Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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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