“I cannot feel myself a beaten man!”
The caravan toiled over a poor road following the route of the railroad south and west, an ancient track worn by buffalo herds, nomadic Indian tribes and Colonial cattle drovers. The Davis party passed through the village of High Point and after failing to find a farm family willing to take them in, camped near Lexington. The first night in the open seemed to bring Davis both new vigor and relaxation. To Mallory’s surprise the President became pleasantly talkative beside the campfire, where he lay on blankets with his head on a saddle, smoking a cigar and telling tales of old times. “He decidedly preferred the bivouac to the bedroom,” Mallory said. The Cabinet now saw a Davis they had not seen before, his conversation bright and humorous, his manner “singularly equable and cheerful.”
Governor Zebulon Vance, who had escaped from Raleigh as Sherman’s horde neared the capital, overtook Davis in Lexington. The governor had sought to save Raleigh from burning by sending two elderly North Carolina leaders to negotiate with Sherman, to the outrage of Davis, who had ordered the emissaries arrested.
Governor Vance was one of the most colorful politicians in North Carolina annals, “a coarsely handsome, barrel-chested, six-foot mountaineer with a leonine head, flowing locks and intense blue eyes.” He had opposed Secession until the moment Lincoln called for troops, and had, in fact, opposed the Davis administration throughout the war, his policy being to “fight the Yankees and fuss with the Confederacy.”
Still, Vance’s leadership inspired impoverished North Carolina to a remarkable war effort. The state had only 115,000 voters, but sent 125,000 troops to war and lost some 41,000 of these.
When desertions among North Carolina troops reached epidemic proportions, Vance declared, “It shows what I have always believed, that the great popular heart is not now & never has been in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians not the people.” Despite his reservations, Vance had followed the President to Lexington, anxious to discuss the military situation with him. Davis called the Cabinet to meet with the governor.
“Mr. President, I have come to see what you wish me to do,” Vance said.
Davis launched upon a “long and solemn” review of the South’s plight, insisting that an army could be rallied to fight in the West, and intimating that Vance should raise North Carolina troops to join General Kirby Smith. Vance was impressed by the President’s determination but was relieved when Breckinridge broke “the sad silence” that followed Davis’s statement.
“Mr. President,” Breckinridge said, “I don’t think you have answered the governor’s question.”
“Well, what would you tell him to do?”
“I don’t think we are dealing candidly with him. Our hopes of accomplishing what you set forth are so remote and uncertain that I, for my part, could not advise him to follow our fortunes further …”
The Kentuckian turned to Vance. “My advice would be that you return to your responsibilities and do the best you can for your people and share their fate, whatever it might be.”
Davis sighed. “Well, perhaps, General, you are right.” He rose and shook the governor’s hand. “God bless you, sir,” he said. “God bless you and the noble old state of North Carolina.”
The Davis caravan reached the Yadkin River on Easter Sunday, and crossed on a ferry and a railroad bridge that had been saved a few days earlier when a local garrison beat off some of General George Stoneman’s raiders.
Frank Vizetelly sketched the scene of the crossing for his British readers, and explained that each wagon, with its mule team, was ferried across in turn, delaying the caravan so that the rumored approach of Federal cavalry made the crossing “a very anxious affair.” Alarms were sounded often, and “the excitement among the rear guard and teamsters was excessive.” Riders stripped off their clothing, removed saddles and forced cavalry horses to swim across the swift current. Frightened horses turned back, threw their riders, struggled to the bank and charged wildly through the crowd. “Notwithstanding this,” Vizetelly said, “the entire train passed safely over this and many other streams.”
In Salisbury, where ruins of a Confederate prison and the rail depot were still smoldering after Stoneman’s raid, Davis and others were invited to the home of the Reverend Thomas A. Haughton, rector of St. Luke’s Church. Davis sat on the veranda with friends until late in the night, talking cheerfully, as if he had put aside his troubles. Even when he told of Lee’s surrender, speaking rapidly while holding an unlighted cigar in his mouth, the President’s tone was not doleful or despairing. Several soldiers spent the night on the veranda as guards, and Burton Harrison slept there with them as an added precaution, in case Federal cavalry should return.
At breakfast the next morning Haughton’s young daughter burst into tears, “Oh, Papa. Old Lincoln’s coming and going to kill us all.”
Davis turned her woeful face up to his own. “Oh, no, little lady. Mr. Lincoln isn’t such a bad man, he doesn’t want to kill anybody, and certainly not a little girl like you.”
The child was soon reassured, and began chatting away gaily of other things.
About this time a courier tracked down the fleeing Davis with a telegraphed appeal from Joseph Johnston—Breckinridge was needed in negotiations with Sherman; the eloquent former Vice-President might win more favorable terms from the enemy. Breckinridge and John Reagan turned back toward Greensboro at once, riding horseback from 10 o’clock one night to midnight the next, to join the negotiations. Reagan did not attend the sessions in a farmhouse near Durham, N. C., but wrote a proposed truce agreement which Johnston presented, only to have Sherman reject it as “too verbose”—whereupon the Federal victor wrote a version of his own, also verbose and almost as favorable to the South as Reagan’s.
The Davis party rode steadily southward. They stopped overnight in the village of Concord, where the President and nine others slept in the home of Judge Victor C. Barringer before moving on to Charlotte, the largest town in the Carolinas border region. Harrison found that rooms had been located for them here—though in the President’s case it had not been an easy task. Members of the Cabinet were welcomed by leading citizens of the town, including Abram Weill, who had taken in Varina Davis and her children during their visit a few days earlier. Weill now took in Benjamin, St. Martin and Burton Harrison. George and Anna Trenholm went to the William F. Phifer house, and George Davis stayed in the home of William Myers.
But fear of retaliation by Stoneman’s raiders against anyone who sheltered Davis was so strong that officers could find only one householder daring enough to welcome the President. Harrison accepted the offer, though the house, he felt, was “not at all a seemly place.” The host was Lewis F. Bates, a Northerner who represented an express company, “a bachelor of convivial habits” who lived alone except for Negro servants and kept “a sort of open house” and a generous supply of liquor. Bates was said by local gossips to be a Yankee spy—or at least “a graceless scamp.”
Davis had just arrived at Bates’s home, in the absence of his host, when a body of Kentucky cavalry rode up in a cloud of dust, waving flags and cheering at the sight of the President. At that moment Davis was handed a telegram from Breckinridge:
President Lincoln was assassinated in the theatre in Washington on the night of the 11th inst.
Seward’s house was entered on the same night and he was repeatedly stabbed and is probably mortally wounded.
Davis read the telegram twice, apparently without comment, then passed it to William Johnston, a Charlotte lawyer and railroad executive who was said to be “the richest man in North Carolina.” Davis said, “Here is a very extraordinary communication. It is sad news.”
Whatever the precise words of the exchange, the incident grew into a controversy. A few weeks later Lewis Bates would tell the Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War that General Breckinridge was with the President when the telegram was opened, and expressed regret over Lincoln’s death—and that Davis had replied, “Well, General, I don’t know; if it were done at all it were better it were well done; and if the same were done to Andy Johnson, the beast, and the Secretary, Stanton, the job would be complete.”
Of this allegation Davis said, “The man who invented the story of my having received the news in exultation had free scope for his imagination as he was not present.”
In any case Bates was in error about the presence of Breckinridge, who had sent the telegram himself, from a point more than a hundred miles distant.
As Davis recalled the incident, he read the telegram, passed it to Johnston with a brief comment, then turned to the Kentucky cavalrymen, who were shouting for a speech. He thanked them, urged them to resist to the last and, pleading fatigue, had turned to enter the house. Johnston read Breckinridge’s telegram to the crowd, and when someone cheered, Davis turned back and raised a hand. The people in the street fell silent.
Davis expressed distress over Lincoln’s murder to Burton Harrison later in the day, “I am sorry. We have lost our best friend in the court of the enemy.”
Davis, Harrison and the Cabinet had often discussed the possibility of Andrew Johnson’s becoming President, and agreed that this Southern Democrat, who had been named to the national Union ticket in 1864 to win wider support for Lincoln’s re-election campaign, would deal harshly with defeated Secessionists. A North Carolinian by birth, Johnson, a tailor’s apprentice, had run away to Tennessee as a ten-year-old. There he had become a popular politician, serving as a senator and governor. Though he had held slaves, Johnson opposed secession and remained with the Union, and Lincoln had named him military governor of Tennessee during the war. He made no secret of his distaste for the planter aristocracy which he felt divided the country. Partly because he knew Johnson so well, Davis maintained that Lincoln’s death was “a great misfortune for the South”—though he conceded that the Rail-Splitter had been so relentless an enemy of the Confederacy that “we could not have been expected to mourn” his passing.
Far behind Davis, on the farm west of Richmond where he remained safe from Federal patrols, the embittered Edmund Ruffin followed the President’s progress. Ruffin hoped that Davis and his Cabinet would reach the Southwest in safety and raise fresh armies to liberate the prostrate Confederacy. If he were younger, the old Secessionist leader declared, he would shoulder his musket and go west to fight the Yankees. As it was, he could not attempt escape—it would be “undignified & humiliating.” He still contemplated suicide, but would “try to time my action so as [to] cause the least damage to my children.”
Ruffin’s reaction to the news of Lincoln’s death was that of a diehard Southern extremist. The President’s murder on Good Friday struck him as peculiarly ironic. He said that Lincoln was “lucky” that an assassin had rescued him from obscurity, and noted in his diary every scurrilous remark he had heard about the martyred President. He conceded, however, that Lincoln’s conciliatory policy of Reconstruction had surprised him. Ruffin did not expect such mercy from the new President, Andrew Johnson, “the low & vulgar & shameless drunken demagogue” who had made no secret of his hatred for “stuck-up aristocrats” who “are not half as good as the man who earns his bread by the sweat of his brow.” Johnson, “The Tailor King,” as Ruffin styled him, was “despicable” in the eyes of the Virginia fire-eater. Ruffin, like many others, feared that Johnson would carry out his threats to eradicate the Southern ruling class and supplant it with “poor white trash.” Not even Ruffin, for all his venomous hatred of the North and his conviction that black slaves were little more than animals, could imagine that the South was to be ruled by illiterate ex-slaves.
It was not until the following day that Davis learned that Lincoln had been shot by the radical John Wilkes Booth, and that a massive manhunt was underway for Booth and his fellow conspirators. There was yet no hint that Davis was suspected of complicity.
On April 23, the first Sunday after Easter, Davis went to church in Charlotte with some of the Cabinet, a few congressmen, General Cooper, Burton Harrison and other aides, making “a congregation the like of which Charlotte had never seen before, and will, doubtless, never see again.” The Reverend George M. Everhart, Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, was not inhibited by his distinguished visitors. He delivered an angry, impassioned sermon on the murder of Lincoln, “a blot on American civilization, which in this 19th century of the Christian era is doubly deep in infamy. It is the tapping of a fountain of blood, which, unchecked, will burst forth and flow onward through the South as well as the North, and bear on its gory bosom a reign of terror like unto which that in the days of Robespierre would fade into insignificance.” Anarchy, Everhart said, was threatening all of America, “with its outbreaks of passion and madness, crime and outrage. This event, unjustifiable at any time, but occurring just now, renders it obligatory upon every Christian to set his face against it—to express his abhorrence of a deed fraught with consequences to society everywhere, and more especially to Southern society.”
Davis sensed that the sermon was meant for him. As he left the church with Colonel Johnston and Harrison he said, smiling, “I think the preacher directed his remarks at me; and he really seems to fancy I had something to do with the assassination.” Oddly enough, it did not seem to occur to Davis that the ideas expressed by Everhart were also being heard in Washington.
Distressing news came to Davis in Charlotte. There was word of the fall of Mobile, one of the last Confederate ports, on April 12, and two days later news that Federal Major Robert Anderson had raised the American flag over Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, just four years after he had surrendered the post to the Rebels.
It was also in Charlotte that Davis received from Lee his explanation for his surrender, a report written just three days after Appomattox. Davis read with surprise:
“Upon arriving at Amelia Court-House on the morning of the 4th with the advance of the army on the retreat … and not finding the supplies ordered to be placed there, nearly twenty-four hours were lost.… The delay was fatal …”
Lee’s weary troops, then near starvation, had been forced to scour the countryside for provisions, losing so much time that pursuing Federal armies had cut them off before they could reach Lynchburg. Had the Confederacy died because of a commissary order gone astray? This controversy was to drag on for more than a century. Davis did not recall a request for the rations from Lee and resolved to investigate. He felt that Lee was mistaken, and had been the victim of his tendency to issue imprecise orders. Historians were to concur in this conclusion.
By this time, though Davis did not know of it, General Lee had returned to his family in Richmond. So far as the greatest soldier of the Confederacy was concerned, the war was over. “The questions at issue,” he said, had been decided, and henceforth he was to devote his life to building a New South. He was soon to declare that he felt no resentment toward the North: “I believe I may say, looking into my own heart, and speaking as in the presence of God, that I have never known one moment of bitterness or resentment.”
The contrast between Lee’s calm resignation and the fierce defiance of the fleeing President was symbolic of attitudes important to the Southern future, as public opinion polarized about the heroes of the defeated nation. Only years later were the views of Lee and Davis toward the enemy to be reconciled.
Burton Harrison needed no reminder that the inflexible Davis was unlikely to abandon his position, but during their stay in Charlotte even he was impressed anew by the depths of the President’s feelings. Davis clung to hope of eventual victory with the fervor of a zealot, all the while torn by frustrations as his closest advisers urged his acceptance of the inevitable. The emotional roots of his inability to surrender had not been revealed, even to his most trusted aide, Harrison. But there was a day when Davis, his face wreathed with a cheerful smile, said impulsively to his secretary, “I cannot feel myself a beaten man!” It was as if the fate of the South were no longer a sectional or national issue, but had become for him a highly charged personal one, linked to attitudes formed during a lifetime. Davis might yet be forced to concede defeat for the South, but he could not conceive of his own. Harrison was to remember the remark for years.
Soon after learning of Lincoln’s death, Davis sent Burton Harrison to Abbeville to guide his wife and family farther to the south, and to carry to her messages about the rapid movement of events. Varina was deep in South Carolina when she read of the murder of Lincoln, and said, “I burst into tears, the first I had shed, which flow from the mingling of sorrow for the family of Mr. Lincoln, and a thorough realization of the inevitable results to the Confederates,” who, she felt, were now at the mercy of Northern radicals.
Varina begged Davis to make no attempt to join her, “unless I happen to cross your shortest path to your bourne, be that what it may.” She repeated this in later letters, “Do not try to meet me. I dread the Yankees getting news of you so much, you are the country’s only hope …”
Much more quickly than her husband, Varina seemed to sense that Lincoln’s murder placed Davis’s life in danger. She feared that radical Northerners saw Lincoln’s death as “a divine rebuke” to those who favored leniency toward the Confederates. A fanatic spirit of revenge was already sweeping the North.
Varina asked her husband’s approval of her plans for continued flight, though they were confused and shifting: She might go to Washington, Ga., then perhaps to Atlanta, or to Florida for passage to Nassau or Bermuda and thence to England unless she happened to find a good school for the children elsewhere. She might join him in Texas, “and that is the prospect that bears me up, to be once more with you.” She added domestic news: Her sister Maggie Howell sent “a thousand loves,” Piecake had become “too playful to suck,” and the boys were well. She also mentioned that their black playmate, Jim Limber, was especially so, “thriving but bad.” The Davises had rescued Jim Limber from his cruel father in Richmond, and through kind treatment had healed his sores and wounded spirits and restored him to happiness. Varina ended with a note of finality in farewell: “God bless you, keep you. I have wrestled with God for you. I believe He will restore us to happiness.”
Though Harrison and the Burts sought to persuade her to remain longer in Abbeville, where she would be safe among friends, Varina left the next morning, feeling that her presence in the town would endanger her husband when he arrived. Harrison agreed to ride with her for several days—though he had planned to precede her to Florida, where he might arrange transportation to the coast for her party. Varina and Harrison left Abbeville by wagon with an escort of young Kentucky cavalrymen who were on sick leave.
In Charlotte, Davis was temporarily cheered by the support of the South Carolina firebrand, General Wade Hampton of the cavalry, who had accompanied Johnston to his conference with Sherman. Hampton agreed with Davis that the military situation called for stout resistance, rather than despair; he claimed that at least 40,000 Confederate troops east of the Mississippi were still in a fighting mood, and that he would like to lead them: “Give me a good force of cavalry and I will take them safely across the Mississippi—and if you desire to go in that direction it will give me great pleasure to escort you.”
Hampton vowed that he himself would never surrender to the base Yankees: “A return to the Union will bring all the horrors of war coupled with all the degradation that can be inflicted on a conquered people.”
Both Hampton and Davis feared that war-weary Southerners, desperately anxious for peace, failed to realize what grim conditions they faced as a conquered people. The huge South Carolinian’s impassioned message may have helped to stiffen the President’s resolve after the lapse noted by Stephen Mallory as the caravan left Greensboro. Davis soon reiterated his faith in the Confederacy.
John Breckinridge, after appearing briefly at the Sherman-Johnston surrender conference near the small town of Durham’s Station, returned to Greensboro with Reagan and then rode horseback southward to the point where the railroad had been cut. Davis sent a train from Charlotte to hurry them to headquarters, but stragglers from Johnston’s army seized the train and ousted the officials.
Breckinridge and Reagan arrived belatedly in Charlotte with a surrender document signed by Sherman and Johnston. Unlike General Lee, Johnston had insisted that Davis approve and sign his surrender terms, evidently to forestall criticism of his action. Under terms of armistice brought to Davis, Confederates would disarm, and existing state governments would remain and be welcomed back into the Union. The U.S. would protect Southern people and property, and guarantee complete freedom from molestation by Federal authorities. Even in this formal document there was no mention of slavery. Sherman believed he was following the wishes of Abraham Lincoln.
Ironically, Sherman, the man most feared and reviled by Southerners, offered more liberal terms than any other Federal conqueror—and Davis agreed that they were liberal indeed.
In fact, Davis was certain that these overgenerous terms would have been rejected even by the humane Lincoln, and predicted that Andrew Johnson and Edwin Stanton would scorn them.
Davis called a Cabinet session and asked members to write their assessment of choices facing the government. John Reagan’s report was typical: “The country is worn down by a brilliant and heroic, but exhausting and bloody, struggle of four years. Our ports are closed.… The supplies … are limited … and our railroads are … broken and destroyed.… Our currency has lost its purchasing power.”
Reagan concluded that Southerners could not “reasonably hope for the achievement of our independence” and that it would be both “unwise and criminal” to continue the struggle. He urged Davis to sign the agreement.
But Reagan and his colleagues were unwilling to surrender on less favorable terms. If Washington rejected this agreement then “it will be our duty to continue the struggle as best we can, however unequal it may be; as it would be … more honorable to waste our lives and substance … than to yield both to the mercy of a remorseless conqueror.”
All of his advisers urged Davis to sign. Attorney General George Davis pointed out that the Southern states would re-enter the Union with the same status they had enjoyed in 1861. Even Judah Benjamin joined the majority and said he felt that no better terms could be had. The President then signed the document.
The President’s own emotions at this moment had been poured out in a long, impassioned letter to Varina, written while his Cabinet members were composing their reports:
The dispersion of Lee’s army and the surrender … destroyed the hopes I had when we parted … Even after that disaster, if the men who “straggled,” say thirty or forty thousand in number, had come back … we might have repaired the damage; but panic has seized the country …
He wrote of the Sherman-Johnston agreement and its terms and added:
The issue is one which it is very painful for me to meet. On one hand is the long night of repression which will follow the return of our people to the “Union”; on the other, the suffering of the women and children, and the carnage among the few brave patriots who … would struggle but to die in vain.
Of himself and their family he wrote:
… I have sacrificed so much for the cause of the Confederacy that I can measure my ability to make any further sacrifice required, and am assured there is but one to which I am not equal—My Wife and my Children—How are they to be saved from degradation or want is now my care.
He repeated his plea that Varina sail abroad, or to Texas. His own plan was still rather vague: “… it may be that a devoted band of cavalry will cling to me, and that I can force my way across the Mississippi, and if nothing can be done there … I can go to Mexico and have the world from which to choose a location.”
He closed melodramatically:
Dear Wife, this is not the fate to which I invited you when the future was rose-colored to us both; but I know you will bear it even better than myself … Farewell, my dear, there may be better things in store for us than are now in view, but my love is all I have to offer, and that has the value of a thing long possessed, and sure not to be lost.…
All the agonizing over the truce agreement was in vain, for it was hardly an hour after Johnston received the copy signed by Davis that news of the Federal rejection came. U. S. Grant was sent south to impose a much sterner peace—and was ordered to remove Sherman from command if he did not comply. Edwin Stanton publicly accused Sherman of disloyalty and intimated that he had been “bribed by Jeff Davis gold.” The new terms to be offered were those that Grant had extended to Lee at Appomattox, which were purely military.
Stanton’s charges stirred a nationwide reaction; people throughout the North refused to believe that their hero, Sherman, had been in collusion with the enemy to thwart the government’s war aims.
From Charlotte, Davis sought to prevent Johnston’s surrender under the new terms proffered. Over the signature of Breckinridge the President urged Johnston to march his troops to some rendezvous beyond the reach of the enemy: “Such a force could march away from Sherman and be strong enough to encounter anything between us and the Southwest. If this course be possible carry it out and telegraph your intended route.”
The more realistic Johnston, with his distaste for Jeff Davis still evident, responded that the presidential plan for continued resistance was “impracticable,” that its only beneficiaries would be Confederate high officials—and that its victims would be the men in ranks and the civilians at home. Johnston urged Davis to abandon all escorts and wagons and flee at once.
Johnston said he would accept the best terms he could get but, to the dismay of Davis, he surrendered not only his own army but most Confederate troops still in uniform throughout the eastern theater, including remnants of the Army of Tennessee under his command in North Carolina and scattered forces in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Only the army of General Richard Taylor in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana was excluded. Captain John Taylor Wood, perhaps reflecting the President’s view, noted that this wholesale surrender by Johnston was “something unparallelled without good reason or authority.”
Davis was bitterly critical of Johnston’s surrender in defiance of orders. He accepted the fact that Lee had given up the fight when surrounded and helpless, but he felt that Johnston had dishonored the Confederacy by surrendering his army before it could be brought to bay, rather than retreating southward as Davis had urged: “Had General Johnston obeyed the order sent to him from Charlotte, and moved on the route selected by himself … he could not have been successfully pursued by General Sherman.” Johnston’s army, he said insistently, could have been reinforced in Charlotte and could then have marched unchallenged to the Mississippi.
On April 24, in the Phifer house on Charlotte’s North Tryon Street, Davis presided over the last full session of the Confederate Cabinet, and sought to make plans for flight. It was not an easy task. As Wood noted, the cavalry escort had become unreliable: “They are committing many depredations.” Wood heard that some members of the party planned to leave the President. “So we are falling to pieces,” he wrote.
Attorney General George Davis became the first Cabinet member to leave the caravan. He asked the President’s advice about resigning. “I want to stand by the Confederacy,” he said, “but my children are here in Charlotte and my only property is in Wilmington. I don’t know where my duty is.”
“By the side of your family,” the President said.
George Davis agreed. His wife had died during the war, and though he felt that his children could safely remain in Charlotte, he expected to be jailed if caught in “Union-infested” North Carolina. The President was sorry to see him go, for he had come to value the opinions of the Tarheel lawyer whose advice had often guided him in important decisions. With an eye upon recorded history, the President responded to the Attorney General’s resignation in writing, and the courtly fugitive was soon off on an escape route of his own.
As the party prepared to leave Charlotte, Secretary Trenholm was so ill as to be bedridden, but gamely insisted to Davis that he could bear the jolting of the wagon on the way southward. It was decided that old General Samuel Cooper, the Adjutant General, should remain behind in the city and await the arrival of Federal troops. Officials, soldiers and local civilians spent the day of April 25 preparing the President’s party for continued flight.
A few more troops appeared in Charlotte, and General Braxton Bragg, who had retreated into central North Carolina, was ordered to march his little command to the city, and to follow the Cabinet.
In New York City on this day the funeral procession of Abraham Lincoln wound through the streets, one of the several ceremonies planned for the slain President’s long journey homeward to Springfield, Ill. As the procession passed the corner of Broadway and 14th Street, two small boys watched from an upper floor—Theodore Roosevelt, the future President, aged six and a half, and his young brother Elliott, the future father of Eleanor Roosevelt. The boys were nephews of James D. Bulloch, the Confederate chief of staff in Europe, spymaster, paymaster and procurer of those remarkable British-built ships which became Rebel raiders on the seas of the world.
Back in Greensboro the wily Admiral Semmes, who had been trained as a lawyer before the war, realized that his exploits as a sea raider might bring charges of piracy against him, and sought to protect himself in a unique surrender ceremony. He went before General William Hartsuff, the Federal commissioner in the town, and presented the muster roll of his command. When he was told that his officers and men need only sign printed forms, Semmes said, “I prefer, if you have no objection, to fill and complete my own here in your presence.”
“Oh, that makes no difference,” Hartsuff said, but when Semmes insisted, the general had an aide complete the form as dictated by Semmes, who pointedly signed himself “Rear Admiral in the Confederate States Navy, and a Brigadier General in the Confederate States Army, commanding a brigade.” He now had recognition from the enemy of his legitimate rank as a general as well as an admiral, and was not merely a “pirate”—a factor that was to help foil later efforts to prosecute him. The parole pledged Semmes to fight no more, and in return he was permitted to return home, “not to be disturbed by the U. S. authorities, so long as he observes this obligation …”
John Breckinridge’s chief contribution to Confederate history was made while he was in Charlotte—the salvage of the official archives of the government. The general put the collection under the care of Robert G. Kean, the chief of the War Bureau. Breckinridge told Kean that the U. S. had rejected the Sherman-Johnston truce and that the enemy might overrun the state. Kean accepted orders to store the documents in Charlotte and to surrender them to the Federal commander when the enemy occupied the city, “preserving them from being destroyed, if I could.”
Breckinridge also asked General Samuel Cooper to help protect the voluminous archives, since they were “essential to the history of the Confederacy.” As the general’s biographer wrote, “This was Breckinridge at his best. His family had always had a keen sense of their own history, and diligently preserved over a span of two centuries every scrap of correspondence, receipts and records.”
There was a new, if temporary, air of cheerful confidence as the party left the city. Emergency calls for troops had brought in three new skeleton brigades, so that the escort had been reinforced to a strength of more than 2,000, all under command of Breckinridge, but led by new field officers: General S. W. Ferguson, an energetic West Pointer from South Carolina who was a Davis favorite; Colonel J. C. Vaughan, a “brave and earnest” Tennessean; and General Basil Duke, an exceptionally able Kentucky cavalryman. Like most of the others, Duke’s men were veterans, but of uncertain discipline in these last days of the Confederacy.
Discipline was breaking down elsewhere. Captain Fred Emory, chief of the baggage guard, had been “drunk continually” in Charlotte and was supplanted by Captain Watson Van Benthuysen, a nephew of the President. The new baggage guard included young soldiers who were thought to be among the most trustworthy men in uniform. Two were brothers of Watson Van Benthuysen—Alfred and Jefferson D.—and five others were scions of prominent families of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. One of the Marylanders was Tench Tilghman, whose great-grandfather, an aide to Washington during the Revolution, had carried to Congress news of victory at Yorktown. Also in the baggage guard were two scouts from Captain Given Campbell’s Kentucky company. In addition there were five Negro servants, including Watson, the President’s cook. Though the flight was to become desperate, the President intended to enjoy the comforts to which he was accustomed.
The caravan entered South Carolina on April 26, a long procession of soldiers, officials and wagons—perhaps fifty men in the President’s immediate party, the 2,000 troops of the expanded escort, and five wagons. Their passing trailed clouds of orange dust across newly green fields.