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

by Shelby Foote

  Elsewhere about the camp the struggle continued on various levels of resistance. Four days ago, a wagon had gone south from Sandersville with most of the $35,000 in gold coin; the remaining $10,000, kept for travel expenses between there and the Gulf, was distributed among the aides and Reagan, who carried it in their saddlebags; as the bluecoats now discovered. Reagan, with his own and the President’s portion of the burden — some $3500 in all — turned it over with no more than a verbal protest, but his fellow Texan Lubbock hung onto his in a tussle with two of the soldiers, despite their threats to shoot him if he did not turn loose. “Shoot and be damned!” he told them. “You’ll not rob me while I’m alive and looking on.” They did, though, and Preston Johnston lost his share as well, along with the pistols his father had carried when he fell at Shiloh. Only John Wood was successful in his resistance, and that was by strategy rather than by force. Knowing that he would be charged with piracy for his work off the New England coast last August, the former skipper of the Tallahassee took one of his captors aside, slipped him two $20 gold pieces, and walked off unnoticed through the pines — eventually to make it all the way to Cuba with Breckinridge, whom he encountered down in Florida two weeks later, determined like himself to leave the country rather than stay and face charges brought against him by the victors in their courts.

  But that was later. For the present, all Wood’s friends knew was that he was missing, and only one of his foes knew even that much. Besides, both groups were distracted by the loud bang of a carbine, followed at once by a shriek of pain. Convinced that the reported millions in coin and bullion must be cached somewhere about the camp, one unfortunate trooper had used his loaded weapon in an attempt to pry open a locked trunk, and the piece had discharged, blowing off one of his hands. Others took over and got the lid up, only to find that all the trunk contained was a hoop skirt belonging to Mrs Davis. Despite their disappointment, the garment turned out to have its uses, being added to the cloak and shawl as evidence that the rebel chieftain had tried to escape in women’s clothes. Three days later, Wilson would inform the War Department that Davis, surprised by the dawn attack, “hastily put on one of Mrs Davis’ dresses and started for the woods, closely pursued by our men, who at first thought him a woman, but seeing his boots while running suspected his sex at once. The race was a short one, and the rebel President soon was brought to bay. He brandished a bowie knife of elegant pattern, and showed signs of battle, but yielded promptly to the persuasion of Colt revolvers without compelling our men to fire.” This was far too good to let pass unexploited, providing as it did a counterpart to the story of Lincoln’s passage through Baltimore four years ago, similarly clad in a Scotch-plaid garment borrowed from his wife, on the way to his first inauguration. “If Jefferson Davis was captured in his wife’s clothes,” Halleck recommended after reading Wilson’s dispatch, “I respectfully suggest that he be sent North in the same habiliments.”

  That too would come later, along with the many jubilant cartoons and a tableau staged by Barnum to display the Confederate leader in flight through brush and briers, cavorting in hooped calico and brandishing a dagger. Just now his worst indignity came from having to look on powerless while the treasure-hungry bluecoats rifled his and Varina’s personal luggage, tossing the contents about and only pausing to snatch from the fire and gulp down the children’s half-cooked breakfast. “You are an expert set of thieves,” he told one of them, who replied: “Think so?” and kept on rifling. Presently the Michigan colonel approached and stood looking down at the Mississippian, seated on his log beside the campfire. “Well, old Jeff, we’ve got you at last,” he declared with a grin. Davis lost his temper at this and shouted: “The worst of it all is that I should be captured by a band of thieves and scoundrels!” Stiffening, the colonel drew himself up. “You’re a prisoner and can afford to talk that way,” he said.

  Davis knew well enough that he was a prisoner. What was more, in case it slipped his memory during the three-day trip to Wilson’s headquarters at Macon, the soldiers took pains to keep him well reminded of the fact. “Get a move on, Jeff,” they taunted him from time to time. He rode in an ambulance with his wife and a pair of guards, while her sister Margaret followed in another with the children, all four of whom were upset by her weeping. The other captives were permitted to ride their own horses, which were “lent” them pending arrival. There was a carnival aspect to the procession, at least among the troopers riding point. “Hey, Johnny Reb,” they greeted paroled Confederates by the roadside, “we’ve got your President!” That was good for a laugh each time save one, when an angered butternut replied: “Yes, and the devil’s got yours.” A supposed greater shock was reserved for Davis along the way, when he was shown the proclamation Andrew Johnson had issued charging him with complicity in Lincoln’s assassination. He took it calmly, however, remarking that there was one man who knew the document to be false — “the one who signed it, for he at least knew that I preferred Lincoln to himself.”

  After a night spent in Macon, May 13, he and his wife, together with Margaret Howell and the children, Reagan, Lubbock, and Preston Johnston, were placed in a prison train for an all-day roundabout journey to Augusta, where they were driven across town to the river landing and put on a tug waiting to take them down the Savannah to the coast. Already aboard, to his surprise, were two distinguished Confederates, now prisoners like himself. One was Joe Wheeler, who had been captured five days ago at Conyer Station, just east of Atlanta, frustrated in his no-surrender attempt to reach the Transmississippi with three members of his staff and eleven privates. The other was Alexander Stephens, picked up last week at Liberty Hall after Davis passed nearby. Pale and shaken, the child-sized former Vice President looked forlorn in the greatcoat and several mufflers he wore despite the balmy late-spring weather. Davis gave him a remote but courteous bow, which was returned in kind. At Port Royal, on the morning of May 16, the enlarged party transferred to an ocean-going steamer, the side-wheeler William P. Clyde. Presumably, under escort by the multigunned warship Tuscarora, she would take them up the coast, into Chesapeake Bay, then up the Potomac to the northern capital.

  So they thought. But three days later, after a stormy delay while rounding Hatteras, the Clyde dropped anchor off the eastern tip of the York-James peninsula, and there she lay for three more days, under the guns of Fort Monroe, “the Gibraltar of the Chesapeake,” whose thirty-foot granite walls, close to a hundred feet thick at their base, had sheltered its Union garrison throughout the four years of the war. Next day, May 20, Stephens and Reagan were transferred to the Tuscarora for delivery to Fort Warren in Boston harbor. The day after that, Wheeler, Lubbock, and Johnston were sent on their way to Fort Delaware, downriver from Philadelphia. Then on May 22 came Davis’s turn, though he had nothing like as far to go. His destination was there at hand, and the delay had been for the purpose of giving the fort’s masons time to convert a subterranean gunroom into a prison cell: strong evidence that, for him as for the others gone before, the charges and the trial to follow would be military, not civil.

  “In leaving his wife and children,” a witness informed Stanton, “Davis exhibited no great emotion, though he was violently affected.” This last was clearly true, in spite of the prisoner’s efforts to conceal what he was feeling. “Try not to cry. They will gloat over your grief,” he told Varina as he prepared to board the tug that would take him ashore. She managed to do as he asked, but then, having watched him pass from sight across the water, rushed to her cabin and gave way to weeping. It was as if she had read what tomorrow’s New York Herald would tell its readers: “At about 3 o’clock yesterday, ‘all that is mortal’ of Jeff’n Davis, late so-called ‘President of the alleged Confederate States,’ was duly, but quietly and effectively, committed to that living tomb prepared within the impregnable walls of Fortress Monroe.… No more will Jeff’n Davis be known among the masses of men. He is buried alive.”

  3

  On May 10, unaware that the Co
nfederate leader had been captured before sunup down in Georgia, Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation declaring that “armed resistance to the authority of this Government in the said insurrectionary States may be regarded as virtually at an end.” This was subsequently taken by some, including the nine Supreme Court justices, to mark the close of the war, and it was followed twelve days later — the day Davis entered the granite bowels of Fort Monroe — by another presidential edict announcing that all the reunited nation’s seaports would be open to commerce, with the exception of Galveston and three others along the Texas coast, and that civilian trade in all parts of the country east of the Mississippi would be resumed without restrictions.

  That was May 22, and this second pronouncement, like the first, not only reflected the widespread public hope for a swift return to the ways of peace, but also served to clear the Washington stage for still another victory celebration, a two-day Grand Review planned for tomorrow and the next day, larger in scale, and above all in panoply, than the other two combined. Meade’s and Sherman’s armies had come north from Appomattox and Raleigh, and by then were bivouacked around the capital; which gave rise to a number of problems. In addition to the long-standing rivalry between paper-collar Easterners and roughneck Westerners, the latter now had a new burden of resentment to unload. Soon after the Administration’s rejection of the original Durham Station terms, the papers had been full of Stanton’s denunciation of the red-haired general who composed them, including charges that he was politically ambitious, with an eye on the Copperhead vote, and quite possibly had been seduced by Confederate gold, slipped to him out of the millions the fugitive rebel leader carried southward when Sherman obligingly called a halt to let him pass across his front. Angered by the slander of their chief, western officers no sooner reached the capital than they began leaping on saloon bars to call for “three groans for the Secretary of War,” and the men in the ranks provoked fistfights with the Potomac veterans, whom they saw as allied with Stanton if only because of proximity. Eventually Grant solved the problem, in part at least, by having the two armies camp on opposite sides of the river; yet the bitterness continued.

  The showdown would come tomorrow and the following day, not in a direct confrontation — though by now large numbers of men in the ranks of both might have welcomed such a test — but rather in a tandem display, whereby the public would judge their respective merits in accordance with their looks, their martial demeanor as they swung up Pennsylvania Avenue toward a covered stand erected in front of the White House for the President and his guests, including Grant and other dignitaries, civil as well as military. By prearrangement, the Army of the Potomac would parade on May 23 and the Westerners would take their turn next day. Sherman had qualms about the outcome: as well he might, for close-order marching was reported to be the chief skill of the bandbox Easterners, who moreover would be performing on home turf to long-term admirers, whereas his own gangling plowboys, though they had slogged a thousand roundabout miles through Georgia and the Carolinas, then north across Virginia, had done scarcely any drilling since they set out south from Chattanooga, a year ago this month. Then too there was the matter of clothes and equipment, another comparative disadvantage for members of the Armies of the Tennessee and the Cumberland. Their uniforms had weathered to “a cross between Regulation blue and Southern gray,” a New England soldier observed, and the men inside were no less outlandish in his eyes. “Their hair and beards were uncut and uncombed; huge slouched hats, black and gray, adorned their heads; their boots were covered with the mud they had brought up from Georgia; their guns were of all designs, from the Springfield rifle to a cavalry carbine.” That was how they looked to him on their arrival, three days before the start of the Grand Review. Sherman, with only that brief span for preparation, could only order such intensified drill instruction as there was time for, between hours of refurbishing dingy leather and dull brass, and hope meanwhile for the best; or in any case something better than the worst, which would be to have his veterans sneered or laughed at by people along the route of march or, least bearable of all, by those in the reviewing stand itself.

  Washington — midtown Washington anyhow; the outlying sections were practically deserted — had never been so crowded as it was on the day when the first of more than 200,000 blue-clad victors, up from Virginia and the Carolinas, stepped out for the start of their last parade. In brilliant sunshine, under a cloudless sky, bleachers lining the avenue from the Capitol, where the march began, overflowed with citizens dressed this Tuesday in their Sunday best to watch the saviors of the Union swing past in cadence, twelve abreast. All the national flags were at full staff for the first time since April 15, and the crepe had been removed from public buildings as a sign that nearly six weeks of mourning for Lincoln were to be rounded off with two days of rejoicing for the victory he had done so much to win but had not lived to see completed. Meade led the column of march today, and after saluting Johnson and Grant, who stood together against a frock-coated backdrop of dignitaries massed in the stand before the White House, dismounted and joined them to watch his troops pass in review. Zouaves decked in gaudy clothes, Irish units with sprigs of greenery in their caps, engineers with ponderous equipment, artillerists riding caissons trailed by big-mouthed guns, all lent their particular touches to a show dominated in the main by close-packed throngs of infantry, polished bayonets glittering fiery in the sunlight, and seven unbroken miles of cavalry, steel-shod hoofs clopping for a solid hour past any given point. Spectators marveled at the youth of many commanders: especially Custer, whose “sunrise of golden hair” rippled to his shoulders as if in celebration of his latest promotion, one week after Appomattox. Barely four years out of West Point, not yet twenty-six and already a major general of volunteers, he came close to stealing the show when his horse, spooked by a wreath tossed from the curb, bolted just short of the White House. “Runaway!” the crowd shrieked, frightened and delighted. A reporter, watching the general’s hat fly off and “his locks, unskeined, stream a foot behind him,” was put in mind — more prophetically than he knew — of “the charge of a Sioux chieftain.” The crowd cheered as Custer brought the animal under control, though by then he had passed the grandstand and, as Sherman said, “was not reviewed at all.”

  Wedged among the politicians, diplomats, and other honcred guests, the red-haired Ohioan studied today’s parade with all the intentness of an athletic coach scouting a rival team. His eye was peeled for shortcomings, and he found them. Observing for example that the Potomac soldiers “turned their heads around like country gawks to look at the big people on the stand,” he would caution his ranking subordinates tonight not to let their men do that tomorrow. “I will give [them] plenty of time to go to the capital and see everything afterwards,” he promised, “but let them keep their eyes fifteen feet to the front and march by in the old customary way.” Still, for all his encouragement, he decided he would do well to register a disclaimer in advance, and accordingly, as today’s review wore toward a close, he found occasion to remark to Meade: “I am afraid my poor tatterdemalion corps will make a poor appearance tomorrow when contrasted with yours.” The Pennsylvanian, pleased with his army’s performance today, was sympathetic in response. People would make allowances, he assured him.

  Hopeful, but still deeply worried about what kind of showing his Westerners would manage now that their turn had come, Sherman rose early next morning to observe his six corps as they filed out of their Virginia camps — a march likened by one journalist to “the uncoiling of a tremendous python” — first across the Potomac, then on to the assembly area back of Capitol Hill. There they formed, not without a good deal of confusion, and there at 9 o’clock a cannon boomed the starting signal. He was out front on a handsome bay, hat in hand, sunlight glinting coppery in his close-cropped hair, and though the tramp of Logan’s XV Corps marchers sounded solid and steady behind him during breaks in the cheers from the bleachers on both sides, he lacked the nerve to glance
rearward until he topped the rise beside the Treasury Building, where a sharp right would bring into view the stand in front of the White House. Then at last he turned in the saddle and looked back. What he saw down the long vista, a full mile and a half to the Capitol shining on its hilltop, brought immeasurable relief. “The sight was simply magnificent. The column was compact, and the glittering muskets looked like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.” So he later wrote, adding: “I believe it was the happiest and most satisfactory moment of my life.” Now, though, he was content to grin as he released his bated breath. “They have swung into it,” he said.

  They had indeed swung into it, and the crowd responded in kind. A reporter noted “something almost fierce in the fever of enthusiasm” roused by the sight of these lean, sunburnt marchers, all “bone and muscle and skin under their tattered battle flags.” Risking fiasco, their commander had decided to go with their natural bent, rather than try for the kind of spit-and-polish show their rivals had staged the day before, and the gamble paid off from the moment the first of them set out, swinging along the avenue with a proud, rolling swagger, their stride a good two inches longer than the mincing twenty-two inches required by regulations, and springier as well. “They march like the lords of the world!” spectators exclaimed, finding them “hardier, knottier, weirder” than yesterday’s prim, familiar paraders. Moreover, they provided additional marvels, reminders of their recent excursion across Georgia, some grim, others hilarious in effect. Hushes came at intervals when ambulances rolled past in the wake of each division, blood-stained stretchers strapped to their sides, and there was also laughter — rollicksome, however: not the kind Sherman had feared — when the crowd found each corps trailed by a contingent of camp followers, Negro men and women and children riding or leading mules alongside wagons filled with tents and kettles, live turkeys and smoked hams. Pet pigs trotted on leashes and gamecocks crowed from the breeches of cannon, responding to cheers. “The acclamation given Sherman was without precedent,” the same reporter wrote. “The whole assemblage raised and waved and shouted as if he had been the personal friend of each and every one of them.”