Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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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.
CHAPTER 2
“The Direful Tidings”
BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST. Before Davis had even completed his two-block walk from the church to his office and before he could summon his cabinet, the people of Richmond were reacting to the news that Lee was abandoning Petersburg.
The newspaper the Richmond Whig reported this on the following day: “Suddenly, as if by magic, the streets became filled with men walking as though for a wager, and behind them excited Negroes with trunks, bundles, and baggage of every description. All over the city it was the same—wagons, trunks, bandboxes, and their owners, a mass of hurrying fugitives.”
John B. Jones, the ever-observant clerk who had a good grasp of military matters (A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary), recognized the military predicament in which the Confederacy now found itself.
“General Lee may not have troops sufficient to defend both the city and the Danville Road [railroad] at the same time,” Jones noted to himself that Sunday. Jones also observed the reaction of some other interested parties when they heard the news: “The negroes stand about mostly silent, as if wondering what will be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.”
Jones was probably misreading the reactions of the slaves. Slaves rarely displayed their emotions. Showing joy that the South was losing the war or even feigning fear that Federals were approaching might irritate their owners. Some may have feared for their lives after hearing stories that slaves faired poorly when captured and used by Union forces. The slaves in Richmond kept their emotions in check. They waited to see which side prevailed.
Jones, normally accurate in his diary entries, was not above recording wild rumors even if he was the only intended audience: “The President told a lady that Lieutenant General Hardee was only twelve miles distant, and might get up in time to save the day.”
In reality, Hardee’s little force of fewer than eight thousand men was still in North Carolina with General Johnston’s army, more than two hundred miles away. Davis would not have been discussing the displacement of his nation’s armed forces with Richmond’s matrons, but both hopeful and dire rumors were sweeping the city.
Most Richmonders who heard the news about Petersburg’s fall were realists who had no illusions that Davis’s leaving the church service was anything other than what it was—the end of Confederate Richmond.
Diarist Sallie Ann Brock Putnam wrote:
The direful tidings spread with the swiftness of electricity. From lip to lip, from men, women, children and servants, the news was bandied, but many received it first as only a Sunday sensation rumor. Friend looked into the face of friend to meet only an expression of incredulity; but later in the day, as the truth, stark and appalling, confronted us, the answering look was that of stony, calm despair. Late in the afternoon the signs of evacuation became obvious to even the most incredulous.
Richmond had reason to fear.
In the spring of 1862, a Union force had burned Winton, North Carolina, to the ground, the first incident of what would become a common Union method of undermining Southern civilian morale. In the summer of 1863, Vicksburg, Mississippi, had been shelled into submission with the civilian population being the primary targets. Charleston, South Carolina’s civilians had been shelled for two years. All of Atlanta, Georgia, including its residential sections, had been burned by General William T. Sherman’s troops during the summer of 1864. The citizens of Columbia, South Carolina, heard their fate just two months earlier in February 1865 when Sherman’s Fifteenth Corps crossed the Santee River chanting: “Hail, Columbia, happy land. If I don’t burn you, I’ll be dammed.”
The residents of Richmond would not be surprised if the Confederate capital city was also slated to be wiped from the earth.
No one unaware of the telegram who saw the erect Confederate president striding his way along the sidewalk toward his office would have suspected anything out of the ordinary. Davis had always been inscrutable. He had a face that belied any public emotion whatsoever, a manner that was cold, distant, and formal with everyone but his closest friends and family. He treated good news for the Confederacy and bad the same way—with casual indifference.
But if Davis thought he was fooling people about the future of the city by keeping up his passive front, he was mistaken. It was now two months since his flaming speech at the African Church evoking patriotism for the cause. The reality of Richmond’s situation had become real again to citizens who had forgotten the rhetoric.
Food was expensive and in short supply. According to Jones’s diary, barrels of flour were selling for $700, bacon for $20 a pound. Truthfully, there was food to be had if one was willing to eat it. At a nearby hospital, the nurses and doctors regularly enjoyed a meal of a particular kind of roasted meat. One guard invited to partake passed on the offer, preferring to get his nourishment from whatever bread he could find to sop up his gruel.
“Having seen the rats in the morgue running over the bodies of dead soldiers, I had no relish for them,” said the guard.
Mrs. William A. Simmons, a woman whose husband was stationed in the trenches east of Richmond, did not have much to