Читать книгу Pursuit: - Clint Johnson - Страница 10

BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST. Before Davis had even completed his two-block walk from the church to his office and before he could summon his cabinet, the people of Richmond were reacting to the news that Lee was abandoning Petersburg.

The newspaper the Richmond Whig reported this on the following day: “Suddenly, as if by magic, the streets became filled with men walking as though for a wager, and behind them excited Negroes with trunks, bundles, and baggage of every description. All over the city it was the same—wagons, trunks, bandboxes, and their owners, a mass of hurrying fugitives.”

John B. Jones, the ever-observant clerk who had a good grasp of military matters (A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary), recognized the military predicament in which the Confederacy now found itself.

“General Lee may not have troops sufficient to defend both the city and the Danville Road [railroad] at the same time,” Jones noted to himself that Sunday. Jones also observed the reaction of some other interested parties when they heard the news: “The negroes stand about mostly silent, as if wondering what will be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.”

Jones was probably misreading the reactions of the slaves. Slaves rarely displayed their emotions. Showing joy that the South was losing the war or even feigning fear that Federals were approaching might irritate their owners. Some may have feared for their lives after hearing stories that slaves faired poorly when captured and used by Union forces. The slaves in Richmond kept their emotions in check. They waited to see which side prevailed.

Jones, normally accurate in his diary entries, was not above recording wild rumors even if he was the only intended audience: “The President told a lady that Lieutenant General Hardee was only twelve miles distant, and might get up in time to save the day.”

In reality, Hardee’s little force of fewer than eight thousand men was still in North Carolina with General Johnston’s army, more than two hundred miles away. Davis would not have been discussing the displacement of his nation’s armed forces with Richmond’s matrons, but both hopeful and dire rumors were sweeping the city.

Most Richmonders who heard the news about Petersburg’s fall were realists who had no illusions that Davis’s leaving the church service was anything other than what it was—the end of Confederate Richmond.

Diarist Sallie Ann Brock Putnam wrote:

The direful tidings spread with the swiftness of electricity. From lip to lip, from men, women, children and servants, the news was bandied, but many received it first as only a Sunday sensation rumor. Friend looked into the face of friend to meet only an expression of incredulity; but later in the day, as the truth, stark and appalling, confronted us, the answering look was that of stony, calm despair. Late in the afternoon the signs of evacuation became obvious to even the most incredulous.

Richmond had reason to fear.

In the spring of 1862, a Union force had burned Winton, North Carolina, to the ground, the first incident of what would become a common Union method of undermining Southern civilian morale. In the summer of 1863, Vicksburg, Mississippi, had been shelled into submission with the civilian population being the primary targets. Charleston, South Carolina’s civilians had been shelled for two years. All of Atlanta, Georgia, including its residential sections, had been burned by General William T. Sherman’s troops during the summer of 1864. The citizens of Columbia, South Carolina, heard their fate just two months earlier in February 1865 when Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps crossed the Santee River chanting: “Hail, Columbia, happy land. If I don’t burn you, I’ll be dammed.”

The residents of Richmond would not be surprised if the Confederate capital city was also slated to be wiped from the earth.

No one unaware of the telegram who saw the erect Confederate president striding his way along the sidewalk toward his office would have suspected anything out of the ordinary. Davis had always been inscrutable. He had a face that belied any public emotion whatsoever, a manner that was cold, distant, and formal with everyone but his closest friends and family. He treated good news for the Confederacy and bad the same way—with casual indifference.

But if Davis thought he was fooling people about the future of the city by keeping up his passive front, he was mistaken. It was now two months since his flaming speech at the African Church evoking patriotism for the cause. The reality of Richmond’s situation had become real again to citizens who had forgotten the rhetoric.

Food was expensive and in short supply. According to Jones’s diary, barrels of flour were selling for $700, bacon for $20 a pound. Truthfully, there was food to be had if one was willing to eat it. At a nearby hospital, the nurses and doctors regularly enjoyed a meal of a particular kind of roasted meat. One guard invited to partake passed on the offer, preferring to get his nourishment from whatever bread he could find to sop up his gruel.

“Having seen the rats in the morgue running over the bodies of dead soldiers, I had no relish for them,” said the guard.

Mrs. William A. Simmons, a woman whose husband was stationed in the trenches east of Richmond, did not have much to eat, but she kept her sense of humor:

Our Confederate money is getting so reduced in value that it is a common remark when one goes out to buy, “You can carry your money in your market basket, and bring home your provisions in your purse.” Even our bacon and greens lack the bacon. The one topic everywhere and on occasions is eating. Even the ministers in the pulpit consciously preach of it.

Hope too was in short supply.

The prescient Mrs. Simmons noted in her April 1 diary entry, the day before the breakthrough at Petersburg: “The air is full of strange rumors, events are thickening around us. It is plain that General Lee cannot hold out much longer. With a force smaller than is reported and almost destitute, it is impossible to hold our long lines stretching below Petersburg, along which for a mile or two, at some places, there is not a sentinel on guard.”

By noon most of Davis’s cabinet had gathered in his office. Present were Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, Postmaster General John Reagan, and Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm. Listening on the sidelines were Richmond’s Mayor Joseph Mayo, Virginia’s governor William Smith, and former governor John Letcher. Those men would have to deal with the federal authorities after the departure of the cabinet.

Davis looked around the room at the men with whom he would share the Confederacy’s fate. After four years of mixing and matching men into positions to which previous officeholders were unsuited, Davis had finally assembled what he considered a capable cabinet. He did not dwell on the irony that the Confederacy was collapsing just as his cabinet was jelling.

Breckinridge was described by female admirers as the “handsomest man in the Confederacy” thanks to his 6-foot-2-inch frame, deep blue eyes, and huge handlebar mustache that framed his angular cheeks. A former lawyer, congressman, and senator, Breckinridge had also served as vice president of the United States under James Buchanan. He had finished third in the 1860 presidential race running as a Southern Democrat. Though untrained in military affairs, Breckinridge proved to be a capable general on battlefields from Mississippi to Kentucky to Virginia. He had been appointed secretary of war in February 1865, so he had not made many worthwhile suggestions to the war effort even if Davis was inclined to give up any of his own power to direct war strategy.

While Davis may have won the Confederate presidency in 1861, Breckinridge, whose name was never brought up as a prospective president, was the more experienced politician. Now after serving as a general, during which he had won some notable battles, the former U.S. vice president had more battlefield experience than the Confederate president, who had no one shooting at him for nearly twenty years.

Mallory, former U.S. senator from Florida, no longer had much to do in his cabinet position. Most of the Confederate navy had been captured or sunk. In his earlier days, however, Mallory had proved innovative, always willing to try new ideas such as building the ironclad CSS Virginia, and financing the European construction of commerce raiders like the CSS Alabama. Mallory was fifty-two years old with a thick body and a beard that ran under his chin, but he grew no mustache. Mallory was the first Catholic to serve in any presidential cabinet, United States or Confederate. He was also a diarist and a keen observer of the personalities of the men with whom he would be keeping company on the escape from Richmond.

Benjamin sat smoking a cigar and playing with his gold-headed cane, seemingly without a care in the world. The former U.S. senator from Louisiana, Benjamin had served Davis as attorney general and as secretary of war before his present position. Davis trusted Benjamin implicitly, one of the few people he did. Benjamin was the first person of Jewish heritage to serve the government in high capacity in either the United States or the Confederacy. He had always ignored any anti-Semitic remarks he heard about himself, just as Davis ignored any about his choice of a Jew for a cabinet member.

The 53-year-old Benjamin was rotund, dark bearded, and dark skinned, and he always smiled even when he was worried about what was happening around him. Benjamin’s smile often irritated those who believed he was unwilling to tell Davis bad news. Mallory looked at Benjamin and noted that the secretary of state’s casual expression made him resemble “the last man outside of the ark, who assured Noah of his belief that it would not be such a hell of a shower, after all.”

On the previous evening of April 1 when it was obvious even before the receipt of the Lee telegrams that Richmond would soon fall, Benjamin had even infuriated General Samuel Cooper, the ranking general in the Confederate army who had never taken a field command. Cooper walked into the secretary of state’s office to find Benjamin’s clerks packing boxes of records. Instead of helping sort through the valuable and the mundane, Benjamin was sitting on top of a box singing and whistling an improvisational tune he called “The Exit from Shockhoe Hill.” Cooper was incensed that the secretary of state would be cracking jokes about the impending flight of high-ranking Confederates from the city they had sworn to protect.

Benjamin’s jolly appearance was really a front to hide his nervousness about what would happen to the Confederate cabinet if and when it fell into the hands of the United States. After the war, the French counsel to the Confederacy, Alfred Paul, wrote that the last time he saw Benjamin was immediately after the cabinet meeting.

“I found him extremely agitated, his hands shaking, wanting and trying to do and say everything at once,” Paul recalled.

The jolly demeanor Benjamin had posed in front of his fellow cabinet officers was gone in front of a single friend.

Reagan of Texas, 46, was a postmaster general and a master administrator though he too had little to do with more of the South falling into Union hands every day. Not only had Reagan built a postal system from scratch that could deliver a letter from one end of the Confederacy to the other in a few weeks, it also made money for the Confederate government. He too was a former U.S. congressman.

Trenholm, fifty-eight, had been secretary of the treasury less than a year. He knew how to make money in his civilian life as he had built a personal fortune running goods into the South from a fleet of blockade-runners. On the other hand, Trenholm’s skills at managing a system of collecting taxes and setting up realistic government budgets had bested him as it had previous treasury secretaries. Though the government still had considerable hard assets in the bank vaults of Richmond, his duties were more important than ever if the government was to survive. Unfortunately, Trenholm was very ill. He suffered, like Davis, from neuralgia, a neurological condition that would frequently send shockwaves of paralyzing pain into his face without warning.

Rather than hold up the meeting, Davis sent an aide to inform the missing Attorney General George Davis (no relation to the president) to be at the train station that night. Davis, 45, was a reluctant secessionist from North Carolina but a good lawyer. Like Trenholm, he had not held a high elective office in the United States government before the formation of the Confederacy. But again like Trenholm, Attorney General Davis proved to be a valuable asset because he gave unbiased advice based on his experience as a private businessman. All the other cabinet members were politicians who gave fawning advice filtered through years of public service of pandering to other officeholders and to a fickle voting public.

Davis called the meeting to order and quickly got to business. He read Lee’s telegram and told his cabinet to pack all critical papers and be prepared to leave that night. The meeting was over in a matter of minutes.

Few of the men were surprised that the evacuation of Richmond as a Confederate capital had come. Davis himself had spent the previous night helping aides box records so that they would be ready to be transported or destroyed on his order.

The cabinet’s choice of where to flee was limited to one direction. Since the Southside Railroad just west of Petersburg had been captured, that left only the recently completed Richmond & Danville Railroad leading to Danville, Virginia, 140 miles to the southwest. That city was on the North Carolina border, linked by rail to Greensboro, about 40 miles south of Danville. At that moment Johnston’s army, shattered and demoralized after the Battle of Bentonville two weeks earlier, was encamped at Smithfield, North Carolina, about 110 miles or five days march to the east of Greensboro. That army, as weak and recently defeated as it was, would play into Davis’s vision of continuing the fight for the Confederacy.

Once Davis dismissed the meeting, the sickly Trenholm and other clerks rushed to pack what was left of the Confederate treasury. At least $600,000 in gold was packed into wooden boxes. Most of the money was in gold coins minted in both Mexico and the United States. The coins had been deposited into the treasury early in the war by merchants and financiers confident in the long-term survival of the Confederacy. They exchanged their coins for paper notes so that the Confederate treasury could honestly tell its citizens that the paper money and bonds being issued were backed by hard assets of gold and silver held in vaults in the Confederate capital.

Davis went back to the Confederate White House where he told the servants to pack up the valuables of the residence and to give them to neighbors for safekeeping. Though he did not want to leave behind anything of true value, Davis also ordered that they do the stripping carefully. Always a perfectionist, Davis wanted the house to look presentable to any Union officer who would occupy it. It was what Southern gentlemen of his generation had been taught—to be polite even to your enemies.

He gave his servants precise instructions, including removing the family cow from the backyard so that she would not be butchered by the invading Federals. Davis followed through on a promise to Varina by crating a bust of him that she favored. That bust was sent to a neighbor who promised to hide it. Another neighbor refused to take Varina’s carriage out of fear that Union troops would harm his family or property if Davis’s possessions were discovered in his care.

Though the servants were confused over what to pack and what to leave, Davis coolly kept his head, even taking time to think of people who might benefit from some of the things he wanted removed from the house. He sent his favorite easy chair to the Franklin Street home where Mrs. Robert E. Lee had been living for the past several months. Crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, Mrs. Lee needed a wheel-chair to get around. Davis thought she would welcome the addition of an easy chair to her home.

Into the midst of the maelstrom of activity at the Executive Mansion arrived former U.S. senator Clement Clay, of Alabama. When Davis expressed surprise at seeing his former Senate colleague, Clay, 48 years old and heavily bearded, joked: “I am probably the last man in the Confederate service to seek to enter Richmond. The trend of Confederate travel seems to be in just the opposite direction.”

While the thought apparently never crossed his mind, Davis might have more closely considered his immediate offer to Clay to join the Confederate cabinet on the escape from the city. His association with Clay throughout 1864 and now at this late date of the war would give the U.S. government reason to believe the two old friends were more like criminal collaborators.

While the first leg of the cabinet’s escape would be by rail, escape from the Confederacy by ocean had been an occasional topic with Davis. Before Varina had left with the children, her husband told her to “make for the Florida coast and from there board a ship to a foreign country.”

It may not have been by chance that two of the men who would be accompanying Davis to Danville had skills that could come in handy should the party make it to a coast.

One was Confederate navy commander John Taylor Wood, Davis’s nephew by his first wife and grandson of former president Zachary Taylor. The 34-year-old Taylor, a Minnesota native, had declined to follow his father into the army. Instead, he joined the United States Navy as a 17-year-old midshipman. He later won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1853. He spent the next eight years at sea chasing slave-trading ships and as an instructor at the academy. In 1861 he resigned from the United States Navy and joined the Confederate navy as one of its most experienced officers.

After early, wasted appointments commanding shore batteries, Taylor was assigned to the CSS Virginia, the ironclad that fought the USS Monitor. After leading several raids to capture Union vessels in 1862, exploits so dangerous and successful that he won the rare official thanks of the Confederate Congress, Taylor was invited by his uncle to be a military aide. Davis rewarded his nephew with the rank of colonel of cavalry. The unusual dual rank in two different services, plus the fact that he was the president’s nephew, gave Wood a level of trust between him, politicians, and officers in the two services. It was in 1864 that Wood found his true calling as a formidable sea raider. While commanding the CSS Tallahassee, he took more than thirty-three Union vessels.

Not on the same train, but soon to follow the cabinet to Danville was the most famous of sailors for both the North and the South, Admiral Raphael Semmes. Semmes was a 55-year-old native of Maryland who practiced looking flamboyant by keeping a waxed mustache whose ends sprang several inches from each side of his face. He had gone to sea with the United States Navy when he was 14 and had spent more than 35 years in the service of his country, including winning commendations for trying to save his ship during a violent storm off Mexico in 1846. Early in 1861 he resigned his commission as a commander and cast his lot with the Confederacy.

Semmes was famous in the South and infamous in the North for his command of first the CSS Sumter and later the CSS Alabama, two fast raider ships designed to run down Northern commercial vessels such as cargo and whaling ships. In the course of two years, Semmes’ two commands accounted for the capture of eighty-seven Union vessels. No Union ship captain left port without fearing that he would one day see Semmes’ sails rushing over the horizon toward him. Semmes was also a formidable foe when he had to do battle. He sank the warship USS Hatteras off Texas in a battle that lasted just thirteen minutes.

Semmes made the mistake of fighting the USS Kearsage off the coast of France on June 19, 1864, when the CSS Alabama was badly in need of an overhaul and fresh gunpowder. The Alabama had been at sea so long that she leaked at several points in her hull, and her powder was so damp that her cannons were not firing as hot as they should have been. When the Alabama’s stern was shot away, Semmes jumped into the sea, but he was quickly pulled from the water by a British ship. Eventually he returned to Richmond and continued to command the ships and ironclads making up the last remnants of the James River Squadron.

Not only were two of the South’s most famous sea captains planning to escape south with Davis, there were at least a dozen skilled ship captains and sailors, refugees from the James River Squadron, who were also retreating toward Danville. If Davis needed an experienced crew of sailors to go wherever he wanted in the world reachable by the seven seas, all he had to do was walk through the train cars and recruit from the flower of the Confederate navy.

As for his long-range plans after escaping from Richmond, Davis seemed determined to head for the vastness of the Trans-Mississippi Theater (Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Indian Territory, and parishes of Louisiana west of the river) where he hoped to find troops still in the field who had not lost the will to fight. He intended to meet up with General Edmund Kirby Smith around Galveston, Texas, an island just a few miles from the coast from which blockade-runners still successfully slipped in and out of port. Ideally, Davis wanted to stop along the way to Texas and link up with another nephew, General Richard Taylor, who was leading a small army quartered near the coastal (but captured) city of Mobile, Alabama.

While Davis would never have admitted it, trying to reach Taylor and Kirby Smith by taking a land route would be virtually impossible because much of the territory between Virginia and Texas was already occupied by Union troops. The best way for the cabinet to reach both of these armies quickly would be by sea. But finding a fast ship large enough to accommodate the cabinet was no longer as easy as it had been just a few months earlier. The big blockade running ports of Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, had been captured. Owners of many of the most successful blockade-runners that had routinely run back and forth to Bermuda and to Nassau, Bahamas, were now holding them in foreign ports, finally convinced that their profitable ventures of trading cotton for war material were over.

It was still possible but not promising to make for the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas. If a small party could slip between Grant’s army around Petersburg, Virginia, and Sherman’s army around Smithfield, North Carolina, they could make for the coastal network of numerous small rivers and streams. Once on the coast, they might find loyal citizens willing to give them a boat seaworthy enough to run to the Bahamas or Bermuda. A small craft, disguised as a fishing boat operating along the Carolina coast, might escape the attention of the Union blockaders who would be concentrating on watching for larger blockade-runners still trying to make a profit.

If the cabinet could survive Atlantic storms in a small boat and reach a neutral country like Bermuda or the Bahamas, they could then board safer, foreign-flagged ships bound for Europe. Or if they still felt loyalty to Davis and the Confederacy, they could risk their freedom by following him and boarding a blockade-runner that would make for Alabama and Texas. One possibility that could have crossed Davis’s mind was reaching and boarding the CSS Stonewall, a French-built, iron-hulled raider that was supposed to be on its way across the Atlantic to Havana, Cuba. No Union wooden blockading ship would have been able to stand against the Stonewall, a ship designed to break the Union blockade. All Davis would have known on April 2 was that the Stonewall should be at sea on its way to Cuba.

But Davis did not try for the shorter escape route toward the Carolina coast. The option Davis apparently chose without conferring with his cabinet was a combination land and sea escape. He chose a longer route that would take them even further from the coast, first into upstate South Carolina and then into Georgia with coastal Florida assumed as the final destination.

The longer route seemed plausible. Florida was still mostly unmolested by Union forces. The third state to secede from the Union had been a blockade-runner’s haven early in the war. But since it was also the smallest of the Confederate states in population, fewer than 45,000 people, there had been little buildup of prewar infrastructure such as railroads or even large towns or ports, so large quantities of supplies could not be brought into Florida and then easily shipped north. The blockade-runners based in Florida were mostly small boats and schooners that could carry a few bales of cotton to Cuba or the Bahamas while carrying loads of lead and arms back to the peninsula that local forces would use.

However, while Florida did not have large blockade-runners, it did have the longest coastline of any state in the Union or the Confederacy at nearly 2,300 miles. Hidden along both the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico coast were scores of inlets and rivers that were too numerous for the United States Navy to patrol continuously. With prior word sent ahead by courier, loyal Confederates could have prepared large boats and small ships for the Confederate cabinet’s use.

But, the escape plan would take weeks to effect, even if nothing went wrong. If the cabinet could successfully avoid Union capture by taking trains south through North Carolina, switching to wagons and horses through unoccupied upstate South Carolina, and then going through unoccupied upstate Georgia, there was a chance they could stay ahead of any pursuing Union troops and disappear into Florida’s still unoccupied panhandle. From north Florida, they would make their way through the upper center of the state before splitting off into one of two directions, either to the southeast below Union-occupied St. Augustine on the east coast or to the southwest toward the Gulf of Mexico on the west coast.

Heading southeast to Florida’s Atlantic coast was the less desirable direction. While the Union blockade on that side of the state was light because there were few coastal towns below St. Augustine that could have engaged in blockade-running, there would also be fewer people living near the coast who could be called on to help with the escape. Leaving for Alabama from Florida’s Atlantic coast would also have added hundreds of miles and days of risky ocean sailing before Davis could reach Mobile.

Leaving from Florida’s west coast had its own problems, principally that those waters were more heavily guarded because Union ships blanketed the Gulf to capture blockade-runners trying to use Mobile and Galveston. Still there was opportunity there. While Florida’s small, blockade-running port of Cedar Key had been captured in 1862, the coastline north of Cedar Key was still in Confederate hands and actively used for making salt that was shipped to Confederate armies. This part of the coast bending upward and westward was just too long for the Union navy to patrol fully. Florida natives living close to the coast and still loyal to the Confederacy would know where boats and ships capable of open-sea travel would be hidden up small creeks and canals. If the cabinet’s boat could hug the coast disguised as a fishing vessel, they could escape detection all the way to finding Taylor’s army.

The hard part facing the cabinet was getting to Florida. The state line lay 600 miles from Richmond. The sparsely settled Gulf Coast, the ideal starting point for a voyage to Mobile, was another 150 miles beyond the border. An unimpeded, continuous trek by train, wagon, and horse would take nearly a month.

One wild card was available in the deck of the last game the Confederacy was playing that could be thrown on the table by the Union at any time. If it landed close to him, Davis would have to fold.

That wild card was the month-long, 6,000-man cavalry raid of Union major general George Stoneman who had left Knoxville, Tennessee on March 25 and who was now somewhere in the North Carolina mountains. Stoneman’s horse soldiers were burning Confederate warehouses and factories. No one in the Confederacy had any idea where Stoneman’s men might turn up or how quickly. Both Grant’s and Sherman’s armies were tied down by slow-walking infantry, but Stoneman’s cavalry could cover up to 50 miles in a day. If a Union telegram or a courier reached Stoneman detailing that Davis and the cabinet were moving south and had not yet even entered North Carolina, an interception would have been possible.

If Davis had given any thought or planning to how quickly the cabinet would move from one location to another, he kept it to himself. All his cabinet and the public knew was that they would be leaving Richmond on the night of April 2. The cabinet gathered at the rail station around 6:00 p.m., along with scores of Richmonders, all of whom heard that the cabinet was leaving the city and who hoped that they too would be able to take a refugee train out of town. It soon became clear to the citizens, however, that only two trains would be leaving the city that night. Only important government employees would be joining the cabinet’s flight. Average citizens would have to face whatever wrath the Yankees intended to inflict on the city.

There were some thirty locomotives left in the city by the end of the war but few that were fully operational. Most had been taken out of service due to lack of parts. The best locomotives and rolling stock had already been evacuated or captured by Union cavalry raiders. The one selected for evacuating the cabinet seemed to be the best of the worst left in Richmond. Its wood-fueled firebox leaked, as did its boiler, meaning it took longer to make enough steam to pull any cars. Under normal circumstances the locomotive assigned to pull the cars carrying the cabinet would have been dismantled for parts, but the railroad president had no choice. It would have to be pressed into service to rescue the Confederate government. A second engine was found to pull the treasury train loaded with the gold and bills that had been gathered from Richmond’s banks.

Perhaps surprisingly, no military escort was gathered to protect the train on which the Confederate nation’s most important officials would be traveling.

While either Davis or Breckinridge could have ordered an escort to be put together, Lee, who sent the telegram suggesting the cabinet leave Richmond, never offered any of his 30,000 troops scattered between Richmond and Petersburg for the job. All of Lee’s messages to his generals in Richmond revolved around how they should rendezvous with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia leaving Petersburg somewhere to the west of both cities.

Lee knew that Davis and the others would be using the railroad line as an escape route as Breckinridge had asked him in one telegram how much longer the Danville Railroad would be open.

“I think the Danville Road will be safe until tomorrow,” was Lee’s terse if indefinite reply in his only known telegram that seemed to have anything to do with the pending evacuation of the cabinet.

In reality, Lee had no idea if the Danville Railroad was safe. His troops had lost control of Five Forks and Sutherland Station in successive days. By midnight on April 2, a time when the cabinet train might be passing through Amelia Court House, no one in the Confederate army could guarantee that Union cavalry would not be astride the Danville tracks, waiting to see what they could capture from any trains passing their way. On the morning of April 2, the way toward the Danville line was wide open if the Federals chose to move on it.

With his lines broken at Petersburg, Lee did not have time to contemplate the fate of his boss, President Davis. Lee just wanted to evacuate his army. Lee’s last telegram to Breckinridge read: “All troops will be directed to Amelia Court House,” a railroad station some forty miles to the southwest, a two-day march for troops.

Amelia Station was on the Danville line, and the cabinet would pass through the small town that night on its escape, a fact that Davis would have to deal with in a postwar controversy involving getting food to Lee’s army.

At a time when Davis could have been working with Breckinridge to find military units in the city who could cover his escape, he was more interested in packing up or dispersing the family’s personal possessions to keep them out of the hands of advancing Federals. Davis seems to have given little thought to his own safety.

There was cavalry available in Richmond who could have ridden in front of, and beside, the Danville-bound train Davis had already decided would be the cabinet’s best option for leaving the city. Brigadier general Martin Gary, a thin, bald man who had been given the nickname “The Bald Eagle” for his high-pitched voice that could be heard above all battle noise, commanded at least 1,000 fully equipped cavalrymen made up of the remnants of cavalry regiments from South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Gary, a Harvard-educated trial lawyer before the war, had been one of South Carolina’s legislators who had carried the state out of the Union in December 1860. He was one of the few officers still alive and still unwounded who had fought in virtually every major battle in Virginia starting with First Manassas in July 1861. Gary remained an ardent secessionist in 1865 and presumably would have welcomed the opportunity to escort the president of the Confederacy to safety—if only he had been asked.

The only troops specifically assigned to leave Richmond as part of the cabinet’s entourage would not be on the same train as Davis, nor would they be soldiers. They were not even men.

The first military escort even close to Davis on the escape south would be little more than teenaged boys who had never faced Union forces. At the cabinet meeting earlier in the day, Mallory volunteered the services of the sixty midshipmen of the Confederate Naval Academy to be assigned as escorts—not for the president and the cabinet—but for the Confederate treasury that would leave Richmond on a separate train.

Mallory’s volunteering of the midshipmen—most between the ages of 14 and 18—at least gave him something constructive to do in his cabinet post in the waning days of the Confederacy. Most of the Confederate navy’s coastal and river-based ironclads and ocean-going commerce raiders had been either sunk by their own crews or captured. One of the few surviving ships was the side-wheeler CSS Patrick Henry, the naval academy school ship on which the boys practiced their seamanship.

The midshipmen had no warning that they would soon be real land soldiers rather than practicing blue water sailors. Their 39-year-old commander, Lieutenant William H. Parker, a native New Yorker who resigned his United States Navy lieutenancy at the beginning of the war, must have suspected something was up when he found Mallory on April 1 pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of his house practicing the cocking and firing of a revolver. Suspicious at the naval secretary’s behavior, Parker asked about any war-front news, but Mallory assured him that “the news that day from General Lee was good, and that affairs around Petersburg looked promising.” Parker, satisfied, then asked to spend the night in town, which Mallory granted.

The next day, April 2, Parker was back on board the CSS Patrick Henry when he received a vague order from Mallory for the cadets to report to the Danville train depot at 6:00 p.m. A curious Parker started walking to Mallory’s house to get him to elaborate on the order. Along the way he noted Union prisoners being transported in daylight rather than at night, which had been the custom throughout the war. Within a block he stopped a panicked government clerk who told him that the cabinet was leaving. On his own, without any orders from Mallory, Parker evacuated all the midshipmen from the Patrick Henry and ordered it burned later that night to keep it out of the hands of the Federals. He then put his cadets on the march toward the train station. He had not anticipated that Mallory’s order meant the cadets would be leaving Richmond and the muskets, with which they had probably rarely trained, were to be used to protect the Confederacy’s last stocks of wealth.

Parker was struck by how quiet the city seemed to be, particularly since everyone knew the Yankees would soon be entering it.

“Perhaps the pale, sad faces of the ladies aided to bring it about [the ‘peculiar quiet’]. They knew it was impossible for them to leave, and they prepared to share the fate of their beloved city with the same heroism they had exhibited during the past four years,” Parker wrote.

The midshipmen guarded the treasure train with the fierce determination of youth, keeping curious citizens and potential thieves back with all the looks of seriousness they could muster on their whiskerless faces. All the boys had been told what was in the wooden boxes, but they had no thoughts of stealing it. They were more interested in winning their place in the history of the war.

Parker and the boys waited at the station for the departure of the first train in line that would be carrying the cabinet. He observed that Davis “preserved his usual calm and dignified manner” and that Breckinridge “was as cool and gallant as ever,” but the rest of the cabinet’s nervousness was showing: “[They] had the air of wishing to be off.”

Finally, around 11:00 p.m. on the night of April 2, more than three hours after the deadline Lee had set for the cabinet to leave the city, Davis’s train pulled out of the station. The treasury train was delayed until all of Richmond’s banks had loaded their paper money. Parker warned his boys to be ready for trouble because the social order of the city was breaking down as deserters and street ruffians sensed that no one in authority was left to keep them from breaking into warehouses.

Someone in authority ordered that the city’s whiskey barrels be broken and turned over to prevent just the sort of unruliness that was starting to sweep the city. Parker watched in disgust as men and women used their own shoes and boots to scoop up whiskey flowing down street gutters.

Just before his train was ready to leave, Parker heard a series of explosions that marked the end of the James River Squadron, including his own CSS Patrick Henry. Not long after the explosions, Parker noticed that fires had begun to break out around the city, a result of the insistence by General Richard Ewell, commander of the Confederate forces protecting the city, that cotton bales stored in the city’s warehouses be burned rather than just pouring turpentine over them to make them worthless.

Finally, four hours after the cabinet’s train had left, Parker’s treasure train pulled out of the station.

Left on the platform were Richmonders who now knew they would have to return to their homes and face the Yankees who were expected to arrive at any minute. Parker described it as a “horror” to leave so many friends behind to an unknown fate.

Among those still standing on the platform were fifty slaves. Just before the second train left, a slave trader named Lumpkin approached the platform with a chain gang of fifty black men and women that he hoped to sell to someone down the line. When Lumpkin was turned away at rifle point by the midshipmen, the man simply unlocked the chains and shooed his happy former property into the darkness. At a prewar cost of at least $1,000 per able field hand, Lumpkin had just given up more than $50,000.

Within a few minutes of the treasure train passing over the rail bridge over the James River and within a few hours of the Confederate cabinet leaving the city, civilization seemed to dissolve in Richmond.

As the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry, part of Gary’s cavalry brigade rear guard, pushed through the Rocketts section of Richmond on its way to the southwest side of the city to cross the James, Lieutenant Colonel Edward M. Boykin noted:

The peculiar population of that suburb were gathering on the sidewalk; bold, dirty looking women, who had evidently not been improved by four years’ military association, dirtier (if possible) looking children, and here and there skulking, scoundrelly looking men, who in the general ruin were sneaking from the holes they had been hiding in.

As he rode, Boykin noted “bare-headed women” looting warehouses as he watched:

A scene that beggars description, and which I hope never to see again—the saddest of many of the sad sights of the war—a city undergoing pillage at the hands of its own mob, which the standards of an empire were being taken from its capitol, and the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gate.

Richmond had collected within its walls the refuse of the war—thieves and deserters, male and female, the vilest of the vile were there, but strict military discipline had kept it down. Now, in one moment, it was all removed—all restraint was taken off—and you may imagine the consequences.

As he rode down Franklin Street (past the house where Mrs. Robert E. Lee was living), Boykin sadly observed:

At the windows we could see the sad and tearful faces of the kind Virginia women, who had never failed the soldier in four long years of war and trouble, ready to the last to give him devoted attendance in his wounds and sickness, and to share with his necessities the last morsel.

As Gary himself passed over the Mayo Bridge, he called out to the man assigned to demolish the bridge: “Blow her to Hell!”

As generals Gary and Ewell rode away, they stopped on a high plain on the south bank of the James and watched as fires seemed to spring up at dozens of places within the city. Ewell’s orders to burn the military warehouses had been carried out, but as the citizens feared, the fires were already getting out of control and spreading to the residential areas. Richmond, the city that had withstood numerous Union campaigns that brought the blue-coated enemy so close they could hear the city’s church bells, had not fallen to an enemy attack. It was set ablaze by the men who had spent the last four years defending the capital city.

The Union soldiers would put out the fires and push into the city within hours of the last Confederates passing over the bridges. Among the first Union soldiers to put down their muskets and pick up fire hoses and axes would be several regiments of United States Colored Troops, freed slaves who had joined the Union army to free other blacks. Instead of letting the Confederate capital burn to the ground, these black men who had every reason to hate Richmond helped save it.

With the two escaping trains huffing and puffing down the Danville line into the darkness with its unknown dangers, Davis and the Confederate cabinet were now officially on the run. The attempt to continue the war without a capital city to defend had begun.