Bloody Times (4 page)

Davis realized that he must do more than set an example. He would, he decided, write a proclamation, a statement for the whole South to read. His most important task was to inspire Southerners to continue the war and to persuade them that, while the fall of Richmond was a terrible blow, it was not the death blow to their independence. “We have now entered upon a new phase of the struggle, the memory of which is to endure for all ages,” he told them. “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. . . . Let us meet the foe with fresh defiance, with unconquered and unconquerable hearts.”

April 4 was a day of two different messages from two different men. One man wanted to end the war and appealed to his people to “Let ’em up easy.” The other man saw simply a “new phase of the struggle” and asked his people to never give up fighting.

Jefferson Davis also wrote a letter to Varina. “The people here have been very kind,” he told her. “I do not wish to leave [Virginia], but cannot decide on my movements until those of the Army are better developed—I hope you are comfortable and trust soon to hear from you. Kiss my dear children—I weary of this sad recital and have nothing pleasant to tell.”

Many Southerners agreed with Davis that the loss of Richmond did not mean the end of the war or the total defeat of the Confederacy. On April 6, Eliza Andrews, a twenty-four-year-old daughter of a lawyer and a plantation owner in Georgia, wrote in her diary. “I took a long walk through the village with Capt. Greenlaw after dinner, and was charmed with the lovely gardens and beautiful shade trees. On coming home, I heard of the fall of Richmond. Everybody feels very blue, but not disposed to give up as long as we have Lee.”

And on April 6 Lee at last got in touch with Davis by telegraph. “I shall be tonight at Farmville,” he told his president. “You can communicate by telegraph to Meherrin and by courier to Lynchburg.” The Army of Northern Virginia was, President Davis believed, still prepared to fight, and that meant the war had not yet been lost.

But on April 7 Abraham Lincoln, still at City Point, had a different opinion. He sensed that Union victory was near. One of his generals told the president something that prompted him to telegraph U. S. Grant. It was time, Abraham Lincoln said, to close in for the kill and win the war.

Head Quarters Armies of the United States
City-Point,
April 7. 11 A.M. 1865

Lieut. Gen. Grant.

Gen. Sheridan says “If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.” Let the thing be pressed.

A. Lincoln

Then Lincoln prepared to board the
River Queen
and return to Washington. Before he left, a United States army band played a farewell concert. At 11:00
P.M.
the
River Queen
steamed away from City Point. Lincoln did not know it, but he was leaving a day too early. If only he could have read Robert E. Lee’s mind, he would never have returned to Washington that night.

While Lincoln was on his way to Washington, Jefferson Davis had been in Danville for five days. He still refused to believe that Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia was in danger of falling apart. But he was far from the battlefield and did not know what his most important general was thinking.

Lee believed that it might be impossible to continue fighting. He had hardly any men left and fit for battle—no more than several thousand. He was thinking of his surviving soldiers. The South would need them once the war was over. If the Confederacy was doomed to lose, could it be right to sacrifice any more lives?

On April 8 Lee sent a messenger to Danville with word for the president: He had little choice but to give up the fight. Then Lee composed a letter to Union general Ulysses S. Grant. The two generals would meet tomorrow.

Grant and Lee met on April 9 around 1:00
P.M.
Neither Abraham Lincoln nor Jefferson Davis was there. In fact, neither president knew that the meeting was happening. While Lincoln sailed back to Washington and Davis waited in Danville for news, Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met at the McLean house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia.

Grant treated Lee with courtesy, and he offered to accept the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia on generous terms. Once the defeated men laid down their arms and agreed to fight no more, they would be free. They could wear their Confederate uniforms, take their horses, and just go home. They would not be made prisoners of war or be punished as traitors. And before men of the Army of Northern Virginia left the field for the final time, the Union soldiers paid honors to them. It was as Lincoln would have wished.

Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, D.C., at 6:00
P.M.
that evening. He went from the boat straight to the home of Secretary of State William Seward, a few blocks from the White House. Seward, who had recently been badly injured in a carriage accident, lay still while Lincoln stretched across the foot of his bed and brought him encouraging news from the front and tales of his wondrous visit to Richmond. The president was happy. The war would be over soon. He could feel it. Lincoln and Seward did not yet know that, several hours ago, Lee had already surrendered.

After an hour of quiet talk, Lincoln went home. Crowds at the White House demanded that Lincoln show himself—the people had missed him and were disappointed that he had not been in Washington to celebrate the fall of Richmond with them. He stood at the second-floor window beneath the north portico and spoke a quick greeting. Later that night, news of Lee’s surrender reached Washington. But no one knows what else Lincoln did after he heard the news. Was he too overjoyed to sleep that night? Did he walk the halls or go to his office and stare through the window into the night? Did he haunt the telegraph office? Did he know that tomorrow morning would begin the greatest day in the history of Washington?

The next morning, April 10, Abraham Lincoln, along with most of the city, awoke to the sound of gunfire. But the city wasn’t under attack. A reporter described how the thunder of hundreds of guns let the citizens of Washington know of Lee’s surrender. “Most people were sleeping soundly in their beds,” he wrote, “when, at daylight on the rainy morning of April 10, 1865, a great boom startled the misty air of Washington, shaking the very earth, and breaking windows of houses about Lafayette Square. . . . Boom! Boom! went the guns, until five hundred were fired . . . for this was Secretary of War Stanton’s way of telling the people that the Army of Northern Virginia had at last laid down its arms, and that peace had come again.”

On this day of victory, no one in Washington was dwelling upon Jefferson Davis, his government in exile, or his last-ditch plans. There may still have been other Confederate armies in the field, but Lee had been the major threat. As far as the North was concerned, the war was over and the Union had won. For Abraham Lincoln it was the climax of the happiest week of his life. The whereabouts of the missing Confederate president and his officials were not front-page news. It was seven days after the fall of Richmond, and Lincoln had still not started a manhunt to capture Davis or the top Confederate leaders. He had his reasons.

While Washington, D.C., began a week of rejoicing, word traveled to Danville. A messenger from Lee’s army reached President Davis. The message he carried, said one of his officials, “fell upon the ears of all like a fire-bell in the night.” The rider delivered his news to the president’s office, where Jefferson Davis and several cabinet and staff members had gathered. Davis read the message, did not speak, and passed it on. Robert E. Lee had surrendered on April 9. The Army of Northern Virginia was no more. The war in Virginia was over. And Danville was in danger. The Confederate government had to get farther away from the Union armies by retreating at once, deeper into the Southern interior.

Leaving Danville meant not only fleeing a town but abandoning the state of Virginia. To Davis, this was a terrible blow. First he had lost his capital, Richmond; he had just lost his greatest general and his best army; and now he was about to lose all of Virginia. This series of three disasters, all in one week, made it much less likely that President Davis would be able to rally the people and save the nation.

The news devastated the president. He wondered whether it had been really necessary for Lee to surrender. Couldn’t his best general have escaped from the Union army, headed south, and lived to fight another day? Davis feared that other Confederate generals would follow Lee’s example. Such a chain of surrenders would be a catastrophe and would end the war once and for all.

Davis ordered his government to leave Danville by a night train to Greensboro, North Carolina. Burton Harrison, back at the president’s side after escorting Varina Davis to safety in Charlotte, took control of the train. “We set to work at once to arrange for a railway train to convey the more important officers of the Government and such others as could be got aboard,” he wrote. They also took “our luggage and as much material as it was desired to carry along, including the boxes and papers” that they had brought from Richmond.

The boxes were an important symbol. Despite the triple disasters of the week, the Confederate government would not leave Danville in a panic. It must maintain good order. As long as Davis kept his officials together and did not abandon the papers he needed to keep the government working, the Confederate States of America lived.

Many of the people in Danville hoped to get on the train and make their way farther south. Guards were posted to make sure that people who weren’t supposed to be aboard could not get on. Dozens begged for passes that would let them ride the train. One general claimed that he possessed valuable fuses and explosives needed for the war, and Jefferson Davis told Harrison to find a place for the man and his daughters. Politely, Davis even offered to let one of the women share his seat.

One observer remembered what he saw as the train was loaded. It was dark and raining; the mud was knee-deep. Wagons were crowding, men were shouting, soldiers were cursing and trying to get past the guards. All of it, he said, “created a confusion such as it was never before the fortune of old Danville to witness.”

At about eleven o’clock, the train finally moved off. “The night was intensely dark,” one passenger remembered, “and with a slight rain, the road in wretched condition, and the progress was consequently very slow.”

Soon Davis regretted offering to let the general’s daughter sit beside him. She would not stop talking—discussing the weather, asking questions—unable to see that Davis was tired of her conversation. “There we all were,” remembered Harrison, “in our seats, crowded together, waiting to be off, full of gloom at the situation, wondering what would happen next, and all as silent as mourners at a funeral; all except, indeed, the General’s daughter, who prattled on in a voice everybody heard.”

Then an explosion rocked the car. It had come from somewhere close to the president. No one knew what had just happened. Had Union troops intercepted the slow-moving train and opened fire on it or tossed a grenade into Davis’s car? Or was it sabotage? Or had a traitor sitting in the car tried to murder the president with a suicide bomb?

Burton Harrison saw it all: “A sharp explosion occurred very near the President, and a young man was seen to bounce into the air, clapping both hands to the seat of his trowsers. We all sprang to our feet in alarm.” The car smelled of black gunpowder. Harrison soon discovered that this was not an attack but an absurd accident. An officer, carrying fuses in the coattail pocket of his long frock coat, had sat down atop a stove. His weight crushed one of the fuses, setting off the explosion directly under his buttocks. Jefferson Davis and the others in the car were unharmed.

As the train went on its way toward Greensboro, North Carolina, Davis drafted a letter to the mayor of Danville, thanking him for taking the Confederate government in. “Sir,” he wrote, “Permit me to return to yourself and council my sincere thanks for your kindness shown to me when I came among you.” And he ended the letter, “May God bless and preserve you, and grant to our country independence and prosperity.”

Davis still believed it was possible, with God’s help, for the Confederacy to win the war and exist as an independent country. But when he would cross the state line the next day, April 11, he would have to accept the reality that Virginia, queen of the Confederacy, was lost.

While Jefferson Davis and the cabinet packed up in Danville, in Washington Abraham Lincoln enjoyed a spontaneous serenade outside his window. He made the crowd who had gathered on the White House lawn laugh by telling them that “Dixie” was one of the spoils of war and that he wanted to hear it played right now. Lincoln had loved the tune from the moment he first heard it. The band agreed, and the anthem of the Confederacy echoed through Lincoln’s White House and drifted across the grounds and into the streets of the capital city of the Union.

Jefferson Davis’s train arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, at around 2:00
P.M.
on April 11. His arrival horrified the citizens. Unlike in Danville, no people came forward to offer food and lodging to their president. The unfriendliness outraged Stephen Mallory, the secretary of the navy. He noted that there were many large and luxurious homes, “but their doors were closed and their ‘latch-strings pulled in’ against the members of the retreating government.”