The pressures of office, added to the preparations for Inauguration Day and all of the other activities of recent weeks, had finally taken their toll on the president. By the middle of March, he was so exhausted that he decided to stay in bed for a few days. There was nothing physically wrong with him; he did not have a cold or a virus or any sort of illness. He was just worn-out, and needed some time off. The New York Herald said, “Mr. Lincoln is reported quite sick to-day, and has denied himself to all visitors.”1 But the Herald did not get its facts straight. Mr. Lincoln was not sick, just tired.
On the day before, March 12, General William Tecumseh Sherman had contacted General Grant from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to give him an update. “The army is in splendid health, condition, and spirits” Sherman wrote, “though we have had foul weather, and roads that would have stopped travel to almost any other body of men I ever heard of.” General Sherman was obviously in splendid spirits himself. His men continued to wreck the arsenal—to smash it beyond recognition would probably be a more accurate description. “I shall therefore destroy this valuable arsenal so the enemy shall not have its use,” he went on to say.2 He was certainly doing his best to carry out his agenda.
In Richmond, Congress passed legislation allowing black troops to join the Confederate army. This revolutionary statute had been requested by General Robert E. Lee, who would be needing all the able-bodied men he could get for the battles that he knew were to come—he was as aware as General Grant and President Lincoln that renewed fighting would begin within the next week or ten days. Hundreds of men were deserting his army every day, and General Lee was desperate to find replacements for them.
Black men had been put to work as laborers for the army, digging trenches and preparing earthworks, but had never been recruited as soldiers. General Lee had expressed a low opinion of blacks as soldiers earlier in the war, but the current crisis in manpower made him change his mind. At the beginning of 1865, General Lee said that he was now in favor of having black troops in the Confederate army, along with an unspecified program of “gradual emancipation.” As Lee now saw the situation, “The services of these men are now necessary to enable us to oppose the enemy.”3
On March 10, General Lee wrote to Confederate president Jefferson Davis, “I do not know whether the law authorizing the use of negro troops has received your sanction, but if it has, I respectfully recommend that measures be taken to carry it into effect as soon as practicable.” Later in the same communiqué, he reported, “I have received letters from persons offering to select the most suitable among their slaves, as soon as Congress should give the authority,” and asked that President Davis take the necessary steps to “raise some negro companies” as soon as possible.4
A week after the Confederate Congress passed its legislation, on March 21, the Richmond Sentinel reported that “the company of colored troops under Captain Grimes” would parade in one of the city's squares dressed in Confederate gray. Black units were issued new uniforms and marched through Richmond's streets to encourage other blacks to enlist. Southern blacks did fight for the Confederacy, a fact that has been overlooked by a good many writers and historians. “I had as much right to fight for my native state as you had to fight for yours,” a captured black soldier told a Union officer, “and a blame sight more than your foreigners what's got no homes.”5