Bloody Crimes Read online

  Davis’s calm notwithstanding, news of Lee’s imminent retreat alarmed the people of Richmond. Many denied it credence. General Lee would not allow it to happen, they told themselves. He would save the city, just as he had repelled all previous Union efforts to take it. In the spring of 1865, Robert E. Lee was the greatest hero in the Confederacy, more popular than Jefferson Davis, whom many people blamed for their country’s misfortunes. This news was not completely unexpected by Davis and others in his government, who had even begun making preparations for it. But there were no outward signs of danger and the people of Richmond had their judgment clouded by their faith in General Lee.

  Now gloom seized the capital. A Confederate army officer, Captain Clement Sulivane, noted the change: “About 11:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 2d, a strange agitation was perceptible on the streets of Richmond, and within half an hour it was known on all sides that Lee’s lines had been broken below Petersburg; that he was in full retreat…and that the city was forthwith to be abandoned. A singular security had been felt by the citizens of Richmond, so the news fell like a bomb-shell in a peaceful camp, and dismay reigned supreme.”

  Davis made his way from St. Paul’s to his office at the old customs house. He summoned the heads of the principal government departments—war, treasury, navy, post office, and state—to meet with him there at once. “I went to my office and assembled the heads of departments and bureaus, as far as they could be found on a day when all our offices were closed, and gave the needful instructions for our removal that night, simultaneously with General Lee’s withdrawal from Petersburg. The event was not unforeseen, and some preparation had been made for it, though, as it came sooner than was expected, there was yet much to be done.”

  Davis assured his cabinet that the fall of Richmond would not signal the death of the Confederate States of America. He would not surrender. No, if Richmond was doomed, then the president, his cabinet, and the government would evacuate the city, travel south, and establish a new capital in Danville, Virginia, one hundred and forty miles to the southwest, and, for the moment, beyond the reach of Yankee armies. The war would go on. Davis told them to pack their most vital records, only those necessary for the continuity of the government, and send them to the railroad station.

  The train would leave that night, and he expected all of them—Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, Attorney General George Davis, Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm, Postmaster John Reagan, and Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory—to be on that train. Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge would stay behind in Richmond to oversee the evacuation and then follow the cabinet to Danville. What they could not take, they must burn. Davis ordered that the train take on other cargo too, more valuable than the dozens of document-crammed trunks: the Confederate treasury, several million dollars in gold and silver coins, plus Confederate currency.

  Davis spent most of the afternoon working at his office with his personal staff. His circle of talented and devoted aides included Francis R. Lubbock, a former governor of Texas; William Preston Johnston, son of the president’s old friend General Albert Sidney Johnston, who had been killed in 1862 at the battle of Shiloh; John Taylor Wood, U.S. Naval Academy graduate, who was Davis’s nephew by marriage and a grandson of Mexican War general and later president of the United States Zachary Taylor; and Micajah H. Clark, Davis’s chief clerk.

  “My own papers,” recalled Davis, “were disposed as usual for convenient reference in the transaction of current affairs, and as soon as the principal officers had left me, the executive papers were arranged for removal. This occupied myself and staff until late in the afternoon.”

  Davis then walked home to the presidential mansion at Twelfth and Clay streets to supervise the evacuation of the White House of the Confederacy. Worried citizens stopped him on his way: “By this time the report that Richmond was to be evacuated had spread through the town, and many who saw me walking toward my residence left their houses to inquire whether the report was true. Upon my admission…of the painful fact, qualified, however, by the expression of my hope that we would under better auspices again return, the ladies especially, with generous sympathy and patriotic impulse, responded, ‘If the success of the cause requires you to give up Richmond, we are content.’ The affection and confidence of this noble people in the hour of disaster were more distressing to me than complaint and unjust censure would have been.”

  When Davis arrived home, an eerie stillness possessed the mansion. His wife, Varina, and their four children were gone. He had foreseen this day. Hoping for the best but anticipating the worst, he had evacuated them from Richmond three days earlier, on Thursday, March 30. The president knew what could happen to civilians when cities fell to enemy armies. If Richmond fell, he wanted his family far removed from the scenes of that disaster.

  Varina remembered their conversation before her departure: “He said for the future his headquarters must be in the field, and that our presence would only embarrass and grieve, instead of comforting him.” The president decided to send his family to safety in Charlotte, North Carolina, which was farther south than Danville. They would not travel alone. He assured Varina that his trusted private secretary, Colonel Burton Harrison, would escort and protect her during the journey.

  Until the end, the first lady begged to stay with her husband in Richmond, come what may: “Very averse to flight, and unwilling at all times to leave him, I argued the question…and pleaded to be permitted to remain.” Davis said no—she and the children must go. “I have confidence in your capacity to take care of our babies,” he told her, “and understand your desire to assist and comfort me, but you can do this in but one way, and that is by going yourself and taking our children to a place of safety.”

  Then the president spoke ominous words. “If I live,” Davis promised his beloved companion and confidante of more than twenty years, “you can come to me when the struggle is ended.”

  If he lived? Varina could not admit that it was possible he might not. But Jefferson prepared her for the worst: “I do not expect to survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.”

  Varina did not want to leave behind all that she owned in Richmond, confessing a feminine attachment to her possessions. “All women like bric-a-brac, which sentimental people call ‘household goods,’ but Mr. Davis called it ‘trumpery.’ I was no superior to my sex in this regard. However, everything which could not be readily transported was sent to a dealer for sale.”

  Varina wanted to ask friends and neighbors to hide her large collection of silver from the Yankee looters, but her husband vetoed her scheme, explaining that enemy troops might punish anyone who helped them. “They may be exposed to inconvenience or outrage by their effort to serve us.”

  The president did insist that she carry with her on the journey something more practical than bric-a-brac. On March 29, the day before Varina and the children left Richmond, he armed his wife with a percussion-cap, black-powder .32- or .36-caliber revolver. “He showed me how to load, aim, and fire it,” she said. The same day, Davis dispatched a written order for fresh pistol ammunition to his chief of ordnance, Josiah Gorgas: “Will you do me the favor to have some cartridges prepared for a small Colt pistol, of which I send the [bullet] moulds, and the form which contained a set of the cartridges furnished with the piece—The ammunition is desired as promptly as it can be supplied.” Gorgas endorsed the note and passed it on to a subordinate: “Col. Brown will please order these cartridges at once and send them here. 50 will be enough I suppose.”

  The image was rich with irony. In the endangered war capital, home to the great Tredegar Iron Works, the principal cannon manufactory of the Confederacy, at a time when tens of thousands of battling soldiers were expending hundreds of thousands of rifle cartridges in a single battle, an anonymous worker in the Confederate ordnance department collected a handful of lead, dropped it into a fireproof ladle, melted the contents over a flame, poured the molten metal into a brass bullet mold, and cooled th
e silver-bright conical bullets in water. Then he took black powder and paper and formed finished, ready-to-fire cartridges for the first lady of the Confederacy. She needed to be able to protect herself. The president feared that roving bands of undisciplined troops or lawless guerillas might seek to rob, attack, or capture his family.

  He told Varina: “You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you, but I charge you solemnly to leave when you hear the enemy approaching; and if you cannot remain undisturbed in our own country, make for the Florida coast and take a ship there to a foreign country.”

  Davis gave Varina all the money he possessed in gold coins and Confederate paper money, saving just one five-dollar gold piece for himself. She would need money to pay—or bribe—her family’s way south. Varina and the children left the White House on Thursday, March 30. “Leaving the house as it was, and taking only our clothing, I made ready with my young sister and my four little children, the eldest only nine years old, to go forth into the unknown.”

  Food was scarce in Richmond—there had been bread riots during the war—and it might prove rarer on the road, so Varina had ordered several barrels of flour loaded onto a wagon assigned to transport her trunks to the railroad station. When the president discovered the flour hoard, he forbade her to take it. “You cannot remove anything in the shape of food from here. The people want it, and you must leave it here.” The sight of a wagon loaded with food ready to be shipped out of Richmond might have provoked a riot.

  The children did not want to leave their father, and it was hard for Varina to part them from him. “Mr. Davis almost gave way, when our little Jeff begged to remain with him,” she wrote. “And Maggie clung to him convulsively, for it was evident he thought he was looking his last upon us.” Davis escorted his family to the depot and put them aboard the train. “With hearts bowed down by despair…,” Varina remembered, “we pulled out from the station and lost sight of Richmond, the worn-out engine broke down, and there we sat all night. There were no arrangements possible for sleeping, and at last, after twelve hours’ delay, we reached Danville.”

  On the night of March 30, Davis returned home to his empty mansion and his imperiled city. There was much to do. He knew that over the next few days the fate of his capital was beyond his control. It was in the hands of the Army of Northern Virginia, which was engaged in a series of desperate battles to save Richmond.

  On Saturday, April 1, Robert E. Lee sent word to Davis that the federal army was tightening the vise:

  The movement of Gen. Grant to Dinwiddie C[ourt] H[ouse] seriously threatens our position, and diminishes our ability to maintain our present lines in front of Richmond and Petersburg…it cuts us off from our depot at Stony Creek…It also renders it more difficult to withdraw from our position, cuts us off from the White Oak road, and gives the enemy an advantageous point on our right and rear. From this point, I fear he can readily cut both the south side & the Danville Railroads being far superior to us in cavalry. This in my opinion obliged us to prepare for the necessity of evacuating our position on the James River at once, and also to consider the best means of accomplishing it, and our future course. I should like very much to have the views of your Excellency upon this matter as well as counsel.

  Lee’s use of the phrase “future course” might seem vague or open-ended, suggesting that he felt they would be making a choice from many options. But he knew there was just one course of action—the abandonment of Richmond. At the end of the dispatch, Lee advised Davis that the situation was too dire for him to leave the front and come to Richmond to confer with the president. The Union forces, with their superior strength, could break through the Army of Northern Virginia’s thin lines at any moment, without warning. If that happened, Lee must be in the field leading his men in battle, not idling and stranded in the capital, miles from the action.

  Davis replied by telegraph, agreeing with his general that it was all in the hands of Lee and the army now: “The question is often asked of me ‘will we hold Richmond,’ to which my only answer is, if we can, it is purely a question of military power.”

  Lee invited the president and the secretary of war to visit his headquarters to discuss war planning, but Davis was too occupied with official business to leave Richmond, and so, during the next crucial days that might determine the fate of the Confederacy, the president and his general in chief never met in person. They communicated only through written dispatches and telegrams. Indeed, for the remainder of the Civil War, Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee would not meet again.

  While Davis awaited news of further developments from Lee, he took stock of his armies in other parts of the country. In addition to Lee’s army in the field in Virginia, there was General Joseph E. Johnston’s army in North Carolina and General Kirby Smith’s forces west of the Mississippi River in Texas. With these forces, the cause was not lost. Davis would not sit passively in Richmond and surrender the city, his capital, and his government to the Yankees. If the Army of Northern Virginia, in order to save itself from annihilation and live to fight another day, had to move off and uncover the city, then the government would move with it. Indeed, on April 1, Davis wrote to General Braxton Bragg, revealing his dreams of future Confederate attacks and a war of maneuver:

  My best hope was that Sherman while his army was worn and his supplies short would be successfully resisted and prevented from reaching a new base or from making a junction with Schofield. Now it remains to prevent a junction with Grant, if that cannot be done, the Enemy may decide our policy…Our condition is that in which great Generals have shown their value to a struggling state. Boldness of conception and rapidity of execution has often rendered the smaller force victorious. To fight the Enemy in detail it is necessary to outmarch him and surprise him. I can readily understand your feelings, we both entered into this war at the beginning of it, we both staked every thing on the issue and have lost all which either the public or private Enemies could take away, we both have the consciousness of faithful service and may I not add the sting of feeling that capacity for the public good is diminished by the covert workings of malice and the constant irritations of falsehood.

  On April 1, Davis also received a message that, unlike the military dispatches that brought only news of military setbacks, offered some relief. It was from his wife, telegraphing from Greensboro, North Carolina, where she had gone after Danville. Varina’s text was brief, written in haste, but precious to him: “Arrived here safely very kindly treated by friends. Will leave for Charlotte at Eight oclock tomorrow Rumors numerous & not defined have concluded that the Raiders are too far off to reach road before we shall have passed threatened points Hope hear from you at Charlotte all well.” Lee’s army was on the verge of destruction, Richmond in danger of occupation, and his own fate unknown, but Davis went to bed that night knowing that his family was safe from harm. What he did not know was that this was his last night in the White House.

  Nor did Davis know that his nemesis, Abraham Lincoln, was on the move. Lincoln had left his White House several days earlier and was now traveling in Virginia, in the field with the Union army. The president of the United States wanted to witness the final act. Lincoln did not want to go home until he had won the war. He did not say it explicitly in conversation, nor did he reveal his desire by committing it to paper, but he wanted to be there for the end. And he dreamed of seeing Richmond fall.

  In March 1865, Abraham Lincoln was restless in his White House. A number of times during the war, he had gone to the field to see his generals and his troops, and he had seen several battlefields, among them Antietam and Gettysburg. He had cherished these experiences and regretted that he could not visit his men more often. But the dual responsibilities of directing a major war and administering the civil government of the United States anchored him to the national capital. He always enjoyed getting away from the never-ending carnival parade of special pleaders, cranks, favor beggars, and officeseekers who were able to
enter the White House almost at will. He had endured their impositions for four years, and now that he had won reelection, they tasted fresh spoils. Lincoln knew the war had now turned to its final chapter. It could be over within a few weeks. He had alluded to it in his inaugural address on March 4 when he said: “The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.”

  Relief came in the form of an invitation from General Grant that sent Lincoln on a remarkable journey.

  On March 23 at 1:00 P.M., Lincoln left Washington from the Sixth Street wharf, bound on the steamer River Queen for City Point, Virginia, headquarters of the armies of the United States. His party included Mrs. Mary Lincoln and their son Tad, Mary’s maid, White House employee W. H. Crook, and an army officer, Captain Charles B. Penrose. The warship Bat accompanied the presidential vessel. The next day the River Queen anchored off Fortress Monroe, Virginia, around 12:00 P.M. to take on water, and at 9:00 P.M. anchored off City Point, Virginia.

  Lincoln rose early on the twenty-fifth, and after receiving a briefing from his son Robert, a captain on Grant’s staff, the president went ashore and walked to Grant’s headquarters. Lincoln wanted to see the battlefield. At 12:00 P.M. a military train took him to General Meade’s headquarters. From there, Lincoln rode on horseback and watched reverently as the dead were buried. On the way back to City Point, he rode aboard a train bearing wounded soldiers from the field. He saw prisoners too. As Lincoln gazed upon their faces, he saw the costs of war. That night he was supposed to have dinner with General Grant but said he was too tired and returned to the River Queen. Later, he sent a message to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton: “I have seen the prisoners myself.”