The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (175 page)

From where he stood, looking back across the river at the holocaust in progress along Richmond’s waterfront, a butternut horseman afterwards observed, “The old war-scarred city seemed to prefer annihilation to conquest.” What was more, she appeared well on the way toward achieving it. Both the Haxall and Gallego mills, reportedly the largest in the world, were burning fiercely, gushing smoke and darting tongues of flame from their hundreds of windows, while beyond them, after spreading laterally the better part of a mile from 8th to 18th streets, the fire licked northward from Canal to Cary, then on to Main, dispossessing residents and driving looters from the shops. Within this “vista of desolation,” known henceforward as “the burnt district,” practically everything was consumed, including two of the capital’s three newspaper offices and plants. Only the
Richmond Whig
survived to continue the long-term verbal offensive against the departed government. “If there lingered in the hearts of our people one spark of affection for the Davis dynasty,” its editor would presently declare, “this ruthless, useless, wanton handing over to the flames [of] their fair city, their homes and altars, has extinguished it forever.” But that was written later, under the once-dread Union occupation. Just now, with the Confederate army gone and the fire department unequal to even a fraction of the task at hand, the only hope of stopping or containing the spread of destruction lay with the besiegers out on the city’s rim, who perhaps would restore order when they arrived: if, indeed, they arrived in time for there to be anything left to save.

They barely did, thanks to the lack of opposition and an urgent plea by the mayor himself that they not delay taking over. From near the crest of Chimborazo, easternmost of Richmond’s seven hills, a hospital matron watched the first of the enemy infantry approach. “A single bluejacket rose over the hill, standing transfixed with astonishment at what he saw. Another and another sprang up, as if out of the earth, but still all remained quiet. About 7 o’clock there fell upon the ear the steady clatter of horses’ hoofs, and winding around Rocketts came a small and
compact body of Federal cavalry in splendid condition, riding closely and steadily along.” At that distance she did not perceive that the enemy troopers were black, but she did see, moving out the road at the base of the hill to meet them, a rickety carriage flying a white flag. In it was eighty-year-old Mayor Joseph Mayo. Dressed meticulously, as another witness remarked, “in his white cravat and irrepressible ruffles, his spotless waistcoat and his blue, brass-buttoned coat,” he had set out from Capitol Square with two companions to urge the invaders to hasten their march, which he hoped would end with their bringing the mob and the fire under control, and he took with him, by way of authentication, a small leather-bound box containing the seal of the city he intended to surrender.

About that time — already some eight hours behind schedule, with other delays to follow — the presidential special crossed the Roanoke River and rolled creakily into Clover Station, two thirds of the way to Danville. A young lieutenant posted there had watched the treasure train go through at daybreak, loaded with bullion and cadets, and now came the one with the Chief Executive and his ministers aboard, all obviously feeling the strain of a jerky, sleepless night. “Mr Davis sat at a car window. The crowd at the station cheered. He smiled and acknowledged their compliment, but his expression showed physical and mental exhaustion.” Finally the engine chuffed on down the track and over Difficult Creek, drawing its brief string of coaches and boxcars. Others followed at various intervals. Increasingly as they went by, jammed to overflowing with the archives and employees of the Treasury Department, Post Office, and Bureau of War, the conviction grew in the young officer that all, or nearly all, was lost; “I saw a government on wheels.” Moreover, as he watched the passage of car after car, burdened with “the marvelous and incongruous débris of the wreck of the Confederate capital,” it seemed to him that each grew more bizarre in its contents than the one before — as if whoever was loading them was getting closer and closer to the bottom of some monstrous grab bag. “There were very few women on these trains, but among the last in the long procession were trains bearing indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot, and a box of tame squirrels, and a hunchback! Everybody, not excepting the parrot, was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement.” Then at last, near midday, the final train passed through. “Richmond’s burning. Gone; all gone!” a man called from the rear platform, and it occurred to the lieutenant that Clover Station, within forty miles of the Carolina line, “was now the northern outpost of the Confederacy.”

This was to discount or overlook Lee, whose army was even then making its way west from Richmond and Petersburg to converge on Amelia Courthouse, sixty miles back up the track. Davis, when he reached Danville in the midafternoon, did not make that mistake. Weary
though he was — the normal four-hour run had taken just four times that long, and sleep had been impossible, what with the cinders and vibration, not to mention the crowds at all the many stops along the way — he had no sooner established headquarters in a proffered residence on Main Street than he set out on an inspection tour of the nearly four-year-old intrenchments rimming the town. Finding them “as faulty in location as in construction,” he said later, “I promptly proceeded to correct the one and improve the other.” So far, despite anxious inquiries, he had heard nothing of or from the general-in-chief, yet he was determined to do all he could to prepare for his arrival, not only by strengthening the fortifications Lee’s men were expected to occupy around Danville, but also by collecting food and supplies with which to feed and refit them when they got there. “The design, as previously arranged with General Lee,” he afterwards explained, “was that, if he should be compelled to evacuate Petersburg, he would proceed to Danville, make a new defensive line of the Dan and Roanoke rivers, unite his army with the troops in North Carolina, and make a combined attack upon Sherman. If successful,” Davis went on, “it was expected that reviving hope would bring reinforcements to the army, and Grant being then far removed from his base of supplies, and in the midst of a hostile population, it was thought we might return, drive him from the soil of Virginia, and restore to the people a government deriving its authority from their consent.”

Although this was unquestionably a great deal to hope or even wish for, it was by no means out of proportion to his needs; that is, if he and the nation he represented were to survive the present crisis. He went to bed that night, still with no word from Lee or any segment of his army, and woke Tuesday morning, April 4, to find that none had come in, either by wire or by courier, while he slept. Around midday Raphael Semmes arrived with 400 crewmen from the scuttled James flotilla; Davis made him a brigadier, reorganized his sailors into an artillery brigade, and put him in charge of the Danville fortifications, with orders to defend and improve them pending Lee’s arrival from Amelia, one hundred miles to the northeast. This done, he retired to his office to compose a proclamation addressed “To the People of the Confederate States of America,” calling on them to rally for the last-ditch struggle now so obviously at hand.

“It would be unwise, even if it were 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.” He admitted as much from the outset, but promptly added: “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.… It is for us, my countrymen, to show by our bearing under reverses how wretched has been the self-deception
of those who have believed us less able to endure misfortune with fortitude than to encounter danger with courage.” Squaring his shoulders for the test to come, he urged his compatriots to do likewise. “We have now entered upon a new phase of the struggle, the memory of which is to endure for all ages and to shed an increasing luster upon our country. Relieved from the necessity of guarding cities and particular points, important but not vital to our defense; with an army free to move from point to point and strike in detail the garrisons and detachments of the enemy; operating in the interior of our own country, where supplies are more accessible and where the foe will be far removed from his own base and cut off from all succor in case of reverse, nothing is now needed to render our triumph certain but the exhibition of our own unquenchable resolve. Let us but will it, and we are free — and who, in the light of the past, dare doubt your purpose in the future?” He asked that, then continued. “Animated by that confidence in your spirit and fortitude which never yet has failed me, I announce to you, fellow countrymen, that it is my purpose to maintain your cause with my whole heart and soul; that I will never consent to abandon to the enemy one foot of the soil of any one of the States of the Confederacy.… If by stress of numbers we should ever be compelled to a temporary withdrawal from [Virginia’s] limits, or those of any other border State, again and again will we return, until the baffled and exhausted enemy shall abandon in despair his endless and impossible task of making slaves of a people resolved to be free. 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.”

Davis himself said later that the appeal had been “over-sanguine” in its expression of what he called his “hopes and wishes” for deliverance; but to most who read it, South as well as North, the term was all too mild. To speak of the present calamitous situation as “a new phase of the struggle,” which ultimately would result in the withdrawal of Grant’s “baffled and exhausted” armies, seemed now — far more than two months ago, when Aleck Stephens applied the words to Davis’s speech in Metropolitan Hall — “little short of demention,” if indeed it was short at all. However, this was to ignore the alternative which to Davis was unthinkable. He was no readier to submit, or even consider submission, than he had been when fortune’s scowl was a broad smile. Now as in the days when he played Hezekiah to Lincoln’s Sennacherib, he went about his duties as he saw them, his lips no less firmly set, his backbone no less rigid.

Mainly, once the proclamation had been composed and issued, those duties consisted of overseeing the pick-and-shovel work Brigadier Admiral Semmes’s landlocked sailors were doing on the fortifications Lee and his men were to occupy when they arrived from Amelia. In the
two days since his and their abandonment of Petersburg and Richmond, there had been no news of them whatever. Davis could only wait, as he had done so often before, for some word of their progress or fate, which was also his.

*  *  *

Lincoln spent the better part of that Tuesday in the capital Davis had left two nights ago, and slept that night aboard a warship just off Rocketts Landing, where he had stepped ashore within thirty hours of the arrival of the first blue-clad troops to enter the city in four years. The two-mile walk that followed, from the landing to the abandoned presidential mansion — Weitzel had set up headquarters there, as chief of occupation, less than twelve hours after Davis’s departure — was a fitting climax to three days of mounting excitement that began soon after sundown, April 1, when he learned of Sheridan’s coup at Five Forks. “He has carried everything before him,” Grant wired, exulting over the taking of “several batteries” and “several thousand” prisoners. Other trophies included a bundle of captured flags, which he sent to City Point that evening by a special messenger. Lincoln was delighted. “Here is something material,” he said as he unfurled the shot-torn rebel colors; “something I can see, feel, and understand. This means victory. This
is
victory.”

Mrs Lincoln had left for Washington that morning, frightened by a dream of her husband’s that the White House was on fire, and Lincoln, perhaps feeling lonesome, had decided to sleep on board Porter’s flagship
Malvern
, a converted blockade runner. As a result, having declined the admiral’s offer of his own commodious quarters, he spent an uncomfortable night in a six- by four-foot cubicle whose built-in bunk was four inches shorter than he was. Asked next morning how he had slept, he replied somewhat ruefully: “You can’t put a long blade into a short scabbard. I was too long for that berth.” In the course of the day — Sunday, April 2 — Porter had the ship’s carpenter take down the miniature stateroom and rebuild it, together with the bed and mattress, twice as wide and half a foot longer. Lincoln however knew nothing of this; he was up at the telegraph office, reading and passing along to Stanton in Washington a series of high-spirited messages from the general-in-chief. Lee’s line had been shattered in several places; Grant was closing in on what remained; “All looks remarkably well,” the general wired at 2 o’clock, and followed this with a 4.30 dispatch — Fort Gregg and Battery Whitworth had just been overrun — announcing that “captures since the army started out will not amount to less than 12,000 men and probably 50 pieces of artillery.” He had no doubt he would take Petersburg next morning, and he urged the President to “come out and pay us a visit.” Lincoln replied: “Allow me to tender to you, and all with you, the nation’s grateful thanks for this additional
and magnificent success. At your kind suggestion, I think I will visit you tomorrow.”

Back aboard the
Malvern
after dark, he and Porter watched from her deck the flash of guns against the sky to the southwest, where Grant had ordered a dawn assault if Lee was still in Petersburg by then. “Can’t the navy do something now to make history?” Lincoln asked, unsated by the daylong flow of good news from the front. The admiral pointed out that the fleet had quite enough to do in standing by to counter a downriver sally by the Richmond flotilla, but he did send instructions for all the ships above Dutch Gap to open on the rebel forts along both banks of the James. Presently the northwest sky was aglow with flashes too, and Lincoln, his impatience relieved to some degree, turned in for another presumably fitful sleep in the cramped quarters he did not yet know had been enlarged. Next morning, rising early and well rested, he announced that a miracle had happened in the night. “I shrunk six inches in length, and about a foot sideways,” he told Porter, straight-faced.