Читать книгу Pursuit: - Clint Johnson - Страница 11

BEFORE HE LEFT FOR THE TRAIN STATION that Sunday night, April 2, President Jefferson Davis took time out of completing his official duties to attend to some personal business. Even with tens of thousands of Union soldiers marching on Richmond and with all the details of evacuating the cabinet and the Confederate treasury to be tended to, Davis sat down at his desk to write a letter to his wife, Varina.

Davis loved writing and receiving letters, and he expected everyone in his family to share his desire to communicate. The written word helped him express thoughts and emotions that he often could not—or would not—say in public. Even short absences and short distances from the family required the person who was leaving to write a letter back to Davis. Just two weeks before this frantic evening, the president had written to his seven-year-old son Jefferson, Jr., who had insisted on visiting the trenches in Petersburg. Over his wife’s concerned objections about letting the boy visit a war zone where snipers watched for movement in the trenches and where cannon shells were regularly lobbed into the city, Davis granted his son permission to play visiting inspector of the troops.

“I was very happy that my dear boy was able to write to me about himself and to give me news from the trenches,” Davis wrote to his son, who was less than twenty-five miles away and coming home soon. “Your Mother and the children are well and are anxious to have you back. It made me glad to hear from your Cousin Joe that you were a good boy,” the president wrote, ending the letter, “With much love, your father, Jeff’n Davis.”

Ignoring the rushed movements and irritated shouts of the servants trying to pack the family’s possessions, Davis sat down at his desk on the second floor of the Executive Mansion. As he dipped the pen into the inkwell, he hesitated, thinking about what he was about to say to his wife. As he composed in his head, another thought crept into his consciousness. He knew where Varina was, but the Union army did not. With the Federals closing in on Richmond, he worried that any courier making his way through enemy lines could be captured and the letter would tip off the Federals to his family’s location. If Varina and the children fell into Federal hands, he would have no choice but to trade himself for their freedom and safety. Davis put his pen down, resolving to write to this wife from Danville the next day. Lee had promised that town was safe for now, and the way south from there should be free of Union soldiers.

VARINA WAS A PERCEPTIVE WOMAN whose assessment in 1843 on first meeting her future husband at a Christmas party was that he “has a way of taking for granted that everyone agrees with him, which offends me.”

Despite Davis’s irritating cocksureness that he was master of every subject, Varina sensed while still at the party that she had found the man she would marry. She claimed not to be able to tell how old he was, though he was obviously much older than her 17 years. When she first saw him before speaking to him, he was on horseback, riding so confidently that she described him being “free and strong.” He was tall with blue-gray eyes. He had thick hair and a prominent, sharp nose. He kept a radiant smile hidden behind his thin lips except for when he was talking to her. There appeared to be only one thing truly wrong with him. He was of the wrong political party.

“Would you believe it, he is refined and cultivated, yet he is a Democrat!” she exclaimed to her mother in the same letter. Her family was Whig.

The political differences were only the first of the problems her parents saw with any budding romance. Varina was still a teenager. Their daughter’s would-be beau was more than twice her age at 35. He was also a widower. As she would discover from asking mutual friends, Davis still carried a ten-year guilt for taking his first wife home to Mississippi in the middle of malaria season. She died before the honeymoon was over.

Davis also appeared to be unhealthy and too reserved for genial public discourse. While Varina described her beau as “slim,” her parents thought him cadaverous in appearance. While he might have a sweet voice and engaging smile for her, they thought him too formal and superior when addressing anyone he did not already know. He was not at all the charming, amusing, young, and lively son-in-law that parents dream of becoming their daughter’s husband. They tried to steer her away from Davis, but they quickly learned that their daughter and her beau possessed at least one common trait: both were stubborn. She refused to be dissuaded by her parents that she should keep looking for a better first love. He refused to believe that any other woman besides this headstrong teenager could ever make him happy again.

In some respects the two were polar opposites. Varina was dark-skinned, while Davis was pale. She was vivacious and outgoing in public, while he was shy and withdrawn. She loved to attend parties. He preferred surrounding himself with a few close friends. She loved to eat fine foods, enough to make her pleasingly plump, while he ate sparingly and only then when forced to fuel his body so he could continue to work.

But for every trait that irritated Varina, her beau had one that complemented her own personality. They were both well educated; he being a graduate of the United States Military Academy and she having studied Latin and English at a girl’s finishing school in Philadelphia. They both respected honesty and held back nothing about their pasts when learning about each other. He readily told her of his first wife’s death and his years of mourning her. She told him that her father’s business had driven the family into bankruptcy. They shared a deep interest in politics even if they were on opposite sides of the political spectrum. They both enjoyed jousting with their peers in lively conversation over a wide variety of topics.

The couple courted just over a year, with her mother continually though fruitlessly pointing out the age differences and his character flaws and with Varina herself pondering his overbearing tendencies. Nothing dissuaded her. She went into the marriage knowing that he would always assert that he was right and everyone else was always wrong. Davis was, above everything else that was part of his character, self-confident in his own abilities. It was a trait he had displayed since his childhood in Kentucky and later Mississippi.

As a seven-year-old, Jefferson and his younger sister were walking along a dark trail on their way to school when they heard someone or something coming down the same path. Jefferson could see what he thought were chair legs about six feet above the ground, indicating that the coming terror was a drunken chair mender who terrified children in the region by his unusual and rude behavior. As his sister started to run into the woods, Jefferson grabbed her hand and told her that he was not scared of the man, and he would protect her from harm. Together, the two children waited for the man to approach them. As the chair legs grew closer, Jefferson saw that the chair was actually a buck deer’s antler rack. The deer itself turned into the woods when it saw the two small children. For the first time in his life, the future president of his nation had stared down what he perceived to be a danger to himself and family. He had told his sister that he would take care of her and he had.

Keeping promises would be a hallmark of Davis’s life.

After transferring from Transylvania College in Lexington, Kentucky, into the United States Military Academy in 1824, Davis learned for the first time in his life that authority figures often expected him to follow their rules rather than his. Davis did not like anyone telling him—not even academy instructors—what to do. On several occasions he found himself in trouble, usually involving minor offenses such as not being in his room for the head count, but also for more serious problems such as being caught off campus in a local bar called Benny Havens.

At a court martial that could have resulted in his expulsion, Davis maintained that while a superior officer had seen him in the bar, the officer had not seen him drinking alcohol, so the officer’s assumption that he had been drinking could not be proved. Impressed with Davis’s quick thinking of coming up with an improbable defense, the court martial judges declined to dismiss Davis from the academy.

Davis proved his coolness and bravery in the face of real danger later in the year when a laboratory accident nearly caused an explosion as the class was experimenting with chemicals. After the instructor ran from the room when the experiment went wrong and the chemicals began an unexpected reaction, Davis calmly threw the materials out the window. The same officers who had been willing to dismiss him now gave him credit for saving lives and academy property. Davis never became a favorite of the academy officers, nor did he try any harder to fit into the system. He graduated twenty-ninth out of thirty-seven cadets in 1828.

Despite his discipline problems, Davis remembered that “the four years I remained at West Point made me a different creature from that which nature had designed me to be,” he wrote to a sister after his graduation.

Davis proved to be a good infantry officer, overcoming his reputation as a stubborn student. When he assisted in the 1832 capture of Black Hawk, an Indian chief who led an uprising in Illinois, the Indian proved prophetic when he spoke admirably of the “good and brave young chief” who treated him with respect while Davis was taking him to a fort where he would be imprisoned.

One good thing came out of the Black Hawk war for Lieutenant Davis. He met Sarah Knox Taylor, the daughter of his commander, Colonel Zachary Taylor. After clashing with another officer and undergoing another court martial that resulted in his acquittal, Davis resigned from the army to marry Sarah. His young wife would be dead from malaria within a few weeks of moving to her new home in steamy Mississippi. His former father-in-law would blame Davis for his daughter’s sudden death. They would not make peace with each other until another war brought them together.

Devastated and guilt ridden that he had somehow contributed to his bride’s death for taking her into a region known for malaria, Davis threw himself into his civilian life for the next ten years by building his plantations. He did it as he did everything else he had always done in his life—his way.

Davis and his brother Joseph ran their plantations in a different way than any of their neighbors. They believed themselves to be responsible for their slaves’ long-term well-being. Davis forbade whipping as discipline for slaves, and he encouraged his people to create their own government and courts to deal with minor offenses such as stealing from each other. Other slaveholders looked askance at his liberal attitude toward slaves, but Davis ignored them.

THEN CAME THAT DAY when the sober, successful planter met the 17-year-old visitor at the party. He had ignored the opportunity to meet other women for more than a decade. Now, something about her bold, mature ways surprised him and helped change him from the recluse he had been since Sarah’s death.

About the same time Davis met Varina, he took up his brother Joseph’s challenge to get involved in politics. After failing to win a state House seat, but winning the attention of party elders, Davis came back the next year and captured a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 1844. Davis found that voters enjoyed his speeches, even though he did not like meeting them personally.

Davis learned that politicians never counted little white lies as being dishonest. On at least one occasion during his House campaign, Davis told the crowd that if elected, he would be proud to serve “Mississippi—the land of my birth.” He had been born in Kentucky.

Davis arrived in Washington in 1845 nationally unknown, but he did not go unnoticed. One fellow freshman representative, Henry W. Hilliard of Alabama, vividly remembered Davis’s arrival in the capitol with a description that would follow him for the rest of his life: “His appearance was prepossessing. Tall, slender, with a soldierly bearing; a fine head, an intellectual face; there was a look of culture and refinement about him that made a favorable impression from the first.”

The newcomer did not follow protocol from the opening days of the Congress. Instead of sitting back and watching the incumbents conduct business while keeping his freshman mouth shut, Davis rose repeatedly to offer his and Mississippi’s opinions on issues facing the United States. He was in favor of speeding up the process of allowing foreigners to become American citizens. He was against allowing Great Britain to expand its colonies in the far northwestern territory of Oregon. He was all in favor of the idea of manifest destiny, that the nation had a God-given right to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Davis was such a good speaker that on at least one occasion, Varina remembered that he attracted the attention of an elderly congressman from Massachusetts who sat transfixed, watching Davis talk.

“We shall hear more from this young man, I fancy,” said former president John Quincy Adams, who loved governing so much that he spent the rest of his life in the House of Representatives.

It was while in Congress that Davis showed future political friends and enemies that he never backed down from a position. Once in a debate where Davis was trying to win appropriations to build forts along the Gulf Coast, a congressman from the North who was seeking appropriations for his own district along the Great Lakes asked if Davis were willing to trade votes.

Davis stared at his fellow Congressman and then carefully in measured tones made his position clear: “Sir, I make no terms. I accept no compromises.”

In the spring of 1846, Davis turned his attention to modernizing the United States Army. He suggested issuing rifles to two regiments of the peacetime army, replacing the older, short-range, smoothbore flintlock muskets that were the standard, but obsolete, weapon the army still used. The bill passed. A few months later, the need for a modern army would manifest itself when on April 25, the Mexican Army crossed the Rio Grande River into Texas. They eventually clashed with a U.S. force under the overall command of General Zachary Taylor, Davis’s former father-in-law. Blood was drawn. On May 9, 1846, President James K. Polk declared war.

Davis made known his war views when he wrote a letter to the editor of the Vicksburg Sentinel and Expositor saying: “Let the treaty of peace be made at the city of Mexico,” meaning that he felt the United States had the right to invade Mexico and capture its capital to end the war. He also hinted that if Mississippians were willing to form a volunteer regiment, he would be willing to leave Congress to lead it. The editor added to Davis’s message by leading the cheer for volunteers and asserting that Davis was “the native, gallant, glorious son of our soil” ready to “lead you to your country’s service.”

Once again it appeared in print that Davis was a native of Mississippi rather than Kentucky. He did not write a letter back to Vicksburg to correct the editor’s mistake. He had been in Mississippi so long, Davis himself might have forgotten his own roots.

Varina was appalled at her husband’s plans to volunteer for a distant war. He had not discussed with her the idea of putting on a uniform nearly ten years after he had taken it off. She tried arguing him out of it, but even her frantic and copious tears failed to dissuade him: “I have cried until I am stupid,” she told her mother.

Her concern was not necessarily that Davis would be killed on the battlefield. She worried that he might not even make it to Texas before expiring from one of the medical conditions he already had. She worried about recurring bouts of malaria, which had almost killed him ten years earlier. She worried about him eating. She had enough trouble making Davis take his meals when she would see him at home, once commenting that he “ate no more than a child.” She worried about his left eye. That eye was continually infected and inflamed from what was probably herpes simplex, the same virus that causes fever blisters. She worried about his neuralgia, which could cause him immobilizing pain when he suffered attacks. He was a sickly man, although he would admit it to no one. Varina had written her mother when they first came to Washington that she worried about her husband exhausting himself without telling her how seriously ill he felt: “You know how patiently Jeffy always bears suffering.”

If the afflictions common to Jefferson Davis had belonged to any other man, he would have been under the constant care of a doctor. But they were part of who Jefferson Davis was, and he did not listen to man or woman. He certainly was not going to allow any physical infirmity to keep him from leading his Mississippians against Mexico, which had attacked his country.

Before he left Congress for his volunteer assignment, Davis made a speechifying mistake on the House floor, one that would come back to haunt him in 1865. Several pacifist congressmen had previously made speeches decrying the need for West Point and professionally trained officers. When Davis rose to praise some victories won by his father-in-law Taylor, he asked, jokingly, if such victories could have been won by a blacksmith or a tailor.

Davis meant no harm in the statement, only to emphasize that professional military training was necessary to win military victories. But at least one former blacksmith and one former tailor who were now high and mighty congressmen took offense at the implication that their previous professions were not honorable. The tailor was Tennessee’s representative Andrew Johnson, who now had an instant reason to take an intense dislike to his Mississippi colleague. On the House floor, Johnson denounced a bewildered, then increasingly irritated, Davis for being part of an aristocracy that looked down on the working class.

Davis and Johnson would have more differences with each other in about twenty years.

When Davis received his appointment of colonel of volunteers, he immediately asked the United States government to supply his 1,000 men with the latest in military technology. He wanted the same type of percussion cap rifles he had suggested for the regular army in 1846. Percussion rifles were a tremendous leap in technology from the antiquated, smoothbore, flintlock muskets the regular army was still using because of decades of congressional resistance to creating a modern army. President James Polk agreed with Davis, although General Winfield Scott suggested that the massed firepower of muskets was still preferable to the rifles.

Before he left his Mississippi plantation, Davis assigned its care to his oldest, best, and most trusted friend, James Pemberton, a slave highly skilled in managing large numbers of acres and the people it took to farm them.

On February 22, 1847, Davis and his regiment, commonly known as the Mississippi Rifles after the new weapons he had demanded for them, won fame at the Battle of Buena Vista, though they also suffered more than a third killed and wounded. Davis himself was wounded in the right foot, but he stayed in the saddle until the battle was over. The stand of the Mississippians led by their brave volunteer congressman who refused to leave the field even after he was wounded was too big a newspaper story to ignore. Davis slowly recovered from his wound, unaware that newspapers across the nation, North and South, were making him into a national hero.

When Davis returned to Mississippi, he discovered men were already planning his future for him. Without much debate, he was appointed U.S. senator, replacing one who had conveniently died at almost the same moment Davis had returned home.

Davis served less than a year as a senator before resigning to run for Mississippi governor, a race he lost to a bitter political enemy, Senator Henry Foote. Foote would later serve in the Confederate Congress where he would continue his enmity toward Davis. Though now without political office himself, Davis stayed interested in politics, campaigning for New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce for president in 1852. Pierce rewarded Davis’s work by appointing him secretary of war.

Davis made the most of a post that allowed him to play politics, but in which he did not have to campaign in front of the public, a necessity with which he never got comfortable. He pushed for enlarging the army in total regiments, as well as equipping them with the rifles that his own Mississippi regiment had proved highly accurate.

Though he would never admit it, Davis did make some mistakes in his post. He insisted on importing a few dozen camels from Africa that he believed would replace horses in the western deserts. The soldiers hated the smelly, cantankerous, spitting beasts, and they were never fully tested when Davis left office in 1857. The new administration of James Buchanan ignored Davis’s camel corps.

While Pierce failed to get renominated for the presidency, Davis did win the election to the United States Senate in 1858, where he became one of the nation’s most famous, respected, and experienced politicians. He had served his country fighting Indians and Mexicans in the House, in the Senate, as secretary of war, and, now again, in the Senate. He had won and lost elections and had been appointed to high office by men who trusted him. Varina, who had sometimes felt abandoned by her husband early in their marriage when he was campaigning for office or campaigning on the battlefield, thought that he had finally found a home in the Senate.

It would be a home that Davis would experience for only two years.

WITH THE ELECTION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN in November 1860, Varina joined in the South’s view that Lincoln was “elected with the express understanding that he would rule in hostility over the minority, while ostensibly acting as the guardian of the whole country.”

She did not sleep the night before her husband stood to give his farewell address to the Senate early in 1861. She wondered from her seat if the senators and other spectators “saw beyond the cold exterior of the orator—his deep depression, his desire for reconciliation, and his overweening love of the Union in whose cause he had bled, and to maintain which he was ready to sacrifice all but liberty and equality.”

Within a few days, the Davis family left Washington for Mississippi. It would be only a few more days before Davis would receive that unwelcome telegram calling on him to report to Montgomery.

After Davis was sworn in as president of the Confederacy in Montgomery, the early leaders of the new nation decided that the Alabama city was too far removed from Washington. Without thinking of the military advantages Montgomery had by being so deep in the South, the fire-eaters of the Confederacy voted to move the Confederate capital to Richmond, just one hundred miles south of Washington. Davis did not have much say in the matter. The Confederates who had elected him wanted to be close to the U.S. capital so they could negotiate peace terms after they won any single battle that they were certain would settle the issue of secession for the last time.

While Varina had been just another Senate wife in the U.S. capital, she found herself in the spotlight in Richmond, the Confederacy’s capital. It was not necessarily a welcoming light. At the fancy ball that was supposed to welcome the new power couple to the elite of Richmond society, the wife of a Confederate colonel up for promotion to general whispered around to her friends that the pregnant Varina looked like an “Indian squaw.” Varina heard the remark being spread among the ladies, passed it along to her husband, and Colonel Abraham Myers remained a colonel for the rest of his Confederate career. It would not be the first time that Varina intentionally or unintentionally influenced the president. She knew she could never win any arguments with him, but she could sometimes mold his opinion.

As First Lady of the Confederacy, Varina was in a unique position as a civilian to learn things that normally would have been military secrets. She knew the end of the war and the end of the Confederate nation was coming from the conversations she overheard during her daily ritual of taking lunch to Davis in his office.

Davis would often work through lunches and suppers without eating anything unless she personally brought the food to him and berated him into eating to keep up his strength. One day in March 1865, she walked in on a conference with Lee and heard her husband discussing the lack of supplies in the east and then saying that “beef and supplies of all kinds were abundant” in the Trans-Mississippi. Foreseeing the end in Virginia, the president was already thinking ahead and looking for uncaptured regions of the Confederacy where the government could move so the nation could live on to fight another day.

Varina assumed that all the Davis family, including Jefferson, would be leaving the city when he chose to evacuate. It came as a shock when her husband took her aside on the morning of March 30, 1865 and spoke quietly into her ear so the children and the servants would not overhear:

“You must leave here today. My headquarters must be in the field, and your presence will only embarrass and grieve me rather than comfort me,” he said. “I have confidence in your capacity to take care of our babies, and understand your desire to assist and comfort me, but you can do this in but one way, and that is by going yourself and taking our children to a place of safety.”

To her horror, her husband then placed into her hands a small Colt revolver, one of the items he had requested a day earlier from Ordnance Department general Josiah Gorgas.

“You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you,” her husband said.

As he talked, Davis demonstrated how to load the Colt, tearing a paper cartridge and pouring the black powder into one of the revolver’s cylinder chambers. It was while loading the pistol, a type of weapon she had probably never fired, that Davis also told her to “make for the Florida coast,” a vague request which he would not elaborate on with her or with his cabinet on their own journey south.

Varina was speechless as her solemn husband continued his demonstration of how to work the loading lever to jam the round lead balls down on top of the powder in each of the Colt’s six chambers. She tried to protest that she would need no revolver, but her husband held up one hand to silence her. His next words chilled her. She had heard him say nothing like it over the past four years:

If I live you can come to me when the struggle is ended, but I do not expect to survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.

Varina’s eyes grew wide with fright and comprehension over what was happening. In twenty years of marriage, her husband had never before even displayed a firearm in her presence. Now he had handed her a loaded revolver, instructing her to defend their children to her own death. He then told her in an almost casual tone of voice that he might soon die. He had not made clear if he meant that his enemies would kill him or if he would take his own life rather than submit to capture.

The First Lady knew that nothing she could say would change the President’s mind about the family leaving his side. His first obligation was to make sure that his family was safe, but his second obligation was to continue being president of the Confederacy. As strong willed as she was, Varina knew her husband’s mind was already made up. She and the children would be leaving the city, just as he insisted. And despite her pleas that he should accompany them out of town, she also knew that he would refuse. He had another bigger job to do.

Almost uncontrollably excited after having her husband talk about both their deaths, Varina began rushing around the Executive Mansion deciding what to pack. She moved first for the silverware. Her husband stopped her, explaining that she must travel light in the event that she would have to switch from the train in which she would leave Richmond to wagons later in her journey. He kept shaking his head and telling her no as she reached for favorite house adornments such as the life-size bust of him.

“Then food. I must pack those barrels of flour,” she said, turning for the basement steps. She had used the money made from selling her dresses to buy flour that she had always intended on taking with her on any flight from the capital city.

The president took her arm: “No. You cannot remove anything in the shape of food from here. The people want it, and you must leave it here.”

Food had been chronically short in the capital for more than two years. Davis realized it would only cause further panic among the people if they saw his wife loading flour, bacon, and soft bread aboard a train. Few people in the city could still afford to buy the flour that Varina had been purchasing and hoarding for the past year for just the sort of hungry circumstances that were finally gripping the city.

“Only clothes. Take only clothes for you and the children and Jim Limber,” Davis said. “Leave everything else behind. It can all be replaced in time.”

The children were Maggie, the oldest at 8; Jefferson, Jr., at 7; Willie, 4; and the newest addition to the family, nine-month-old Varina Anne, whom everyone called “Pie Cake.” One other member of the Davis family who would be leaving was a four-year-old named Jim Limber. The last name of Limber may have been made up by him or the Davises because a limber during the Civil War was a two-wheeled ammunition wagon on which artillery pieces were hitched.

Jim Limber was a black child whom Varina had rescued the previous year from the streets of Richmond when she saw him being beaten by an older black man. She scooped up the child, put him in her carriage, and took him home to the Executive Mansion where he blended in with the children as a brother and playmate. Though no court papers were apparently filed to make his adoption legal, the Davis family treated Jim Limber as just another child in the household, even to the point of having his photograph taken. The president, the First Lady and the Davis children all considered Jim Limber to be as much a Davis as anyone in the family. He would not be left behind on any flight to safety.

THE ONLY DAVIS CHILD who would be left behind in Richmond this day was Joseph.

On a Saturday evening eleven months before, 5-year-old Joseph Davis had fallen to his death from the second-floor balcony of the Confederate White House. Joseph, named for the president’s older brother, had reportedly been following his own older brother, Jefferson, Jr., as the 6-year-old dared his younger sibling to join him in a game of follow the leader. The boys’ Irish-born nurse, Catherine, was tending to the younger Davis daughter and had not noticed that the two boys had slipped out the door of their nursery and onto the balcony. It was a twenty-foot drop to a granite walkway where Joseph cracked his skull and broke both legs. Catherine did not learn of the accident until neighboring women rushed into the house carrying Joseph bleeding from his mouth and nose.

Within minutes a messenger delivered an urgent note from neighbors to the president at his office three blocks away. Varina was also there begging her husband to eat his supper rather than work on into the night as was his custom. When both read the note, food was forgotten. They rushed to the side of their son.

Joseph died two hours later with his shocked and grieving parents at his bedside. Davis, always the stoic in public, stood silently during the wake, watching over his youngest son. He said nothing, only nodding as neighbors and friends patted him on the back and whispered condolences. That night, in the privacy of his bedroom above the dining room, visiting close friends heard the tread of the president’s feet walking back and forth in his bedroom. For the first time, they heard Davis remark on the loss of his willful son Joe who Varina told everyone in earshot was most like his father of all their children.

“Not mine, O Lord, but thine,” Davis said repeatedly to himself and his God from behind his closed door. Sending his son to Heaven was the only comfort the president could find in the tragedy. He took that comfort alone in his room while his wife watched over her son’s body one floor below.

The next day, Monday, Joseph was buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, surrounded by hundreds of child mourners who already knew after three years of war in the South what death was about. One little girl boldly walked up to Mary Chesnut, the wife of a general and a keen observer of political and personal goings-on in Richmond, to ask that she cover Joe’s body with her bouquet because she knew him so well.

That afternoon, May 1, 1864, Davis resumed his duties in his office, leaving his wife and remaining children to mourn and reflect on Joe’s funeral in their own fashion. The president’s method of dealing with the loss of his son was to go back to work. In his mind, the Confederacy needed him more than his family did.

NOW, ONE YEAR LATER, his family, which had grown to include his second daughter and last child, needed him more than the Confederacy.

It was after 9 p.m. when Davis escorted his wife and children to the railroad station. Rain was coming down in torrents as it had been for days. Most people in Richmond were praying for the rain to end, but Davis welcomed it this night. It would mask his family’s departure.

The decision to remove Varina and the children had been made so quickly that there had been no time to outfit a special train suited to the wife of the president. Waiting for the Davis family was one wheezing, wood-fired engine, one elderly passenger car with cracked leather seats infested with fleas, and a single leaky baggage car on which Varina’s carriage and two horses were loaded. Davis said nothing when he saw the dilapidated condition of the railcars. At least they were rolling.

Varina also eyed the cars, but she too knew that the family was lucky to have what they had. The first stop would be Danville, Virginia, before pushing on to Charlotte, North Carolina, where Davis hoped a rental house was waiting for his family to live in until he could join them. He was sending his family to an unfamiliar city where they knew no one. He did not know when he would be able to find them again if he—or they—were captured by the Federals.

It was a small party, consisting only of Varina; the children; Maggie Howell, Mrs. Davis’s sister; Burton Harrison, Davis’s personal secretary; two daughters of Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm; two trusted black servants named Ellen and James Jones; and a young midshipman named James Morgan, who would act as the sole armed guard for the party. Though Federal forces were threatening the capital city and Union cavalry was roaming the countryside, Davis did not assign a military escort to protect his family. Varina, biographer of her husband, never speculated in print as to why the family did not rate a guard of soldiers when it would be venturing close to enemy-held territory. The president may have thought two things: if a military train was leaving Richmond with his family, it could create more notice and potential public panic, and second, if the train was approached by Union cavalry and the Confederate escort resisted, the Union soldiers might indiscriminately fire on the train without realizing that it carried only women and children.

Davis knelt and warmly embraced his children, showering them with kisses. The few bystanders standing on the station’s landing were shocked at his behavior. In public Davis was always reserved, barely acknowledging strangers and expressing reluctance even to shake hands. But in the presence of his own family or in the privacy of the Executive Mansion, he was an attentive, affectionate father, instantly on his knees to be eye to eye with his children. At home Varina had repeatedly admonished him to change out of his dress suits before rolling on the floor with his children. He had worn out many pairs of expensive dress pants crawling around on all fours playing with his children.

As the president stood and regained his public face, a tearful Maggie wrapped herself around his leg, begging him to come along with them, not to leave them alone. Jefferson, Jr., grabbed the other leg, begging to stay in Richmond with his father so he could help fight back the Yankees that even the small boy knew were coming soon. Jefferson, Jr., saw the fighting in the trenches at Petersburg and knew what death meant. Though he was only 7, he wanted to be a man. He wanted to stay behind and help his father save the Confederacy.

Davis, fighting back his own tears, hugged his children again and whispered in their ears that he would see them again soon. He pulled out his purse and emptied it into Varina’s handbag. He kept only a five-dollar gold piece for himself. In his pocket was an uncashed check for $28,000, money Varina had raised by selling off most of her good jewelry and dresses in Richmond’s stores. There had been no time to cash it before the banks closed that day. The check would never be cashed.

It was nearly 10:00 p.m. The rain continued down in torrents, making final, whispered good-byes impossible because the rain crashing into the clay tiles of the train station’s roof made quiet conversation difficult.

As the train chugged away, belching smoke from the green, un-seasoned wood its crews were forced to burn because all the dried wood had long since been burned or captured, Davis waved at his family. A rare smile was on his face as he tried to convince his family they would soon be reunited. While the children might have been fooled, Varina was not.

“He looked as though he was looking his last upon us,” she remembered.

Davis pulled his raglan overcoat around him and then trudged alone back to the Executive Mansion, slipping and sliding up the flooding, clay streets.

What Davis did not learn until more than a month later when he rendezvoused with his family was that Varina’s train had barely made it twelve miles before stopping for the night. The engine’s steam power was so weak, probably from a combination of a leaking firebox and boiler and from the green wood, that it could not negotiate a slight grade in the driving rain. The engineer decided to wait until morning when he hoped the sun would dry the tracks so the engine could get enough traction to top the grade.

At some point, either immediately before leaving Richmond or on board the leaky baggage car, Varina wrote a letter to General John S. Preston, a friend who had suffered much public criticism because his duty was to enforce the 1863 conscription law that drafted thousands of men into the ranks who had not volunteered earlier in the war. The letter, apparently misdated either by accident or by design if Varina was trying to conceal the date she actually left Richmond, reveals a woman at once in fear for her country and for her husband’s continued welfare now that she was no longer at home to care for him. It is also remarkable for its vagueness as to whom she is speaking about.

In the letter Varina mentions “Mr. Davis” only twice deep in the text, which she signed with a false name. Her use of a pseudonym in writing the letter was employed in the event she was captured on the way south. Varina hoped to keep her own identity secret, and if any Union officer actually read the letter, she hoped he would miss the passing references to her husband’s name of Mr. Davis rather than President Davis. In the letter it is clear that while Varina’s husband was publicly insisting the Confederacy could live on, his wife knew better than to hold on to an impossible dream.

Varina wrote:

My heart is sadder today than I can readily communicate to you at this distance. Affairs seem darker, the spirit of the people daily more depressed, women tremblingly come to me and beg me to say what I can to comfort them. All I can say is that my husband will never cry for quarter [mercy] and all we can hope for is that the spirit of the people may enable him to defend the women and children of our unhappy land…. Mr. Davis look sworn and exhausted, prays without ceasing and hopes for better than I can foresee arguing from the signs of the times.

She ended the letter on a sad note: “Excuse this scrawl; I am so depressed and uncertain of our future that I cannot successfully arrange my thoughts.”

THAT SAME NIGHT of March 30, 1865, back at the Executive Mansion, now empty of children’s laughter, Davis sat down to write his own remarkable letter to one of his oldest friends, General Braxton Bragg. During the Mexican War Davis’s regiment had saved Bragg’s artillery battery from capture or annihilation at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. The crucible of war in those few minutes of hot combat had made the two fast friends for life. He opened up to Bragg: “We both entered into this war at the beginning of it; we both staked everything on the issue, and lost all which either public or private enemies could take away,” Davis wrote.

To a close friend—but not to the Confederacy’s citizens—Davis had just admitted that the war was lost. Publicly, Davis took the opposite tack. Over the next month, the president would declare to everyone who would listen that the Confederacy could still—and would—win the war.

Davis apparently made no other plans in advance for his and the cabinet’s own escape. For the next three days, he worked from his official office three blocks away or from his home office in the Confederate Executive Mansion. He was constantly checking reports from Lee and from distant battlefields in Alabama. Without Varina around to force him into a healthy schedule of work followed by relaxation, he ate little and slept little. She had undoubtedly forced him to make a promise to her that he would eat more, but when she was not around, he always broke that promise. Davis had never eaten much, but had never made any connection that his lifelong poor health and regular attacks of neuralgia may have been linked to his poor diet.

When the sun rose on April 2, 1865, he had no idea that by the end of the day he would be a president on the run. The end of the Confederacy was obvious to all who would look and listen, but Davis, true to form, had made no plans for running.