by Shelby Foote
Toombs need not have fretted about the prospect of disgrace to his former comrades, either in Virginia or elsewhere. For though the army, by and large, had favored adoption of the measure (144 out of 200 men in an Alabama regiment, for example, signed a petition addressed to Congress in its favor, and the proportion was about the same in a Mississippi outfit) the legislation failed in application: not so much because of the shortness of “time for organization and instruction,” of which Davis had complained, as because of a lack of support by the owners of prospective black recruits — and possibly by the slaves themselves, though of the latter there was little chance to judge. Some few came or were sent forward to Richmond before the end of March; new gray uniforms were somehow found for them, and there was even a drill ceremony in Capitol Square, performed to the shrill of fifes and throb of drums; but that was all. Small boys jeered and threw rocks at the paraders, not one of whom reached the firing line while there was still a firing line to reach.
Nor was it only on this side of the Atlantic that the proposal to invoke the assistance of the Negro in the struggle which so intimately concerned him failed to achieve its purpose. Judah Benjamin, ever willing to play any last card in his hand, had written to Mason and Slidell in late December, instructing them to sound out the British prime minister and the French emperor, respectively, as to what effect a Confederate program for emancipation — “not suddenly and all at once, but so far as to insure abolition in a fair and reasonable time” — might have on their views with regard to recognition of the Confederacy and possible intervention in the war. Napoleon rather blandly replied that slavery had never been an issue so far as France was concerned, and Lord Palmerston said much the same of England in an interview on March 14 with Mason, who wrote Benjamin that he was “satisfied that the most ample concessions on our part in the matter referred to would have produced no change in the course determined by the British government.” Twelve days later, in conversation with the Earl of Donoughmore, a Tory leader friendly to the South, the Virginian’s view was confirmed by a franker response to the same question. If the proposal had been made in midsummer of 1863, while Lee was on the march in Pennsylvania, the earl did not doubt that recognition would have followed promptly. But that was then. What about now? Mason asked, and afterwards informed the Secretary: “He replied that the time had gone by.”
It would have been at best a deathbed conversion, and as such would have lacked the validity of conviction and free will. Meantime, opponents of the earlier and more limited proposal — to induct blacks into the army, even without the promise of freedom as a reward for any suffering short of death — were no doubt pleased that, in practical application, the Lost Cause was spared this ultimate “stain” on its record. In any case the Confederacy’s chief opponent, Abraham Lincoln, professed not to care one way or another about the success or failure of the experiment. “There is one thing about the Negro’s fighting for the rebels which we can know as well as they can,” he remarked, “and that is that they cannot at the same time fight in their armies and stay home and make bread for them. And this being known and remembered, we can have but little concern whether they become soldiers or not.” Something else he saw as well, and when news of the action by the Richmond lawmakers reached Washington he expressed it in an address to an Indiana regiment passing through the capital on March 17, six days before he set out down the coast for City Point. “I am rather in favor of the measure,” he told the Hoosiers, “and would at any time, if I could, have loaned them a vote to carry it. We have to reach the bottom of the insurgent resources, and that they employ or seriously think of employing the slaves as soldiers gives us glimpses of the bottom. Therefore I am glad of what we learn on this subject.”
Davis by now had caught more than “glimpses” of the scraped bottom. Yet for all his West Point training and his regular army background, both of which contributed to the military realism that had characterized his outlook as Commander in Chief — and paradoxically, because of his unblinking recognition of the odds, had made him a believer in long chances and a supporter of those generals who would take them — it was also in his nature, as the leader of his people, to deny, even to himself, the political consequences of whatever of this kind he saw, even with his own eyes. “I’d rather die than be whipped,” Jeb Stuart had said at Yellow Tavern, ten months back. So would Davis, but he took this a step further in his conviction that no man was ever whipped until he admitted it; which he himself would never do. Earlier this month, writing to thank a Virginia congressman for support “in an hour when so many believed brave have faltered and so many esteemed true have fallen away,” he declared his faith in survival as an act of national will. “In spite of the timidity and faithlessness of many who should give tone to the popular feeling and hope to the popular heart, I am satisfied that it is in the power of the good man and true patriots of the country to reanimate the wearied spirit of our people. The incredible sacrifices made by them in the cause will be surpassed by what they are still willing to endure in preference to abject submission, if they are not deserted by their leaders. Relying upon the sublime fortitude and devotion of my countrymen, I expect the hour of deliverance.”
His resolution was to be tested to the full before the month was out. Gordon’s failure at Fort Stedman prompted Lee to state unequivocally next day that he would have to give up Richmond before Sherman and Grant effected a junction he could do nothing to prevent, and two days later, March 28, in response to a query from Breckinridge as to how much notice the capital authorities could expect — “I have given the necessary orders in regard to commencing the removal of stores, &c.,” the Secretary wrote, “but, if possible, would like to know whether we may probably count on a period of ten or twelve days” — Lee replied: “I know of no reason to prevent your counting upon the time suggested.” So he said. But next morning he learned that Grant had begun another crablike sidle around his thin-stretched right. Both infantry and cavalry were involved, and the movement was across Monk’s Neck Bridge, over Rowanty Creek just below the confluence of Hatcher’s and Gravelly runs; their initial objective seemed to be Dinwiddie Courthouse, a scant half-dozen miles beyond, which would give them a clear shot north at Five Forks, a critical intersection out the White Oak Road, about the same distance west of Burgess Mill, the right-flank anchor of Lee’s line. Five Forks, defended now by no more than a handful of gray vedettes, was within three miles of the Southside Railroad, whose loss would interfere grievously — perhaps disastrously — with the army’s projected withdrawal, not only from its lines below the James but also from those above, since the Richmond & Danville would also be exposed beyond the Appomattox.
Informed of this, Davis requisitioned from Gorgas ammunition for the pistol he gave his wife next day, along with instructions on how to use it. By that time Lee had troops in motion westward to meet the threat, which further reports had identified as substantial; Sheridan was at Dinwiddie with his cavalry, and two blue corps had also crossed the Rowanty, apparently to lend heft to the roundhouse left Lee believed was about to be thrown at Five Forks. Unable to stretch his line that far, lest it snap, the gray commander detached Pickett from Longstreet, reinforcing his division to a strength of 6400, and posted him there, four miles beyond the farthest reach of the intrenchments on that side of Hatcher’s Run. Fitzhugh and Rooney Lee’s divisions, as well as Rosser’s, lately arrived from the Valley — a total of 5400 troopers; all but a handful of all the army had — were called in from roundabout and sent to bolster Pickett. Nor was that all Lee did. Aggressive as always, he visited the outpost position the following morning, March 30, and ordered an advance toward Dinwiddie the following day, hoping thus to seize the initiative and throw the flankers into confusion, despite odds he knew were long. This done, he rode back to Petersburg. “Don’t think he was in good humor,” a young lieutenant entered in his diary.
Heavy rain had been falling with scarcely a let-up since the night before, and it continued throug
h the final day of March, hampering last-minute preparations for the departure that evening of Mrs Davis, made urgent by the threat to the Danville line. Guns boomed daylong east of Richmond, mixed with peals of thunder; Grant no doubt was feeling the works in that direction, as well as elsewhere along the nearly forty random miles of their extent, for evidence that Lee had weakened them to confront the movement around his right. Soon after dark an overloaded carriage set out from the White House for the railroad station, bearing Mrs Davis and her sister Margaret Howell, the four children and their nurse, a young midshipman assigned as escort, and Burton Harrison, the President’s secretary, who was to help them get settled in Charlotte, then rejoin his chief — wherever he might be by then. They arrived well before leaving time, 8 o’clock, and boarded a passenger coach which, though dilapidated and “long a stranger to paint,” was the best the Confederacy could provide for its First Lady at this late stage of its existence. She looked with dismay at the lumpy seats, with threadbare plush the color of dried blood, and made the children as comfortable as she could; Billy, three, and the baby Pie were stretched out asleep by the time their father arrived to see them off. He sat talking earnestly with his wife, ten-year-old Maggie clinging to him all the while and eight-year-old Jeff trying hard to keep from crying. When the whistle blew, an hour and a half past schedule, he rose, kissed the children, embraced Varina, and turned to go, still with an appearance of great calm, though he came close to giving way to his emotion when Maggie persisted in clinging to him, sobbing, and Little Jeff begged tearfully to remain with him in Richmond. “He thought he was looking his last upon us,” Mrs Davis later wrote.
There was a further wait on the station platform; he walked up and down it, talking with Harrison until 10 o’clock, when the train gave a sudden lurch that left the secretary barely time to leap aboard. Davis stood and watched the tail light fade and vanish, then rode back to the big empty-seeming house at Clay and 12th streets, there to await word from Lee that he too must leave the city.
All the evidence was that it would not be long, and next morning — All Fools Day — a message from the general-in-chief served notice that the time was shorter than he or anyone else had known. Pickett’s advance the day before, supported by Fitz Lee’s troopers, had driven the startled Federals back on Dinwiddie by sunset, but there they rallied, pumping lead from their rapid-fire carbines, and Pickett felt obliged to pull back in the rainy predawn darkness, leaving the situation much as it had been when he set out from Five Forks yesterday morning. Sheridan still held Dinwiddie, cutting the Stony Creek supply line, and had followed up Pickett’s withdrawal so closely as to deny him use of the critical White Oak Road leading east to Hatcher’s Run. Supported as it was by at least two corps of infantry, Lee told Davis, this movement of Grant’s “seriously threatens our position and diminishes our ability to maintain our present lines in front of Richmond and Petersburg.… I fear he can cut both the South Side and the Danville railroads, being far superior to us in cavalry. This in my opinion obliges us to prepare for the necessity of evacuating our position on James River at once, and also to consider the best means of accomplishing it, and our future course.”
* * *
“Grant has the bear by the hind leg while Sherman takes off the hide,” Lincoln had told a White House caller some weeks back, explaining the situation as it then obtained. But now the holder-skinner roles were to be reversed, and Sheridan — much to his delight — was the catalytic agent injected by Grant to bring the change about. At Dinwiddie on the 29th, just as the rain began to patter on the roof of the tavern where he had set up for the night, he received a dispatch that sent his spirits fairly soaring. “I feel now like ending the matter, if it is possible to do so, before going back,” his chief informed him. “In the morning, push around the enemy, if you can, and get onto his right rear. The movements of the enemy’s cavalry may, of course, modify your action, [but] we will all act together as one army until it is seen what can be done.”
“Onto,” Grant said, not into Lee’s rear: meaning that the strike at the two railroads had become incidental to his main purpose, which was to crush the rebel army where it stood. “My hope was that Sheridan would be able to carry Five Forks, get on the enemy’s right flank and rear, and force them to weaken their center to protect their right so that an assault in the center might be successfully made.” That was how he put it later; Warren and Humphreys would support the cavalry effort west of Hatcher’s Run, and Wright was to lunge at Petersburg on signal, supported on the left and right by Ord and Parke, while Weitzel maintained pressure on Richmond’s defenses beyond the James, partly to hold Longstreet in position, but also to be ready to move in when the breakthrough came, beyond the Appomattox. Glad to find his superior following through on what he had told him in private, three days back — “I mean to end the business here” — Sheridan briefed his subordinates on their share in the operation. All during the conference, however, rain drummed hard and harder on the tavern roof; daylight showed a world in flood, with no sign of a let-up; roads were practically bottomless, preventing the movement of supplies, and the rain continued to fall in sheets, converting meadows into ponds. To make things worse, a bogged observer noted, “the soil was a mixture of clay and sand, partaking in some places of the nature of quicksand.” Grant could testify to this, his headquarters beside the Vaughan Road being one such place. Formerly a cornfield, it now resembled a slough, with effects at once comic and grim on men and mounts, coming and going or even trying to stand still. “Sometimes a horse or mule would be standing apparently on firm ground,” he later wrote, “when all at once one foot would sink, and as he commenced scrambling to catch himself, all his feet would sink and he would have to be drawn by hand out of the quicksands so common in that part of Virginia.”
Veterans wagged their heads, remembering Burnside’s Mud March, and some declared the situation was no worse than might have been expected, what with all the glib predictions that Bobby Lee was about to be outfoxed. They had heard that kind of talk before, with results that varied only in the extent of their discomfort when the smoke cleared. “Four years of war, while it made the men brave and valorous,” a Pennsylvania private would point out, “had entirely cured them of imagining that each campaign would be the last.” Still they were not dispirited; soggy crackers and soaked blankets often went with soldiering, especially on occasions like the present; “When are the gunboats coming up?” they called to one another as they slogged along the spongy roads or stood about in fields too wet for sitting.
Sheridan, on the other hand, fumed and fretted. He had scouting parties working northward out of Dinwiddie in accordance with his orders, but he feared the arrival of a dispatch changing those orders because of the weather. Sure enough, just such a message came from Grant around midmorning. “The heavy rain of today will make it impossible for you to do much until it dries up a little, or we get roads around our rear repaired.” His suggestion was that Sheridan “leave what cavalry you deem necessary to protect the left” and return with the rest to a station on the military railroad, where he could draw rations and grain for his troopers and their mounts. Or, better yet: “Could not your cavalry go back by the way of Stony Creek Depot and destroy or capture the store of supplies there?”
Go back! Sheridan frowned as he read the words, then set out instead for Grant’s command post, seven miles northeast, to argue for all he was worth against postponement of the forward movement. Hoping to save time — “a stumpy, quadrangular little man,” a subsequent acquaintance was to say, “with a forehead of no promise and hair so short that it looks like a coat of black paint” — he rode a long-legged Kentucky pacer, much admired for its mile-eating gait. But the going was slow on the mud-slick roads, pelted by unrelenting rain, and slower still around midday when he turned off the Vaughan Road, a mile beyond Gravelly Run, and urged his mount across the drowned headquarters cornfield. “Instead of striking a pacing gait now,” a staffer noted, “[the horse] wa
s at every step driving its legs knee-deep into the quicksand with the regularity of a pile driver.” Grant was in conference just then, but Little Phil, “water dripping from every angle of his face and clothes,” launched forthwith into his protest to such listeners as were handy. Give him his head, he said, and Lee would be whipped in short order. How about forage? someone asked; to his disdain. “Forage?” he snorted. “I’ll get all the forage I want. I’ll haul it out if I have to set every man in the command to corduroying roads, and corduroy every mile of them from the railroad to Dinwiddie. I tell you I’m ready to strike out tomorrow and go to smashing things!”