“A fire bell in the night”
Jefferson Davis and his official party jolted along on their westward journey through the night of April 2–3, halted frequently as workmen repaired war-worn tracks. Through the barren country on each side of them Lee’s shrunken army plodded in the same direction, on a route roughly parallel to that of the railroad. The Davis party, badly shaken by the loss of Richmond, spent a sleepless night on the first leg of the flight.
But the Confederate cabinet could not justly be charged with the collapse of their experimental nation. They were among the ablest men in the public life of the region, experienced in government, well educated and devoted to their cause. They were representative of the Southern ruling class, though some had reached high position through their own efforts and abilities rather than birth. They had worked effectively with Jefferson Davis, who had chosen them with care. These survivors of Cabinet duty, who had replaced less productive predecessors, were probably the most capable the South could offer.
Yet the high officials of the disintegrating Confederacy were not an inspiring sight as they endured the overnight passage in their “frightfully overcrowded” train. John Reagan felt that the refugees were “oppressed with sorrow for those we left behind us,” but Stephen Mallory observed that they were “very depressed,” not merely because they had been forced to flee their capital—but also because every member of the party was fearful that the rail line would be cut by Federal cavalry at any moment. Almost to a man these leaders expected to be hanged if captured, probably without trial. Most of them were acutely aware of the violent ends that had come to unsuccessful leaders of revolutions and civil wars of the past.
Secretary of the Navy Mallory, who left a record of this journey in a brief diary, had served as chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee in the prewar U.S. Senate and had been familiar with the navy’s facilities and personnel in the South. He had launched a vigorous and imaginative program which was to make the Confederate Navy a formidable fighting force in the face of overwhelming odds.
Despite the lack of naval yards, machinery, iron and rolling mills, Mallory had created an amazingly large fleet of ironclads and wooden ships. To accomplish this he assembled about 300 former U.S. naval officers, among whom were such men of genius as Matthew Fontaine Maury, “The Pathfinder of the Seas”; John M. Brooke, a noted designer of ordnance; and the formidable sea captains Admiral Raphael Semmes and Franklin Buchanan. Not only had these men assembled a navy of 199 vessels, they had also made history by developing submarines, mines, torpedoes and floating gun batteries. The Navy’s growth had stemmed largely from the initiative and industry of the competent Mallory.
Tonight the gregarious, smiling Floridian studied his fellow passengers with an appreciation for the unique historical aspects of the flight that was to bear the Confederate leaders to such varied fates.
Anna Trenholm nursed her husband as he lay across a seat, apparently unruffled in her role as the only woman in the car filled by thirty men and their servants and a swarm of visitors from other parts of the train. The Secretary of the Treasury had been sedated by a doctor before departure, treatment for neuralgia and a stomach ailment, and he was now “quite sick from the effects of the morphine as well as the pain in his head.” Trenholm had grown wealthy from steamship lines, wharves, railroads, South Carolina cotton plantations and the labor of hundreds of slaves. The ships of Frazer, Trenholm & Co. had carried contraband through the blockade and its Liverpool offices had become a vital Confederate outpost.
The second man to hold office as Confederate Treasurer, Trenholm was not a politician but a banker and international trader who had been one of the wealthiest Americans in 1861. After serving as adviser to Treasurer Christopher Memminger from the opening of the war, he had succumbed to the pleas of Davis and taken over the office in the summer of 1864, when it was too late to save the South from financial ruin. When Congress refused to raise taxes or to put the new nation on a cash basis, Trenholm turned to the public, begging gifts of cash, jewelry, even food for the government. Though he himself contributed $200,000 in cash and bonds to aid the cause, it was all in vain. Inflation raged out of control. As early as mid-1864 many soldiers deserted, disgusted because they were seldom paid.
The Treasurer’s distinguished appearance and charming manner were of little moment in this crisis. The new nation’s currency neared a state of collapse that presaged doom for the Confederacy. Since he had campaigned so insistently for a sound fiscal policy, Trenholm seemed to suffer no loss of public confidence, but affluent Southerners refused to buy most of his bonds and the Confederacy drifted into bankruptcy. Trenholm had failed because the people had lost faith in victory.
Mallory felt that the most anxious of the group was John Reagan, who sat “whittling a stick down to nothing, his eyes bright and glistening as beads,” as if they were unseeing. Reagan, too, had taken his office reluctantly, but since he had served on the House Postal Committee of the U.S. Congress, and was also familiar with the Southern territory, Davis was able to persuade him to become his Postmaster General. The resourceful Reagan had quickly made the Confederate system profitable by the simple expedient of confiscating the U.S. postal network in the South and hiring some postal officials to come down from the North to join him. Reagan created early surpluses at the cost of efficient operations, and despite innovations—such as the establishment of a school for clerks—complaints of poor service had been incessant.
A loyal, energetic official, Reagan was a self-made man, a Tennessee farm boy who went to the Texas frontier to become an Indian fighter, surveyor, lawyer, judge and congressman. The habits of his youth remained with him; a Richmonder had seen him at a party, “ill at ease and looking as if he might have left his carry-log and yoke of oxen at the door.” Though regarded as a rough countryman who was out of his element in the society of the capital, Reagan had been one of the most dependable members of the Cabinet.
But, like most other Confederate officials, the Texan had seen his labors come to naught in recent months, his scattering of post offices across the South falling into disrepair, manned by a handful of clerks and postmasters who were isolated by the destruction of the railroads.
Judah Benjamin, “the brain of the Confederacy,” was the center of attention in the refugees’ car. Mallory suspected that his air of unconcern was a pose, since Benjamin’s face was “a shade or two darker than usual” as he munched a late sandwich by the light of the swinging oil lamps, but Benjamin was well known for his aplomb. An observer said that he had “moved through the most elegant or simplest assemblages on rubber-tired and well-oiled bearings.” Benjamin’s companion tonight was the Reverend Moses Hoge, a Presbyterian minister from Richmond said to be “the only man Benjamin trusted.” Nearby was the tiny Jules St. Martin of New Orleans, Benjamin’s brother-in-law, who was a clerk in the Department of Justice.
Davis, who admired “the lucidity of his intellect,” had defended Benjamin against all critics during the war, even after his brief, stormy, term as Secretary of War, when one of his orders had so offended General “Stonewall” Jackson that he threatened to resign. Jackson never knew that, in this case, Benjamin was merely carrying out an order from Davis. A hostile press assailed Benjamin as “the chief thief in a Cabinet of liars,” and Davis removed him, but only to make him Secretary of State. Though it was little known even in Richmond, Benjamin’s capacity for work was so phenomenal that he had not only performed his own duties with dispatch, but near the end of each day entered the President’s office to labor with Davis until late evening, lending his considerable skill and experience to help cope with the recurrent crises of the Confederacy.
Benjamin had joined the government early, in a lowly position, had supported it with all his energy, and had become a major influence in its affairs. Born in St. Croix to British parents who were Sephardic Jews, Benjamin was brought up in Wilmington and Fayetteville, N. C., and Charleston, S.C. In three years at Yale—he had failed to graduate—he gained a superior education and was fluent in several languages. He had arrived in New Orleans with only five dollars in his pocket, and by prodigious effort became a prosperous lawyer and then a United States senator. Benjamin had been known as the wealthiest lawyer in Washington, with a thriving international practice—though much of his income was spent at gambling tables. He was a founder of the railroad that became the Illinois Central, had served nine years as U.S. senator from Louisiana and had once declined a seat on the United States Supreme Court. He had become popular as a host in Washington’s Decatur House, where Martin Van Buren and Henry Clay had been tenants before him; Benjamin had lived there alone after his lovely French-born Catholic wife Natalie, whom he adored, left him to live in Paris. He had visited her annually, but rumors of her several love affairs had so shaken him that he sold the fine furniture and objets d’art he had collected for her—though there had been no divorce, probably out of consideration for their daughter, Ninette. Tonight, as usual, Benjamin was smiling, urbane and loquacious, as if determined to make the best of approaching catastrophe.
Attorney General George Davis was also a prominent figure in the car. The North Carolinian, though not regarded as brilliant, had become one of the President’s chief advisers because of his practical approach to Confederate problems. He was a capable lawyer and a noted orator and had been an honor graduate of the University of North Carolina. Of medium height, poised and unaffected, Davis had gained a reputation as an honorable man of cosmopolitan tastes, a personable gentleman of the old Southern school.
George Davis had turned to politics belatedly, and after serving as a conservative Whig leader in his home state he had abruptly changed his position to become a Democrat and an ardent Secessionist—and a Confederate senator. He had served as Attorney General for little more than a year.
Among others on the train were the presidential secretaries, Frank Lubbock and William Preston Johnston. Lubbock, a wartime governor of Texas, was born in Beaufort, S. C. into a wealthy family of shipowners and cotton planters, and was brought up in Charleston. At seventeen he had joined the States’ Rights movement during the South Carolina nullification crisis of 1832, and was thus a seasoned Secessionist. After a brief career as cotton merchant and buyer, Lubbock had moved to New Orleans, where he married a wealthy Creole woman, but after a financial panic in 1836 had moved to Texas, to the small tent city called Houston. Lubbock won the friendship of Sam Houston, became clerk of the House of Representatives and then Comptroller of Texas at the age of twenty-two. Lubbock was now almost fifty years old.
Johnston, the son of the ill-fated western commander who was killed at Shiloh, was a thirty-four-year-old lawyer, an honor graduate of Yale, and a former field officer who had been forced to give up his command by illness. For three years he had served as a presidential aide, chiefly as liaison between Davis and his generals. Johnston was a gentle, courtly, introspective man, a poet whose major interests were literature and history.
Also in the car were Samuel Cooper, the aged Adjutant General; Captain Micajah Clark of the Davis staff; Dr. A. Y. P. Garnett, the President’s personal physician; Robert G. Kean, chief of the War Bureau; and the Davises’ old friend Clement Clay.
To John Reagan it appeared that the most composed of the fugitives was Davis himself. Everyone in the car, the Postmaster General thought, was “impressed with his calm and manly dignity, his devotion to the public interest and his courage.” In fact, Reagan felt that Davis was beyond question the greatest man he had known. The other two Cabinet secretaries who had served throughout the war and had come to know Davis well also admired the President extravagantly. Benjamin said he had never known a more dedicated or patriotic man, and that he had never heard Davis express an “ungenerous or unworthy thought” about others. Secretary Mallory praised Davis as patient, energetic and industrious, with a shrewd understanding of human nature, the prompt, businesslike methods of a merchant and a keen, analytical mind.
But even among those aboard the car, estimates of the President’s gifts as a leader were in such striking contrast that it seemed impossible that friends and foes were speaking of the same man. Robert Kean of the War Department reflected bitterly that Davis himself had been the cause of Confederate catastrophe: “… peevish, fickle, hair-splitting … a man with a passion for detail and a grandiose reluctance to delegate authority.”
As the little train rattled on its slow way toward Danville, Kean, with a bemused eye on the President, thought of a friend who had spoken of Davis as a “mule,” but withal “a good mule.” Now, Kean thought, his friend would be forced to agree that the President had turned out to be “a jackass.”
A theme common to much criticism of Davis was that he had been overbearingly dictatorial, a charge most often heard from bureaucrats in the War Department, who had experienced presidential intrusion more than most government officials. One critic, in fact, had charged: “He was not only President and Secretary of five Departments—which naturally caused some errors—but that spice of the dictator in him made him quite willing to shoulder the responsibilities of all the positions.”
Davis had indeed found it difficult to delegate authority, particularly in military affairs, a field in which he felt himself most competent. At times he had interfered in the operations of the War Department, even to dealing personally with officers in the field, or signing purchase orders and expense vouchers himself. His friends maintained that he felt obliged to take such steps in light of staff incompetence, and pointed out that the President’s failure to impose his strategic concepts on some field commanders had cost the Confederacy dearly. Davis had also failed to exert authority over certain governors who put the welfare of their states above that of the Confederacy. In truth, though its armies and navy had fought with a valor and ferocity seldom equaled and though many of its leaders were able and resourceful, the government of the Confederate States had been something of a paper tiger, basically ineffectual because of its inability to enforce its will upon the States (and Congress itself). From the start the Davis administration was forced to deal with a bureaucracy torn by faction and dissension.
In many respects, Jefferson Davis was to remain an enigma to his contemporaries and to scholars of later generations. But despite the salvos of criticism he inspired in the twilight of the Confederacy’s life, there were few who questioned his single-minded devotion to the Southern cause. His obvious sincerity of purpose did not prevent a striking diversity of opinion about this complex, sternly repressed leader. Later scholars have been forced to the conclusion that there was truth even in the most extreme expressions about Jefferson Davis, by both supporters and adversaries.
Tonight, in any case, a president in retreat but not yet a fugitive, Davis radiated confidence, giving most of his associates the impression that neither his will nor his faith had flagged. Against all logic this doggedly resolute Rebel chief held out to these experienced men of mature judgment the hope, even the expectation, that the Confederacy would survive. Not until the very end, in the face of utter catastrophe, would he concede defeat.
It was now for the first time that Davis had leisure to hear of the adventures of Clement Clay on his foray into Canada, where he had gone under the leadership of Jacob Thompson, a talented North Carolinian who had made his fortune in Mississippi before the war. A flamboyant spymaster, Thompson had been sent northward to foment rebellion in the hope of creating a northwestern confederacy to force peace upon the North. His propaganda persuaded many midwesterners to oppose Lincoln’s re-election, and he was involved in a plot to burn New York City—an attempt that had failed after Barnum’s Museum and a dozen hotels had been set ablaze (but only because of faulty “Greek fire” incendiaries and the prompt work of city firemen).
Clay and Thompson had spent some $300,000 of a secret fund on their Canadian foray and other ventures, including a raid by armed men on St. Albans, Vt., and plots to rescue prisoners from Federal pens. In the end the two had created little more than a nuisance and their efforts to promote a peace treaty with the aid of Horace Greeley had failed.
In returning home, Clay had barely escaped with his life as the blockade runner Rattlesnake ran aground in Charleston harbor on a bitter February day. When the ship was set afire by enemy guns, Clay got into a lifeboat, which also grounded, forcing him to wade ashore in chin-deep waves. Miraculously, he managed to salvage not only a trunk of valuables meant for Judah Benjamin but also saved a large Newfoundland dog which had been stolen from Robert E. Lee by a Union soldier who sold him into Canada, where Clay found him. After a month-long illness caused by exposure, Clay had made his way to Richmond just as the Confederacy began to collapse.
Long after midnight the President’s train slowed to a stop at Clover Station, a village some eighty miles southwest of Richmond, where an eighteen-year-old army lieutenant, John Wise, saw the fleeing Cabinet. The boy officer was the son of ex-Governor Henry A. Wise of Virginia, the President’s adversary. For the past two days young Wise had learned of accumulating Confederate disasters through the chattering key of the railroad telegrapher. Trains from the capital had begun passing early Sunday night, and by midnight young Wise thought that most of Richmond must have been moving westward on the cars that swayed above the fragile rails.
When these trains halted for wood or water Wise heard the bland assurances of Confederate officials as they greeted the small crowd at the country depot. “The army’s not beaten or demoralized,” one of these men said. “It’s retreating in good order, and Lee is now out from under the burden of holding those long lines. Why, he’ll whip the Yanks yet. Wait and see!”
Wise took heart, but his despair returned at 3 A.M. when he saw the train bearing the President and his Cabinet come to a halt in the torchlit darkness.
Davis smiled wanly at the few people along the track and waved a thin hand. Wise saw “physical and mental exhaustion” in his bony face and languid gesture.
The train was soon on its way, laboring westward with a dwindling of its lanterns and a subdued soughing of its ancient engine. Other trains were in its wake, and Wise watched them all: the Treasury Department train with its burden of silver and gold, both official and private, guarded by Captain Parker and his midshipmen and the bank tellers led by Judge W. W. Crump; later trains bore archives and employees of the Post Office and the Bureau of War.
The boy lieutenant realized that he was witnessing the death of the Confederacy: “I saw a government on wheels … the marvelous and incongruous debris of the wreck of the Confederate capital … indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot, and a box of tame squirrels, and a hunchback.” All, including the parrot, were intensely excited at the sight of the people clustered about the Clover station.
As the last train that crept through the village passed on, a man standing at the rear shouted to them: “Richmond’s burning. Gone. All gone.”
Soon afterward Lieutenant Wise was sent on a perilous mission through enemy lines to reach General Lee and carry news of the army’s progress to President Davis in Danville. Wise and a young trainman roared off into the night aboard a decrepit engine, running without lights toward Burkeville Junction, which the enemy was thought to have occupied by then.
It was 4 P.M. of April 3 before the presidential train reached Danville, after an eighteen-hour journey that covered only 140 miles. A local delegation met the party and carried the passengers to their homes; offices and living quarters had been made ready for the establishment of a new Confederate capital. Davis and his staff were housed in the large home of Major W. T. Sutherlin on Main Street, where he found a warm welcome that was in vivid contrast to Varina’s experience in Charlotte. “Nothing,” Davis said, “could have exceeded the kindness and hospitality of the patriotic citizens. They cordially gave us an ‘Old Virginia welcome’ …” This did not include the cashing of his check, which he found non-negotiable.
The anxious President asked for news of Lee, but learned that there was none. He wrote his wife in Charlotte, N. C., of his arrival in Danville and of the fall of Richmond, warning her that “military necessity” might force him to further flight. Varina responded loyally in a letter brought back to Danville a few days later by Burton Harrison: “I … know that your strength when stirred up is great, and that you can do with a few what others have failed to do with many.” She was confident that he would “deliver” the South, but confessed that news of Richmond’s fall “came upon me like the ‘abomination of desolation.’”
Davis turned vigorously to the improvement of Danville’s inadequate defenses; both soldiers and slaves dug new trenches and gathered supplies for the expected arrival of Lee’s troops. The refugees then settled for an indefinite stay in the town.
The traveling Treasury Department, which had arrived in Danville a few hours later than the presidential train, now opened for business. Captain Clark and Chief Teller Philbrook paid out from the official treasure an unspecified amount under “informal requisitions” and also redeemed more Confederate bills, exchanging silver for them in a ratio of $1 to $70. After three days of brisk activity the Treasury moved south by rail through Greensboro to Charlotte, N. C., where the money was to be stored in the old U.S. Mint, still under guard of Parker’s young sailors.
The Confederate treasure was assigned its first precise value by Captain Clark as his train left Danville: $327,022.90. No one was to explain further the substantial reduction of the treasure from its supposed value estimated on departing Richmond at between $500,000 and $600,000. Since there was no estimate of the “informal requisitions” or of the amounts of coin paid out in currency redemption, future efforts to account for all the official funds were to be in vain. Whatever the facts of the Danville transactions, this casual reporting of payments inspired suspicions. Wild and absurdly misleading rumors were already circulating that Davis carried millions in gold and silver specie—rumors that were to plague the guardians of the treasure to the end.
The Virginia bank funds, which left Danville at the same time, remained intact and separate from the official Confederate treasure. Judge Crump’s coin containers had not been opened.
On April 5, after a Cabinet session, Davis issued a proclamation exhorting the people of the South to further exertions. Judah P. Benjamin wrote the document, using a sheet of dingy foolscap, and took it to the Danville Register for publication. Davis’s call to his people, as a biographer of Benjamin wrote, was a cry of “desperation rather than reasoned hope”:
“We have now entered upon a new phase of the struggle. Relieved from the necessity of guarding particular points, our army will be free to move from point to point to strike the enemy … Let us but will it, and we are free …
“I will never consent to abandon to the enemy one foot of the soil of any of the states of the Confederacy …
“Let us not despond then, my countrymen; but, relying on God, meet the foe with fresh defiance and … unconquerable hearts.”
Also on April 5 there was finally a report from Lee, this one “favorable”—though the army was still retreating. Thus encouraged, the President, Captain Wood, Dr. Garnett and the staff opened a mess and prepared for an extended stay—though Wood left the city the following day to visit his family, for whom he had rented quarters in Greensboro. Troops arriving in Danville, among them the sailors of Admiral Semmes, were posted for defense of the town. Davis immediately commissioned Semmes as a brigadier general so that he could assume command of all forces there. Semmes pointed out that this was lower than his naval rank, but that he would not protest. “I will waive my rights pending further discussion,” the grinning admiral said.
Davis gave him one of his rare smiles. “That’s the right spirit,” he said, and entrusted Danville’s safety to the admiral-general.
Semmes found that desertions had reduced his strength to 400 men. He formed these into skeleton regiments and, after some drilling, moved them into the Danville trenches on April 7. One of his command was his youngest son, Cadet Raphael Semmes, aged thirteen.
The refugees, whose pause in flight was unknown to most of the country, were the object of intense speculation by now. A jubilant Northern public hailed the fall of Richmond as the end of the long, bloody war, but Harper’s Weekly cautioned that the Confederate leaders were “not men who will relinquish the struggle until the defeat … of their soldiers assure them that there is no alternative. These soldiers comprise the most desperate men of the insurrection …” The Northern press also debated the fate of the Confederate President and his Cabinet. The New York Times said that Davis was already fleeing for Mexico, and that it was doubtful he would ever be captured, “But if he is caught he should be hung … He was the prime mover of the conspiracy … To forgive his followers, will be noble and wise. To forgive Jeff Davis himself will be a miserable and most mischievous weakness.”
Horace Greeley’s Tribune challenged the vengeful Times, pointing out that Davis had left the Union later and more reluctantly than most Southern leaders and could not be charged with the instigation of the rebellion. Severe punishment for Confederate leaders, the Tribune said, would merely single out each victim as “conspicuous hero and martyr” to the Southern people—particularly if the government hanged Jefferson Davis.
In occupied Richmond, now that order had been restored, Abraham Lincoln appeared on the streets, where he was greeted by vast crowds of Negroes, many of whom fell to their knees. The President seemed to be embarrassed. “Don’t kneel to me,” he said, “that’s not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for liberty … But you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle upon your limbs.” When the blacks refused to disperse even after a few Marines pushed forward with bayonets, Lincoln quieted them with an impromptu speech:
“My poor friends, you are free—free as air … Liberty is your birthright. God gave it to you as he gave it to others, and it is a sin that you have been deprived of it for so many years. But you must try to deserve this priceless boon. Let the world see that you merit it … Learn the laws and obey them; obey God’s commandments and thank Him for giving you liberty …”
When the crowd fell quiet, Lincoln said, “There, now. Let me pass on. I have but little time to spare. I want to see the capital.”
An officer saw Lincoln toiling up a hill with a crowd at his heels, “walking along with his usual long, careless stride and looking about him with an interested air and taking in everything.”
Lincoln sat for a few moments at the desk of Jefferson Davis, who had left it so recently. The President was moved by the poignancy of his presence there, a moment that marked a turning point in American history, the end of a fratricidal war that had claimed more than half a million lives. “This must have been President Davis’s chair,” Lincoln mused, staring out a window with “a dreamy expression,” as if he felt a new awareness of the dreadful dilemmas his wartime adversary had dealt with in this place. But if he experienced a tug of sympathy for the departed Rebel chief, Lincoln kept it to himself.
The President was soon gone, after brief inspection of the city’s grim prisons and the legislative halls, where he saw “dreadful disorders, with Confederate scrip and … documents lying on the floor.” In Capitol Square Lincoln paused before the bronze equestrian statue of Washington, whose eyes seemed to fix upon each passerby, and whose right hand was raised. Lincoln said, “Washington is looking at me and pointing to Jeff Davis.”
When the city’s new commanding officer asked what should be done with Richmond’s people, Lincoln said, “I don’t want to give any orders on that, General, but if I were in your place, I’d let ’em up easy. Let ’em up easy.”
Meanwhile, Secretary of War John Breckinridge, who had tarried in Richmond to oversee final details of the evacuation, was making his way westward with a small party on horseback. They moved amidst Lee’s retreating troops. Hoping to overtake Davis, Breckinridge led his band toward Danville: Quartermaster General A. R. Lawton, Commissary General Isaac St. John, Colonel James Wilson, and Breckinridge’s oldest son, Cabell. The Secretary of War and his party rode with General Lee for several miles, but left him on April 5 or April 6 with the feeling that the cause was hopeless.
Breckinridge had one adventure during this brief period. When Federal cavalrymen attacked a wagon train a couple of miles away, a panic-stricken quartermaster fled along the column shouting, “The Yankees! The Yankees are coming!” Teamsters and others fled across a bridge, leaving Breckinridge and a handful of men in an isolated position. The general collected about twenty horsemen and a hundred men on foot, and marched toward the enemy, his command including nearly as many generals and colonels as it did privates. This advance opened with a wild charge led by a drunken captain, against an unoccupied woodland. But soon afterward, when a Federal party cut off a few rear wagons, Breckinridge led his motley force to the site and drove off the enemy—thereby distinguishing himself as the only American Cabinet officer to lead troops in battle.
Breckinridge telegraphed Davis to say that he had left Lee at the small town of Farmville, Va., adding: “There was very little firing yesterday and I hear none today … The straggling has been great and the situation is not favorable … Will join you as soon as possible.” By now the enemy had cornered a wing of Lee’s army at Sayler’s Creek, capturing 7,000 men, including half-a-dozen generals, among them Richard Ewell, who was soon on his way to prison.
In Danville on the night of April 8, as the Cabinet met in the Sutherlin dining room, a disheveled Lieutenant Wise appeared with a verbal message from Lee—the general had feared to send a written dispatch. Wise told of the disintegration of the army as Federal forces gathered in its path. When Davis asked if Lee might escape, Wise replied, “I regret to say, no. From what I saw and heard I am satisfied that General Lee must surrender. It may be that he has done so today.”
The men about the table, shocked by this devastating news on the heels of a favorable report from the army, said nothing. Wise noted that they shifted uneasily when he added glumly, “It is a question of only a few days at most.” For the first time Davis and his Cabinet began to consider the actuality of a surrender of Lee’s army, but since there was as yet no definitive report, they clung to their hopes.
The exhausted Lieutenant Wise was given supper and then reported more fully to Davis, a recitation taken down by the secretary, Burton Harrison. Wise quoted from memory Lee’s plan to retreat along two rail lines, the Richmond and Danville and the Southside: “The enemy’s cavalry is already flanking us from the south and east. You may say to Mr. Davis that as he knows, my original purpose was to adhere to the line of the Danville road. I have been unable to do so, and am now endeavoring to hold the Southside Road as I retire in the direction of Lynchburg.” Wise said he had asked Lee if he planned to make a last stand along the route, but the general had shaken his head and said slowly, “No. I shall have to be governed by each day’s development … A few more Sayler’s Creeks and it will be all over—ended—just as I have expected it would end from the first.” Davis, as Burton Harrison noted, sat quietly for a moment, “peering into the gloom outside,” perhaps recalling Lee’s air of optimism after his victories in the summer of 1862, when Confederate hopes had been high. Davis entrusted Wise with orders to Lee, urging that the army be kept together.
It was in Danville that Senator Clement Clay left the party. He spent a few days there with his cousin, Dr. Robert Withers, but was so anxious to hurry southward to join his wife, Virginia, that the President urged him to precede the caravan on its journey. Davis himself was fond of Virginia Clay, with whom he corresponded occasionally on a rather intimate basis; he, too, appeared to be drawn to this attractive—though far from beautiful—woman who had been so alluring to men throughout her life.
On Palm Sunday, April 9, Davis sent Lee a telegram: “You will realize my reluctance to leave the soil of Virginia and appreciate my anxiety to win success north of the Roanoke … I hope soon to hear from you at this point … May God sustain and guide you.”
But the army was in the final stages of disintegration. The British correspondent Francis Lawley, who had followed Lee, wrote of the march: “Every mud-hole and every rise in the road choked with blazing wagons—the air filled with the deafening reports of ammunition exploding and shells bursting … dense columns of smoke ascending … exhausted men, worn-out mules and horses lying down side by side—gaunt Famine glaring hopelessly from sunken, lacklustre eyes—dead mules, dead horses, dead men everywhere.”
It was thus that, on Sunday, Robert E. Lee, wearing a new uniform, a yellow sash, gold spurs and new boots embroidered in red silk, rode out from his army to meet General Grant in the McLean House at Appomattox Courthouse; an exchange of messages over the past few days had prepared the way for a peace conference. Brief, sharp fighting had begun about dawn, but ceased when Lee saw that he was surrounded, his lines of retreat and supply severed.
Though he said, “I would rather die a thousand deaths,” Lee endured the surrender ceremony with calm dignity. Grant’s terms were generous, even magnanimous, and were to influence American military and foreign policy for many years—but Confederate troops received the news as the end of their world.
The engineer, Colonel William Blackford, watched Lee as he returned to his troops: “Tears filled his eyes and trickled down his cheeks.… The men’s cheers changed to choking sobs as with streaming eyes and many cries of affection they waved their hats.… Grim-hearted men threw themselves on the ground, covered their faces with their hands and wept like children.… One man held his arms wide over the crowd and shouted, ‘I love you just as well as ever, General Lee.’” Men passed their hands affectionately over Traveler’s flanks as the general rode by.
A few moments later, Lee halted and spoke to a small group of soldiers. “Men, we have fought the war together, I have done my best for you. My heart is too full to say more.”
On this day in Danville, Davis and some of the Cabinet went to church, a combined service of all the city’s congregations. Though the day was otherwise uneventful, forlorn soldiers straggled in from Lee’s army, deserters who had fled to avoid surrender. The sight of them caused consternation among the townspeople, who had been told little of events in the field. A number of young officers had also escaped through enemy lines, vowing to fight to the last; one of these was the commander’s son, Robert E. Lee, Jr.
On the late afternoon of this day—April 9—nearing the end of a homeward voyage up the Potomac, Abraham Lincoln entertained his wife and a few guests by reading somberly from Macbeth, lingering over the lines so obviously familiar to him:
Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst; nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.
Soon afterward, when the River Queen docked in Washington, Mary Lincoln swept the capital lying before them with an agonized glance. “That city is full of enemies!” she said.
Lincoln turned to her with an impatient gesture, “Enemies! Never again must we repeat that word.”
The party entered the city in a carriage, past bonfires blazing in the streets and crowds of shouting, laughing people. Lincoln’s bodyguard called out, “What has happened?”
A man stared at them in amazement. “Why, where have you been? Lee has surrendered.”
On the afternoon of April 10, Davis and others were in conference in Danville when Captain W. P. Graves arrived from the army with “positive” news of surrender. This, as Mallory said, “fell upon the ears of all like a fire bell in the night.” The men passed the message around the table and became silent, “a silence more eloquent of great disaster than words could have been.”
The President seemed to recover from this blow by sheer power of will, but was then told that enemy cavalry was approaching from the west—some 6,000 veteran riders led by General George Stoneman, driving in from East Tennessee, looting, burning and cutting communications. The party must flee at once, before the enemy cut rail lines leading southward into North Carolina.
Under Burton Harrison’s direction, government documents were repacked and hauled to the railroad station. Davis telegraphed General Joseph E. Johnston about the emergency, and asked him to meet the Cabinet in Greensboro. The official party was told to prepare to leave for the fifty-mile journey by 8 P.M. So that they could meet Johnston, who was falling back before Sherman. Davis contemplated nothing but continued defiance toward the enemy, and he was not alone in his delusion. Mary Lee, who heard news of Appomattox in her invalid’s chair in Richmond, told a friend that all would yet be well. “The end is not yet,” the resolute cripple said firmly. “General Lee is not the Confederacy. There is life in the old land yet.”
But the reported surrender struck dread to the heart of Judah Benjamin in Danville. He was reading poetry—Tennyson—to a young woman when he was interrupted by word of the army’s disaster at Appomattox. Benjamin at once sought his friend the Reverend Hoge, whom he found in the parlor of the Johnston house talking with several women. The secretary of state, who seemed as cheerful as ever, joined the conversation and said nothing of the grim news, but signaled Hoge and led him to their room. “I didn’t have the heart to tell those good ladies what I have just learned,” he said. “General Lee has surrendered and I fear the Confederate cause is lost.”
Hoge was silent for a moment. “What will you do?”
“I will go with Davis and the Cabinet to Greensboro. Beyond that, I don’t know.”
“How can you escape? Federal troops will be scouring the country for you, and you’ll be with the President and the whole Cabinet.”
Hoge long remembered Benjamin’s “pitiless smile” and firm words: “I will never be taken alive.”
Davis returned to the Sutherlin mansion through a rainstorm, and told his hostess “almost in a whisper” that he must flee, since Lee had surrendered. Though he was evidently overwhelmed by this “astounding misfortune,” the vigorous Davis continued to pack bags for further flight. As he said farewell, Mrs. Sutherlin offered Davis a bag of gold. His eyes brimmed with tears, “I cannot take your money,” he said. “You and your husband are young and will need it … I doubt if I shall need anything much very long.” He gave her a small gold pencil as a keepsake.
Eight o’clock found the Danville station roaring with the confusion of flight—there was an air of panic after news of Lee’s surrender, and a desperate scramble for places on the train. Heavy rains had left bogs in the city streets, and men floundered toward the depot knee-deep in mud. Mule teams struggled, teamsters and soldiers bellowed curses, horses whinnied in terror when driven up makeshift ramps into cars, and a growing crush of men threatened to overpower the guards and fight their way aboard the train. The crowd was excited by a rumor that the enemy had already cut the line to Greensboro, and that to make the railroad journey would be as perilous as to remain in Danville.
It was 10 o’clock when members of the Cabinet and a few other officials appeared near the train, where they sat on their luggage, waiting silently in darkness “lighted only by Mr. Benjamin’s inextinguishable segar.” It was even later when Davis arrived and entered the train, followed by his aides. The car was locked against the press of soldiers and civilians, but a few unexpected passengers went aboard despite the efforts of guards.
Robert S. Rankin, a Confederate officer based in the area, had been ordered to board the train with eight men, and when he found the Davis coach locked, simply led his troops to the roof. The train rattled off in a cold drizzle just before midnight, moving slowly over the dangerously worn rails. Rankin and his men “doubled up around a stove pipe” atop the Davis car and piled blankets over the flue in an attempt to keep themselves warm; this forced smoke downward through the wood stove and filled the car with stifling clouds. There was a roar of “expostulative remarks” from the presidential car, but Rankin’s men continued to cover the flue, until the coughing, choking officials were obliged to open windows and endure blasts of cold night air in order to breathe.
The train made halting progress, with frequent short stops, until dawn enabled the engineer to see that the rails ahead of him had not yet been broken by enemy cavalrymen. The small engine resumed its labored chuffing and the train careered along at top speed.
The train reached Greensboro about noon of April 11, having averaged four miles per hour on its journey. It was in the nick of time. A few moments after the President’s party had passed over, Federal troopers burned a tall trestle just north of the town. When Davis was told of his narrow escape he said only, “A miss is as good as a mile.”