The winds of late March scuffed the dark James and tore tatters of smoke from factory chimneys. They howled on the barred windows of Libby and Belle Isle, where the prisoners were, and fell upon crowds in Capitol Square, where people stared at drilling Negro troops of the Confederacy—the first.
In moments when the wind died a humid heat came from the river, and there was something more: The pulsing of guns from the south and west, louder today.
A nineteen-year-old midshipman climbed from the Navy landing at the waterside, a gunner on a day’s leave from a river Battery. His name was James Morris Morgan.
Morgan had almost a thousand dollars on his back, for he wore a splendid new gray uniform whose cloth he had sought in the shops for weeks. His boots, sickly in color, half-tanned and squeaky, had cost $300. But he had so spruce a look that he had more than once, these last few days, been asked to stand as a groomsman at a wedding.
In store windows as the boy passed were crude signs telling as surely as if they were calendars of Richmond’s four years at war:
Bacon, $20 a pound. Live hens, $50 each. Beef, $15 a pound. Fresh shad, $50 a pair. Butter, $20 a pound.
A hundred thousand people now thronged the little city and the markets could not decently feed 70,000—to say nothing of the army in the trenches outside.
Young Morgan walked through Capitol Square beneath tossed branches of budding trees, and into the building where the Confederate Congress was in session.
Even here he heard the guns. Timbers shuddered underfoot and there was a rattling of windowpanes. He went into the Senate chamber for a few minutes and emerged with an expression of youthful outrage. The Senators had to raise their voices to be heard over the guns—yet they were debating the question of just how many newspapers should be left on their desks each morning.
Morgan wandered downhill into one of the hospitals, a converted tobacco warehouse still odorous of its trade, now packed with sick and wounded; women of the city passed among the cots.
Near the doorway Morgan found the friend for whom he sought, Captain F. W. Dawson, a wounded cavalryman who had ridden with Jeb Stuart in the war’s good old days.
Dawson lay in the cooling breezes from the door, his pale face flat on his cot. He whispered, “For God’s sake, Jimmy, make ’em move me to the back.”
“You’ll get no air back there,” Morgan said. “This is the best spot you could find.”
Dawson shook his head. “Every damned woman that comes in that door scrubs my face and pokes me full of homemade jelly. My face is sore and I’m ready to pop.”
Morgan laughed, but he sent a note to the head surgeon and did not leave until he had seen an order fixed to Dawson’s cot:
This man must be washed and fed only by regular nurses.
Young Morgan left him at last and went back to his guns by the river.
Fannie Walker was a copying clerk in the Bureau of War, an earnest young woman who shared the optimism of the city’s youth.
Late in the afternoon as she was on the point of leaving her office amid a swarm of girls, Dr. Cooke, her chief clerk, entered with a final packet of letters for copying. Fannie began work anew with a sigh. As she opened the pack she glanced at the signature: “… R. E. Lee.”
Her pen scratched a few lines and halted. She turned to Cooke. “Oh, Doctor! If this is true we are lost!”
Cooke glanced at the dispatch. General Lee made an urgent request for more troops and provisions. Without them, the message said, “we cannot hold Petersburg.” Not even Richmond pretended that there were more troops or provisions.
Cooke shook his head. “Remember,” he said, “mum’s the word.”
Fannie went home with a burden of dread she dared not reveal; she thought that she must be one of the few people in Richmond who knew that the city was doomed.
Only the heedless could not sense catastrophe at hand. One of those who had expected it daily was Captain Micajah H. Clark, a confidential secretary to President Jefferson Davis who had once been in the Treasury Department. Clark now watched gloomily the long queues of civilians and warworn soldiers who crowded about the doors of the Treasury.
For almost a month, “for the relief of the people,” the Treasury had passed out silver coin—at the rate of $1 for each $60 in paper. Most of the city’s people had not seen such coins since the beginning of the war. Clark knew that the silver could have but one purpose: It could be spent outside the Confederate lines when the Yankees broke through. The ratio of paper to silver was rising; it would soon reach 70 to 1.
In one large house, as in dozens of others this night, a “Starvation Party” was in progress. The music and laughter, as noted by a young diarist, T. C. DeLeon, matched that of the brilliant balls of other days. More than a hundred young women and their escorts thronged the party. Most of the men had come from the trenches since nightfall.
DeLeon thought the young men “worn and tired from camp and famished for society and gayety of some sort.” An old Negro fiddler provided the music and, when the growing dance drowned out his tunes, a girl in a rather frowsy dress joined the Negro, playing a piano.
Refreshments were forbidden, and on tables were ranged ornate bowls, relics of the gay old life, now filled with water. Nothing stifled the high spirits of the dancers.
“Never, amid the blare of the best-trained bands,” DeLeon said, “the popping of champagne, and the clatter of forks over pâté de foie gras, was there more genuine enjoyment and more courtly chivalry than at these primitive soirees.”
The party went through the dances of the “graceless, Godless German cotillion” in defiance of the city’s pious elder citizens who had proclaimed them sinful. From his corner DeLeon watched admiringly:
“Despite the denunciations, the ridicule, and even the active intervention of one or two ministers, the young soldiers and their partners whirled away as though they had never heard a slander or a sermon.”
DeLeon wrote as if he could hear, above the tinny music, Richmond’s struggle to preserve the old social amenities as she neared ruin. He spoke for the young men in the room:
“‘But,’ said the dancers, ‘we do the fighting—we are the ones who are killed—and if we don’t object, why in the deuce should you? Cooped up in camp, with mud and musty bacon for living, and the whistling of miniés and whooshing of shells for episode, we long for some pleasure when we can get off. This is the sole enjoyment we have, and we go back better men in every way for it.’”
The dance went on.
DeLeon seemed to haunt every entertainment in the city, lured by music and laughter as they drowned “rumble of dead cart and ambulance.”
DeLeon saw that the gaiety was a feverish symptom of Confederate weakness, “only a spasm.” In the streets he saw what was happening: “Desertions from the army were assuming fearful proportions that no legislation or executive rigor could diminish. Every day saw brigades double-quicking back and forth through the suburbs; the continuous scream of steam whistles told of movements here and there, and every indication showed that the numbers of men were inadequate to man the vast extent of the lines.”
Day after day in late March he saw covert moves of the government: First the archives and papers of the departments; then heavier stores, guns and supplies not in daily use; then the few reserve medical supplies rattled off in the infrequent trains from the Danville depot; last of all, the young women of the clerical offices, sent to safety in Columbia, South Carolina.
A. R. Tomlinson, a wounded soldier, was now a sergeant of guards at Winder Hospital. He was always hungry, and could hardly stand his post between the meals of gruel and small bits of bread. He watched others eating but could not bring himself to join them.
He wrote: “The surgeons and matrons ate rats and said they were as good as squirrels, but, having seen the rats in the morgue running over the bodies of the dead soldiers, I had no relish for them.”
Colonel Walter Taylor often came into the city from Petersburg in these days. He usually went first to his fiancée, Elizabeth Selden Saunders, the daughter of a prewar Federal Navy captain. Taylor was a romantic figure, a slight, handsome, still well-dressed boy in his mid-twenties who had spent the war as General Lee’s most intimate staff officer. His coat was perhaps a bit large, but the cloth was fine and the sleeves were looped with gold. Taylor wore a tiny mustache and a struggling Vandyke.
Near the end of March he visited other women friends in their fallen estate at a rooming house called The Arlington. They were three women, a mother, daughter and a stranger taken in, out of necessity, to share their small room. In other days they had lived like empresses in the city, with a great house, several carriages and servants they hardly troubled to count. Taylor gallantly concealed the name of the proud family in his memoirs.
Now, as he climbed steep stairs to their room, he had no need to be told their story. Sights, sounds and smells were enough. There were a few pieces of furniture, including a lumpy bed. A crude coalbin occupied one corner. Sticks of stovewood were piled under the bed. Taylor laughed:
“I fully expect to come here some day and find a pig tied to the bed, and a brood or two of poultry.”
He was not far wrong. Until a day or so earlier the women had had a hen tethered to the bed, stuffing her with dried peas in a vain attempt to fatten her for the pot. They cooked on a fireplace grate—though when there was a miracle and they found a stringy roast or a pound of flour, they might command the services of a Negro cook who lived in the rear of the house.
Rent for the room was $25 a month, the price of a large house in prewar days.
These women were friends of Taylor’s fiancée, Betsy Saunders, and they had a gay hour together, as a climax descending to the landlady’s rooms to play the piano and sing. When Taylor had gone, gaiety disappeared and the women returned to work. They huddled near the failing source of light at the windows and went back to their sewing. From odd bits of silk they knitted ties and socks and sold them in the streets. Profits went into sorghum and tea and other delicacies, for the staples of their diet were inevitable: boiled rice, dried apples, beans, and field peas, day after day.
John Beauchamp Jones was a leader of Richmond culture. He had been editor of The Saturday Visitor and The Southern Monitor, in Baltimore, had been praised by Poe, and was author of the novel, Wild Western Scenes, which had sold more than 100,000 copies before the war. He had married a Virginian and come to Richmond as a War Department clerk to see the conflict at first hand.
Now, as spring came on, Jones recovered from an illness and his only work was the daily entry in his diary. On March twenty-ninth he had a little smoked herring and a cup of tea, all that his house afforded. He felt better, reduced his medicine to ten grains of blue mass and told himself that he must avoid overexertion. He had a visit from General Lee’s son Custis, who had spent most of the war in Richmond offices. Jones did not neglect the diary, and he seemed to see or hear everything:
The papers give forth an uncertain sound of what is going on in the field, or of what is likely to occur. The Negro experiment will soon be tested. Custis says letters are pouring in at the Department from all quarters, asking authority to raise and command Negro troops. One hundred thousand recruits from this source might do wonders.
He recorded a dispatch from General Lee in the field, reporting that the Federal cavalryman, Sheridan, had swept around Confederate lines below Petersburg, crossing Hatcher’s Run and marching for Dinwiddie Court House. The enemy aim was to cut the Southside Railroad. Jones thought they might succeed, and cited the ominous words of General Lee:
We have here no adequate force of cavalry to oppose Sheridan, and it may be possible, if Sheridan turns his head this way, that shell may be thrown into the city.
Jones noted an even more insistent sign that all was not well:
Mrs. President Davis has left the city with her children for the South.… Some of their furniture has been sent to auction.
Inflation had not spared Jefferson Davis. The distant Mississippi cotton empire was no longer able to sustain his family in the capital.
He had already sold his own horses, except for one he rode daily, and he was now forced to sell at auction even the matched team of carriage horses used by his wife. A band of patriots rescued the animals from the auctioneer and sent them back to the Confederate White House with compliments. The eminent man of business, James Lyons, signed their note. The horses had cost the Samaritans $12,000—but today that was, after all, only $240 in hard money.
No sooner had Varina Davis got back her carriage horses than a provost marshal’s guard halted her on the street and seized them once more, leading them away for government use. The President would not lift a hand to save them, but again wealthy friends returned the animals to the household.
They were still in want at the Presidential mansion. The public began to note in store windows items which had become familiar during the four-year reign of the Mississippi Rose as First Lady of the Confederacy: an old green silk gown, laces, silks, gloves, feathers, artificial flowers; and from the rooms of the mansion, imported works of art, furniture, china, glass and silver. Gossiping women knew more certainly than from an official pronouncement that the end was at hand.
Varina Howell Davis was almost thirty-nine years old, a dark-eyed, striking woman of no real beauty. She had already merged into Southern legend, though leaders of Richmond society had greeted her coolly. She was a bona fide patrician, if any were, though the roots of her lineage spread beyond the Mason-Dixon Line. Her paternal grandfather, William Burr Howell, had been Governor of New Jersey and a naval officer in the War of 1812. Her mother was a Virginian, Margaret Louise Kemp, who was born on farmlands over which the battles of Bull Run were to be fought. Grandfather Kemp, a man of means and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, had been a refugee from Ireland to Virginia, fleeing a charge of treason; in turn, he had fled to Mississippi after killing a Virginian in a duel.
Varina was the second Mrs. Jefferson Davis. She had lost one son in infancy, and another, little Joe, had fallen to his death from a porch of the Confederate White House during the war. Now, in this March of 1865, there were four Davis children: Maggie, nine; Jefferson, Junior, seven; Willie, four; and the baby, Varina Anne, a fat, red, teething infant of nine months.
One morning in the last week of the month Davis faced his wife with an expression of finality on his grim lips. She had expected the crisis for months, and saw that he had been postponing it with dread. She thought his air “gentle, but decided.”
“My headquarters must soon be in the field, Winnie,” he said.
She stared at the firelight on the Carrara marbles of the hearth with a feeling she would not see it again.
“Yes, Banny, but—”
“You and the children would only grieve and embarrass me. You know there will be no place for you.”
“I can’t leave you.”
The hollow-cheeked President brought it to an end:
“I have confidence that you can care for the babies, and I know you want to help me. The only way is to take them to a safe place.”
She thought she had never seen him so sad as when he said at last:
“If I live you can come to me when it’s over. But I don’t expect to … survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.”
There was a touch of his old fire in the final words, but he reached into a pocket and poured in her hand a small mound of gold coins; he kept for himself one five-dollar piece. He also gave her a bundle of Confederate bills; his engraved image stared up at her from one of them with a hawklike defiance.
He had few further instructions.
“I hope you will not ask any of our Richmond friends to keep our silver plate,” he said. “It might bring some outrage upon them, if the enemy found them out.”
“I can take the flour with me, I suppose, Ban.”
“No,” he said, “you must not take away anything in the shape of food. The people need it so badly. You must leave it here.”
She turned to the house servants, giving orders to take furnishings to the auction houses and to begin the packing.
A few hours later Davis came into her room with a small pistol, twirling its chamber and showing her how to load, aim and fire it. He was like a solemn schoolmaster before a child who did not fathom the hidden meaning of his words.
“If you fall into … the wrong hands,” he said, “you can at least force them to kill you. But you must do as I say. When you hear the enemy approaching, wherever you are, you must go. If they will not leave you undisturbed in our country, make for the Florida coast and take a ship.”
There were few last-minute details. Varina asked her Irish housekeeper, Mrs. Omelia, to see that the remaining treasures went into safe places, but she did not trust the woman, and feared that all would be lost.
Good news came from the auction house—a draft for $28,400, for goods gobbled up by eager shoppers. By telegraph Mr. Davis rented a house for Varina and her party in distant Charlotte, North Carolina. She made ready for her trip by packing only a few pieces of clothing, but as they left the mansion her carriage horses were in the little procession.
They left in the rainy evening of March thirty-first with red auction flags still flapping along Clay Street. There was a chill in the air, but fruit trees were already in bloom. The party rattled toward the depot.
Midshipman James Morris Morgan had spent a memorable day at Battery Semmes, whose guns faced the enemy at close range. In the morning a cannon had exploded, with heavy casualties, and soon afterward a well-aimed Yankee shot disabled an eight-inch gun. At noon, more unexpected than the remarkable shot from the enemy, came a summons for Morgan from the office of the Secretary of the Navy in Richmond.
The boy went as he was bidden, his belongings in a sea bag, apprehensive until the smiling Stephen Mallory himself shook his hand and put him at ease.
“Mrs. Davis is leaving for the South,” Mallory said, “and I want you to act as a guard for her.” He smiled more broadly. “It may involve a dangerous duty. The daughters of Secretary Trenholm will go along.”
Morgan’s mind was not on the coming tragedy of Richmond’s fall as he hurried from the room. Betty Trenholm, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, was his fiancée.
The boy was puzzled by inactivity at the White House when he called; Mr. and Mrs. Davis gave no sign of an impending journey or separation. At the Trenholm home there was a similar air of unreality. The family chattered and lingered over dinner as if nothing were awry, and when a messenger came, directing the girls to meet Mrs. Davis at the depot, they rose leisurely from the table as if they were off for a stroll.
They went through deserted streets to the station, where Morgan led the young women to a passenger car, looking about him in dismay. The paint had long since weathered away, and the interior, lit by smoking lamps, was a ruin of scarred and peeling varnish, the plush seats soiled and torn. He thought that there must be fleas.
The Davises arrived, tumbling from the crowded carriage, which Morgan thought must be almost the last private vehicle left in Richmond: Mrs. Davis, her younger sister, Maggie Howell, the four children, two mulatto servants, the maid, Ellen, and the coachman, James Jones. There was also President Davis, come to see them off, and his private secretary, the immaculate Burton Harrison, who was leaving with Mrs. Davis.
The little train had three cars. Into one of them James Jones led the carriage horses. The refugees followed Mrs. Davis into another, where Morgan and the Trenholm girls greeted them. There were no other passengers.
The sleepy children stretched on the dirty brown plush of the lumpy seats, but stirred when the President entered and began talking with his wife. Davis soon went outside and gave Harrison final instructions.
“Latest word from General Lee is that Sheridan is moving around our right flank with cavalry to tear up the railroad. He may remain there, return to Grant, or join Sherman in the South.
“When you have seen my family safe in North Carolina, come back to me here as soon as you can.”
Despite several calls from trainmen that they would soon depart, it was ten o’clock before the train creaked into motion. Davis said his farewells and hurried to the platform. Harrison waved to him from the steps as the cars jerked from sight.
Morgan helped the women to settle for the journey and tried to make himself comfortable on a forward seat. He discovered that his suspicions about the fleas were well founded.
The train rattled along, but within a few moments halted on a slight grade and refused to budge. Rain began to drip from the ceiling of the car and bedding was soaked. Children cried and the women crouched miserably. The train sat on the outskirts of Richmond until dawn before it crept away to the southwest.
One of those left behind in the capital was Mrs. Judith Brockenbrough McGuire, one of the most loyal patriots left to the Confederacy. While Mrs. Davis fretted in her leaky railroad car during the early morning of April first, Mrs. McGuire wrote in her diary:
The croakers croak about Richmond being evacuated, but I can’t and won’t believe it.
Four years at war had made Robert Lee an old man. Even the most devoted of his intimates noted it. Colonel Armistead Long of his staff wrote:
“He had aged somewhat in appearance … but had rather gained than lost in physical vigor, from the severe life he had led. His hair had grown gray, but his face had the ruddy hue of health, and his eyes were as clear and bright as ever.… Though always abstemious in diet, he seemed able to bear any amount of fatigue.”
Lee rode the crooked crescent of his lines almost daily even now, peering over the bristling forts and ditches to the enemy. He still wore a uniform of plain gray, without the buff facings and gold lace affected by general officers, so that many men took him for a colonel. A North Carolina captain looked at him in wonder: “There is a fearless look of self-possession without a trace of arrogance.”
His troops, however, did not stand in awe of him. On a recent day when he was trotting behind the lines, men stepped into the path of gray Traveller, demanding his attention. One of them stuck out a bare foot for Lee to see.
“I’ve got no shoes, Ginral.”
Another shouted, “I’m hungry, sir. We’ve got nothing to eat.”
Lee hid his despair from the men but could not keep it from the reports to Richmond.
He called for more Negro laborers; he had only 1200 of the 5000 he needed, and many had deserted. His soldiers could not leave the trenches to work.
“There is a great suffering in the army for want of soap,” he wrote. Skin diseases were rampant, and Lee could not understand why quartermasters did not supply the plentiful commodity, lye soap.
The cavalry was dispersed for lack of forage.
For three days his commissary had “not a pound of meat.”
“You must not be surprised if calamity befalls us,” he had warned as early as February.
A single stick of firewood now fetched the price of $5 in the trenches.
Even a child could guess from Lee’s manner that hope was gone. One day the commander rode beside a mule-drawn army ambulance as escort to a little girl from Petersburg, Anne Banister, whose father had died in defense of the town. The child sat beside the driver, now and then slapping the mules with a whip. Lee halted her, but the girl persisted.
“Anne, you must not do that again,” Lee said sternly. “These animals are on half feed, as we all are, and I don’t feel entirely at ease about using them like this.”
The girl was silent for the rest of the ride, but went in tears to her mother. “I don’t believe General Lee thinks we are going to win the war.”
“Of course we can’t win,” the woman said. “We are all starving.”
Yet Lee’s good humor did not desert him. He entertained a visiting dignitary, B. H. Hill, and said quietly, “Mr. Hill, we made a great mistake in the beginning, and I fear it will be fatal.”
“What is that, General?”
“Why, we appointed all our worst generals to command the armies, and all our best generals to edit the newspapers. I have given the work all the care and thought I could, and sometimes, when I was through, my plans seemed to me to be perfect. But when I have fought the campaigns I have discovered defects.
“When it was all over, I found by reading a newspaper that these editor-generals saw all the defects plainly from the start … but they did not tell me until it was too late.”
Hill smiled uncertainly as Lee paused.
“I have done my best,” Lee said, “but I haven’t succeeded as I would like. I’m willing to yield my place to these best generals, and I will do my best for the cause by editing a newspaper.”
Lee once became so desperate as to ride up to Richmond to talk with the politicians, and afterward gave a rare display of temper to his son Custis and others of his family: “The Congress don’t seem to be able to do anything except eat peanuts and chew tobacco, while my army is starving.”
On March twenty-eighth, when the sky cleared after weeks of rain, Lee saw the enemy in motion; great columns crawled southward behind the Federal lines, and outposts reported a major movement of cavalry. Lee saw what he had long feared, a general turning movement against his flank, toward the last feeble link with the South, Southside Railroad. He was not strong enough to prevent it.
He wrote a homely note to his wife, Mary, in Richmond:
I have received your note with a bag of socks. I return the bag and receipt. The count is all right this time. I have put in the bag General Scott’s autobiography, which I thought you might like to read. The General, of course, stands out very prominently, and does not hide his light under a bushel, but he appears the bold, sagacious truthful man that he is. I enclose a note for little Agnes. I shall be very glad to see her tomorrow, but can not recommend pleasure trips now.
He did not repeat the words of warning he had written her so recently:
Should it be necessary to abandon our position to prevent being surrounded, what will you do? Will you remain, or leave the city? You must consider the question and make up your mind.
At ten o’clock on the morning of March thirtieth Lee came to the far right of his line, where he had pushed George Pickett’s three little brigades during the rainy night; for all his care in pulling the men from trenches yesterday, they had been seen by Federal lookouts. The men marched along the Southside Railroad to Sutherland’s Tavern, ten miles from Petersburg, then behind Fitz Lee’s cavalry to the very end of the gray line.
Walter Harrison, the adjutant general to Pickett, watched Lee as he talked with his commanders. The generals had few suggestions, except for Harry Heth, who was still full of fight.
“I’ll attack in my front, and let Pickett support from the flank.”
Lee shook his head, and at last sent Pickett beyond the protection of his trenches to the right, toward Dinwiddie Court House. He added to his little force two riddled brigades of infantry and six cannon under Colonel Willie Pegram. For the guns, at least, the army could afford no more spirited commander.
Lee hung about, waiting. His reward was a dispatch from Fitz Lee:
Enemy cavalry in force at Five Forks, driving in my pickets.
With the dispatch came a prisoner, a smiling young Federal captain of cavalry who seemed to have no fear of Lee. He spoke up under questioning:
“What were you doing at Five Forks?”
“We’re turning you, sir. The whole line.”
“Sheridan’s command?”
“Yes.”
“In what force?”
“All of it, about fifteen thousand.”
A staff officer nearby gave a low whistle. Lee gave the boy a quick look of speculation.
“He does not believe him,” Walter Harrison thought.
“Is there more?” Lee asked.
“A big infantry force with Sheridan at Dinwiddie,” the captain said.
Lee hesitated a moment and then, as if he had no alternative, passed his orders: Fitz Lee would lead the cavalry to Five Forks, with Pickett’s men behind. Pickett would take command.
Before he left the spot there was the faint crackling of rifle fire from the southwest, where the cavalry had met bluecoats. Such of the great men as were left to the cavalry corps were taking the tired brigades into position: Fitzhugh Lee, Rooney Lee, Thomas Munford, Thomas Rosser.
General Lee turned back toward Petersburg, going slowly behind the entrenched line; men were twenty feet apart in the earthworks.
Near the tag end of the trenches lay a handful of elite troops, such as they were—the Sharpshooters of McGowan’s Brigade of South Carolinians. In the months of siege these men had been trained as marksmen; they were armed with Enfield rifles, and many of them were deadly accurate to a range of 900 yards.
Brevet Captain William H. Brunson, who commanded a company of them, was led by a guide to a dangerous spot: “Yanks in that skirmish line over there. Been there since Wise’s brigade pulled out. Hold this line.”
The line was three quarters of a mile long and the company was weak. Nonetheless it survived the adventure. Brunson remembered it:
“A company of Federal cavalry, mistaking us for their own men, rode up within twenty yards of where we stood. A single volley from my line unhorsed nearly the last man of them, and in a few minutes my barefooted crowd were up to their knees in cavalry boots.”
But it was the beginning of retreat, and Brunson was sent to a bridge in the rear, on Hatcher’s Run, to screen a demoralized brigade. The Sharpshooters startled a big enemy force by springing from thickets in a screaming charge and, while the bluecoats fled, trailed rearward, beyond the hospital of Pickett’s division, into an apple orchard where they would not draw fire on the wounded. They skirmished most of the day.
THE ENEMY
Mr. Lincoln had come down from Washington on the paddle wheeler River Queen to visit the army. He disembarked in the teeming new harbor at City Point, where the Appomattox flowed into the James, amid a swarm of tugs, sailing ships, barges, troopships, steamers, all crowding toward the wharves and warehouses which lined the banks as far as the President could see. Beyond, the army’s traffic simply filled the landscape. Wagons, ambulances and soldiers threaded the bluffs to the riverside and there was a din of wheels, ship’s boilers, screaming anchor chains, and boat whistles. Coffins by the thousand were carried on homeward-bound ships. When night fell, the burning lights of vessels gleamed red, blue, and yellow on the water, and sounds fell away to the occasional chuffing of a tug and the bells on men-of-war striking the hours.
The President settled on the Malvern, a captured blockade-runner now serving as flagship for Admiral David Porter, and chose a miniature stateroom in which, Porter complained, “I couldn’t swing a cat.” Lincoln slept in a space little larger than a closet.
The President placed his boots and socks outside his door the first night. Porter found holes in the socks; he had them washed and darned, and the boots shined.
Lincoln beamed at breakfast. “A miracle happened to me last night. When I went to bed I had two large holes in my socks, and this morning they are gone. That never happened to me before. It must be a mistake.”
“How did you sleep?”
“Well enough, but you can’t put a long blade in a short scabbard. I was too long for that berth.”
While Lincoln visited the army that day, carpenters swarmed on the Malvern to dismantle, enlarge and reassemble his stateroom. New bedding was installed. The changes were not mentioned to the President.
Lincoln emerged smiling the next morning.
“A greater miracle than ever happened last night,” he said. “I shrank six inches in length and about a foot sideways. I got somebody else’s big pillow and slept in a better bed than I did on the River Queen.”
The President seemed happy to be marooned from advisers and office seekers, especially those of his Cabinet who were forever quoting from German military experts to him. Porter handed him a telegram from William S. Seward, his Secretary of State:
Shall I come down and join you?
Lincoln grimaced at Porter. “No,” he said. “I don’t want him. Telegraph him that the berths are too small, and there’s not room for another passenger.”
“But I can provide for him if you wish.”
“Tell him, then, that I don’t want him. He’d talk to me all day about Vattel and Puffendorf. The war will be over in a week, and I don’t want to hear any more of that.”
The army watched with unconcealed curiosity as Lincoln stalked among the commands. On March twenty-sixth he rode with General Grant and a little escort to the headquarters of General George Meade. They passed a body of some 1500 Confederates, prisoners of the 9th Corps.
Colonel Theodore Lyman of Meade’s staff thought the prisoners the most disheveled he ever saw: “They grew rougher and rougher. These looked brown and athletic, but had the most matted hair, tangled beards, and slouched hats, and the most astounding carpets, horse-sheets and transmogrified shelter-tents for blankets.”
Meade turned to Lincoln. “I have just now a dispatch from General Parke to show you.”
“Ah,” said Lincoln, pointing to the prisoners, “there is the best dispatch you can show me from General Parke.”
The officers laughed, but young Lyman stared at Lincoln in fascination.
“The President is, I think, the ugliest man I ever put my eyes on. On the other hand, he has the look of sense and wonderful shrewdness, while the heavy eyelids give him a mark almost of genius. He strikes me, too, as a very honest and kindly man; and, with all his vulgarity, I see no trace of low passions in his face. On the whole, he is such a mixture of all sorts, as only America brings forth. He is as much like a highly intellectual and benevolent satyr as anything I can think of. I never wish to see him again, but, as humanity runs, I am well content to have him at the head of affairs.”
Two days later, on the morning of March twenty-eighth, Lincoln came under the eye of an attentive reporter, Charles C. Coffin of the Boston Journal. Lincoln entered Grant’s headquarters cabin on the bluff over the James for a conference with his commander and General William T. Sherman, who had come up from North Carolina for final instructions. The President doffed his tall hat and ducked into the door, round-shouldered and loose-jointed, in comic contrast to the low, stout Grant, who puffed a cigar in silence, his face impassive under the stiff brim of a new hat. Sherman impressed Coffin more strongly than either: “Tall, commanding forehead, almost as loosely built as the President. His sandy whiskers were closely cropped. His coat was shabby with constant wear. His trousers were tucked into his military boots. His felt hat was splashed with mud.”
George Meade hung about them, tall, thin, with straggling gray beard and stooped posture. There was Sheridan, too, shorter even than Grant, and full of hurried talk and enthusiasm.
It was Lincoln who turned to the table in the cabin, where a huge map lay open.
Grant ran a thick finger down the tracing of his forty-mile entrenched line and stabbed a point at the junction of roads to the west and south.
“Five Forks,” he said. “I’ll try to take it. That would pull Lee out of the trenches to fight.”
He explained how Sheridan’s horsemen would move during the afternoon, leading the sweep against the Confederate flank. Coffin went out to stare at the country where the assault would be made, making notes of it before darkness fell.
Hatcher’s Run wandered southeastward through the eroded clay hills; three roads leading southwest from distant Petersburg crossed the stream: Vaughan Road to the east, then Squirrel Level Road, and, nearest of all, Boydton Plank Road. Within sight was the bridge of the Plank Road, held by the Confederates.
The country beyond the trenches was densely wooded, chiefly with pine, with rare clearings marking sites of old sawmills. The Plank Road led through the pines, fifteen miles from Petersburg, to Dinwiddie Court House. Some four miles away lay the road junction known as Five Forks, the key to the Confederate position.
If Grant could move the army in the swimming roads, Coffin reflected, the movement would be like that of fishermen stretching a seine. One end would be fastened to the bank of the Appomattox, and Sheridan would draw the other past Dinwiddie to Five Forks, and beyond to the railroad, perhaps, to snare Lee’s whole army.
Sheridan’s regiments moved through the gray afternoon. The Rebels were restive the next day, and firing increased. Nightfall of March twenty-ninth brought an artillery duel. Coffin described it for his eager New England readers: “I stood upon the hill in rear of the Ninth Corps, and witnessed the display. Thirty shells were in the air at the same instant. The horizon was bright with fiery arches, crossing each other at all angles, cut horizontally by streams of fire from rifled cannon. Beneath the arches thousands of muskets were flashing. It surpassed in sublimity anything I had witnessed during the war.”
The night was very dark, and there was a wind from the south, bringing more rain. Tomorrow, surely, the army would bog down once more and the offensive must be postponed. On this day Sheridan made headquarters at Dinwiddie. Grant moved to follow him.
Mr. Lincoln came ashore from the Malvern, rowed through the harbor by sailors in a drizzling rain. Before eight-thirty he was at Grant’s headquarters to say good-bye. The field commander was in a joking mood, telling the President of the ingenious suggestions for winning the war which were poured upon him daily.
“The latest one was to supply the men with bayonets exactly a foot longer than the enemy’s, and then charge. When they met, our bayonets would go through them, they couldn’t reach us, and the war would be over.”
Lincoln laughed. “Well, there’s a good deal of terror in cold steel. I got a chance to test it myself once. When I was a young man, walking on a back street in Louisville one night about midnight … a very tough-looking citizen sprang out, reached back of his neck and pulled out a bowie knife that looked to me about three feet long. He flourished that thing before my face to see how close he could come to cutting off my nose without touching it. He held his knife close to my throat and said, ‘Stranger, will you lend me five dollars on that?’ I never reached in my pocket and got out money so fast in my life. I handed him a banknote and said, ‘There’s ten, neighbor, now put up your scythe.’”
Grant turned away to his cabin door, where he kissed his wife; she stared after them with her long, plain face pale but composed, as the officers walked toward a little military train.
In the party was General Horace Porter of Grant’s staff, who noted that Lincoln looked older, with deeper lines in his face and darker circles under his eyes. Lincoln stood at the rear as the officers climbed to the platform and raised their hats. His voice almost broke as he called to them, “Good-bye, gentlemen. God bless you all. Remember, your success is my success.”
The train moved away. It went like a fly over a corrugated washboard, Horace Porter thought, over the new tracks laid by engineers to the rough contour of the land. Within the train, headquarters quickly assembled.
Grant took a seat at the end of the car, went through his familiar routine of striking his flint and slow match, and was soon half-hidden in blue cigar smoke. Porter and several others sat near the commander, who began to talk of his plan of campaign. He halted as if his attention had been diverted.
“The President is one of the few visitors I ever had who never tried to squeeze out of me every one of my plans—though he’s the only one with a right to know them.”
Grant looked through the dirty window at snaking lines of infantry on the move.
“He will stay at City Point,” he said, “and he’ll be the most anxious man in the country to hear from us, his heart is so wrapped up in it. I think we can send him some good news in a day or two.”
Older officers exchanged glances. They had never known Grant to express such optimism at the opening of an offensive.
The train rattled through light rain to the end of the thirteen-mile track, where they followed Grant out. They mounted horses led from the baggage car, rode slowly along the Vaughan Road and in midafternoon camped in a cornfield. At night rain fell in torrents, rose from nearby swamps and made fields into shallow lakes.
Behind, along the abandoned line, were thousands of chimneys, desolate in the rain, tents stripped from them; roofless huts marked the old camp of an army corps. Columns struggled in the roads which were like porridge as the miserable troops were driven westward. The chief quartermaster complained to Colonel Lyman that it was the worst moving day of his memory. A train of 600 wagons, though aided by 1000 engineer troops, spent fifty-six hours in moving five miles.
But, like Lyman, the men could raise their heads and look across the landscape: “One pretty sight was a deserted farmhouse quite surrounded by peach trees, loaded with blossoms. In the distance it seemed covered with pink clouds.”
Horses inched along with water up to their bellies and wagons almost disappeared in the sloughs. Men made jokes in the ranks:
“If ever anybody was to ask us if we’d ever been through Virginia we could say, ‘Yes, sir! In a number of places.’”
Soldiers shouted to passing officers on horseback:
“When the gunboats coming up?”
Phil Sheridan was in a hurry, and the cavalry suffered. There were no tents, and the mess wagons were stuck in the mud somewhere in rear of the driving columns. Sheridan himself was among the first men to ride into the country crossroad hamlet called Dinwiddie Court House, where four roads intersected, the most vital leading through Five Forks to the Confederate flank. There was little else.
Sheridan’s bright black gaze found a headquarters site:
“A half-dozen unsightly houses, a ramshackle tavern propped up on two sides with pine poles, and the weather-beaten building that gave official name to the crossroads.”
The staff had no more than peeked into the primitive tavern when a rainstorm broke upon them. There was promise of a bleak night, but soon there was laughter and the tinkling of a piano; officers found two women in the place, refugees from Savannah to Petersburg to Dinwiddie, they said, and in gay spirits despite all. They exacted promises from the cavalrymen:
“You gentlemen won’t fight right here at the Cote House? We know you won’t. Our gentlemen were on picket right about here, until you came up, and they told us they’d not allow bloodshed. Can’t we expect the same of you Northern gentlemen?”
The staff found coffee in an officer’s haversack and the women brewed a pot for the staff. There was late singing at headquarters.
Dispatch riders soon found the place, and messages came in from Grant: This was no longer intended to be a cavalry raid backed by infantry. The entire army would join the offensive. Sheridan slept contentedly in a fat Virginia feather bed, despite warnings from his staff that Confederate agents might attack him there. In the morning there was more rain.
Sheridan moved the troops into position in a downpour, covering the roads, with a wary eye toward Five Forks; the Confederates were beginning to stir.
The two women at headquarters were still thumping the tinny piano when there was a glum note from Grant. Sheridan read it with impatience:
The heavy rain of today will make it impossible for us to do much until it dries up a little, or we get roads around our rear repaired. You may, therefore, leave what cavalry you deem necessary to protect the left, and send the remainder back.…
Sheridan quickly mounted the big Confederate gray pacer he called Breckinridge, captured from the enemy, and with an officer and about a dozen cavalrymen he rode to the cornfield camp of Grant near Gravelly Run. Sheridan’s party and the headquarters throng regarded each other with amusement. The little cavalry chief’s horse plunged in mud to the knees at each mincing step, and the riders were splattered almost beyond recognition. The infantry officers stood about Grant’s tents like roosting chickens, perched on boards and logs to prevent their sinking into the mire.
Sheridan bantered with Grant’s staff:
“I can drive in the Rebel cavalry with one hand, and if they give me infantry, I’ll strike Lee’s right so hard they can break the lines and march to Petersburg.” He became so excited that he ended by shouting.
“How will you get forage in this weather?” someone asked.
“I’ll get all I want. I’ll haul it out if I have to set every man in the command to corduroying roads. I tell you I’m ready to strike out tomorrow and go to smashing things.”
The little horseman paced back and forth in the slush, splashing his boots to the hips.
“That’s the kind of talk we need at headquarters,” an officer said. “You go in and tell Grant that.”
“I don’t want to break in there. He’s with Rawlins, you say.”
An officer went in to Grant. “Sir, General Sheridan’s here with some mighty interesting matters. He’d like to come in and talk with you.”
Grant was engaged in a slow argument with John Aaron Rawlins, his chief of staff and closest friend; Rawlins urged that the attack be continued.
“Bring him in,” Grant told the intruding officer, and as Sheridan entered Grant was chiding the chief of staff, “Well, Rawlins, I think you’d better take command.”
Sheridan excused himself. “I’m cold and wet,” he said. “I’ll go to the fire.” He went out, and soon disappeared into the tent of General Ingalls. Within a few moments, Grant sought him there.
“I’m afraid we can’t move,” Grant said. “If we have no roads, we’d best pull back.”
“Please let me go on,” Sheridan said. “The men are already moving, and we’re covering the roads on the flank. We may have a chance later, but you know what they’ll say if we turn back now. Burnside’s Mud March of ’sixty three all over again.”
“It’s my better judgment to go on,” Grant said, “but they all find reasons to stop. They lose wagons, they say, and wear out the men, and wet the ammunition, and say they’ll have no artillery left. I want to go ahead if it can be done.”
“We can do it without trains,” Sheridan said. “We have them just where you want ’em.” He saw that Grant needed little persuasion, and fell silent.
Grant soon rose. “We’ll go on,” he said. Sheridan recognized the determination in the quiet voice.
Late the next morning Sheridan’s exposed men were struck by Confederate cavalry, and when fighting slowed, gray infantry howled through pine woods after them. Bluecoats fell back in stubborn lines from Five Forks toward their camp at Dinwiddie, and skirmishing became heavy.
Horace Porter, riding from Grant with important dispatches, came near the firing and noted a cheering sign: Along the road, within rifle shot of skirmishers, was one of Sheridan’s big regimental bands, mounted on fine gray horses. They blared away at “Nellie Bly” and the music carried down into the wet thickets, even over the thundering of the new repeating rifles of General George Custer’s men. Porter could no longer hear the minor shriek of the Rebel Yell.