Dixie Betrayed (39 page)

Finally Lee gave in and assigned Johnston to command the Army of Tennessee on February 25. “I have directed Genl. J. E. Johnston
to assume command of [the] Southern Army,” Lee penned to Beauregard, “and to assign you to duty with him. Together, I feel
assured you will beat back Sherman.” Below Lee’s telegraphic message Beauregard wrote, “Not without your assistance by concentration.”
²³

In Washington on March 4, Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated on the east portico of the Capitol, with Andrew Johnson of Tennessee
now becoming his vice president. Lincoln struggled to summarize the horrifying war that had characterized nearly his entire
first term and still had not drawn to a conclusion. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right
as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for
him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting
peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
²⁴

As Lincoln looked forward the politicians in Richmond glared at each other. On the issue of habeas corpus, Davis still demanded
action and got nothing. Even some of Davis’s enemies tried to assist. “The maxim that it is better one hundred guilty men
should escape than that one innocent man should be punished, will not do for a time of war,” said Wigfall. “In times like
these, it is better that one hundred innocent persons should be arrested than one suspected man would escape.”
²⁵

On March 13 the president scolded Congress: “The Writ of Habeas Corpus must be suspended. Congress has not concurred with
me in this opinion. On Congress must rest the responsibility of declining to exercise a power conferred by the Constitution
as a means of public safety to be used in periods of national peril from foreign invasion.”
²⁶
Two days later the completed habeas corpus bill went to the Senate Judiciary Committee but was rejected by a vote of nine
to six. In the House a completed habeas corpus bill was passed thirty-six to thirty-three. The next day in the Senate, the
House bill was debated and finally lost by a vote of nine to six. Nothing would come of it in the end.
²⁷

Lee’s attack finally came at Fort Stedman on the Petersburg front on the afternoon of March 25. An attempted breakthrough
by Confederate troops worked well at first before a counterattack stalled it. The situation for Lee deteriorated rapidly.
Sheridan, who had defeated the scattered remnants of Early’s forces in the valley, rejoined Grant, and movements by Maj. Gen.
Edward O. C. Ord on March 27-28 allowed Grant to send Sheridan and Warren westward to threaten the Southside Railroad, potentially
severing Petersburg from the rest of the country. An explosive engagement along the White Oak Road southwest of Petersburg
on March 31 ended in Confederate failure, and the situation for Lee crumbled. At Five Forks, fifteen miles southwest of Petersburg,
on April 1, Sheridan and Warren—despite confusion in orders and slowness in executing them—struck the force of forty-five
hundred under Maj. Gen. George E. Pickett, capturing them, eliminating the Southside Railroad as a supply route for Lee, and
forcing the evacuation of Petersburg.

Struck heavily by Union artillery and a piercing set of attacks on their right flank, Lee’s army was in a hopeless situation.
Assaults on weak gaps in the Confederate lines continued through April 2, and Grant ordered such thrusts to continue the following
day. The main defenses of the Confederacy in the east were collapsing; as soon as Petersburg fell, with its rail lines running
north into Richmond, the Confederate capital would be compelled to surrender. Events accelerated. Gen. Robert E. Lee telegraphed
Davis, telling him that he could no longer hold his position at Petersburg and could not maintain any protection of Richmond.
As the beautiful spring morning infused hope into those who didn’t yet know, churchgoers crowded Richmond’s streets. Summoned
from the Broad Street Methodist Church, Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge scurried to the War Department to await further
telegrams. The telegraph wires went dead, however, spooking the group of officials left at the building. Finally, after a
period of silence, the wires reignited, and by 10:40 a.m., word arrived that shocked everyone into silence. Lee sent a message
declaring he would have to abandon his positions that evening or perhaps sooner. Now, even those who held out the most hope
saw that the Confederacy was coming down around them.

The president, on his way to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, greeted citizens as best he could. “When Davis entered,” wrote Adj.
Gen. Samuel Cooper, “one who saw him noted his appearance: ‘the cold calm eye, the sunken cheeks, the compressed lip, were
all as impenetrable as an iron mask.’” In the Davis family pew, sans family, the president listened to the hymn “Jesus, Lover
of My Soul” as he waited for the Reverend Charles Minnegerode’s sermon.

Davis was kneeling during antecommunion when St. Paul’s sexton approached the pew and handed him a telegram from General Lee.
Although Davis had heard the news already, he felt he could remain in the pew no longer and, “with his usually quick military
tread,” walked out. Many in the packed house seemed shocked and noticed the president’s “deathly pale, absolutely calm demeanor.”
“The occurrence probably attracted attention,” Davis later recalled, “but the people had been too long beleaguered, had known
me too often to receive notice of threatened attacks, and the congregation at St. Paul’s was too refined to make a scene at
anticipated danger.”
²⁸

A little while after Davis left the church, the sexton returned and pulled Cooper away from his pew; then he returned for
Assistant Secretary of War John Campbell. It was clear to all that the great moment of terror was arriving, and whole sections
of parishioners rose and walked out of St. Paul’s. As befuddled throngs of citizens stood in the church’s entryway, the streets
were already littered with documents and stacks of military supplies. The Central Hotel on Grace Street, within sight of the
church, had served as offices for the Confederate States’ auditors. Now, government clerks piled crates of documents carrying
the history of the South’s war effort outside the hotel, set them ablaze, and transformed them into a tower of black-and-white
smoke rising above the Richmond skyline.

Davis walked downhill toward the river, to his office in the former U.S. Customs House. He convened the cabinet, as well as
Governor William Smith and Mayor Joseph Mayo, and read Lee’s telegram aloud. The suddenness of Lee’s evacuation of Petersburg
surprised Davis, who knew the rail center would be given up but not necessarily so quickly. Davis felt the collapse was not
so “near at hand.”
²⁹
The president inquired from Lee by telegraph whether the government could have any further time to prepare for an evacuation.
Lee, somewhat irritated by the chief executive, replied that no more time was available. Packing of the government archives
had been going on for some time—those documents that would not be burned—but there would still be much that would stay behind.

The Confederate president then walked uphill to his home on Clay Street. He projected a serene air of resignation to Richmond’s
fate. Ordinary citizens asked him what to do. Should they scatter for the hills? No, they should calmly leave the city. A
group of ladies in Capitol Square, frantic, pleaded with the president for guidance. Perhaps General Hardee would come in
on time to prevent any catastrophe, he told them. This couldn’t have been true, but it reduced the level of panic in their
eyes. To a government colleague he was more blunt: “Get out of town.”
³⁰

Davis issued an address to the people of the Confederate States. “The General in Chief of our Army has found it necessary
to make such movements of the troops as to uncover the capital and thus involve the withdrawal of the Government from the
city of Richmond,” he revealed. He went on:

It would be unwise, even were it possible, to conceal the great moral as well as material injury to our cause that must result
from the occupation of Richmond by the enemy. It is equally unwise and unworthy of us, as patriots engaged in a most sacred
cause, to allow our energies to falter, our spirits to grow faint, or our efforts to become relaxed under reverses, however
calamitous. . . . Let us not, then, despond, my countrymen; but, relying on the never-failing mercies and protecting care
of our God, let us meet the foe with fresh defiance, with unconquered and unconquerable hearts.
³¹

The withdrawal from Richmond began in good order, but quickly collapsed into chaos and frenzy. When he arrived at the Executive
Mansion, Davis found a group of friends and ordinary citizens waiting for him. He walked into the house to pack the few personal
belongings he would take on the train to Danville. The president bid several people adieu, climbed with a freshly lit cigar
into a carriage, and rode toward the station. When the special train was found unprepared, Davis waited in the railway president’s
office, and then finally, at 11 p.m., he left the beleaguered city accompanied by his cabinet members and Samuel Cooper.

Evacuation fires set to destroy supplies that would otherwise fall into Yankee hands burned out of control, eventually destroying
nearly a third of the city. “I was wakened suddenly by four terrific explosions, one after the other, making the windows of
my garret shake,” wrote Richmond resident Constance Cary on April 4. “It was the blowing up, by Admiral Semmes, by order of
the Secretary of the Navy, of our gunboats on the James, the signal for an all-day carnival of thundering noise and flames.
Soon the fire spread, shells in the burning arsenals began to explode, and a smoke arose that shrouded the whole town, shutting
out every vestige of blue sky and April sunshine. Flakes of fire fell around us, glass shattered, and chimneys fell.”
³²
As had been the case all war long, much of the damage had been self-inflicted.

Some of the Confederate troops greeted Grant’s men with quiet joy. On February 7 the Senate had resolved to take into the
army about 200,000 black soldiers and, at the end of the war, emancipate the loyal ones; the matter was referred to committee,
where the bill lost nine to eight. By March 13 President Davis had had enough. He sent the Senate a secret message by way
of Burton Harrison, his private secretary. The president’s alarm read like a final appeal, a search for those who might in
the greatest hour of crisis consider themselves old friends and come to his support. The president wrote,

Recent military operations of the enemy have been successful in the capture of some of our seaports in interrupting some of
our lines of communication, and in devastating large districts of our country. These events have had the national effect of
encouraging our foes and dispiriting many of our people. The capital of the Confederate States is now threatened, and is in
greater danger than it has heretofore been during the war. . . . I desire also to state my deliberate conviction that it is
within our power to avert the calamities which menace us.

Long deliberation and protracted debate over important measures are not only natural, but laudable in representative assemblies,
under ordinary circumstances, but in moments of danger, when action becomes urgent, the delay thus caused is itself a new
source of peril. . . . The bill for employing negroes as soldiers has not yet reached me. Much benefit is anticipated from
this measure, though far less than would have resulted from its adoption at an earlier date, so as to afford the time for
its organization and instruction during the winter months.
³³

A few days later the Senate had begrudgingly issued a Select Committee report on emancipation. “At what period of the session
the president or Secretary of War considered the improbable contingency had arisen,” the report began, “which required a resort
to slaves as an element of resistance, does not appear by any official document within the knowledge of your committee. .
. . The president has never asked, in any authentic manner, for the passage of a law authorizing the employment of slaves
as soldiers.”
³⁴
(This, of course, was untrue.)

Soon thereafter Congress stopped bickering about communications and passed the bill to enlist black soldiers in the Confederacy.
But it was too little too late, and no authenticated African American combat soldiers ever served in the field; the unit that
had been issued uniforms was simply drilling in Richmond when the city fell to Union forces. The mere fact that the official
step had been taken was evidence of the Confederacy’s desperation.

F
AR
to the south the prospect of the Confederate army meeting up with Joe Johnston was shrinking daily. Sherman had moved out
of Savannah and toward Columbia, where on February 17 an evacuation fire also destroyed much of that city. “I began to-day’s
record early in the evening, and while writing I noticed an unusual glare in the sky,” wrote George Ward Nichols, of Sherman’s
staff, “and heard a sound of running to and fro in the streets, with the loud talk of servants that the horses must be removed
to a safer place. Running out, I found, to my surprise and real sorrow, that the central part of the city, including the main
business street, was in flames, while the wind, which had been blowing a hurricane all day, was driving the sparks and cinders
in heavy masses over the eastern portion of the city.”
³⁵
On March 16 a portion of Johnston’s command had attempted to block Sherman at Averasboro but was beaten badly. Three days
later, at Bentonville, Johnston’s force had hit Sherman squarely but again was defeated.

Lee’s army had fled westward in what became the Appomattox campaign. The pursuit by Grant’s army would be quick and stunning.
Lee concentrated at Amelia Court House, thirty-five miles northwest of Petersburg, on April 5, where he expected to find supply
trains that never came. The following day, at Sayler’s Creek, Federals cut off the Confederate rear guard, capturing more
than eight thousand men, including six general officers. On the same day former Virginia governor Henry A. Wise wrote Lee:
“[There] has been no country, general, for a year or more. You are the country to these men. They have fought for you.”