Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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had collected within its walls the refuse of the war—thieves and deserters, male and female, the vilest of the vile were there, but strict military discipline had kept it down. Now, in one moment, it was all removed—all restraint was taken off—and you may imagine the consequences.
As he rode down Franklin Street (past the house where Mrs. Robert E. Lee was living), Boykin sadly observed:
At the windows we could see the sad and tearful faces of the kind Virginia women, who had never failed the soldier in four long years of war and trouble, ready to the last to give him devoted attendance in his wounds and sickness, and to share with his necessities the last morsel.
As Gary himself passed over the Mayo Bridge, he called out to the man assigned to demolish the bridge: “Blow her to Hell!”
As generals Gary and Ewell rode away, they stopped on a high plain on the south bank of the James and watched as fires seemed to spring up at dozens of places within the city. Ewell’s orders to burn the military warehouses had been carried out, but as the citizens feared, the fires were already getting out of control and spreading to the residential areas. Richmond, the city that had withstood numerous Union campaigns that brought the blue-coated enemy so close they could hear the city’s church bells, had not fallen to an enemy attack. It was set ablaze by the men who had spent the last four years defending the capital city.
The Union soldiers would put out the fires and push into the city within hours of the last Confederates passing over the bridges. Among the first Union soldiers to put down their muskets and pick up fire hoses and axes would be several regiments of United States Colored Troops, freed slaves who had joined the Union army to free other blacks. Instead of letting the Confederate capital burn to the ground, these black men who had every reason to hate Richmond helped save it.
With the two escaping trains huffing and puffing down the Danville line into the darkness with its unknown dangers, Davis and the Confederate cabinet were now officially on the run. The attempt to continue the war without a capital city to defend had begun.
CHAPTER 3
“My Husband Will Never Cry for Quarter”
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