A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

by Amanda Foreman

  The city’s residents were frightened of showing courtesy to Varina and furious with her husband for mismanaging the war. “Mrs. Davis would have been in a sad plight if it had not been for the courage and chivalric courtesy of a Jewish gentleman, a Mr. Weil,” wrote Morgan, “who hospitably invited her to stay at his home until she could make other arrangements. May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless him wherever he is!”18

  Jefferson Davis waited anxiously in the Confederate capital while Lee sought to delay Grant’s encirclement of Petersburg. The Army of Northern Virginia had dwindled to no more than 35,000 men, while Grant’s Army of the Potomac had grown to over 125,000. President Lincoln was less than twenty miles from Richmond, having traveled from Washington on the River Queen to visit Grant’s headquarters at City Point on the James River. (Mary and Tad accompanied him for the first days, but Mary behaved so strangely—raving at the slightest provocation—that she was encouraged to stay in her cabin.) Lincoln’s greatest concern was that peace, which seemed so close now, should not be a pyrrhic victory for the North. “I want no one punished,” he told Sherman and Grant. Their armies were to be restrained from violence or vengeance. When asked about President Davis, Lincoln expressed a wish that the Confederate leader would emigrate, unnoticed and unmolested.

  —

  Lee and Grant had fought each other over seven hundred square miles of territory since June 9, 1864; more than seventy thousand soldiers had died in nineteen separate battles. Now, the struggle had narrowed to the possession of the Five Forks crossroads, fifteen miles from Petersburg. Lee needed to hold it just long enough for his forces to escape from Petersburg using the Southside Railroad. Tom Conolly was again at Lee’s headquarters, where he watched the general outline the battle plan to his staff, using a stick and a “mud map.” Conolly remained with Lee rather than following Generals Fitz Lee and George Pickett to Five Forks, and he was rewarded with the spectacle of a skirmish between two picket lines:

  This pleased [Conolly] so much, [wrote General Wilcox] that he offered his service to me for the coming campaign, and said if I would permit him he would remain with me until its close. I accepted his tender of service, and told him I would make him one of my volunteer aides. He thanked me, and asked if I would let him go under fire. I replied that it would hardly be possible for him to escape being under fire. He said he would return to Richmond, get his baggage and report to me early Monday morning [April 3].19

  At Five Forks, Fitz Lee and Pickett had orders to hold the crossroads “at all hazard.” Welly had been placed on Fitz Lee’s staff, where he was delighted to discover another British volunteer, Francis Dawson. They rose at 3:30 A.M. on March 31, and “after a rough breakfast we all went down to General Pickett’s headquarters where a Council of War took place. We remained here for 3 hours or so, smoking and telling stories in a downfall of rain the whole time.”20 Years afterward, Dawson also remembered the terrible rain that had chilled him to the bone. He had tried to keep warm by gulping coffee out of an old tin cup before the fighting commenced, scalding his lips in the process. Later in the morning another moment seared itself in his memory. “It was very difficult to rally the men,” he wrote:

  One fellow whom I halted as he was running to the rear, and whom I threatened to shoot if he did not stop, looked up in my face in the most astonished manner, and, raising his carbine at an angle of forty-five degrees, fired it in the air, or at the tops of the pines, and resumed his flight. It made me laugh, angry as I was.21

  Toward sundown, General Fitz Lee’s men made a final, desperate charge against Sheridan’s line. One bullet struck an overhanging branch just as Dawson lowered his head to ride under the tree; the next tore into his shoulder.

  “Bad news from Pickett,” recorded Welly on April 1. “He has lost 5,000 men out of 8,000, and the remainder are cut off from us.” The two generals, Fitz Lee and Pickett, had ridden off to a picnic, having assumed that Sheridan would spend the day entrenching his men. Far from it: Sheridan launched a surprise attack. “We had no idea that the enemy were so close to us,” wrote Welly, “when all of a sudden about 250 Yankees let drive at us, it was so sudden that nobody could help being startled. I looked round and the whole regiment had disappeared.” Sheridan captured more than four thousand prisoners at Five Forks. As the scattered Confederates found one another, Welly was relieved to learn that “Dawson, one of my brother ADCs,” had not been killed, but sent to Richmond at Fitz Lee’s insistence.22

  Dawson arrived in the city so befuddled with morphine that he was oblivious to the turmoil in the streets. At dawn on Sunday, April 2, Grant ordered an all-out attack on Lee’s defenses, smashing through at almost every point. Lee realized he had to retreat immediately or risk being surrounded and captured. He ordered the troops to evacuate and sent a telegram to Davis advising him to leave Richmond. The message was delivered to Davis while he was at church. Conolly was sitting in a pew nearby and observed the sexton whisper in his ear. “He rises and leaves the Church. Then the same operation to one and a second member of the government, both follow suit; people begin to whisper … they rose in tens and 20s and left the Church, outside the secret was soon abroad.” Only the most faithful remained for communion. Conolly fought his way through the streets—“a regular stampede has begun”—to the home of his friends Mrs. Enders and “her nice pretty daughters.” He promised the distraught women he would spend the night, guarding the house for them. Having satisfied himself that they were safe for the moment, Conolly set off in search of Francis Lawley and found him packing his bags at the hotel: “We take a parting cup to our next merry meeting.”

  Map.21 Petersburg and Appomattox, March 25–April 9, 1865

  Click here to view a larger image.

  Jefferson Davis was also packing. Trains were being laid on to take the government and the treasury to Danville, forty miles southwest of Richmond. There was pandemonium in the city. People were fighting and clawing at each other to escape the city, “on horseback, in every description of cart, carriage and vehicle,” wrote Lawley, “on canal barges, skiffs, and boats.” Stephen Mallory and Judah P. Benjamin were already at the station waiting for the rest of the cabinet. Mallory had sent an order to Raphael Semmes, who had been placed in charge of Richmond’s water defenses after his return to the South in November 1864, to destroy the fleet of nine ships on the James River and take his force to wherever Lee established his new headquarters. The Confederate navy secretary had not heard from James Bulloch in weeks. Each day he had waited for a telegram announcing the arrival of CSS Stonewall, but despite Bulloch’s efforts, the cruiser had only set sail from Spain on March 28. Mallory had no idea of the whereabouts of CSS Shenandoah (the raider was in the Pacific, near the Eastern Caroline Islands, south of Guam), nor did it matter now. Judah Benjamin was inscrutable, but he, too, had to accept that his final gamble had failed. Even if Duncan Kenner had succeeded in obtaining Southern recognition from Palmerston in exchange for emancipation—which Benjamin seriously doubted after receiving Lord Russell’s protest—it was too late for the Confederacy.

  The trains began rumbling out of Richmond at eleven o’clock. First went the government train, followed by the treasury’s, and finally the government archives. Every car was crowded with refugees; more were riding on the roofs and clinging to the sides. Some of the guards on the trains were boys, barely in their teens. “Up to the hour of their departure from Richmond,” insisted Francis Lawley, “I can testify that Mr. Davis and the three most prominent members of his Cabinet went undauntedly forth to meet the future, not without hope that General Lee would be able to hold together a substantial remnant of his army.”23

  Tom Conolly stood by the front window of the Enders family home, keeping watch while the women lay on the sofas behind him, “weep[ing] and sob[bing] till their hearts seem breaking.” Francis Lawley also remained awake. “During that memorable night there was no sleep in Richmond,” he wrote. “In front of every Government bureau, of every auditor’
s office, around the Capitol, and upon each side of Capitol-Square, the glare of vast piles of burning papers turned night into day.” The last regiments to leave Richmond had orders to destroy the ordnance depots to keep them from enemy hands, and to dispose of the city’s liquor supply. In a well-intentioned but disastrous move, the Confederates emptied hundreds of whiskey kegs onto the streets. “Women and boys, black and white, were seen filling pitchers and buckets from the gutters,” wrote John B. Jones in his diary.24

  Both Conolly and Lawley heard the explosions, which seemed to shake every building in Richmond to its foundations:

  As I walked up between 5 and 6 in the morning of Monday, the 3rd, to catch the early train [wrote Francis Lawley], a vast column of dense black smoke shot into the air … as the eye ranged backwards along the James River, several bright jets of flame in the region of Pearl and Cary streets augured the breaking forth of that terrible conflagration which subsequently swept across the heart of the city. As the train moved off from the Fredericksburg depot about 6 o’clock, I parted with Mr. Conolly, the Member for Donegal, who had passed a month in Richmond, and was upon this eventful morning still undecided whether to follow General Lee’s army or to strike northwards like myself.25

  In the commercial district, hardly a single pane of glass remained unbroken, and from Main Street to the canal nearly a thousand buildings were on fire. The bridges were also destroyed. This, together with the “roaring and crackling of burning houses … made up a scene that beggars description and which I hope never to see again,” wrote a departing Confederate officer; “a city undergoing pillage at the hands of its own mob, while the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gates!”26 Lawley was overwhelmed at the sight. For the past four years he had venerated the South; he had perjured himself on its behalf and had perpetuated a dream, only to watch helplessly now as it transmogrified into a nightmare. “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here,” he quoted from The Tempest.

  Conolly returned to his hotel at sunrise, shoving aside anyone who attempted to get in his way. Hundreds of fires were still burning. He had almost reached the building when he heard a cry: “the Yankees, the Yankees.” The city’s bleary-eyed residents were astonished to see a combination of white and Negro regiments from the Union Army of the James—Butler’s old army—riding through the streets. Many were singing “John Brown’s Body” as they marched. The scene helped to make up Conolly’s mind to quit the Misses Enders, and by midmorning he was riding for Fredericksburg. Already a Federal flag was hanging from the rooftop of the Capitol. “The ensign of our subjugation,” lamented a female resident, but its appearance represented salvation just as much as disaster.27 The general leading the Federal entrance, Godfrey Weitzel, hurriedly ordered his officers to organize teams of firefighters. The hotels, the banks, the better class of shops, the warehouses, depots, and hundreds of private houses were either charred heaps of brick or empty edifices. Fifty-five blocks in the center of Richmond had disappeared, but Weitzel’s men saved many more.

  Hundreds of families collected in Capitol Square, sitting in huddled groups with the detritus of destruction around them, waiting miserably for the Federals to take charge of their future. Hour by hour, order was gradually restored to the streets. By ten o’clock that night, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., led the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry into the city, an unofficial curfew made the place seem deserted. “To have led my regiment into Richmond at the moment of its capture is the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the Army,” he admitted to his father. “For the first time I see the spirit of the Virginians, the whole people are cowed—whipped out.”28

  Abraham Lincoln arrived at the city a few hours after Charles Francis Jr., on the morning of the fourth.29 The black population was anything but “whipped out.” They clustered about him, shouting ecstatically, touching his clothes, shaking his hand; he protested when some knelt down as he passed. Lincoln entered the Confederate White House and looked around Davis’s office, even sitting in his chair. He seemed tired and worn to those around him. Victory was at hand, but not yet in his hands—not until the surrender of Lee’s army, he reminded a Confederate delegation who called on him to discuss Virginia’s political future. During the afternoon, Lincoln toured hospitals and prisons, showing a gentle courtesy to Federals and rebels alike. He displayed a magnanimity toward the defeated Confederates that was conspicuously absent among his colleagues in the cabinet.

  Lee would be able to keep fighting if he could reach North Carolina and consolidate his army with the survivors of General Joe Johnston’s. He ordered his commanders to head forty miles west, toward the courthouse at Amelia Springs, where the scattered fragments of the Army of Northern Virginia could regroup and distribute supplies for the long journey ahead. But Grant was in pursuit, his forces moving so swiftly that Quartermaster Sergeant James Horrocks (since his promotion in March) returned from his furlough in New York to find his camp deserted. Not knowing where the 5th Battery, New Jersey Artillery had gone, he walked into Richmond and spent the night on the floor in one of the bedrooms in the Confederate White House. “So I had the honor of sleeping in the house of Jeff Davis,” he wrote to his brother, “if there is any honor in that.”30

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “A True-Born King of Men”

  Lincoln in Richmond—Appomattox Court House—A final salute—From actor to assassin—Punch apologizes—The American example—Flight to the interior—Vizetelly’s £50 note

  On April 5, 1865, Abraham Lincoln spent his second day in Richmond riding about in an open carriage. His bravery terrified the presidential retinue, but it no doubt contributed as much to the city’s return to order as any overt display of arms. The aftermath of Richmond’s burning was also observed by Thomas Kennard, an English railway engineer, who was so eager to be a part of the momentous events in Virginia that he had chartered a private yacht to take him and a small group of British and American tourists along the James River to the Confederate capital. They wandered through the streets, shocked to find “that nearly half the city has been reduced to ashes,” though they thought the Federal soldiers’ behavior was exemplary:

  No pillage or destruction of property had taken place [wrote Kennard], and, to the great honour of the Federal arms be it fairly said, never before did cities like Petersburg and Richmond, entered by excited troops after years of siege, suffer to so trifling an extent. Tobacco was the only temptation that could not be resisted. There was not a whisper amongst the inhabitants conversed with, other than that they had been treated in the most humane and proper manner. We can all certify to the fact that out of the thousands upon thousands of troops we have seen only one man has been detected the worse for drink. This is accounted for by the fact that spirits are forbidden both in the army and navy on service. One could not fail to remark the deep mourning worn by the ladies moving about the streets, or the careworn expression of their countenances. The “darkie” element, on the contrary, was decidedly jubilant.1

  Lincoln stopped at Capitol Square on his way to General Weitzel’s headquarters in the former Confederate White House and addressed a crowd of newly freed slaves: “My poor friends, you are free,” he said, “free as the air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it.… Liberty is your birthright.” But later, at the close of his meeting with Weitzel, Lincoln urged the general to treat the defeated white population with tact: “If I were in your place,” the president told him, “I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.”2

  Lincoln was impatient for peace, and he urged General Grant, in a telegram on April 6, to finish off Lee’s army before it escaped to Georgia: “Nothing … is to delay, hinder, or interfere with your work.”3 Grant had heard from Sheridan that the Confederates had massed at Amelia Court House, forty miles west-northwest of Petersburg, and were desperately foraging for food in the surrounding countryside, as their supplies had failed to arrive. Grant realized immediately that his adv
ersary had only one course of action: “It now became a life and death struggle with Lee to get south to his provisions.”4 More than a million and a half rations of bread and meat were waiting for the famished Confederates at Danville, a hundred miles away on the Virginia–North Carolina border. “The soldiers are in a dreadful state from hunger,” Welly wrote in his diary on the sixth. Lee had heard that the road to Danville was blocked, but there were 80,000 rations at Farmville, only eighteen miles from his present position; this had to be the next destination, or else his men would either collapse from starvation or desert.

  Francis Lawley had changed his mind about fleeing immediately to New York, returning instead to observe the final scene of the drama that had absorbed his life since he became the Times’ special correspondent. “All day long upon the 6th, hundreds of men dropped from exhaustion,” he wrote, “and thousands let fall their muskets from inability to carry them any further.”5 Lee pleaded with his son Rooney, who was commanding a division of the cavalry corps, to keep up its spirits, exhorting him, “don’t let it think of surrender. I will get you out of this.”6 But Sheridan pounced on the Confederate army as it retreated across Sayler’s Creek. Two divisions, amounting to almost a quarter of Lee’s forces, were cut off from their comrades; here, beside a naked line of trees, occurred the final battle between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia.