Jefferson Davis also wrote a letter to Varina. “The people here have been very kind,” he told her. “I do not wish to leave [Virginia], but cannot decide on my movements until those of the Army are better developed—I hope you are comfortable and trust soon to hear from you. Kiss my dear children—I weary of this sad recital and have nothing pleasant to tell.”
Many Southerners agreed with Davis that the loss of Richmond did not mean the end of the war or the total defeat of the Confederacy. On April 6, Eliza Andrews, a twenty-four-year-old daughter of a lawyer and a plantation owner in Georgia, wrote in her diary. “I took a long walk through the village with Capt. Greenlaw after dinner, and was charmed with the lovely gardens and beautiful shade trees. On coming home, I heard of the fall of Richmond. Everybody feels very blue, but not disposed to give up as long as we have Lee.”
And on April 6 Lee at last got in touch with Davis by telegraph. “I shall be tonight at Farmville,” he told his president. “You can communicate by telegraph to Meherrin and by courier to Lynchburg.” The Army of Northern Virginia was, President Davis believed, still prepared to fight, and that meant the war had not yet been lost.
But on April 7 Abraham Lincoln, still at City Point, had a different opinion. He sensed that Union victory was near. One of his generals told the president something that prompted him to telegraph U. S. Grant. It was time, Abraham Lincoln said, to close in for the kill and win the war.
Head Quarters Armies of the United States
City-Point,
April 7. 11 A.M. 1865
Lieut. Gen. Grant.
Gen. Sheridan says “If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.” Let the thing be pressed.
A. Lincoln
Then Lincoln prepared to board the River Queen and return to Washington. Before he left, a United States army band played a farewell concert. At 11:00 P.M. the River Queen steamed away from City Point. Lincoln did not know it, but he was leaving a day too early. If only he could have read Robert E. Lee’s mind, he would never have returned to Washington that night.
While Lincoln was on his way to Washington, Jefferson Davis had been in Danville for five days. He still refused to believe that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was in danger of falling apart. But he was far from the battlefield and did not know what his most important general was thinking.
Lee believed that it might be impossible to continue fighting. He had hardly any men left and fit for battle—no more than several thousand. He was thinking of his surviving soldiers. The South would need them once the war was over. If the Confederacy was doomed to lose, could it be right to sacrifice any more lives?
On April 8 Lee sent a messenger to Danville with word for the president: He had little choice but to give up the fight. Then Lee composed a letter to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. The two generals would meet tomorrow.
Grant and Lee met on April 9 around 1:00 P.M. Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis was there. In fact, neither president knew that the meeting was happening. While Lincoln sailed back to Washington and Davis waited in Danville for news, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met at the McLean house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.
Grant treated Lee with courtesy, and he offered to accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on generous terms. Once the defeated men laid down their arms and agreed to fight no more, they would be free. They could wear their Confederate uniforms, take their horses, and just go home. They would not be made prisoners of war or be punished as traitors. And before men of the Army of Northern Virginia left the field for the final time, the Union soldiers paid honors to them. It was as Lincoln would have wished.
Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, D.C., at 6:00 P.M. that evening. He went from the boat straight to the home of Secretary of State William Seward, a few blocks from the White House. Seward, who had recently been badly injured in a carriage accident, lay still while Lincoln stretched across the foot of his bed and brought him encouraging news from the front and tales of his wondrous visit to Richmond. The president was happy. The war would be over soon. He could feel it. Lincoln and Seward did not yet know that, several hours ago, Lee had already surrendered.
After an hour of quiet talk, Lincoln went home. Crowds at the White House demanded that Lincoln show himself—the people had missed him and were disappointed that he had not been in Washington to celebrate the fall of Richmond with them. He stood at the second-floor window beneath the north portico and spoke a quick greeting. Later that night, news of Lee’s surrender reached Washington. But no one knows what else Lincoln did after he heard the news. Was he too overjoyed to sleep that night? Did he walk the halls or go to his office and stare through the window into the night? Did he haunt the telegraph office? Did he know that tomorrow morning would begin the greatest day in the history of Washington?
The next morning, April 10, Abraham Lincoln, along with most of the city, awoke to the sound of gunfire. But the city wasn’t under attack. A reporter described how the thunder of hundreds of guns let the citizens of Washington know of Lee’s surrender. “Most people were sleeping soundly in their beds,” he wrote, “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 . . . 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.”
On this day of victory, no one in Washington was dwelling upon Jefferson Davis, his government in exile, or his last-ditch plans. There may still have been other Confederate armies in the field, but Lee had been the major threat. As far as the North was concerned, the war was over and the Union had won. For Abraham Lincoln it was the climax of the happiest week of his life. The whereabouts of the missing Confederate president and his officials were not front-page news. It was seven days after the fall of Richmond, and Lincoln had still not started a manhunt to capture Davis or the top Confederate leaders. He had his reasons.
Chapter Five
While Washington, D.C., began a week of rejoicing, word traveled to Danville. A messenger from Lee’s army reached President Davis. The message he carried, said one of his officials, “fell upon the ears of all like a fire-bell in the night.” The rider delivered his news to the president’s office, where Jefferson Davis and several cabinet and staff members had gathered. Davis read the message, did not speak, and passed it on. Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9. The Army of Northern Virginia was no more. The war in Virginia was over. And Danville was in danger. The Confederate government had to get farther away from the Union armies by retreating at once, deeper into the Southern interior.
Leaving Danville meant not only fleeing a town but abandoning the state of Virginia. To Davis, this was a terrible 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 Virginia. This series of three disasters, all in one week, made it much less likely that President Davis would be able to rally the people and save the nation.
The news devastated the president. He wondered whether it had been really necessary for Lee to surrender. Couldn’t his best general have escaped from the Union army, headed south, and lived to fight another day? Davis feared that other Confederate generals would follow Lee’s example. Such a chain of surrenders would be a catastrophe and would end the war once and for all.
Davis ordered his government to leave 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,” he wrote. They also took “our luggage and as much material as it was desired to carry along, including the boxes and papers” that they had brou
ght from Richmond.
The boxes were an important symbol. Despite the triple disasters of the week, the Confederate government would not leave Danville in a panic. It must maintain good order. As long as Davis kept his officials together and did not abandon the papers he needed to keep the government working, the Confederate States of America lived.
Many of the people in Danville hoped to get on the train and make their way farther south. Guards were posted to make sure that people who weren’t supposed to be aboard could not get on. Dozens begged for passes that would let them ride the train. One general claimed that he possessed valuable fuses and explosives needed for the war, and Jefferson Davis told Harrison to find a place for the man and his daughters. Politely, Davis even offered to let one of the women share his seat.
One observer remembered what he saw as the train was loaded. It was dark and raining; the mud was knee-deep. Wagons were crowding, men were shouting, soldiers were cursing and trying to get past the guards. All of it, he said, “created a confusion such as it was never before the fortune of old Danville to witness.”
At about eleven o’clock, the train finally moved off. “The night was intensely dark,” one passenger remembered, “and with a slight rain, the road in wretched condition, and the progress was consequently very slow.”
Soon Davis regretted offering to let the general’s daughter sit beside him. She would not stop talking—discussing the weather, asking questions—unable to see that Davis was tired of her conversation. “There we all were,” remembered Harrison, “in our seats, crowded together, waiting to be off, full of gloom at the situation, wondering what would happen next, and all as silent as mourners at a funeral; all except, indeed, the General’s daughter, who prattled on in a voice everybody heard.”
Then an explosion rocked the car. It had come from somewhere close to the president. No one knew what had just happened. Had Union troops intercepted the slow-moving train and opened fire on it or tossed a grenade into Davis’s car? Or was it sabotage? Or had a traitor sitting in the car tried to murder 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. Harrison soon discovered that this was not an attack but an absurd accident. An officer, carrying fuses in the coattail pocket of his long frock coat, had sat down atop a stove. His weight crushed one of the fuses, setting off the explosion directly under his buttocks. Jefferson Davis and the others in the car were unharmed.
As the train went on its way toward Greensboro, North Carolina, Davis drafted a letter to the mayor of Danville, thanking him for taking the Confederate government in. “Sir,” he wrote, “Permit me to return to yourself and council my sincere thanks for your kindness shown to me when I came among you.” And he ended the letter, “May God bless and preserve you, and grant to our country independence and prosperity.”
Davis still believed it was possible, with God’s help, for the Confederacy to win the war and exist as an independent country. But when he would cross the state line the next day, April 11, he would have to accept the reality that Virginia, queen of the Confederacy, was lost.
While Jefferson Davis and the cabinet packed up in Danville, in Washington Abraham Lincoln enjoyed a spontaneous serenade outside his window. He made the crowd who had gathered on the White House lawn laugh by telling them that “Dixie” was one of the spoils of war and that he wanted to hear it played right now. Lincoln had loved the tune from the moment he first heard it. The band agreed, and the anthem of the Confederacy echoed through Lincoln’s White House and drifted across the grounds and into the streets of the capital city of the Union.
Jefferson Davis’s train arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, at around 2:00 P.M. on April 11. His arrival horrified the citizens. Unlike in Danville, no people came forward to offer food and lodging to their president. The unfriendliness outraged Stephen Mallory, the secretary of the navy. He noted that there were many large and luxurious homes, “but their doors were closed and their ‘latch-strings pulled in’ against the members of the retreating government.”
A colonel from Davis’s staff invited the president to share his family’s room, which he had rented for them after he had removed them from Richmond. But the owners of the house insisted that Davis must leave. They were terrified of what might happen to them if the Union armies learned that Jefferson Davis had stayed there. That fear was felt by most of the people of Greensboro. “It was rarely that anybody asked one of us to his house,” Burton Harrison complained, “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.”
At last Davis and his officials were settled in what Stephen Mallory described as a “dilapidated, leaky” railroad passenger car. “Here they ate, slept, and lived during their stay in Greensboro,” he wrote, “a negro boy cooking their rations in the open air near by.” Just as they had made the best of their two train rides from Richmond and from Danville, the members of the Confederate government endured everything with good humor. The car became, said Mallory, “a very agreeable resort” during the “dreary days” in the unfriendly town. “The navy store supplied bread and bacon . . . 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.” The highest officials of the Confederacy ate like common soldiers.
Mallory went on to describe how the Confederate officials managed their “curious life” in the train car. “Here was the astute ‘Minister of Justice’ . . . with a piece of half-broiled ‘middling’ in one hand and a hoe-cake in the other, his face bearing unmistakable evidence of the condition of the bacon. There was the clever Secretary of State busily dividing his attention between a bucket of stewed dried apples and a haversack of hard-boiled eggs. Here was the Postmaster-General sternly and energetically running his bowie knife through a ham as if it were the chief business of life, and there was the Secretary of the Navy courteously swallowing his coffee scalding hot that he might not keep the venerable Adjutant-General waiting too long for the coveted tin cup!”
A few days later Jefferson Davis would give a brief speech—no more than twelve or fifteen minutes long—in Greensboro. He boasted to his audience “how vast our resources still were, and that we would in a few weeks have a larger army than we ever had.” Davis explained how such an army was to be raised. “Three fourths of the men are at home, absent without leave. Now we will collect them, and then there are a great many conscripts on the rolls who have never been caught—we will get them—and with the 100,000 men from Gen. Lee’s army and the 85,000 men from Gen. Johnston’s, we will have such an army as we have never had before.”
But these remarks rested on wishful thinking. Lee’s and Johnston’s armies were much smaller than Davis imagined. Thousands of men had deserted and gone home, and Davis had no way to round them up and force them to fight. And even if, by some miracle, Jefferson Davis was able to assemble a force of 185,000 men or more, how would he arm them, feed them, and supply them with ammunition? And even if he could overcome these obstacles, the Union armies would still outnumber them.
* * *
On the afternoon of April 11, Abraham Lincoln sat in his office and wrote out a draft of an important speech he planned to deliver from the second-floor window of the White House that night. He did not know that he was preparing his last speech. He would honor the men who had won the war and then speak about giving blacks the right to vote.
On April 12 General Lee wrote to tell Davis what he already knew. This was Lee’s official announcement to the president that he had surrendered.
Near Appomattox Court House, Virginia
April 12, 1865
Mr. Pre
sident:
It is with pain that I announce to Your Excellency the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia. . . . The enemy was more than five times our numbers. If we could have forced our way one day longer it would have been at a great sacrifice of life; at its end, I did not see how a surrender could have been avoided. We had no subsistence for man or horse . . . the supplies could not reach us, and the men deprived of food and sleep for many days, were worn out and exhausted.
With great respect, yr obdt svt [obedient servant]
R. E. Lee
Genl [General]
The arrival of General Lee’s letter jolted President Davis into reality. Lee’s son was there in Greensboro when Davis received it. “After reading it,” the young man remembered, “he handed it without comment to us; then, turning away, he silently wept bitter tears.”
At least the president’s family was safe. Varina wrote to Jefferson on April 13, telling him she had crossed the North Carolina state line and was now in Chester, South Carolina. She kept traveling, hoping to avoid Union soldiers: “I am going somewhere, perhaps to Washington Ga—perhaps only to Abbeville just as the children seem to bear the journey I will decide. . . . I feel wordless, helpless—the children are well. . . . Would to God I could know the truth of the horrible rumors I hear of you. . . . May God have mercy upon me, and preserve you safe your devoted wife.”
In Washington on April 13, Abraham Lincoln was busy. The war was not over. And when it was, he must plan the reconstruction of the South. He visited the telegraph office early in the morning and then had meetings with his generals and officials. At night the president, like all of Washington, enjoyed a grand illumination of the city to celebrate Lee’s surrender.
Bloody Times Page 3