CHAPTER TEN
“By God, You Are the Men We Are Looking For”

Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Davis’s camp, a mounted Union patrol of 128 men and 7 officers—a detachment from the Fourth Michigan Cavalry regiment—led by regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel B. D. Pritchard, was closing in on Irwinville.

Pritchard reached Wilcox’s Mills by sunset of May 9, but the horses were spent. He halted for an hour and had the animals unsaddled, fed, and groomed. Then he pushed on in the dark. “From thence we proceeded by a blind woods road through almost an unbroken pine forest for a distance of eighteen miles, but found no traces of the train or party before reaching Irwinville, where we arrived about 1 o’clock in the morning of May 10, and were surprised to find no traces of…the rebels.”

Pritchard ordered his men to examine the conditions of the roads leading in all directions, but they saw nothing to suggest that a wagon train or mounted force had passed that way. Pritchard left most of his men on one side of town and rode ahead with a few men to the other side where his main body had not been spotted and, posing as Confederate cavalrymen, they questioned some villagers. “I learned from the inhabitants,” Pritchard recounted, “that a train and party meeting the description of the one reported to me at Abbeville had encamped at dark the night previous one mile and a half out on the Abbeville road.”

At first Pritchard suspected it was a Union camp—he knew firsthand from an earlier encounter with them that men from the First Wisconsin Cavalry regiment were in the region hunting for Davis too—but then he realized that mounted federals would not be moving with tents and wagons. Whoever was in that camp, they were not Union men. Pritchard left Abbeville and positioned his men about half a mile from the mysterious encampment. “Impressing a negro as a guide,” Pritchard recalled, “…I halted the command under cover of a small eminence and dismounted twenty-five men and sent them under command of Lieutenant Purington to make a circuit of the camp and gain a position in the rear for the purpose of cutting off all possibility of escape in that direction.”

Pritchard told Purington to keep his men “perfectly quiet” until the main body attacked the camp from the front. Tempted to charge the camp at once, Pritchard decided to wait until daylight: “The moon was getting low, and the deep shadows of the forest were falling heavily, rendering it easy for persons to escape undiscovered to the woods and swamps in the darkness.” The men of the Fourth Michigan were in place by about 2:00 A.M. For the next hour and a half, they waited in the dark, undetected.

At 3:30 A.M., Pritchard ordered his men into their saddles and to ride forward: “[J]ust as the earliest dawn appeared, I put the column in motion, and we were enabled to approach within four or five rods of the camp undiscovered, when a dash was ordered, and in an instant the whole camp, with its inmates, was ours.” Pritchard’s men had not fired a shot. Pritchard exaggerated the speed with which his men had captured the camp. “A chain of mounted guards was immediately thrown around the camp,” Pritchard claimed, “and dismounted sentries placed at the tents and wagons. The surprise was so complete, and the movement so sudden in its execution, that few of the enemy were enabled to make the slightest defense, or even arouse from their slumbers in time to grasp their weapons, which were lying at their sides, before they were wholly in our power.”

But Pritchard was not omniscient. He could only see what events transpired in front of his own eyes. Throughout the camp, individual human dramas unfolded simultaneously as the Fourth Michigan charged the tents and wagons. Before Pritchard’s men could gain full control of the camp, and before the colonel even verified that this was Jefferson Davis’s camp, gunfire broke out where Pritchard had stationed Lieutenant Purington and twenty-five men. It was a rebel counterattack, Pritchard feared. He spurred his horse past the tents and wagons and rode to the sound of the gunfire.

As Purington faced Davis’s camp, awaiting Pritchard’s signal, he heard mounted men approaching him from his rear. He stepped out from cover to halt them, and they called out that they were “friends.” But they refused to identify themselves and would not ride forward when Purington ordered them to. In response to his repeated command that they identify themselves, one of them shouted, “By God, you are the men we are looking for” and began to ride away. Purington ordered his men to open fire. The First Wisconsin fired back.

Lieutenant Henry Boutell of the Fourth heard the gunfire and rode toward Purington. “Moving directly up the road,” said Boutell, “I was met with a heavy volley from an unseen force concealed behind tree…and from which I received a severe wound.” Another man from the Fourth was shot and killed. As the battle continued, a third man from the Fourth was wounded, and several Wisconsin men were also shot. In the dark they could not see that they wore the same uniform, Union blue cavalry shell jackets decorated with bright yellow piping.

The shooting woke Jim Jones, Davis’s coachman, and he gave the alarm. He roused William Preston Johnston, whom the charging horses had not awakened.

“Colonel, do you hear that firing?” Jim asked.

Johnston sprang up and commanded, “Run and wake the president.”

Jones also woke Burton Harrison: “I was awakened by the coachman, Jim Jones, running to me about day-break with the announcement that the enemy was at hand!”

As Harrison sprang to his feet, he heard musket fire on the north side of the creek. He drew his pistol just in time to confront several men from the Fourth Michigan charging up the road from the south. Harrison raised his weapon and took aim.

“As soon as one of them came within range,” he remembered, “I covered him with my revolver and was about to fire, but lowered the weapon when I perceived the attacking column was so strong as to make resistance useless, and reflected that, by killing the man, I should certainly not be helping ourselves, and might only provoke a general firing upon the members of our party in sight. We were taken by surprise, and not one of us exchanged a shot with the enemy.” William Preston Johnston didn’t hear any more gunfire and began to pull on his boots. He walked out to the campfire to ask the cook if Jim had been mistaken.

“At this moment,” Johnston reported, “I saw eight or ten men charging down the road towards me. I thought they were guerillas, trying to stampede the stock. I ran for my saddle, where I had slept, and began unfastening the holster to get out my revolver, but they were too quick for me. Three men rode up and demanded my pistol, which…I gave to the leader…dressed in Confederate gray clothes…One of my captors ordered me to the camp fire and stood guard over me. I soon became aware that they were federals.”

Lubbock was up too. “We sprang immediately to our feet.” Lubbock pulled his boots on, stood up, and secured his horse, which had been saddled all night and was tied near where the governor had laid down his head. It was too late. “By this time the Federal troopers were on us. We were scarce called upon to surrender before they pounced upon us like freebooters.”

Lubbock put up a fight, resisting an attempt by two of the cavalrymen to rob him. Reagan saw it all:

When this firing occurred the troops in our front galloped upon us. The major of the regiment reached the place where I and the members of the President’s staff were camped, about one hundred yards from where the President and his family had their tents. When he approached me I was watching a struggle between two federal soldiers and Governor Lubbock. They were trying to get his horse and saddle bags away from him and he was holding on to them and refusing to give them up; they threatened to shoot him if he did not, and he replied…that they might shoot and be damned, but that they should not rob him while he was alive and looking on.

A Union officer spotted Reagan and spurred his horse toward the only member of the Confederate cabinet who had volunteered to remain with the president. The postmaster-general readied his pistol.

“I had my revolver cocked in my hand, waiting to see if the shooting was to begin,” he remembered. “Just at this juncture the major rode up, the men contending with Lubbock had disappeared, and the major asked if I had any arms. I drew my revolver from under the skirt of my coat and said to him, ‘I have this.’ He observed that he supposed I had better give it to him. I knew that there were too many for us and surrendered my pistol.”

Pritchard rode up to Harrison and demanded to know the source of the shooting. “Pointing across the creek, [he] said, ‘What does that mean? Have you any men with you?’ Supposing the firing was done by our teamsters, I replied, ‘Of course we have—don’t you hear the firing?’ He seemed to be nettled at the reply, gave the order, ‘Charge,’ and boldly led the way himself across the creek, nearly every man in his command following.”

Still inside Varina’s tent, Davis heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp and assumed these were the same Confederate stragglers or deserters who had been planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train for several days.

“Those men have attacked us at last,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.”

He opened the tent flap, saw the bluecoats, and turned to Varina: “The Federal cavalry are upon us.”

Jefferson Davis had not faced a cavalry charge for two decades. The last time he was in battle, he was in command of his beloved regiment of Mississippi Rifles at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. There he encountered one of the most frightening sights a man could see on a nineteenth-century battlefield—massed lancers preparing to charge. The lance was not a toy, and at close quarters it could be more deadly than a pistol or saber. Napoleon’s lancers had been feared throughout Europe, and Mexican lancers had slaughtered American soldiers with ease in California and Mexico. Indeed, Colonel Samuel Colt had perfected his dragoon revolver for the express purpose of shooting down charging Mexican lancers. At Buena Vista, Davis’s regiment was outnumbered and at risk of being overrun in moments. Davis ordered his men form an inverted formation of the letter V, allow the Mexicans to charge into the open V and, at the last moment, unleash a devastating rifle volley into them. It worked, and the Mississippi Rifles broke the charge. That victory made Davis a hero, and, in a circuitous route, his military fame two decades earlier had led him to this camp in the pinewoods of Georgia. But this morning he had too little advance warning and not enough men to resist the charge of the Fourth Michigan.

Davis had not undressed this night, so he was still wearing his gray frock coat, trousers, riding boots, and spurs. He was ready to leave now, but he was unarmed. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. If he could just get to that horse, he could leap into the saddle, draw a revolver, and gallop for the woods, ducking low to avoid any carbine or pistol fire aimed in his direction. He knew he was still a superb equestrian and was sure he could outrace any Yankee cavalryman half his age. Seconds, not minutes, counted now, and if he hoped to escape he had to run for the horse.

ON THE MORNING OF HIS CAPTURE, JEFFERSON DAVIS WORE A SUIT OF CONFEDERATE GRAY AND NOT ONE OF VARINA’S HOOPSKIRTS.

John Taylor Wood got free of the cavalry and tried to help Davis: “I went over to the president’s tent, and saw Mrs. Davis. [I] told her that the enemy did not know that he was present and during the confusion he might escape into the swamp.”

Before Jefferson left, Varina asked him to wear an unadorned raglan overcoat, also known as a “waterproof.” Varina hoped the raglan might camouflage his fine suit of clothes, which resembled a Confederate officer’s uniform. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina explained, “I plead with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat and after he started sent the colored woman after him with a bucket for water, hoping he would pass unobserved.”

Jefferson Davis described what happened that morning:

As I started, my wife thoughtfully threw over my head and shoulders a shawl. I had gone perhaps between fifteen or twenty yards when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and the raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him; he leveled his carbine at me, but I expected, if he fired, he would miss me, and my intention was in that event to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into the saddle, and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching me, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. Success depended on instantaneous action, and recognizing that the opportunity had been lost, I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent…

Even before the gun battle ceased, some of the cavalrymen started tearing apart the camp in a mad scramble. They searched the baggage, threw open Varina’s trunks, and tossed the children’s clothes into the air. “The business of plundering commenced immediately after the capture,” observed Harrison. The frenzy on the part of the cavalry suggested that the search was not random. The Yankees were looking for something.

Lubbock said that “in a short time they were in possession of very nearly everything of value that was in the camp. I resisted being robbed, and lost nothing then except some gold coin that was in my holsters. I demanded to see an officer, and called attention to the firing, saying that they were killing their own men across the branch, and that we had no armed men with us…While a stop was being put to this I went over to Mr. Davis, who was seated on a log, under guard.”

Johnston was not as lucky resisting the plunderers. Several cavalrymen got his horse and his saddle, with the accoutrements and pistols, which his father, General Albert Sidney Johnston, had used at the Battle of Shiloh on the day he was killed in action. Understandably, the son prized his father’s personal effects.

Harrison did not want his captors to lay their vulgar hands on the letters from Constance Cary he carried with him all the way from Richmond: “I emptied the contents of my haversack into a fire where some of the enemy were cooking breakfast, and they saw the papers burn. They were chiefly love-letters, with a photograph of my sweetheart.”

As the skirmish between the Union regiments died down, Colonel Johnston’s guard left him unattended and he walked fifty yards to Varina Davis’s tent, where he found the president outside. “This is a bad business, sir,” Davis said, “I would have heaved the scoundrel off his horse as he came up, but she caught me around the arms.”

“I understood what he meant,” Johnston said, “how he had proposed to dismount the trooper and get his horse, for he had taught me the trick.” It was an old Indian move that Davis had learned years before when he served out west in the U.S. Army.

Once Davis had been apprehended, John Taylor Wood decided to escape. “Seeing that there was no chance for the President I determined to make the effort.” Lubbock and Reagan approved his plan. Wood strolled around the camp, examining the faces of the Union cavalrymen, until “at last I selected one that I thought would answer my purpose.” He asked the soldier to go to the swamp with him, where Wood offered him forty dollars. The Yankee grabbed the money and let him go.

Johnston warned another Union officer that they were firing on their own men: “Feeling that the cause was lost, and not wishing useless bloodshed, I said to him: ‘Captain, your men are fighting each other over yonder.’ He answered very positively: ‘You have an armed escort.’ I replied, ‘You have our whole camp; I know your men are fighting each other. We have nobody on that side of the slough.’ He then rode off.”

Soon Pritchard and his officers discovered that this was true. There were no Confederate soldiers behind the camp. His men were fighting the First Wisconsin Cavalry, and they were killing each other. Greed for gold and glory may have contributed to the deadly and embarrassing disaster. The troopers of the Fourth Michigan and the First Wisconsin cavalries knew nothing about President Johnson’s proclamation of May 2, offering a $100,000 reward for the capture of Jefferson Davis. They were not after that reward money, although once they learned of it, a few days after the Davis capture, they were eager to claim it. No, they wanted a bigger prize—Confederate gold. Every Union soldier had heard the rumors that the “rebel chief” was fleeing with millions of dollars in gold coins in his possession.

The Northern newspapers had reported it, Edwin M. Stanton and a number of Union generals had telegraphed about it, and, no doubt, every last man of the Fourth Michigan and First Wisconsin had heard about it. The lure of the so-called Confederate “treasure train” was irresistible. General James Wilson’s broadside proclamation of May 9, which General Palmer had printed and then distributed as handbills in Georgia, intoxicated Union soldiers with dreams of untold riches.

Eliza Andrews had seen the reward posters:

The hardest to bear of all the humiliations yet put upon us, is the sight of Andy Johnson’s proclamation offering rewards for the arrest of Jefferson Davis, Clement C. Clay, and Beverly Tucker, under pretense that they were implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It is printed in huge letters on handbills and posted in every public place in town—a flaming insult to every man, woman, and child in the village, as if [the Yankees] believed there was a traitor among us so base as to betray the victims of their malice, even if they knew where they were…if they had posted one of their lying accusations on our street gate, I would tear it down with my own hands, even if they sent me to jail for it.

Wilson had promised this: Whoever captured Davis could claim the millions of dollars in gold he was carrying as their reward. But what these man hunters did not know was that Davis was not the one transporting it.

But Davis’s pursuers wanted more than gold—they were also after glory. After a patrol of the Sixteenth New York Cavalry tracked down John Wilkes Booth, they, and especially the sergeant who shot the actor, became national heroes. Why shouldn’t the men who captured the archcriminal Jefferson Davis be rewarded with the same level of fame?

The fatal skirmish between the two regiments created tensions on both sides. Their failure to capture the rebel treasure exacerbated their anger and humiliation. They blamed each other for the fratricide, accused each other of appropriating leads about Davis’s whereabouts during the chase, and fought over the reward money. The Fourth Michigan did not want to share the money with the First Wisconsin. The Wisconsin men claimed that if the Fourth had not fired upon them, they would have been the ones who captured Davis, not the Fourth. The Wisconsin faction accused Colonel Pritchard of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. The accusation later made it into the press, and Pritchard demanded the right to a public reply. To settle the dispute, one general suggested that the reward money be divided among all the men of both regiments present at the scene that morning.

Davis, who had sacrificed all he owned for the Confederacy, who never sought to profit from his office, and who was captured without a single dollar to his name, must have appreciated the irony. He never commented publicly about the ugly dispute among his captors, but it must have amused him to see Yankees killing one another and then squabbling over money in their greed to claim him as their prize.

It was only after the deadly skirmish that Pritchard realized he had captured the president of the Confederate States of America. Pritchard took an inventory of his prisoners:

As soon as the firing had ceased I returned to camp and took an inventory of our captives, when I ascertained that we had captured Jeff. Davis and family (a wife and four children), John H. Reagan, his Postmaster-General; Colonels Harrison [Johnston] and Lubbock, aides de camp to Davis; Burton N. Harrison, his private secretary; Major Maurin, Captain Moody, Lieutenant Hathaway, Jeff. D. Howell, midshipman in the rebel navy, and 12 private soldiers; Miss Maggie Howell, sister of Mrs. Davis; 2 waiting-maids, 1 white and one colored, and several servants. We also captured 5 wagons, 3 ambulances, about 15 horses, and from 25 to 30 mules. The train was mostly loaded with commissary stores and private baggage of the party.

Pritchard did not bother to list in his report the names of the handful of common Confederate soldiers who were captured with Davis. They were not important enough. If a junior officer from the Fourth Michigan had not added their names to another tally of the prisoners, the identity of these twelve men who had volunteered to risk their lives to serve their president might have been lost to history.

In the confusion, Davis’s aides gathered around him to protect him and his family. The cavalrymen made no attempt to bind or handcuff Davis. Harrison could not believe that Davis had been captured. He believed that Davis had left during the night, hours before: “I had been astonished to discover the President still in camp when the attack was made.” The Union soldiers began taunting and insulting Davis, enraging Governor Lubbock: “The man who a few days before was at the head of a government was treated by his captors with uncalled for indignity…A private stepped up to him rudely and said: ‘Well, Jeffy, how do you feel now?’ I was so exasperated that I threatened to kill the fellow, and I called upon the officers to protect their prisoner from insult.”

Lubbock praised Varina’s demeanor in the presence of her enemies: “[S]he bore up with womanly fortitude…her bearing towards [our captors] was such as was to be expected from so elegant, high-souled, and refined a Southern woman.” But the governor saw that her family was frightened: “The children were all young, and hovered about her like a covey of young, frightened partridges; while her sister, Miss Maggie Howell, was wonderfully self-possessed and dignified.”

Davis’s aides had used good judgment on the morning of May 10. No matter how much they might have wanted to open fire on the Union cavalry, they knew they would lose the fight. They might have killed several of the enemy, but the federals, outnumbering them by more than ten to one, could have killed them all and then shot the president. A gunfight at dawn, when visibility was low, might also have had fatal consequences for Mrs. Davis and the children. The president’s aides had done everything that their honor as Confederate officials and Southern gentlemen had required. Surrender, however hateful, had been the honorable choice. Davis never suggested his men should have done more for him that morning. Indeed, he expressed affection for his inner circle for the rest of his life.

And now, thirty-eight days after he evacuated Richmond, after an epic journey through four states by railroad, ferry boat, horse, cart, and wagon, Davis was a prisoner. Others, including his aides, would speculate for years why Davis hadn’t placed his own welfare first and escaped to Texas, Mexico, Cuba, or Europe. Judah Benjamin and John C. Breckinridge did so and had escaped abroad. Burton Harrison always believed that Davis could have escaped—if he had “ridden on after getting supper with our party the night we halted for the last time; had he gone but five miles beyond Irwinville, passing through that village at night, and so avoiding observation, there is every reason to suppose that he and his party would have escaped either across the Mississippi or through Florida to the sea-coast…as others did.”

Harrison speculated that the reason Davis did not was “the apprehension he felt for the safety of his wife and children which brought about his capture.”

No one really knows why Davis failed to leave the camp that night. Perhaps he was tired of life on the run, or maybe his chronic illnesses had weakened him. Maybe he thought a few more hours of stolen rest would not matter. In Virginia, John Wilkes Booth had paid the price for tarrying too long at a farm where he had found respite from his manhunt. The assassin might have reached Mexico if he had not slowed his flight. Delay had cost him his life. Perhaps Davis thought it was too late to escape to Texas and resuscitate a western Confederacy there. He might have feared once he left this camp, he would never see his wife and children again. Perhaps part of him did not want to flee, run away to a foreign land, and vanish from history. Instead he would remain onstage for the drama’s last act, waiting for the curtain to fall upon the lost cause. Any explanation is just speculation.

But he failed in his mission, which was not escape but victory. He had not been able to rally the army or the people to continue the war. He did not make it across the great Mississippi River to create a new Confederate empire in the west. But he had done his best.

The war, and the chase for Jefferson Davis, were over. But he was alive. His story might have ended at the little camp near Irwinville, Georgia. The cavalryman he hoped to unseat from the saddle might have shot him. Or, if he had seized the horse and galloped for the woods, he might have been cut down by carbine fire. And if he had escaped the scene, he might have been, an hour, a day, or a week later, shot and killed, unprotected and alone, somewhere in the wilderness of southwest Georgia or beyond. May 10, 1865, was the end for Jefferson Davis’s presidency and his dream of Southern independence. But it was the beginning of a new story too, one he began to live the day he was captured. “God’s will,” he said.

Now Davis would begin a new, twelve-day journey to imprisonment.

John Taylor Wood, who had been hiding in the swamp for three hours, witnessed what happened next. “I was within hearing of the camp on either side of the stream and…when they came down for water or to water their horses I was within a few yards of them. The wagons moved off first, then the bugles sounded and the President started on one of the carriage horses followed by his staff and a squadron of the enemy. I watched him as he rode off. Sad fate.” Wood fled, embarking on a fantastic odyssey by land and sea to avoid capture by Union forces.

That day in Washington, people did not rush into the streets to celebrate Davis’s capture. No one knew about it. Georgia was too far away for the news to travel to the capital on the same day. Instead, the newspapers were filled with headlines and stories about the Lincoln

ASECOND REWARD POSTER FOR DAVIS AND OTHER CONFEDERATE LEADERS. NEITHER DAVIS NOR HIS PURSUERS LEARNED OF THE REWARD UNTIL AFTER HE WAS CAPTURED.

assassination. May 10 was the opening day of proceedings in the great conspiracy trial.

In Washington the eight defendants charged as Booth’s accomplices went on trial before a military tribunal convened at the Old Arsenal penitentiary. Many people believed that if Davis was captured before the trial ended, he would be rushed to Washington and charged as the ninth conspirator in Lincoln’s murder. Indeed, the government’s first plan was to transport Davis to Washington and imprison him at the Old Capitol prison, two blocks east of the Great Dome. Since mid-April the Bureau of Military Justice had been building a case against Jefferson Davis based on mysterious documents and questionable witnesses.

It took four days to travel from the capture site to Macon, where General James Wilson had his headquarters. At an encampment along the way Davis learned about the $100,000 bounty on his head. Burton Harrison recalled the moment: “It was at that cavalry camp we first heard of the proclamation offering a reward of $100,000 for the capture of Mr. Davis, upon the charge, invented by Stanton and Holt, of participation in the plot to murder Mr. Lincoln. Colonel Pritch-ard had himself just received it, and considerately handed a printed copy of the proclamation to Mr. Davis, who read it with a composure unruffled by any feeling other than scorn.”

Outside Macon, John Reagan got into a dispute with Colonel Pritchard:

On the morning of the day we arrived at Macon, while I and the President’s staff were taking an humble breakfast, sitting on the ground, Colonel Pritchard came by where we were, and I said to him that I understood we were to reach Macon that morning, that I had not changed my clothing for some time, and requested some clothes which I had in my saddle bags, taken from me when we were captured.

“We have not got your saddle bags,” he answered me.

“I am sorry to hear you say that, Colonel,” I retorted, “for I know you have them.”

He asked how I knew that.

“Because your officers told me of your examining their contents right after our capture,” I answered; “and named correctly what was in them.”

With some temper he questioned, “Who told you so?”

“Your officers.”

“What officers?”

“Since you question the fact,” I said, “I will not put them in your power by giving you their names.” Then I added, “It does not look well for a colonel of cavalry in the United States Army to steal clothes.”

“Sir,” he said, “I will put you in irons.”

“You have the power to do so,” I replied, “but that will not make you a gentleman or a man of truth.”

He walked off as if intending to execute his threat, but I heard no more of it.

In Macon, Davis met with General Wilson, who had flashed news of his capture to Washington.

Macon, Ga.,

May 12, 1865—11 A.M.

Lieut.-Gen. U.S. GRANT and Hon. Secretary of War, Washington, D.C.:

I have the honor to report that at daylight of the 10th inst., Col. Pritchard, commanding the 4th Michigan Cavalry, captured Jeff. Davis and his family, with Reagan, Postmaster-General; Col. Harrison, Private Secretary; Col. Johnson, A.D.C.; Col. Morris, Col. Lubbock, Lieut. Hathaway and others. Col. Pritchard surprised them their camp at Irwinsville, in Irwin County, Ga., 75 miles south-east of this place. They will be here to-morrow night, and will be forwarded under strong guard without delay. I will send further particulars at once.

J. H. Wilson, Brevet Major-General.

Once the Davis party arrived in Macon, they received better treatment than they had on the road. Union troops honored Davis by presenting arms upon his arrival. It was the last time that federal troops would honor him. John Reagan commented on their treatment: “When we reached Macon, we were taken to the headquarters of General Wilson, which was a large building that had been used as a hotel. General Wilson invited President Davis, his staff, and myself to dine with him, treating us with courtesy.”

When Reagan learned that he and Davis were to be separated, he asked General Wilson if he might remain with the president. “I thereupon observed that President Davis was much worn down, and that, as I was the only member of his political family with him, I might be of some service to him, and requested to have the order changed as to send me on with him. He asked me if I was aware that this might involve me in danger. I told him I had considered that; that we had entered upon the contest together, and that I was willing to end it with him, whatever that end might be.”

On the morning of their capture, Davis, Mrs. Davis, Reagan, Harrison, Johnston, and Lubbock remained unbowed and defiant. They were not meek prisoners. They had resisted the plundering of their persons and the baggage train, took umbrage at the crude language with which the soldiers addressed Davis, and scorned their captors as moral and social inferiors. To the Southern mind, the officers and men of the Fourth Michigan Cavalry, some of them immigrants, represented all that was wrong with the North and were living proof of the superior civilization of the South.

To the Davises and their loyal aides, these rude, uncouth, ungentlemanly, thieving Yankee troops confirmed the depravity of the North. Davis and his men refused to show fear and conducted themselves as members of the Southern elite. Their hauteur infuriated their captors. The cavalrymen would find a way to settle the score, not with violence but by degrading Jefferson Davis’s most precious possession—his reputation. Thus, within a few days, began the myth that Jefferson Davis was captured in women’s clothing. If Davis would not behave like a beaten man, then his captors could humiliate and emasculate him.

POPULAR IMAGES LAMPOONED DAVIS FOR ALLEGEDLY ATTEMPTING TO ESCAPE CAPTURE DRESSED AS A WOMAN.

John Reagan remembered: “As one of the means of making the Confederate cause odious, the foolish and wicked charge was made that he was captured in women’s clothes; and his portrait, showing him in petticoats, was afterward placarded generally in showcases and public places in the North. He was also pictured as having bags of gold on him when captured…I saw him a few minutes after his surrender, wearing his accustomed suit of Confederate gray, with his boots and hat on…and he had no money.”

Davis was taken from Macon to Atlanta by train on May 14, and then he traveled to Augusta, from where he departed for Savannah.

On Sunday, May 14, the stupendous news of Davis’s capture appeared in the morning papers in Washington. Benjamin Brown French left his home on Capitol Hill to buy a copy of the Daily Morning Chronicle. “When I came up from breakfast I went out and got the Chronicle,” he recalled, “and the first thing that met my eyes was ‘Capture of Jeff Davis’ in letters two inches long. Thank God we have got the arch traitor at last. I hope he will not be suffered to escape or commit suicide. Hanging will be too good for him, double-dyed Traitor and Murderer that he is.” Gideon Welles noted the Confederate president’s capture in his diary: “Intelligence was received this morning of the capture of Jefferson Davis in southern Georgia. I met Stanton this Sunday P.M. at Seward’s, who says Davis was taken disguised in women’s clothes. A tame and ignoble letting-down of the traitor.”

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, journalist George Alfred Townsend wandered around the White House. He wanted to see, one month after the assassination, what signs of Lincoln remained there. Mary Lincoln had still not moved out, forcing President Andrew Johnson to continue living in his hotel room at the Kirkwood House. Townsend went to the second floor, up the same staircase that Lincoln’s body descended the night of April 18. It was as though Lincoln had never left.

“I am sitting in the President’s Office,” Townsend reported. “He was here very lately, but he will not return to dispossess me of this high-backed chair he filled so long, nor resume his daily work at the table where I am writing.

“There are here only Major Hay and the friend who accompanies me. A bright-faced boy runs in and out, darkly attired, so that his fob-chain of gold is the only relief to his mourning garb. This is little Tad, the pet of the White House. That great death…has made upon him only the light impression which all things make upon childhood. He will live to be a man pointed out everywhere, for his father’s sake; and as folks look at him, the tableau of the murder will seem to encircle him.”

Townsend’s eyes scanned the room. His description of Lincoln’s empty office was as eloquent as anything that had been uttered downstairs in the East Room, or during the thirteen-day journey of the funeral train: “The room is long and high, and so thickly hung with maps that the color of the wall cannot be discerned. The President’s table at which I am seated, adjoins a window at the farthest corner; and to the left of my chair as I recline in it, there is a large table before an empty grate, around which there are many chairs, where the cabinet used to assemble. The carpet is trodden thin, and the brilliance of its dyes lost. The furniture is of the formal cabinet class, stately and semi-comfortable; there are oak book cases, sprinkled with the sparse library of a country lawyer.”

Townsend watched while the staff cleared out the office: “They are taking away Mr. Lincoln’s private effects, to deposit them wherever his family may abide, and the emptiness of the place, on this sunny Sunday, revives that feeling of desolation from which the land has scarce recovered. I rise from my seat and examine the maps…[they] exhibit all the contested grounds of the war; there are pencil lines upon them where some one has traced the route of armies…was it the dead President…?”

Townsend walked over to Lincoln’s worktable and saw some books there.

Perhaps they have lain there undisturbed since the reader’s dimming eyes grew nerveless. A parliamentary manual, a Thesaurus, and two books of humor, “Orpheus C. Kerr,” and “Artemus Ward.” These last were read by Mr. Lincoln in the pauses of his hard day’s labor. Their tenure here bears out the popular verdict of his partiality for a good joke; and, through the window, from the seat of Mr. Lincoln, I see across the grassy grounds of the capitol, the broken shaft of the Washington Monument, the long bridge and the fort-tipped Heights of Arlington, to catch some freshness of leaf and water, and often raised the sash to let the world rush in where only the nation abided, and hence on that awful night, he departed early, to forget this room and its close application in the abandon of the theater.

I wonder if that were the least of Booth’s crimes—to slay this public servant in the stolen hour of recreation he enjoyed but seldom. We worked his life out here, and killed him when he asked for a holiday.

I am glad to sit here in his chair…

On May 15, the New York Tribune touted “Our Special Dispatch” received from Washington the previous day: “The public here manifest the utmost enthusiasm over the capture of Jeff. Davis. Some timid politicians, however, express a wish that he had been shot as Booth was, for fear his possession may be embarrassing to the Government.” The editors suggested that he be rushed to Washington for trial with Booth’s conspirators. “If he is placed in the prisoner’s dock at the court, by the side of Harrold and Payne he will certainly be convicted of complicity in the assassination of Mr. Lincoln.” Or, speculated the paper, Davis could be tried for treason. “It is urged strenuously, however, by some in high position, that the dignity of the nation demands that on his arrival here the assassination charge ought to be waived, and he be arraigned and tried for treason, the highest crime known to our laws, and, on conviction, hanged. Secretary Stanton will order Jeff. Davis to be put on a gunboat and forwarded direct to Washington.”

The Tribune’s editorial page implied that Davis must be hanged, but it opposed a vigilante-style lynching. Let things be done according to the law, the paper cautioned:

Jefferson Davis is a prisoner of the Government. He surrendered under no capitulation but his own,—which—he being isolated, disguised in one of his wife’s dresses, and directly within range of several troopers’ revolvers—was too sudden to be otherwise than unconditional. Being a prisoner, we trust that he will be treated as a prisoner, under the protection of the dignity and honor of a self-respecting people.

As we are officially assured that he is proved to be inculpated in the plot which culminated in the murder of President Lincoln, we trust he is to be indicted, arraigned and tried for that horrid crime against our country and every part of it. We hope he may have a fair, open, searching trial, like any other malefactor, and, if convicted we trust he will be treated just like any other. We have no faith in killing men in cold blood, or in hot blood either, unless when (as in battle) they obstinately refuse to get out of the way; but we neither expect nor desire that the execution or non-execution of the laws shall depend on their accordance or disagreement with our convictions of sound policy. But let all things be done decently and in order.

As soon as the “Davis in a dress” story began to spread, the great showman P. T. Barnum knew at once the garment would make a sensational exhibit for his fabled “American Museum” of spectacular treasures and curiosities in downtown New York City. He wanted that hoopskirt and was prepared to pay a formidable sum to get it. Barnum wrote to Edwin Stanton, offering to make a donation to one of two worthy wartime causes, the care of wounded soldiers or the care of freed slaves.

Bridgeport,

May 15, 1865

Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War:

I will give $500 to Sanitary Commission or Freedman’s Association for the petticoats in which Jeff. Davis was caught.

P. T. Barnum

It was a hefty sum—a Union army private’s pay was $16 a month—and that $500 could have fed and clothed a lot of soldiers and slaves. Still, Stanton declined the offer. Perhaps Barnum should

TRUTH VS. MYTH. LEFT: THE RAGLAN COAT JEFFERSON DAVIS ACTUALLY WORE THE MORNING OF HIS CAPTURE. RIGHT: THE SHAWL AND SPURS DAVIS WORE THE MORNING OF MAY 10, 1865.

have offered more money. George Templeton Strong, a New Yorker who kept a celebrated diary chronicling life in wartime Gotham, wrote that “Barnum is a shrewd businessman. He could make money out of those petticoats if he paid ten thousand dollars for the privilege of exhibiting them.”

But the secretary of war had other plans for these treasures. He earmarked the capture garments for his own collection, and had ordered that they be brought to his office, where he was keeping them in his personal safe along with other historical curiosities from Lincoln’s autopsy, Booth’s death, and Davis’s capture. But the arrival in Washington of the so-called petticoats or dress proved to be a big letdown. When Stanton saw the clothes, he knew instantly that Davis had not disguised himself in a woman’s hoopskirt and bonnet. The “dress” was nothing more than a loose-fitting, waterproof “raglan,” or overcoat, a garment as suited for a man as a woman. The “bonnet” was a rectangular shawl, a type of wrap President Lincoln had worn on chilly evenings. Stanton dared not allow Barnum to exhibit these relics in his museum. Public viewing would expose the lie that Davis had worn one of his wife’s dresses. Instead, Stanton sequestered the disappointing textiles to perpetuate the myth that the cowardly rebel chief had tried to run away in his wife’s clothes.

Barnum’s failure to obtain the actual clothing did not deter artists from using their imaginations to depict Jefferson Davis in the coveted petticoats. Printmakers published more than twenty different lithographs of merciless caricatures depicting Davis in a frilly bonnet and voluminous skirt, clutching a knife and bags of gold as he fled Union troopers. These cartoons were captioned with mocking captions, many of them delighting in sexual puns and innuendoes, and many putting shameful words in Davis’s mouth. Ingenious photographers doctored images of Davis by adding a skirt and bonnet.

On May 16, Davis arrived in Savannah, one of the loveliest cities in the South. General Sherman had announced its capture in a famous telegram to Lincoln on December 22, 1864: “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah with 150 heavy guns & plenty of ammunition & also about 25000 bales of cotton.” Now a captive in a captive city, Davis did not know it when he left Savannah, but he would return there someday, in an unexpected, triumphant, even miraculous reversal of fortune. The citizens of Savannah would see him again. Davis was put aboard a vessel bound for Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Now that Davis and all the Confederate armies east of the Mississippi River had surrendered, the Union was ready to celebrate the end of the war in style. On May 18, Grant issued General Order No. 239, announcing that a “Grand Review” of the Army of the Potomac and Sherman’s Army of the West would take place over two days in Washington, on Tuesday, May 23, and Wednesday, May 24. This extravaganza was rumored to be bigger than even the April 19 Lincoln funeral procession.

On May 19, Davis, aboard the William P. Clyde, neared Fort Monroe.

The same day, General James Wilson recommended that all of the officers and men of the First Wisconsin and Fourth Michigan cavalry regiments engaged in the pursuit of Davis below Abbeville receive medals of honor and that the reward be divided among all of the men actually engaged in the capture, with “ample provision being made for the families of the men killed and wounded in the unfortunate affair between the two regiments.”

Stanton wanted his prisoners transported in secret, and he was alarmed when he intercepted telegrams sent to Gideon Welles by two naval officers. Commander Frailey and Acting-Rear-Admiral Radford sought to inform the navy secretary that the Tuscarora had convoyed to Hampton Roads the vessel William Clyde, with Davis on board. Welles recalled Stanton’s feeling that “the custody of these prisoners devolved on him a great responsibility, and until he had made disposition of them, or determined where they should be sent, he wished their arrival to be kept a secret…He wished me to…allow no communication with the prisoners except by order of General Halleck of the War Department…and again earnestly requested and enjoined that none but we three—himself, General Grant, and myself—should know of the arrival and disposition of these prisoners…not a word should pass.”

Welles scoffed at Stanton’s obsession with secrecy: “I told him the papers would have the arrivals announced in their next issue.” But Welles indulged his military counterpart: “I, of course, under his request, shall make no mention of or allusion to the prisoner, for the present.”

Stanton, Welles, and General Grant, who was also present, discussed what to do with Varina Davis and the other women in custody. Stanton exclaimed that they must be “sent off” because “we did not want them.” “They must go South,” Stanton declared, and he drafted an order dictating that course. When Stanton read the dispatch out loud, Welles could not resist toying with him: “The South is very indefinite, and you permit them to select the place. Mrs. Davis may designate Norfolk, or Richmond.”

Or anywhere. Grant laughed and agreed—“True.”

Stanton could not tolerate the former first lady of the Confederacy showing up wherever she wanted. “Stanton was annoyed,” Welles saw, and “I think, altered the telegram.” Stanton knew that if Varina returned to Washington, she could be an influential and dangerous political opponent.

On Saturday, May 20, Davis was two days out from Fort Monroe. In Washington, the Lincoln funeral train, its work done and now back from the thirty-three-hundred-mile round-trip to Springfield, sat at the United States Military Railroad car shops in Alexandria, Virginia. The death pageant had been a spectacular success. Now, on the heels of the Lincoln funeral pageant, Stanton, Grant, and the War Department worked on the final details for the unprecedented Grand Review—the gigantic, two-day parade, the biggest in American history—of the victorious Union armies up Pennsylvania Avenue.

In Richmond, the population labored to recover from the twin plagues of occupation and fire, not knowing that another calamity was about to befall the city. By 5:30 P.M. Saturday, “portentous clouds” had covered Richmond. Then, as the Richmond Times reported, they “burst forth with vivid lightning and stunning thunder.” This “sudden and extraordinary storm” poured rain until 4:00 A.M., Sunday, May 21, and then, after a brief respite, continued until 1:00 P.M. “Never within ‘the recollection of the oldest inhabitant,’” the Times testified, “has such a destructive rainstorm occurred in this city.” The wind and water seemed a plague of almost biblical proportions. Indeed, “the very floodgates of heaven seemed to open. And so great was its effect that the whole valley of the city was soon submerged in water, overflowing all the streams and washing from their banks a number of small houses, trees, & c.” Wagons, furniture, supplies, and all manner of stuff were swept away and destroyed by the flood. Some people believed the Confederate capital cursed: sacked by mobs, then burned, then occupied by Yankees, and now engulfed by a great deluge. What punishment would Richmond suffer next?