The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox

by Shelby Foote

  Suddenly there was the boom of guns a mile downriver, which to everyone’s relief turned out to be the Malvern; she had made it through the rebel obstructions to drop anchor at last off Rocketts, and was firing a salute in celebration. Porter was especially relieved. He still considered the President’s welfare his responsibility, and he was in a state of dread from the risk to which he had let him expose himself today. Refusing to take no for an answer, he insisted that Lincoln sleep that night aboard the flagship, where he could be isolated from all harm. Weary from the strain of a long, exciting day, his charge turned in shortly after an early dinner, and presumably got another good night’s sleep in the refurbished stateroom, this time with a guard posted outside his door.

  One hundred miles to the north, few citizens of his own capital got any such rest, either that night or the one before. Washington was a blaze of celebration, and had been so ever since midmorning yesterday, when a War Department telegrapher received from Fort Monroe, for the first time in four years, the alerting message: “Turn down for Richmond,” meaning that he was to relieve the tension on the armature spring of his instrument so that it would respond to a weak signal. He did, and the dit-dahs came through, distant but distinct. “We took Richmond at 8.15 this morning.” Church bells pealed; fire engines clattered and clanged through the streets. Locomotives in the yards and steamboats on the river added the scream of their whistles to the uproar. Schools dismissed; clerks spilled out of government buildings; extras hit the stands. “Glory!!! Hail Columbia!!! Hallelujah!!! Richmond Ours!!!” the Star exulted. Army batteries fired an 800-gun salute that went on forever, three hundred for Petersburg, five hundred more for the fall of the rebel capital, while the Navy added another hundred from its biggest Dahlgrens, rattling windows all over town. “From one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other,” a reporter noted, “the air seemed to burn with the bright hues of the flag.… Almost by magic the streets were crowded with hosts of people, talking, laughing, hurrahing and shouting in the fullness of their joy. Men embraced one another, ‘treated’ one another, made up old quarrels, renewed old friendships, marched arm-in-arm singing and chatting in that happy sort of abandon which characterizes our people when under the influence of a great and universal happiness. The atmosphere was full of the intoxication of joy.” Stanton gave a solemn, Seward a light-hearted speech, both wildly cheered by the celebrants outside their respective offices: especially when the former read a dispatch from Weitzel saying Richmond was on fire. What should he reply? “Burn it, burn it! Let her burn!” the cry came up. “A more liquorish crowd was never seen in Washington than on that night,” the newsman declared, and told of seeing “one big, sedate Vermonter, chief of an executive bureau, standing on the corner of F and 14th streets, with owlish gravity giving fifty-cent ‘shin plasters’ to every colored person who came past him, brokenly saying with each gift, ‘Babylon has fallen.’ ”

  That was Monday. The formal celebration — or “grand illumination,” as it was called — was set for the following evening. All day Tuesday, while Lincoln walked and rode through the cluttered streets of Richmond, workmen swarmed over Washington’s public buildings, preparing them for the show that would start at dusk. When it came it was altogether worth the waiting. “This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes” was blazoned in huge letters on a gaslighted transparency over the western pediment of the Capitol, which glittered from its basement to its dome. City Hall, the Treasury, the Post Office, the Marine Barracks, the National Conservatory, the prisons along First Street, even the Insane Asylum, lonely on its hill, burned like beacons in the night.

  All Washington turned out to cheer and marvel at the candlelight displays, but the largest crowd collected in front of the Patent Office, where flaring gas jets spelled out UNION across the top of its granite pillars. A speaker’s stand had been erected at their foot; for this was the Republican mass rally, opened by Judge David Cartter of the district supreme court, who got things off to a rousing start by referring in racetrack terms to Jefferson Davis as “the flying rascal out of Richmond,” by way of a warm-up for the principal speaker, Andrew Johnson. He had been lying rather low since the inauguration, yet he showed this evening that he had lost none of his talent for invective on short notice. He too mentioned Davis early on, and when his listeners shouted, “Hang him! Hang him!” the Vice President was quick to agree: “Yes, I say hang him twenty times.” Nor was the rebel leader the only one deserving of such treatment. Others like him were “infamous in character, diabolical in motive,” and Johnson had a similar prescription for them all, including confiscation of their property. “When you ask me what I would do, my reply is — I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them.… Treason must be made odious,” he declared; “traitors must be punished and impoverished.”

  Other remarks, public and private — all in heady contrast to Lincoln’s “Let ’em up easy,” spoken today in the other capital after the interview in which Campbell described “the gentler gamester” as “the soonest winner” — followed as the celebration went on into and through the night. Long after the candles had guttered out and the flares had been extinguished, serenaders continued to make the rounds and corks kept popping in homes and hotel bars all over town.

  Headaches were the order of the day in Washington by 10 o’clock Wednesday morning, April 5; at which time, as agreed on yesterday, the President received the Alabama jurist aboard the Malvern, riding at anchor off Rocketts Landing. Campbell brought a Richmond lawyer with him, Gustavus Myers, a member of the Virginia legislature, and their suggestion was that this body, now adjourned and scattered about the state, be reassembled for a vote withdrawing the Old Dominion from the Confederacy and formally returning her to her old allegiance. Weitzel, who was present, later summarized their proposal. “Mr Campbell and the other gentleman assured Mr Lincoln that if he would allow the Virginia Legislature to meet, it would at once repeal the ordinance of secession, and that then General Robert E. Lee and every other Virginian would submit; that this would amount to virtual destruction of the Army of Northern Virginia, and eventually to the surrender of all the other rebel armies, and would assure perfect peace in the shortest possible time.”

  Lincoln liked the notion, in part because it provided a way to get local government back in operation, but mainly because it offered at least a chance of avoiding that “last bloody battle” Grant and Sherman had told him would have to be fought before the South surrendered. Accordingly, he gave Campbell a document repeating his three Hampton Roads conditions—“restoration of the national authority throughout all the states”; “no receding by the Executive on the slavery question”; “no cessation of hostilities short of an end to the war and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government” — in return for which, confiscations of property would be “remitted to the people of any state which shall now promptly and in good faith withdraw its troops and other support from further resistance.” In addition, though he declined to offer a general amnesty, he promised to use his pardoning power to “save any repentant sinner from hanging.” Finally he agreed to reach an early decision in regard to permitting the Virginia legislators to reassemble.

  This last he did next day, informing Weitzel that “the gentlemen who have acted as the legislature of Virginia, in support of the rebellion, may now desire to assemble at Richmond and take measures to withdraw the Virginia troops and other support from resistance to the general government. If they attempt it, give them permission and protection, until, if at all, they attempt some action hostile to the United States, in which case you will notify them and give them reasonable time to leave.… Allow Judge Campbell to see this, but do not make it public.” Sending word to Grant of his decision, he added: “I do not think it very probable that anything will come of this, but I have thought it best to notify you, so that if you should see signs you may understand them,” then closed with the familiar tactical warning: “Nothing I have done
, or probably shall do, is to delay, hinder, or interfere with you in your work.”

  He was back at City Point by then, having steamed downriver at Porter’s insistence as soon as the meeting with Campbell ended. Today — Thursday — made two full weeks he had been gone from Washington, and in response to a wire from Seward the day before, offering to come down for a conference on several matters “important and urgent in conducting the government but not at all critical or serious,” he had informed the Secretary: “I think there is no probability of my remaining here more than two days longer. If this is too long come down.” For one thing, he was awaiting the arrival next day of Mrs Lincoln. Having found her husband’s dream of a White House fire a false alarm, she was returning with a number of distinguished visitors, all eager for a look at fallen Richmond. This might prolong his stay; or so he thought until bedtime Wednesday, when he received news that threatened to cut his vacation even shorter than he had supposed. Seward, he learned, had been thrown from his carriage that afternoon and had been so seriously injured, it was feared, that Lincoln might have to return to Washington at once. A follow-up wire from Stanton next morning, however, informed him that while the New Yorker’s injuries were painful they were almost certainly not fatal; Lincoln could stay away as long as he chose. So he went down to the wharf at noon, this April 6, to meet his wife and the party of sightseers she had brought along on the boatride down the coast.

  Irked to find that her husband had already been to the rebel capital and would not be going there again, Mrs Lincoln decided to make the trip herself on the River Queen, which would afford overnight accommodations for her guests, Senator and Mrs Harlan, Attorney General Speed and his wife, Charles Sumner and a young French nobleman friend, the Marquis de Chambrun. They left that afternoon and reached Richmond in time for a cavalry-escorted tour of the city before returning to sleep aboard the Queen, anchored in the James. Sumner was especially gratified by all he had seen, including the looted Capitol, where he asked in particular to examine the ivory gavel of the Congress. When it was brought he put it in his pocket — as a souvenir, or perhaps as further recompense for the caning he had suffered at the hands of Preston Brooks, nine years ago this spring — and brought it back with him to City Point next morning. Once more Lincoln was waiting on the dock, this time with an offer to take them by rail to Petersburg for a look at what ten months of siege and shelling had accomplished.

  He was in excellent spirits, Harlan noted. “His whole appearance, pose, and bearing had marvelously changed. He was, in fact, transfigured. That indescribable sadness which had previously seemed to be an adamantine element of his very being had been suddenly changed for an equally indescribable expression of serene joy, as if conscious that the great purpose of his life had been attained.” Partly this was the salutary effect of being removed for two full weeks from Washington and the day-in day-out frets that hemmed his White House office there, but a more immediate cause was a series of dispatches from Grant, all of them so encouraging to Lincoln that, in telling the general of his decision to let the Virginia legislature assemble, he remarked that Grant seemed to be achieving on his own, by “pretty effectually withdrawing the Virginia troops from opposition to the government,” what he had hoped the legislators would effect by legal action. Not only had the blue pursuers won the race for Burkeville, thereby preventing Lee from turning south to combine with Johnston; they had also netted some 1500 grayback captives in the process. “The country is full of stragglers,” Grant reported, “the line of retreat marked with artillery, burned or charred wagons, caissons, ambulances, &c.” Gratifying as this was, he capped the climax with a wire sent late the night before, telling of a victory scored that afternoon by Humphreys, Wright, and Sheridan, some eight miles beyond Burkeville. Five rebel generals had been taken, including Richard Ewell and Custis Lee, along with “several thousand prisoners, fourteen pieces of artillery with caissons, and a large number of wagons.” Such were the spoils listed by Sheridan in a message Grant passed along to Lincoln. “If the thing is pressed,” the cavalryman urged his chief in closing, “I think Lee will surrender.” Lincoln’s enthusiasm soared, and he replied at 11 o’clock this Friday morning, about the time his wife and her guests returned from their overnight cruise to Richmond: “Sheridan says, ‘If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.’ Let the thing be pressed.”

  Two distractions, one slight and rather easily dismissed, the other a good deal more poignant in effect, broke into this three-day span of high good feeling. The first was a note from Andrew Johnson, who had come down on an army packet, now anchored nearby, and wanted to pay the President a visit before proceeding upriver for a tour of the fallen capital. Lincoln frowned, having read in the Washington papers of the Tennessean’s call for all-out vengeance in his speech at the Republican mass rally Tuesday night. “I guess he can get along without me,” he said distastefully, and did not reply to the note. That had been yesterday afternoon, and the second distraction followed that evening. He was taking the air after supper on the top deck of the Malvern, once more in a happy frame of mind, when he looked down from the rail and saw a group of rebel prisoners being loaded for shipment north aboard a transport moored alongside. The guard Crook, with him as usual, watched them too. “They were in a pitiable condition, ragged and thin; they looked half starved. When they were on board they took out of their knapsacks the last rations that had been issued to them before capture. There was nothing but bread, which looked as if it had been mixed with tar. When they cut it we could see how hard it was and heavy. It was more like cheese than bread.” He watched, and as he did so he heard Lincoln groan beside him: “Poor fellows. It’s a hard lot. Poor fellows.” Crook turned and looked at his companion. “His face was pitying and sorrowful. All the happiness had gone.”

  Next morning’s dispatch from the general-in-chief revived his genial spirits. “Let the thing be pressed,” he replied, echoing Sheridan, and looked forward to the brightest news of all, which would be that Lee had at last been run to earth. Once that happened, he believed, commanders of other gray armies were likely to see the folly of further resistance on their part — if, indeed, they managed to survive that long. Developments elsewhere finally seemed to be moving at a pace that matched the stepped-up progress of events here in Virginia: particularly in South and Central Alabama. Canby had a close-up grip on Mobile’s outer defenses, Spanish Fort and Fort Blakely, whose fall would mean the fall of the city in their rear, and he was preparing to assault, with results that were practically foregone, considering his better than four-to-one numerical advantage. Similarly — and incredibly, in the light of what had happened to those who tried it in the past — James Wilson, after crossing the Black Warrior, then the Cahaba, had driven Bedford Forrest headlong in the course of a two-day running skirmish, fifty miles in length, to descend on Selma, April 2, the day Richmond itself was abandoned. By now the all-important manufactories there were a mass of smoking rubble, and Wilson had his troopers hard on the go for Montgomery, where the Confederacy began. Neither Canby nor Wilson had started in time to be of much help to each other, as originally intended; nor had Stoneman crossed the Smokies in time to strike in Johnston’s rear for Sherman’s benefit. But now, in accordance with Grant’s revised instructions, he turned his raiders north for Lynchburg, where Lee was apparently headed too.

  No wonder, then, that Harlan found Lincoln “transfigured” as he stood on the dock at City Point to welcome his wife and her guests back from Richmond, or that he took increased encouragement from what he saw on the trip to Petersburg that afternoon. “Animosity in the town is abating,” he told Chambrun; “the inhabitants now accept accomplished facts, the final downfall of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. There still remains much for us to do, but every day brings new reason for confidence in the future.”

  Aboard the River Queen that night — April 7; Good Friday was a week away — Elihu Washburne, en route to the front for another visit with Grant,
whose rise he had done so much to promote through the first three years of a war that now had stretched to nearly four, called on Lincoln and found him “in perfect health and exuberant spirits,” voluble in recounting for his guests the events of the past week, including his walk through the streets of Richmond. “He never flagged during the whole evening,” the Illinois congressman would recall. Chambrun, however — a liberal despite his privileged heritage and the conservative domination of his homeland under the Second Empire — observed in his host contrasting traits often remarked by others in the past: Crook for one, just the night before, and Sherman at the conference held on this same vessel, ten days back. “He willingly laughed either at what was being said to him, or at what he said himself,” the Frenchman later wrote. “But all of a sudden he would retire within himself; then he would close his eyes, and all his features would bespeak a kind of sadness as indescribable as it was deep. After a while, as though it were by an effort of his will, he would shake off this mysterious weight under which he seemed bowed; his generous and open disposition would again reappear. In one evening I happened to count over twenty of these alternations and contrasts.”