Читать книгу Pursuit: - Clint Johnson - Страница 9

AT THE DISMAL DAWNING of 1865, more than one quarter of the one million men who had enlisted in the South’s armies over the previous three years were dead. Another 125,000 were wounded, their shattered arms and missing legs virtually ensuring that they would be unable to return to their prewar occupations as farmers and laborers. Another quarter million Southerners were languishing in widely scattered prisoner-of-war camps like “Hell-Mira” in Elmira, New York, and “40 Acres of Hell” in Camp Douglas, outside Chicago.

Southern civilians were not faring much better. The two largest cities in Virginia, Richmond and Petersburg, were slowly strangling, their communications and their food supplies being cut off by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the James and the Army of the Potomac. The Shenandoah Valley, once the breadbasket of the Confederacy, had been burned so completely that one Union general boasted to another that a crow flying over the devastated farms would have to pack his own lunch.

The situation elsewhere in the South was even worse. Western Confederate state capitals like Nashville, Tennessee; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been captured years earlier. Atlanta, Georgia, had been shelled into submission in the summer of 1864 and then burned to the ground when General William T. Sherman and his 63,000 angry young men left on their destructive March to the Sea. Savannah and its wealth of unshipped cotton were presented to President Lincoln as a gift at Christmas 1864 by Sherman just a few weeks earlier. Now Sherman was preparing to cross the Savannah River to unleash his battle-tested veterans in South Carolina, the state these Midwesterners blamed for starting the war.

Just up the coast from Savannah, a massive sea bombardment and land invasion force were bearing down on Wilmington, North Carolina, the war’s most successful blockade-running port. Though Wilmington was still open despite four years of the smothering Union blockade, the government leaders in Richmond knew if Fort Fisher fell, the end of the Confederate nation would soon follow. That was an inevitable truth as most of the Army of Northern Virginia’s supplies came ashore at Wilmington and were loaded on railroad cars for off-loading in Petersburg. If that rail line was captured south of Petersburg, then the end of the war could come quickly because the army would run out of food and ammunition.

Disaster piled upon defeat throughout the South. There seemed to be no hope that anything could be salvaged from the piles of rubble that were already there and the even larger mounds of debris that soon would be.

Yet there was one man in the South who confidently, almost cheerfully, still believed the Confederate States of America would triumph in the four-year war with the North. He was Jefferson F. Davis, the seceded nation’s president.

February 6, 1865—three weeks after the capture of Fort Fisher, North Carolina—an event Davis knew very well meant disaster for resupplying Lee’s army, Davis gave a morale boosting speech:

Does any one who has seen the Confederate soldiers believe they are willing to fail? If so, the suspicion is most unjust! Go to our camps; go to our guarded lines; go where our pickets hold their dangerous watch, and to the posts where our sentinels tread their weary rounds, and you will find in none of those the place for grumblings and complaints. The resolutions of our soldiers exclaim with Patrick Henry, “Victory or death!”

Those who knew Davis only casually might have thought his resolute, confident attitude about winning the war was a surprisingly sunny position for the president to take. After all, Davis had stepped onto the national stage of secessionist politics in a sour mood, warning both sides of the dangers of war between the regions.

Those who knew Davis well were not at all surprised that the president truly believed the war was still winnable. He had convinced himself years earlier that the war was politically ethical, morally right, and, most important of all, absolutely legal under the U.S. Constitution. He would die believing in his cause.

FROM CHILDHOOD, Davis had displayed one personality trait that would stay constant in his life. That quirk would continually infuriate his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his wife, his personal friends, and his political enemies. He considered it strength of character.

Everyone else found it maddening.

Once Davis made up his mind that the course he had chosen in his politics, or in his personal or business affairs was correct, he never wavered from that decision. Once his decision was made, he never changed his mind despite the best efforts of his supporters to offer their own differing opinions.

Davis not only believed he was right all the time, he also believed he was the only person he knew who was prescient about the course of history. Sometimes he was tragically correct.

For at least three years preceding the opening of the war, Davis believed that a war between the North and the South was inevitable unless both sides listened to a voice of reason. He firmly, if humbly, believed that he was the one to voice those warnings, and if his voice was ignored, there would be hell to pay.

In an 1858 speech in Faneuil Hall to the citizens of Boston Davis hinted at civil war if the federal government continued to trample on the sanctity of states’ rights. Throughout the speech Davis coyly suggested that Massachusetts political heroes like Samuel Adams and John Hancock had invented the concept that states were the primary political unit in the nation. Such a view was in accordance with his belief that the Constitution was an instrument designed to govern a voluntary Union of all states.

Davis cleverly explained his bedrock belief in states’ rights over federal control of those states by reminding the Bostonians that Massachusetts Governor Hancock once refused to call on President George Washington who was visiting the state. Hancock believed that the nation’s president should defer to the assumed power of the state governor he was visiting and that Washington should have called, hat in hand, on him.

Davis warned that any action based on the belief that the federal government was superior to the states’ power would have dire consequences.

Skillfully working in references that it was in Faneuil Hall that Massachusetts’ political leaders had plotted secession from England, Davis said:

Thus, it is that the peace of the Union is disturbed; thus it is that brother is arrayed against brother; thus it is that the people come to consider, not how they can promote each other’s interests, but how they can successfully make war upon them.

Firebrands on both sides ignored the warnings from Davis, the best known and most popular in the North of all the Southern senators. Nearly three years after his widely reported Boston speech, the debate between the states’ rights advocates for the South and the unbreakable Union advocates for the North ended in December 1860 when South Carolina left the Union. Starting in January 1861, six other Deep South states followed South Carolina out of the Union, just as Davis had predicted.

After Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union, Davis assured his Senate colleagues in his January 21, 1861, resignation speech that people in the South “hope for peaceful relations with you, though we must part.” Knowing his suggestions had been ignored in the past, Davis also gravely warned that “the reverse will bring disaster on every part of the country.”

For days after leaving Washington on January 22, 1861, all Davis could think about was the coming calamity of war. After arriving in the capital city of Jackson, the governor of Mississippi appointed him major general of volunteers and suggested that the purchase of 75,000 muskets would be sufficient to defend the state.

Davis scoffed: “We will need all and many more than we can get, I fear.”

After accepting visitors in his hotel room who were confident of a successful, peaceful severing of ties with the Union, Davis wailed to his wife, “God help us, war is a dreadful calamity even when it is made against aliens and strangers. They know not what they do!”

When the seceded states planned their constitutional convention for early February in Montgomery, Alabama, Davis must have known, even before leaving Washington, that his name would be brought up as a potential president for the proposed “confederacy” of slaveholding states. As a humble but true Mexican War hero, a popular United States Secretary of War in the Franklin Pierce administration, a former congressman, and most recently a widely respected senator, Davis was one of the most government-experienced Southerners on the national scene.

But Davis had always been a reluctant politician. He hated shaking hands and meeting common voters. He hated the backslapping and the toasting to other politicians’ health. He hated the backroom dealing and trading of votes to get bills passed and money appropriated. He hated everything about nineteenth-century politics except making laws and protecting the South’s interests.

With the secession of Mississippi and his resignation from the Senate, Davis was suddenly free of public service for the first time in more than fifteen years. He no longer had to participate in the grubbiness he detested, which almost certainly would be a part of the forming of the new nation. He had never expressed any interest in even discussing how to form this new country, nor had he asked any of the Mississippi delegates to the secession convention to put his name into nomination. He did not even ask them to keep him informed. In fact, Davis gave a letter to one delegate specifically stating that he did not think himself suited for the job as president in the event his name came up for nomination.

His name did come up. Davis was the only presidential candidate seriously discussed after former United States senator Robert Toombs from Georgia made a spectacle of himself openly drinking to excess at the convention hotel. The Mississippi delegate whom Davis had asked to discourage his nomination never took Davis’s letter from his vest pocket. After former United States senator Alexander Stephens from Georgia was nominated for the vice president’s slot, Davis was unanimously nominated and elected by the delegates to a single six-year term as president on February 9, 1861.

Davis had not told anyone he wanted the job. He had not campaigned for it. He had done everything he could to avoid being considered for it. Yet as he had feared, his career as the most famous and successful of Southern politicians in the late 1850s had doomed him to fill the slot.

A courier who had ridden hard from Montgomery with an important letter in his satchel found Davis on February 10 tending his rose garden at Brierfield, one of the Davis family’s plantations near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The man handed Davis a sealed telegram.

For the fleeting instant it took Davis to unfold the paper, he must have hoped that the message agreed with his own belief that the Confederacy did not need the services of a perpetually ill, fifty-three-year-old man who had already served his previous nation for nearly two decades. But knowing the firebrands who were taking the Southern states out of the United States, they would demand something of its most famous politician. Davis held out hope that he would be offered a generalship in the still-forming army. And, if he were to take that post, he wanted to do more than recruit and train militia. He wanted a field command, something that would take him back to the thrill of leading men under fire.

When Davis read the telegraph’s few lines congratulating him on his unanimous election to the post of president of the Confederate States of America, his hands quivered and his face darkened. Davis looked so stricken with grief that his wife, Varina, thought that the message had informed her husband of a death in the family.

Varina remembered: “After a few minutes of painful silence, he told me, as a man might speak of a sentence of death. As he neither expected nor desired the position, he was more depressed than before.”

Despondent but ever certain that a man did not shirk from duty thrust upon him, Davis departed for Montgomery the day after receiving the telegram. He would take the job that he did not want. He would take the job that would quickly make him one of the most hated men in the United States and the Confederate States.

NOW, four years into his single six-year term, Davis felt virtually alone. His instincts were right. Though his cabinet still supported him—at least in cabinet meetings and in their public statements—Davis’s political adversaries, newspaper editorial writers, his personal friends, and the common citizens of the Confederacy had begun to question his leadership.

Frustrated with the president’s insistence that he act as chief war strategist as well as commander in chief, the Confederate Congress had begun to challenge Davis more vigorously on war planning. For the first time, Confederate Congress passed a law forcing Davis to name a general in chief. That was a war measure the United States had passed more than a year and a half earlier with the appointment of Grant to direct war strategy on all fronts.

Davis, who fancied himself a military expert since he had graduated from West Point and had served under fire, resisted the legislation. He finally accepted the law when his friends in the Confederate Congress watered it down so that he could still make such an appointment himself rather than leave it to Congress to name its own favorite person to such an important position. Davis wisely chose the only commander who had been able to stand up to Grant’s continuous, yearlong onslaught, Robert E. Lee.

Lee was an acceptable choice to Davis’s critics. Newspaper editorial writers, always among the most fierce of Davis’s political critics and who normally mocked his military acumen, breathed a sigh of relief that Davis had not chosen his best friend, General Braxton Bragg. The Richmond Examiner published a headline in October 1864 when it learned Davis had appointed Bragg to the defense of Wilmington, North Carolina: “Bragg Is Going To Wilmington. Good-bye Wilmington.” In the body of the article the newspaper expanded on its headline with: “General Bragg’s presence wherever he has controlled, has been felt as a disaster, an omen of impending evil like a dark, cold, dreary cloud.”

In some ways, it was remarkable that Davis had not chosen Bragg. He might have slotted Bragg into the position just to spite his political enemies, who had objected to his leadership style since his inauguration four years ago. Davis fought back against them by ignoring them, doing the opposite of what they wanted, or wasting his time by often writing them long, complicated letters condemning them for their complaints.

Davis could strike back at the political elites who had nominated him to run the government that they now complained about, but he had no power other than speeches to influence what the average Southern citizen thought of him and his conduct of the war.

John B. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate War Department, never had the ear of Davis, but he had the common man’s pulse on what the public felt about the chief executive as the end of the Confederacy was becoming apparent to all but its president. Jones kept a diary for most of the war where he made observations about all he saw happening around his little desk.

On December 17, 1864, Jones noted that a wild rumor was circulating in the streets that Davis had died. He wrote: “Alas for President Davis’s government! It is now in a painful strait.” He ended the day’s entry with a final comment about the rumor he personally discounted: “His death would excite sympathy,” but he also noted that Davis’s “enemies are assailing him bitterly, and attributing all our misfortunes to his incompetence.”

Jones believed that so many men in high positions now hated the president that they were considering a coup against him. On Christmas day Jones wrote that “a large number of the croaking inhabitants censure the President for our misfortunes and openly declare for General Lee as Dictator.” On New Year’s Eve, Jones wrote again of the supposed plot:

It can only be done by revolution and the overthrow of the Constitution. Nevertheless, it is believed many executive officers, some high in position, favor the scheme.

But while common clerk Jones had sympathy for Davis, he also did not think he made a good president. On January 1, 1865, Jones wrote down what many of Davis’s enemies were thinking and saying:

The President is considered really a man of ability, and eminently qualified to preside over the Confederate States, if independence were attained and we had peace. But he is probably not equal to the role he is now called upon to play. He has not the broad intellect requisite for the gigantic measures needed in such a crisis, nor the health or the physique for the labors devolving onto him.

Jones continued his observations that all the politicians who voted Davis into office in 1860 now “desire to see General Lee at the head of affairs [but] the President is resolved to yield the position to no man during his term of service.”

DAVIS WOULD NOT YIELD to any man in the Confederacy, and he would not yield to any man in the United States, including Lincoln, whose troops were closing in on the capital city of Richmond from the east and the south.

On February 3, 1865, Davis sent three commissioners, including Vice President Stephens, to talk over peace terms with Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward. Davis himself did not go because Lincoln had declared in a December 1864 speech to the United States Congress that he would never recognize Davis as a head of state, but he was open to the possibility of meeting with lower ranking Confederate officials.

The meeting took place aboard the Union transport ship River Queen at Hampton Roads, Virginia, within shouting distance of Fortress Monroe, a U.S. fort on the tip of the peninsula between the James and the York rivers that had never fallen into Confederate hands. The meeting’s eventual outcome was telegraphed to all attending within a few minutes of it starting when Lincoln noticed that Davis had changed Lincoln’s original letter asking for the meeting to discuss “securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Davis had written his own reply, using Lincoln’s own sentence structure, but substituted “our two countries” for Lincoln’s “common country.” Although most of the Confederacy was already occupied and the rest in imminent danger of being overrun by overwhelming Union forces, Davis still insisted that any peace would hinge on the United States recognizing the continuing existence of the Confederacy.

Lincoln said to the Confederates when he noted the change in wording:

The restoration of the Union is a sine qua non [Latin legal term for an indispensable action] with me, and hence my instructions that no conference was to be held except upon that basis.

The commissioners listened as Lincoln offered some surprisingly liberal terms, such as allowing the Confederate states immediately back into the House and Senate, and some terms that they knew were unacceptable to the Confederate Congress and its citizens. Lincoln offered $100 per slave compensation to owners who would willingly free them, less than ten percent of the prewar range between $1,000 and $1,500 for a fit field hand. Lincoln and Seward also confused the Confederate commissioners by hinting that the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime measure that might be found unconstitutional by the U.S. Courts. In another part of the discussion, Lincoln told the Confederates that the U.S. Congress (minus the Southern states) had just passed the Thirteenth amendment outlawing slavery. Seward suggested that if the Southern states quickly reentered the Congress, they might be able to rally their own state legislatures to defeat the ratification of the amendment.

Grant would later remember that he was surprised at the liberal terms offered to the Confederates by Lincoln.

Grant wrote:

They would have to agree on two points; one being that the Union should be preserved and the other that slavery should be abolished; and if they were ready to concede those two points, he was almost ready to sign his name to a blank piece of paper and permit them to fill in the balance of the terms upon which we could live together.

The Confederate commissioners, their heads swimming in confusion over what they had just heard, left the meeting with no assurances that the war would end unless the surviving Southern states gave up and returned to the Union. That much they understood from the meeting because Lincoln had not permitted any notes to be taken to produce an official transcript as to who said what and who offered what to whom.

It had been a promising meeting where peace was discussed, but the Confederate commissioners returned to Richmond knowing no matter what the Union had offered, Davis would not agree to surrender the idea of the Confederacy as a separate nation from the Union. He was committed to an independent Confederacy.

On the evening of February 6, 1865, not long after the commissioners had returned, the president addressed a large crowd in the auditorium of Richmond’s African Church, a church that slave owners had built so that their people could worship in the city. On every other day but Sunday, the African Church was a favorite speaking spot for politicians because it featured a large auditorium, larger than any white church in the city.

Davis, a man normally taciturn in his dealings with the public, came alive with a rousing, extemporaneous speech condemning Lincoln for demanding the surrender of the Confederacy.

At one point Davis exclaimed:

We must lock shields together and go forward to save our country, or sink together to honorable graves…. If our disagreements result from passion we must exorcise it, and make the good of our country our sole aim. If we will all do our duty, we shall reap a brilliant reward. If the absentees from our armies will return, and if the local assistance be rendered which may be readily afforded, the noble Army of Northern Virginia will read General Grant a yet severer lesson than it taught him from the Rapidan to the James; while the gallant Beauregard will cause Sherman’s march across Georgia to be his last.

Immediately after hearing Davis’s speech, Vice President Stephens left Richmond for his Georgia home. He did not share Davis’s optimism that the South could rise again. In his 1870 book, A Constitutional View of the War, Stephens remarked that Davis’s speech was “not only bold and undaunted in tone, but had that loftiness of sentiment and rare form of expression, as well as magnetic influence in its delivery by which the people are moved to their profoundest depths.”

Stephens was not the only person inspired by Davis, who previously had a reputation for giving slow-moving policy speeches. The president’s off-the-cuff remarks were wildly applauded by the audience and reported favorably by newspapers that usually criticized the administration’s handling of the war.

Stephens himself refused to offer any rousing speeches.

Stephens said:

I could not undertake to impress upon the minds of the people the idea that they could do what I believed to be impossible, or to inspire in them hopes which I did not believe could be realized.

While Stephens remembered being impressed with the speech in his 1870 book, he made an earlier assessment of it while languishing as a political prisoner in the summer of 1865 in Fort Warren, a cold stone fort in Boston’s harbor. Stephens twice wrote in his diary that he thought Davis must have lost his mind to be so optimistic when the nation’s capital was almost cut off from the rest of the Confederacy. One diary entry recorded on June 21, 1865, reads: “When he made that speech in Richmond, brilliant though it was, I looked upon it as nothing short of dementation.”

BY APRIL 2, 1865, the burst of Confederate patriotism bolstered by Davis’s widely reported February speech had faded with the reality that talk did nothing to throw back the armies of Grant and Sherman. In the fifty-five days since Davis had given his African Church speech, at one point predicting that “before another summer solstice falls upon us, it will be the enemy that will be asking us for conferences,” the Confederacy had been dealt even more blows. It would be a long, cold, hard spring before the solstice Davis predicted would arrive.

In those fifty-five days, the war in the upstate of the Carolinas, a section of the South that had seen few battles or even scouting forays by the Federals, turned heavily against the Confederacy. Sherman had crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina and then slashed his way northward, burning farms and towns until he captured the state capital of Columbia on February 17. Much of the capital city burned to the ground that same night. On that same day, Charleston, the city where the war had started, surrendered after nearly two years of constant shelling of its civilian population.

North Carolina was not faring any better. Wilmington surrendered on February 22. After securing the town, another Union force was on the march west toward the interior of the state, intending to link up with Sherman’s forces. Sherman burned the armory at Fayetteville, and then headed north. Along the way he defeated the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s cobbled-together forces at the three-day Battle of Bentonville from March 19 to 21. Johnston’s army limped away to the west after the battle, lucky that it was not totally destroyed.

Now, three weeks later, nothing stood between Sherman and North Carolina’s capital at Raleigh but the battered and bruised forces of Johnston. His men could not survive another battle with Sherman. Both generals knew that fact.

Confederates in Virginia were also fighting losing battles. On March 2, the last of the Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley was defeated. There was so little Confederate opposition left in the Valley that Union general Phillip Sheridan abandoned the region and moved east to join Grant for the final assaults on the Army of Northern Virginia.

Grant, who had lost tens of thousands of men assaulting Confederate lines over the past year as Lee slowly retreated toward Richmond, was now content to starve the Confederates into submission as they lay in their muddy trenches. Grant knew Lee’s men still had fight left in them. On March 25 Lee’s men briefly broke through Grant’s lines at Fort Stedman near Petersburg, but they were pushed back, effectively demonstrating to Lee that Grant’s army was too strong to be defeated.

The end was near. Everyone but Davis could sense it, could feel it, and could see it.

THE FINAL FATE of the Confederacy was sealed an hour before the sun rose on April 2, 1865, when Grant ordered an assault on the Confederate trenches on the south side of Petersburg. At 4:40 a.m. the Union Sixth Corps under Major General Horatio Wright boiled out of the ground like yellow jackets in the direction of the Confederate trenches along the Boydton Plank Road. The 10,000 Federals rushing the Confederate trenches were grateful for the darkness. It made them harder targets.

Though some Union men suspected this to be the last big fight they would ever have with the Confederates they had been harassing for more than a year, others believed it was just one more futile attack on a well-dug-in enemy. The Federals had been told repeatedly over those last nine months that one day soon the Confederates would give up because the Petersburg civilians were demoralized by the constant shelling. They had been told the Confederates were starving, reduced to eating rats for meat, and boiling their own shoe leather for soup.

But each day of the first three months of 1865 had passed without any sign of a white flag being raised over the Confederate trenches.

These Sixth Corps men were going to be careful with their lives. All it would take was one hard, concentrated volley from the Confederate trenches, and the first wave of the assault would drop dead on the ground like harvested, blue-clad wheat.

But as the corps rushed forward over the shell-pocked, grass-barren ground, there was no concentrated musket volley from the Confederate trenches, no hailstorm of canister coming from Lee’s cannons. Confederate deserters had confessed to Grant and Wright that their trenches were barely manned after months of siege, disease, and desertions. The Confederate defenders were standing ten feet apart rather than shoulder to shoulder, as they should have been.

To their surprise and relief, Wright’s corps swept over and into the Confederate trenches with little opposition. They captured four cannons that were loaded with canister but which the gunners had not had time to set off. Wright ordered his brigades to fan out toward Petersburg to crush any remaining opposition.

The Union’s piercing of the Confederate line came so quickly that Lee himself was still napping when an aide rushed into his headquarters bedroom reporting the news. As the weary, bleary-eyed Lee was putting on the topcoat of his uniform, his First Corps commander Lieutentant General James Longstreet opened the front door of the house they were using as a headquarters. The proof of the collapse of the Confederate lines was right in front of them.

“As far as the eye could cover the field, [was] a line of skirmishers in quiet march toward us,” Longstreet later wrote.

It was still before 7:00 a.m. when Lee telegraphed his first message to the Confederate secretary of war John C. Breckinridge. That telegram was forwarded to Breckinridge’s superior, President Davis.

Lee wrote:

I see no prospect of doing more than holding my position here till night. I am not certain that I can do that. It is absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position tonight, or run the risk of being cut off in the morning…. Please give all orders that you find necessary in and about Richmond.

As Lee rode away from his headquarters back toward Petersburg, he turned in his saddle and watched as Union explosive shells set the house afire.

“I told those politicians in Richmond that this would happen. I told them,” Lee said to an aide. Lee had once complained that all Congress—the Confederate Congress—was capable of doing was “chewing tobacco and eating peanuts.”

Richmond’s residents on the south side of the city heard the cannons booming some twenty-five miles to their south around Petersburg, but that was a sound they had grown accustomed to for more than a year and a half. They had no idea that Petersburg’s lines had been pierced, and Lee’s army protecting Richmond from Union attack from the south would soon be marching away to the west.

The day dawned bright and cloud free, a welcome respite from days of rain that had left the streets of Richmond deep with mud. Were it not for the knowledge that the Federals could almost hear the city’s church bells, the citizens of Richmond would have been reveling in what promised to be the portent of a wonderful, colorful spring.

By 10:30 that morning, Davis had already spent several hours at his desk in the Executive Mansion poring over maps and reading Robert E. Lee’s gloomy Saturday night report describing the recent loss of The Battle of Five Forks on April 1. Five Forks, a crossroads community to the southwest of Petersburg, was near the Southside Railroad, the last link the Confederacy had to supply lines extending into North Carolina. Once those rail lines were cut, all supplies coming into Petersburg and Richmond from the south would be lost. Davis had not yet received Lee’s telegram detailing the predawn attack on Petersburg itself. Alone with his thoughts for now, Davis knew that the end for Richmond could now be measured by hours, not the days, weeks, and months that he had been using as guidelines since Grant had placed his forces to the east of both Richmond and Petersburg in the summer of 1864.

Frustrated that there was no fresh news from Lee, Davis rose from his desk and called to his aide, former Texas governor Frank Lubbock. Davis had promised his wife that he would not neglect going to church no matter how much work piled up on his desk.

As Davis walked down the hill toward the church with his head down and his hands clasped behind him, he ignored his surroundings while Lubbock, a man used to dry, brown, sometimes treeless Texas, reveled in their surroundings. Every house yard seemed to have a dozen or more dogwood trees bursting into bloom. The neighborhoods were awash with white petals and a fragrance that masked the streets’ stench of horse manure and drying mud.

The cold, dismal winter had ended weeks ago. Now the nights were still cool, but the days were rapidly warming, bringing forth the buds on the trees and the flower bulbs from the ground. Today was shaping up to be a day where one’s eyes were drawn to blue sky and the white-petaled trees in front yards.

The two were still strolling to morning worship services at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church when a breathless Postmaster General John Reagan ran up. The portly Reagan, his face flushed with excitement, concern, and overexertion, handed Davis a telegram from Lee addressed to the newly installed secretary of war Breckinridge. It was just twenty minutes before church would begin at 11:00 a.m.

Davis read the telegram with a seemingly unconcerned look on his face. He scribbled a reply to Lee for Reagan to take back to the telegrapher at the War Department. He then continued his leisurely walk toward church.

Reagan, a 47-year-old former U.S. congressman who had argued against secession until his own state, Texas, voted to leave the Union, was flabbergasted. He had read the telegram. Its meaning was indisputable. Yet, the inscrutable Davis had read it without even changing the expression on his face. Neither had Davis asked Reagan, his own cabinet member, what course he thought the cabinet should take now that Federal forces appeared poised to capture the capital itself. Reagan watched Davis and Lubbock continue their meander down the hill for a few moments while he got his second wind. Reagan rushed back to the War Department to send Davis’s reply to Lee.

As the sun climbed higher in the sky, Richmond’s residents were filling the sidewalks on their way to church. Dryer streets meant the men were pulling on their good, low-cut, Sunday shoes rather than their boots. They were wearing their best knee-length frock coats, no longer worrying that passing carriages would fling mud from wheels onto their sleeves. Their wives were reaching back into the closets and bringing out long, formal, spring dresses. Those who still had silk dresses that had not been donated early in the war to make fine flags were smoothing the wrinkles. Such a nice day demanded nice clothes.

It was a great, cheerful day, but it was more than just a sunny Sunday. It was communion Sunday. One week away was Palm Sunday, and there were two weeks until the holiest day of the year for Christians, Easter. It was a perfect time for men and women to pray for deliverance of their nation.

Passersby nodded to Davis and he only nodded to them. If anyone spoke, it was only to say “Good morning.” Richmond’s residents knew Davis was not a gregarious man. Governing a nation at war with an enemy at its doorstep was not a task for the lighthearted.

It was now at least four hours since the fighting had broken the Confederate trenches in Petersburg. While Lee was still riding toward downtown Petersburg, a courier found him with a telegraphed reply from Davis to his earlier message. Aides watched Lee’s eyes darken and his face flush and tighten as he read Davis’s reply that Reagan had telegraphed back to Lee.

“To move tonight will involve the loss of many valuables, both for the want of time to pack and transportation,” Davis had answered.

Petersburg and Richmond were about to be captured, having been threatened for weeks, and Davis was complaining about not having sufficient warning. With a stub of pencil, Lee wrote out another telegram to Davis briefly describing the military situation. Lee was done with suggestions to the politicians. He now had to save his army.

By 11:00 a.m., Davis was seated in the pew he sponsored at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church at the corner of Grace and Ninth Streets, just steps from the State Capitol. He was dressed in his signature gray suit, white shirt, and black tie. His broad-brimmed hat lay beside him on the pew. He was alone, a circumstance that surprised those who had not heard that Varina and the children had left Richmond by train three nights earlier.

Residents just now finding out about Varina’s leaving of the city knew it was a bad sign. If a nation’s president evacuates his family from the capital, there must be bad news coming that he has not yet announced. Yet Davis sat placidly, calmly waiting for the service to begin.

The upper-crust ladies of St. Paul’s had known through their own grapevine that Mrs. Davis had been planning an evacuation weeks before she actually left. She had put her finest possessions such as her collection of silk dresses and leather gloves on consignment in the shops in the city that specialized in fine ladies attire. Richmond’s leading matrons, many of whom had never liked the Mississippi native, suspected those actions hinted that the Confederacy’s First Lady had no plans to return to Richmond and reclaim her prized possessions.

Standing in St. Paul’s pulpit was the thin-faced, diminutive Reverend Dr. Charles Minnigerode. Minnigerode had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1839 when he began to suspect that his activism against the land-hoarding feudal system would result in his eventual death at the hands of lords who were not interested in having their subjects rebel against them. He had taken a job as a language professor at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1842 and had been ordained a priest in 1847.

It was while acting as a private tutor in Williamsburg that Minnigerode, homesick for Germany, started an American tradition. Coaxed by the children he was teaching to tell them about how he celebrated Christmas back in Germany, Minnigerode went into the forest, cut down a pine tree, and brought it into his employer’s house to decorate with paper ornaments and lighted candles. By 1860 decorating Christmas trees was already an American tradition in the North and the South.

Minnigerode became rector at St. Paul’s in 1852. He had always been an advocate for secession and a strong supporter of the Confederacy. Under his leadership the church had grown in numbers and influence in the city. The man himself had become something of a tourist attraction, attracting out-of-towners to standing-room-only services. One diarist once counted fourteen generals seated in two pews, including noted Presbyterian Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Minnigerode had officiated at the graveside service for General J.E.B. Stuart in May 1864, and then both the wedding and funeral several days later of General John Pegram after he was killed in combat south of Petersburg.

Davis had been baptized by Minnigerode in 1862. Since then Davis had attended church regularly. He enjoyed the rector’s rousing, challenging sermons, which always supported his role as president. Just three months ago, a month before Davis had made his African Church speech, Minnigerode had asked his congregation:

What is it that makes the present crisis so painful?

Our reverses? No, Brethren! For great as they have been (and no honest man would hide their extent), we have had reverses before, and God always has blessed them to us, made them the source of greater harmony among ourselves, roused us to new and greater exertions, and taught us to bear them and repair them as men. What makes the present crisis so painful and so perilous lies not in what the enemy has done to us with his armies, but in what our own coward, faithless, selfish hearts may do.

Davis liked this reverend and his sermons. That message of pushing ahead with a cause no matter how many people were against it resonated with the president.

The service had just begun with a hymn and a prayer, when an excited clerk from the War Department yanked open the huge doors and rushed into the vestibule. He started to walk down the aisle when a sexton stopped him with a hand to the chest. The prayer was still underway. When Minnigerode finished, the sexton took the folded paper from the messenger’s hand and strode down the aisle to Davis’s pew.

Davis read the note. It was the second telegram from Lee that morning, the one an irritated Lee had written after being admonished by Davis that “many valuables would be lost.”

“I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight. I will advise you later, according to circumstances,” Lee had written.

Lee had not even bothered addressing Davis’s earlier admonition that the general had not given the government time to pack its “valuables.”

Without saying a word to Lubbock, or even nodding an apology to Minnigerode, Davis rose from his seat, turned up the aisle, and walked quickly out of church. The congregation turned and watched. Unknowing of what the note said and unsure as to how they should react to their president rudely walking out of a church service, they exchanged worried glances and whispers. What could be so important that the president of the nation could not wait an hour before disrupting church?

Opinions differed among the congregation as to how Davis reacted when he read the telegram.

Constance Cary, the fiancée of Burton Harrison, Davis’s private secretary, remembered that the president’s “cold calm eye, the sunken cheeks, the compressed lip, were all as impenetrable as an iron mask.”

But another member of the church said, “I plainly saw the sort of gray pallor that came over his face as he read a scrap of paper.”

One person recalled that Davis “was noted to walk unsteadily out of the church.”

But another watched Davis rise from his seat and walk “softly down the aisle, erect and quiet.”

When Davis walked out of the church clutching the telegram in his hand, he glanced to his right toward the Virginia State Capitol lawn. What he saw would have troubled the president of any other nation: clerks building bonfires of paper money and bonds. Much of the remaining wealth of the Confederacy was either burning to ashes or blowing down the street, but no one bothered to rescue any of the $50 bills that featured Davis’s idealized portrait showing an unlined, youthful, pleasant, clean-shaven face.

The real Davis, skeletal in frame, blind in one eye, and pale, with a face sometimes paralyzed by neuralgia, should have been furious at the destruction of the assets of the Confederate treasury. He had not ordered it—at least not yet. But the president seemed curiously unmoved watching bills emblazoned with his face being consumed by the fire.