Bloody Crimes: The Funeral of Abraham Lincoln and the Chase for Jefferson Davis

by James L. Swanson

  Washington awoke the next morning to the sound of an artillery barrage. If this was 1861, not 1865, Lincoln might have concluded that the national capital was under rebel bombardment. But, as one of the few people who had learned the previous night about Lee’s surrender, Lincoln knew better.

  The president ate breakfast with Noah Brooks, who described how the inhabitants of the national capital learned of the surrender at Appomattox:

  Most people were sleeping soundly in their beds when, at daylight on the rainy morning of April 10, 1865, a great boom startled the misty air of Washington, shaking the very earth, and breaking windows of houses about Lafayette Square…Boom! Boom! went the guns, until five hundred were fired. A few people got up in the chill twilight of the morning, and raced about in the mud to learn what the good news might be…but many lay placidly abed, well knowing that only one military event could cause all this mighty pother in the air of Washington; and if their nap in the gray dawn was disturbed with dreams of guns and terms of armies surrendered to Grant by Lee, they awoke later to read of these in the daily papers; for this was Secretary of War Stanton’s way of telling the people that the Army of Northern Virginia had at last laid down its arms, and that peace had come again.

  Welles delighted in the moment: “Guns are firing, bells ringing, flags flying, men laughing, children cheering; all, all are jubilant.” Welles, like many others, believed that Lee’s surrender meant the war was over now, and he made no mention in his diary that day about the retreating Jefferson Davis: “This surrender of the great Rebel captain [Lee] and the most formidable and reliable army of the Secessionists virtually terminates the Rebellion. There may be some marauding, and robbing and murder by desperadoes, but no great battle, no conflict of armies, after the news of yesterday reaches the different sections. Possibly there may be some stand in Texas or at remote points beyond the Mississippi.”

  On this day of victory no one in Washington was dwelling upon Jefferson Davis, his government in exile, or his last-ditch plans. It was seven days after the fall of Richmond, and Lincoln had still not issued any orders to capture Davis or the top Confederate political and military leaders. He had his reasons. The New York Times speculated that the rebel chief had already escaped but called for his death anyway. “It is doubtful whether Jeff Davis will ever be captured. He is, probably, already in direct flight for Mexico…but if he is caught he should be hung.” Indeed, on this day of jubilee, the predominant popular image of the fleeing president was one of dismissive bemusement rather than one of avenging pursuit. Soon that would change.

  Robert E. Lee was preparing to leave his army and travel to Richmond, where he would reunite with his wife, Mary Custis Lee. His house had survived the fire and was now under guard to protect her property from looters. But first he wanted to thank his men and say good-bye. He did so by drafting a document that was meant as a personal, heartfelt tribute to be read aloud to the soldiers under his personal command who had surrendered with him. But soon it became known to a wider audience and spread throughout the South, where the people of the Confederacy embraced it as the thanks of the nation to all the men, living and dead, who had fought in the war.

  General Order, No. 9

  Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia

  April 10, 1865

  After four years of arduous service, marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.

  I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to the result from no distrust of them.

  But feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that would compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.

  By the terms of the agreement officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed, and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection.

  With an increasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous considerations for myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.

  R. E. Lee

  Genl

  While Washington began a week of rejoicing, word traveled to Danville that there had been a great disaster, the worst possible news. A courier from Lee’s army reached Jefferson Davis. The intelligence he carried, remembered Navy Secretary Mallory, “fell upon the ears of all like a fire-bell in the night.” The rider delivered the message to the president’s office, where Davis and several cabinet and staff mem bers had gathered. Davis read the dispatch, did not speak, and passed it on. “They carefully scanned the message as it passed from hand to hand,” Mallory recalled, “looked at each other gravely and mutely, and for some moments of silence.”

  Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9. The Army of Northern Virginia, one of the greatest military forces in history, was no more. The war in Virginia was over.

  Lee’s surrender made Davis’s position in Danville dangerous. The news from Appomattox devastated the president. He questioned whether Lee should have surrendered. Couldn’t his best general have somehow disengaged from the Union army, charted a route south, and escaped to fight another day? Or could he have dispersed his men to reassemble at a designated point of concentration? Davis also feared that Lee’s capitulation would set a surrender precedent that other Confederate armies would follow. Such a chain reaction would be a catastrophe and would surely cause the total collapse and defeat of the Confederacy. Davis could not fight on alone, without troops to sustain the cause. With the Army of Northern Virginia now lost, it was urgent that the Confederate government increase the distance between it and the Union armies by retreating at once, deeper into the southern interior.

  If Davis did not order that everyone evacuate the city at once, enemy cavalry could swoop in and capture what remained of the Confederate government. That would end the war. Leaving Danville meant not only fleeing one town but abandoning the state. To Davis, fleeing the principal state of the Confederacy was a terrible psychological blow. First he had lost his capital, Richmond; he had just lost his greatest general and his best army; and now he was about to lose all of old Virginia. This series of three staggering blows, all within one week, jeopardized Davis’s ability to rally the people and save the nation.

  He ordered the immediate evacuation of Danville by a night train to Greensboro, North Carolina. Burton Harrison, back at the president’s side after escorting Varina Davis to safety in Charlotte, took control of the train: “We set to work at once to arrange for a railway train to convey the more important officers of the Government and such others as could be got aboard, with our luggage and as much material as it was desired to carry along, including the boxes and papers that had belonged to the executive office in Richmond.” The boxes were an important symbol because Davis felt that as long as he kept his cabinet intact and did not abandon the archives and working documents necessary for the continued operation of the government, the Confederate States of America lived.

  Davis could not leave this place without thanking the people of Danville. He drafted a letter to the mayor.

  To Mayor J. M. Walker

  Danville, Va.,

  April 10, 1865

  Sir:

  Permit me to return to yourself and council my sincere thanks for your kindness shown to me when I came among you, under that pressure of adversity which is more apt to cause the loss of friends than to be the occasion for forming new ones.

  I had hoped to have been able to maintain the Confederate Government on the soil of Virginia, though compelled to retire from the Capital. I had hoped to have contributed somewhat to the safety of your city, the desire to the last was rendered more than a mere sense of
public duty, by your generous reception of myself and the Executive officers who accompanied me. The shadows of misfortune which were on us when I came have become darker, and I trust you accord to me now as then your good wishes and confidence in the zeal and singleness of heart with which I have sought to discharge the high trust which the people of the Confederate States conferred upon me.

  May God bless and preserve you, and grant to our country independence and prosperity.

  Very truly yours,

  JEFFN. DAVIS

  Jefferson Davis’s “Danville Farewell” communicated a message very different from Robert E. Lee’s “General Order #9.” Lee told his men that continuing the war would have resulted in the “useless sacrifice” of their lives. He advised them that it was time to “return to [their] homes” and fight no more. In Danville, Davis expressed contrary sentiments. He regretted only that he could not “maintain the Confederate Government on the soil of Virginia” and called upon God to grant the Confederacy its independence. Davis and his government headed for their next destination, Greensboro, North Carolina. When he would cross the state line the next day on April 11, he would have to concede an awful fact. Virginia, queen of the Confederacy, was lost.

  While Jefferson Davis and the cabinet packed up in Danville, in Washington Lincoln was treated to an evening of White House serenades that featured a boisterous performance of “Dixie.” Lincoln had loved the tune from the moment he heard it performed before the war at a theater in Chicago. The Confederacy’s adoption of the song as its anthem failed to diminish Lincoln’s enjoyment of it. When he spotted a band among a crowd of torch-bearing well-wishers who had gathered on his lawn, he made the people laugh by telling them that “Dixie” was one of the captured spoils of war and that he wanted to hear it right then. The band obliged, and the music of the Lost Cause echoed through Lincoln’s White House, drifted across the grounds and into the streets of the Union capital.

  Meanwhile, Harrison posted guards to prevent unauthorized persons or baggage from coming aboard the train. The sentinels had their hands full. “Of course,” recalled Harrison, “a multitude was anxious to embark, and the guards were kept busy in repelling them.” Dozens of people beseeched him for passes. One general from the “torpedo bureau” claimed that he possessed valuable fuses and explosives vital for the war effort. Dubious, Harrison told the general there was no room aboard the train for him and his collection. Undeterred, the general got access to President Davis, with whom he had served in the army years ago. Davis told Harrison to find a place for the man and his daughters, and the ever-courteous president invited one of the women to share his seat.

  Mallory painted a railroad station scene more chaotic than the night Richmond was evacuated:

  Much rain had fallen, and the depot could be reached only through mud knee deep. With the utter darkness, the crowding of quartermasters’ wagons, the yells of their contending drivers, the curses, loud and deep, of soldiers, organized and disorganized, determined to get upon the train in defiance of the guard, the mutual shouts of inquiry and response as to missing individuals or luggage, the want of baggage arrangements, and the insufficient and dangerous provision made for getting horses into their cars, the crushing of the crowd, and the determination to get transportation at any hazard, together with the absence of any recognized authority, all seasoned by sub rosa rumors that the enemy had already cut the Greensboro road, created a confusion such as it was never before the fortune of old Danville to witness.

  Burton Harrison marveled at the mad scene. He watched as the guards “excluded all persons and material not specially authorized by me to go aboard.” Harrison was not above taking advantage of the situation, if it was for the good of the cause. As he stood in front of the government’s headquarters supervising the removal of baggage and boxes of documents, two mounted officers—one a colonel—rode into town from Richmond. Harrison told them that Lee had surrendered and that the government was about to abandon Danville. Then Harrison eyed the colonel’s mount.

  “I remarked on the freshness and spirit of his horse, and asked where he had got so good a steed,” he recalled. Harrison knew Davis could not count on obtaining uninterrupted railroad transportation for their entire journey. At some point, circumstances would dictate that they continue the retreat on horseback. The president and his aides could use all the good horses they could get for the next stages of the trip, and Harrison proposed a trade. He said he “should be glad to have the horse” in exchange for passage on the train.

  Reluctant to surrender the animal, the colonel rode off and tried to board one of the cars, but the guards told him he could not without a written order from Harrison. He returned to Harrison, “whereby he remarked,” said Harrison, “that, if I would furnish such an order, he would accept my proposition about the horse. The arrangement was made immediately, and the colonel became a passenger on the train, which also conveyed my horse, with others belonging to the President and his staff.”

  Mallory watched his colleagues gather near the train: “At ten o’clock, Cabinet officers and other chiefs of the government, each seated upon or jealously guarding his baggage, formed near the cars a little silent group by themselves in the darkness, lighted only by Mr. Benjamin’s inextinguishable cigar. It was nearly eleven o’clock when the president took his seat and the train moved off. The night was intensely dark, and with a slight rain, the road in wretched condition, and the progress was consequently very slow.”

  It didn’t take long before Davis began to regret the invitation he had extended for the torpedo general’s daughter to sit beside him. “That young lady,” complained Colonel Harrison, “was of a loquacity irrepressible; she plied her neighbor diligently—about the weather, and upon every other topic of common interest—asking him, too, a thousand trivial questions.” Until the train could get up steam, the passengers crowded together in the cars, according to Harrison, “waiting to be off, full of gloom at the situation, wondering what would happen next, and all as silent as mourners at a funeral.” The exception was the general’s daughter, “who prattled on in a voice everybody heard.”

  Then an explosion close to the president rocked the car. No one knew what had just happened. Had Union troops intercepted the slow-moving train and tossed a grenade into Davis’s car? Or had a traitor sitting in the car tried to assassinate the president with a suicide bomb?

  Burton Harrison saw it all: “A sharp explosion occurred very near the President, and a young man was seen to bounce into the air, clapping both hands to the seat of his trowsers. We all sprang to our feet in alarm.” The car smelled of black gunpowder, but no one had seen the telltale flash of the explosion. Harrison quickly discovered that this was not an attack but an absurd accident. One of the torpedo general’s officers, carrying explosive detonation fuses in the coattail pocket of his long frock coat, had sat down atop a flat-bottomed stove. His weight crushed one of the fuses, setting off the explosion, and nearly blowing off his backside. Davis and the other occupants of the car were unharmed.

  Davis’s train arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, at around 2:00 P.M. on April 11. He conferred with General Beauregard that day, and on the following day General Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the Confederate army in North Carolina, joined them to discuss Davis’s desire to continue the war. Davis also learned that a unit of federal cavalry had cut the road at a point where his train had passed only five minutes before. This was the closest he had come to capture since he had left Richmond, and from this point on, the government in exile was in danger of encountering Union troops at any moment.

  Davis was not greeted with open arms by the citizens of Greensboro, as he had been in Danville. This time the local dignitaries did not come forward to offer food and lodging to their president and his cabinet. The unfriendly reception outraged Stephen Mallory. “No provision had been made for the accommodation of the President and staff, or for his Cabinet…Greensboro had been a flourishing town, and there were many commodious
and well-furnished residences in and about it, but their doors were closed and their ‘latchstrings pulled in’ against the members of the retreating government.” Colonel John Taylor Wood from Davis’s staff invited the president to share his family’s modest quarters, which Wood had rented for them after moving them away from Richmond to safety. Colonel Harrison commented on Davis’s reception there: “[The owners] of the house continuously and vigorously insist[ed] to the colonel and his wife…that Mr. Davis must go away, saying they were unwilling to have the vengeance of Stoneman’s [Union] cavalry brought upon them by his presence in their house.”

  Mallory denounced the people of Greensboro as “pitiable” and ill-mannered. “Generous hospitality has ever been regarded as characteristic of the South, and had such a scene as this been predicted of any of its people, it would have encountered universal unbelief.” But Greensboro had denied the president the “uniform kindness, courtesy, and hospitality” which he had received elsewhere. Harrison echoed Mallory’s opinion of Greensboro. “The people in that part of North Carolina had not been zealous supporters of the Confederate Government; and, so long as we remained in the State, we observed their indifference to what should become of us. It was rarely that anybody asked one of us to his house; and but few of them even had the grace even to explain their fear that, if they entertained us, their houses would be burned by the enemy, when his cavalry should get there.” While in Greensboro, the horses belonging to Davis, his personal aides, and the cabinet were kept under twenty-four-hour guard to prevent their theft by townspeople or refugees.

  The members of the Confederate cabinet, just as they had made the best of their two train rides from Richmond and from Danville, endured their Greensboro humiliation with good humor. Upon their humble quarters, they bestowed the exalted nickname the “Cabinet Car” and made the best of the situation. It was, said Mallory, “a very agreeable resort” during the “dreary days” in the unfriendly town. “Its distinguished hosts did the honors to their visitors with a cheerfulness and good humor, seasoned by a flow of good spirits, which threw a charm around the wretched shelter and made their situation seem rather a matter of choice than of necessity. The navy store supplied bread and bacon, and by the active foraging of Paymaster Semple and others of the party, biscuits, eggs, and coffee were added; and with a few tin cups, spoons, and pocket knives, and a liberal use of fingers and capital appetites, they managed to get enough to eat, and they slept as best they could.” Unashamed, the highest officials of the Confederacy ate like common soldiers.