Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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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