the city before its fall was of golden flames flickering against the night sky as great fires consumed the wharves: the retreating Confederates had deliberately torched the remaining cotton and set fire to ships in the harbor. He was unaware that this “magnificent sight” had led to a horrific tragedy: a large crowd of civilians, mostly women and children, had been foraging in a warehouse that contained a lethal combination of food and gunpowder when it exploded, killing 150 and leaving many more to die in agony.²

Federal troops entered Charleston on February 18 and almost immediately went on the rampage. The contents of the houses, including pianos and four-poster beds, were either plundered or destroyed, depending on the humor and taste of the invaders. Consul Henry Pinckney Walker reappeared and invited any British subjects in the city to register at the consulate, although he did not offer the building as a refuge.³ Some women were not only afraid to leave their houses, but were unable to do so, since looters had stolen their dresses.

It was ten days before Feilden had another opportunity to write. During that time he had not changed his clothes or slept in a real bed. “I do not know how much more we have to endure,” he wrote on the twenty-eighth, “but as far as I am concerned I am a stronger Southern Man at this moment than ever I was before, and I shall not give up till the very last moment.”⁴ His devotion was not a universal feeling among the retreating Confederates. General Hardee had come down with typhus shortly before the order to evacuate and was barely able to walk, let alone inspire courage or fortitude among his demoralized troops. Months of defensive duties had made the soldiers unfit for forced marches, and the struggle through frozen swamps in unceasing downpours caused many to faint with exhaustion. Whole companies disappeared in the darkness.⁵ The officers’ ability to prevent desertion during daylight was hardly more successful, and the small army was losing almost two hundred men a day. Hardee’s destination was a small town north of Wilmington called Fayetteville, in North Carolina, an important supply base for the Confederates. General Johnston—whom Lee had recently reinstated—had ordered all available troops to meet there to make a last stand against Sherman’s advancing forces.

Confederate regiments were already gathering at Fayetteville when Thomas Conolly, an Anglo-Irish MP from County Kildare, Ireland, arrived on March 2. Conolly had invested in the blockade runner Emily II and sailed to Bermuda with her, intending to run the blockade at Wilmington. A less eccentric character might have chosen to return home after the fall of Fort Fisher, but Conolly saw no reason to let a Northern victory get in the way of his visiting “Dixie.” Leaving the Emily II at Nassau, he persuaded Captain Maffitt, who was taking his ship, the Owl, to Havana, to make a slight detour by way of the North Carolina coast and drop him off somewhere near Cape Fear. On February 26, Conolly and two friends climbed into a skiff and rowed through the pouring rain over the sandbar and into the neck of the Shallotte River, some thirty-seven miles north of Wilmington. Soaked to the skin and hungry, they called at several houses until they found someone willing to give them shelter for the night.⁶

It was only after he landed that Conolly learned of General Sherman’s arrival in South Carolina. The news made him drop his plans to tour Charleston in favor of reaching Richmond as quickly as possible. He arrived at Fayetteville on March 2 to find it mobbed with wagons and soldiers. “The bar-room of the large Hotel is crowded with men in uniform, and a fine young fellow, very handsome, is hobbling about on a new wooden leg,” Conolly jotted in his diary. The three travelers passed two days in the town while Conolly tried to negotiate the purchase of a horse. “So we make the best of it,” he wrote, “and order a banjo band and whiskey to our room and ask all the wounded officers about and have a capital evening’s amusement up to 1 o’clock dancing and singing.”⁷ Two days later, they ran into Frank Vizetelly, who obligingly offered to take them to Richmond.

The small party arrived at the capital on March 8. Conolly’s penchant for bright red breeches looked incongruous amid the browns, grays, and deep mourning. “The aspect of Richmond at this time is wretched,” he wrote. “Shops with nothing in them except enough to show how miserably they are run out. Stores with open doors and empty bales and broken up packing cases and dirty straw.” Government clerks were quietly packing their archives in anticipation of having to leave the city. Vizetelly deposited Conolly at the Ballard Hotel and went in search of Francis Lawley. The Ballard was “now miserably furnished, scarcely anything in the bedrooms except the beds and a few broken chairs,” Conolly recorded. The carpets had been torn up and sent to the army for coats. “Almost all the crockery in the Hotel is cracked and broken, and we had to buy 3 tumblers for our room at 25 dollars each.” He was annoyed to discover that a bottle of brandy set him back $60.⁸

The first resident to receive a visit from Conolly was the wife of James Mason, the Confederate commissioner in London. “Plucky dear old Lady,” he wrote. She was nursing her son, James M. Mason, Jr., who was one of the few survivors of a recent skirmish against General Sheridan.⁹ The day had been proclaimed by Davis as one of fasting and prayer, and Conolly confined himself to muffins for tea, followed by oysters and cocktails. During the next few days he attached himself to various generals, his open and liberal purse helping to soften any objections to his presence. His persistence paid off, and on March 13, he received an invitation to supper at the Confederate White House at 9:00 P.M.

Conolly was impressed by President Davis’s calm demeanor. “I never saw quiet determination more strikingly manifest in any person than in Jeff Davis,” he wrote. “His conversation is easy, copious in illustration from foreign countries, and rich and animated!” Varina Davis, on the other hand, was less adept at hiding her true thoughts; though obtuse at times, Conolly knew when he was being put down. “Mrs. Davis is a very different character,” he decided, “a great talker and very bitter. She is calculated to damage any cause however good.”¹⁰

Had Conolly appeared a day later, it is unlikely that the Davises would have invited him to dinner. Lord Russell’s protest to the Confederate commissioners was delivered to Richmond on March 14, the morning after. “Britain gives us a kick while the Federal generals are pounding us,” the War Department clerk John Jones wrote bitterly.¹¹ But by then, Conolly had already left the capital and was being entertained by General Lee at Petersburg. Conolly’s reaction to meeting Lee was similar to Colonel Wolseley’s in 1863. Even in the hour of his greatest trial, Lee still retained an aura of magnificence. “The Hope of His Country is also the handsomest man in all that constitutes the real dignity of man that I ever saw,” wrote Conolly. The general drew the line at allowing Conolly to stay the night, and General Pryor’s wife was prevailed upon to take him in. However, she was quickly won over by Conolly’s charm: “The MP proved a most agreeable guest,” she wrote, “a fine-looking Irish gentleman with an irresistibly humorous, cheery round of talk.”¹² During Conolly’s final dinner at Petersburg, Lee opened a bottle of “very old Madeira.” “Excellent! Just 2 glasses,” wrote Conolly mournfully, not realizing that he had consumed all the vegetables and the only turkey in the mess. After saying goodbye to Lee, who gave him his photograph and a Confederate flag, Conolly braved a storm to attend a party at Petersburg with “some nice young fellows” and a bevy of pretty ladies.

The Confederate Congress was holding what would turn out to be its last session when Conolly returned to Richmond on March 18. Four days earlier, the politicians had agreed to allow owners to volunteer their slaves as soldiers, having voted unanimously “to prosecute the war with the United States until … the independence of the Confederate States shall have been established.” But today the members adjourned with no thought of when they would meet again.¹³ The city was tense and quiet as the residents waited to learn whether General Johnston would stop Sherman’s advance now that Fayetteville had fallen to the Federals. “If Sherman cuts the communication with North Carolina,” wrote John Jones, “no one doubts that this city must be abandoned by Lee’s army.”¹⁴

“We are falling back slowly before Sherman,” Feilden had scribbled in a penciled note to Julia on March 13. “I hope that we may have a victory over this man Sherman. I should like to pursue him from here to South Carolina.”¹⁵ None of the Confederate generals, including Hardee, had expected Sherman to make it through the Carolina swamps so quickly, if at all. The right wing of Sherman’s army was within marching distance of Raleigh, North Carolina’s capital. In desperation, Hardee deployed his outnumbered and weakened forces in a surprise attack against Sherman’s left flank on March 16.

The ambush slowed Sherman just enough for Johnston to organize his army into battle formation at Bentonville, North Carolina. There, for three days, beginning at dawn on March 19, 1865, a force of twenty thousand Confederates struggled against an army three times its size. The disparity between the two armies was exacerbated by the Confederates’ muddled organization, but Johnston suddenly showed his critics that he could fight—and fight hard—when pressed. By March 21 Johnston’s army had suffered more than twenty-five hundred casualties, to the Federals’ fifteen hundred. Feilden was talking to General Hardee when a stray shot struck the tree beside them. The next bullet passed through Feilden’s sleeve “near enough to jar my funny bone” and hit his horse, Billy, in the leg. The wound was just bad enough to prevent him from riding the horse in the next cavalry charge. Hardee’s sixteen-year-old son, Willie, begged to take part, and in the heat of the moment, Hardee nodded his assent and kissed the boy farewell. A short while later, a Texas Ranger brought Willie back, shot through the chest. “He was a mere schoolboy,” wrote Feilden in anguish. “He was as gallant a little fellow as ever fired a musket.” The tragedy made him long to be with Julia: “Oh! My precious one, if we are only spared to meet again, and live together, what happiness it will be,” he wrote. “I don’t care how poor we may be. It will be the greatest blessing this earth can afford us.”¹⁶

After the Battle of Bentonville, Sherman continued his march toward Richmond while the Confederates retreated to Raleigh, North Carolina—Johnston apparently too stunned to consider pursuit. He telegraphed Lee: “Sherman’s course cannot be hindered by the small force I have. I can do no more than annoy him.” Lee realized that in a few days he would be facing the combined forces of Grant, Sheridan, and Sherman, and he began planning the Army of Northern Virginia’s evacuation from Petersburg. He knew that Richmond would then fall to the Federals, but if his army remained intact, the South would still have its fighting capability. On March 25, he launched a surprise attack against the Union Fort Steadman, on the east side of Petersburg, hoping to distract Grant long enough to enable the rest of the Confederate army to retreat southward, toward North Carolina. The assault was an outright disaster, costing Lee four thousand casualties against the Federals’ fifteen hundred, without any weakening of Grant’s line.

Thomas Conolly was in Richmond during the attack, but the news of its failure made no difference to his confidence in the ultimate outcome of the war: “Richmond thy sun is not setting, rather the Day is just about to break over your hero-crested virgin hills!” he wrote in his diary, adding for good measure: “Always darkest before the dawn! What a dawn, Independence!” Late on the twenty-fifth he received a note inviting him to visit Mrs. Mason’s house. “ ‘Welly’ is to be there!” wrote Conolly in surprise, learning for the first time that his friend Lieutenant Llewellyn Traherne Bassett Saunderson, of the British Army’s 11th Hussars, had arrived in the South at the same time as he had, hoping to volunteer on General Lee’s staff.¹⁷

The following day, March 26, Conolly went to church, where the vicar’s sermon put him to sleep; “I hate argument, I like faith much better!” Conolly was oblivious to the fact that the city was emptying around him. Jefferson Davis had overridden his wife’s protests and instructed her to take the family to Charlotte, North Carolina, three hundred miles to the southwest, and to go farther if necessary. Their furniture was sent to auction, and Varina distributed various mementos to friends and servants. Davis also asked his private secretary to accompany the family to safety. He gave Varina all his gold save for one five-dollar piece and a small Colt pistol, which she was to use in the “last extremity.”

CSS Georgia’s former lieutenant James Morgan met the Davis family at the station. In his wildest dreams he had never imagined himself as personal guard to a mother and her small children. When summoned by the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, to the Navy Department, he thought it was for some infraction: “I at once began to think of all my sins of commission and omission. To my surprise, he told me that I was to accompany Mrs. Jefferson Davis south, and added, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, that the daughters of the Secretary of the Treasury [George Trenholm] were to be of the party.” (Morgan had become engaged to Trenholm’s younger daughter, Helen, whom he met in Charleston the night of his introduction to Matthew Fontaine Maury.)

As Morgan observed the parting between Jefferson and Varina, he realized that the Davises were behaving as though it was their final moment together as a family. The two eldest children clung to their father, crying to stay with him. Davis kissed them all again, stroked the baby that lay asleep on a bench, embraced his wife, wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls a safe journey, and walked heavily down the carriage steps. What should have been a six-hour train journey took more than four days. When the creaking train pulled into Charlotte, a furious mob surrounded the carriage:

I closed the open windows of the car so that the ladies could not hear what was being said [recalled Morgan]. We two men were helpless to protect them from the epithets of a crowd of some seventy-five or a hundred blackguards, but we stationed ourselves at the only door which was not locked, determined that they should not enter the car. Colonel Harrison was unarmed, and I had only my sword, and a regulation revolver in the holster hanging from my belt. Several of the most daring of the brutes climbed up the steps, but when Colonel Harrison firmly told them that he would not permit them to enter that car the cowards slunk away. When the disturbance had quieted down Mrs. Davis, her sister, and her children left the train.

The city’s residents were frightened of showing courtesy to Varina and furious with her husband for mismanaging the war. “Mrs. Davis would have been in a sad plight if it had not been for the courage and chivalric courtesy of a Jewish gentleman, a Mr. Weil,” wrote Morgan, “who hospitably invited her to stay at his home until she could make other arrangements. May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless him wherever he is!”¹⁸

Jefferson Davis waited anxiously in the Confederate capital while Lee sought to delay Grant’s encirclement of Petersburg. The Army of Northern Virginia had dwindled to no more than 35,000 men, while Grant’s Army of the Potomac had grown to over 125,000. President Lincoln was less than twenty miles from Richmond, having traveled from Washington on the River Queen to visit Grant’s headquarters at City Point on the James River. (Mary and Tad accompanied him for the first days, but Mary behaved so strangely—raving at the slightest provocation—that she was encouraged to stay in her cabin.) Lincoln’s greatest concern was that peace, which seemed so close now, should not be a pyrrhic victory for the North. “I want no one punished,” he told Sherman and Grant. Their armies were to be restrained from violence or vengeance. When asked about President Davis, Lincoln expressed a wish that the Confederate leader would emigrate, unnoticed and unmolested.

—

Lee and Grant had fought each other over seven hundred square miles of territory since June 9, 1864; more than seventy thousand soldiers had died in nineteen separate battles. Now, the struggle had narrowed to the possession of the Five Forks crossroads, fifteen miles from Petersburg. Lee needed to hold it just long enough for his forces to escape from Petersburg using the Southside Railroad. Tom Conolly was again at Lee’s headquarters, where he watched the general outline the battle plan to his staff, using a stick and a “mud map.” Conolly remained with Lee rather than following Generals Fitz Lee and George Pickett to Five Forks, and he was rewarded with the spectacle of a skirmish between two picket lines:

This pleased [Conolly] so much, [wrote General Wilcox] that he offered his service to me for the coming campaign, and said if I would permit him he would remain with me until its close. I accepted his tender of service, and told him I would make him one of my volunteer aides. He thanked me, and asked if I would let him go under fire. I replied that it would hardly be possible for him to escape being under fire. He said he would return to Richmond, get his baggage and report to me early Monday morning [April 3].¹⁹

At Five Forks, Fitz Lee and Pickett had orders to hold the crossroads “at all hazard.” Welly had been placed on Fitz Lee’s staff, where he was delighted to discover another British volunteer, Francis Dawson. They rose at 3:30 A.M. on March 31, and “after a rough breakfast we all went down to General Pickett’s headquarters where a Council of War took place. We remained here for 3 hours or so, smoking and telling stories in a downfall of rain the whole time.”²⁰ Years afterward, Dawson also remembered the terrible rain that had chilled him to the bone. He had tried to keep warm by gulping coffee out of an old tin cup before the fighting commenced, scalding his lips in the process. Later in the morning another moment seared itself in his memory. “It was very difficult to rally the men,” he wrote:

One fellow whom I halted as he was running to the rear, and whom I threatened to shoot if he did not stop, looked up in my face in the most astonished manner, and, raising his carbine at an angle of forty-five degrees, fired it in the air, or at the tops of the pines, and resumed his flight. It made me laugh, angry as I was.²¹

Toward sundown, General Fitz Lee’s men made a final, desperate charge against Sheridan’s line. One bullet struck an overhanging branch just as Dawson lowered his head to ride under the tree; the next tore into his shoulder.

“Bad news from Pickett,” recorded Welly on April 1. “He has lost 5,000 men out of 8,000, and the remainder are cut off from us.” The two generals, Fitz Lee and Pickett, had ridden off to a picnic, having assumed that Sheridan would spend the day entrenching his men. Far from it: Sheridan launched a surprise attack. “We had no idea that the enemy were so close to us,” wrote Welly, “when all of a sudden about 250 Yankees let drive at us, it was so sudden that nobody could help being startled. I looked round and the whole regiment had disappeared.” Sheridan captured more than four thousand prisoners at Five Forks. As the scattered Confederates found one another, Welly was relieved to learn that “Dawson, one of my brother ADCs,” had not been killed, but sent to Richmond at Fitz Lee’s insistence.²²

Dawson arrived in the city so befuddled with morphine that he was oblivious to the turmoil in the streets. At dawn on Sunday, April 2, Grant ordered an all-out attack on Lee’s defenses, smashing through at almost every point. Lee realized he had to retreat immediately or risk being surrounded and captured. He ordered the troops to evacuate and sent a telegram to Davis advising him to leave Richmond. The message was delivered to Davis while he was at church. Conolly was sitting in a pew nearby and observed the sexton whisper in his ear. “He rises and leaves the Church. Then the same operation to one and a second member of the government, both follow suit; people begin to whisper … they rose in tens and 20s and left the Church, outside the secret was soon abroad.” Only the most faithful remained for communion. Conolly fought his way through the streets—“a regular stampede has begun”—to the home of his friends Mrs. Enders and “her nice pretty daughters.” He promised the distraught women he would spend the night, guarding the house for them. Having satisfied himself that they were safe for the moment, Conolly set off in search of Francis Lawley and found him packing his bags at the hotel: “We take a parting cup to our next merry meeting.”

Map.21 Petersburg and Appomattox, March 25–April 9, 1865
Click here to view a larger image.

Jefferson Davis was also packing. Trains were being laid on to take the government and the treasury to Danville, forty miles southwest of Richmond. There was pandemonium in the city. People were fighting and clawing at each other to escape the city, “on horseback, in every description of cart, carriage and vehicle,” wrote Lawley, “on canal barges, skiffs, and boats.” Stephen Mallory and Judah P. Benjamin were already at the station waiting for the rest of the cabinet. Mallory had sent an order to Raphael Semmes, who had been placed in charge of Richmond’s water defenses after his return to the South in November 1864, to destroy the fleet of nine ships on the James River and take his force to wherever Lee established his new headquarters. The Confederate navy secretary had not heard from James Bulloch in weeks. Each day he had waited for a telegram announcing the arrival of CSS Stonewall, but despite Bulloch’s efforts, the cruiser had only set sail from Spain on March 28. Mallory had no idea of the whereabouts of CSS Shenandoah (the raider was in the Pacific, near the Eastern Caroline Islands, south of Guam), nor did it matter now. Judah Benjamin was inscrutable, but he, too, had to accept that his final gamble had failed. Even if Duncan Kenner had succeeded in obtaining Southern recognition from Palmerston in exchange for emancipation—which Benjamin seriously doubted after receiving Lord Russell’s protest—it was too late for the Confederacy.

The trains began rumbling out of Richmond at eleven o’clock. First went the government train, followed by the treasury’s, and finally the government archives. Every car was crowded with refugees; more were riding on the roofs and clinging to the sides. Some of the guards on the trains were boys, barely in their teens. “Up to the hour of their departure from Richmond,” insisted Francis Lawley, “I can testify that Mr. Davis and the three most prominent members of his Cabinet went undauntedly forth to meet the future, not without hope that General Lee would be able to hold together a substantial remnant of his army.”²³

Tom Conolly stood by the front window of the Enders family home, keeping watch while the women lay on the sofas behind him, “weep[ing] and sob[bing] till their hearts seem breaking.” Francis Lawley also remained awake. “During that memorable night there was no sleep in Richmond,” he wrote. “In front of every Government bureau, of every auditor’s office, around the Capitol, and upon each side of Capitol-Square, the glare of vast piles of burning papers turned night into day.” The last regiments to leave Richmond had orders to destroy the ordnance depots to keep them from enemy hands, and to dispose of the city’s liquor supply. In a well-intentioned but disastrous move, the Confederates emptied hundreds of whiskey kegs onto the streets. “Women and boys, black and white, were seen filling pitchers and buckets from the gutters,” wrote John B. Jones in his diary.²⁴

Both Conolly and Lawley heard the explosions, which seemed to shake every building in Richmond to its foundations:

As I walked up between 5 and 6 in the morning of Monday, the 3rd, to catch the early train [wrote Francis Lawley], a vast column of dense black smoke shot into the air … as the eye ranged backwards along the James River, several bright jets of flame in the region of Pearl and Cary streets augured the breaking forth of that terrible conflagration which subsequently swept across the heart of the city. As the train moved off from the Fredericksburg depot about 6 o’clock, I parted with Mr. Conolly, the Member for Donegal, who had passed a month in Richmond, and was upon this eventful morning still undecided whether to follow General Lee’s army or to strike northwards like myself.²⁵

In the commercial district, hardly a single pane of glass remained unbroken, and from Main Street to the canal nearly a thousand buildings were on fire. The bridges were also destroyed. This, together with the “roaring and crackling of burning houses … made up a scene that beggars description and which I hope never to see again,” wrote a departing Confederate officer; “a city undergoing pillage at the hands of its own mob, while the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gates!”²⁶ Lawley was overwhelmed at the sight. For the past four years he had venerated the South; he had perjured himself on its behalf and had perpetuated a dream, only to watch helplessly now as it transmogrified into a nightmare. “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” he quoted from The Tempest.

Conolly returned to his hotel at sunrise, shoving aside anyone who attempted to get in his way. Hundreds of fires were still burning. He had almost reached the building when he heard a cry: “the Yankees, the Yankees.” The city’s bleary-eyed residents were astonished to see a combination of white and Negro regiments from the Union Army of the James—Butler’s old army—riding through the streets. Many were singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched. The scene helped to make up Conolly’s mind to quit the Misses Enders, and by midmorning he was riding for Fredericksburg. Already a Federal flag was hanging from the rooftop of the Capitol. “The ensign of our subjugation,” lamented a female resident, but its appearance represented salvation just as much as disaster.²⁷ The general leading the Federal entrance, Godfrey Weitzel, hurriedly ordered his officers to organize teams of firefighters. The hotels, the banks, the better class of shops, the warehouses, depots, and hundreds of private houses were either charred heaps of brick or empty edifices. Fifty-five blocks in the center of Richmond had disappeared, but Weitzel’s men saved many more.

Hundreds of families collected in Capitol Square, sitting in huddled groups with the detritus of destruction around them, waiting miserably for the Federals to take charge of their future. Hour by hour, order was gradually restored to the streets. By ten o’clock that night, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., led the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry into the city, an unofficial curfew made the place seem deserted. “To have led my regiment into Richmond at the moment of its capture is the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the Army,” he admitted to his father. “For the first time I see the spirit of the Virginians, the whole people are cowed—whipped out.”²⁸

Abraham Lincoln arrived at the city a few hours after Charles Francis Jr., on the morning of the fourth.²⁹ The black population was anything but “whipped out.” They clustered about him, shouting ecstatically, touching his clothes, shaking his hand; he protested when some knelt down as he passed. Lincoln entered the Confederate White House and looked around Davis’s office, even sitting in his chair. He seemed tired and worn to those around him. Victory was at hand, but not yet in his hands—not until the surrender of Lee’s army, he reminded a Confederate delegation who called on him to discuss Virginia’s political future. During the afternoon, Lincoln toured hospitals and prisons, showing a gentle courtesy to Federals and rebels alike. He displayed a magnanimity toward the defeated Confederates that was conspicuously absent among his colleagues in the cabinet.

Lee would be able to keep fighting if he could reach North Carolina and consolidate his army with the survivors of General Joe Johnston’s. He ordered his commanders to head forty miles west, toward the courthouse at Amelia Springs, where the scattered fragments of the Army of Northern Virginia could regroup and distribute supplies for the long journey ahead. But Grant was in pursuit, his forces moving so swiftly that Quartermaster Sergeant James Horrocks (since his promotion in March) returned from his furlough in New York to find his camp deserted. Not knowing where the 5th Battery, New Jersey Artillery had gone, he walked into Richmond and spent the night on the floor in one of the bedrooms in the Confederate White House. “So I had the honor of sleeping in the house of Jeff Davis,” he wrote to his brother, “if there is any honor in that.”³⁰