Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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Confederate money is getting so reduced in value that it is a common remark when one goes out to buy, “You can carry your money in your market basket, and bring home your provisions in your purse.” Even our bacon and greens lack the bacon. The one topic everywhere and on occasions is eating. Even the ministers in the pulpit consciously preach of it.
Hope too was in short supply.
The prescient Mrs. Simmons noted in her April 1 diary entry, the day before the breakthrough at Petersburg: “The air is full of strange rumors, events are thickening around us. It is plain that General Lee cannot hold out much longer. With a force smaller than is reported and almost destitute, it is impossible to hold our long lines stretching below Petersburg, along which for a mile or two, at some places, there is not a sentinel on guard.”
By noon most of Davis’s cabinet had gathered in his office. Present were Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, Postmaster General John Reagan, and Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm. Listening on the sidelines were Richmond’s Mayor Joseph Mayo, Virginia’s governor William Smith, and former governor John Letcher. Those men would have to deal with the federal authorities after the departure of the cabinet.
Davis looked around the room at the men with whom he would share the Confederacy’s fate. After four years of mixing and matching men into positions to which previous officeholders were unsuited, Davis had finally assembled what he considered a capable cabinet. He did not dwell on the irony that the Confederacy was collapsing just as his cabinet was jelling.
Breckinridge was described by female admirers as the “handsomest man in the Confederacy” thanks to his 6-foot-2-inch frame, deep blue eyes, and huge handlebar mustache that framed his angular cheeks. A former lawyer, congressman, and senator, Breckinridge had also served as vice president of the United States under James Buchanan. He had finished third in the 1860 presidential race running as a Southern Democrat. Though untrained in military affairs, Breckinridge proved to be a capable general on battlefields from Mississippi to Kentucky to Virginia. He had been appointed secretary of war in February 1865, so he had not made many worthwhile suggestions to the war effort even if Davis was inclined to give up any of his own power to direct war strategy.
While Davis may have won the Confederate presidency in 1861, Breckinridge, whose name was never brought up as a prospective president, was the more experienced politician. Now after serving as a general, during which he had won some notable battles, the former U.S. vice president had more battlefield experience than the Confederate president, who had no one shooting at him for nearly twenty years.
Mallory, former U.S. senator from Florida, no longer had much to do in his cabinet position. Most of the Confederate navy had been captured or sunk. In his earlier days, however, Mallory had proved innovative, always willing to try new ideas such as building the ironclad CSS Virginia, and financing the European construction of commerce raiders like the CSS Alabama. Mallory was fifty-two years old with a thick body and a beard that ran under his chin, but he grew no mustache. Mallory was the first Catholic to serve in any presidential cabinet, United States or Confederate. He was also a diarist and a keen observer of the personalities of the men with whom he would be keeping company on the escape from Richmond.
Benjamin sat smoking a cigar and playing with his gold-headed cane, seemingly without a care in the world. The former U.S. senator from Louisiana, Benjamin had served Davis as attorney general and as secretary of war before his present position. Davis trusted Benjamin implicitly, one of the few people he did. Benjamin was the first person of Jewish heritage to serve the government in high capacity in either the United States or the Confederacy. He had always ignored any anti-Semitic remarks he heard about himself, just as Davis ignored any about his choice of a Jew for a cabinet member.
The 53-year-old Benjamin was rotund, dark bearded, and dark skinned, and he always smiled even when he was worried about what was happening around him. Benjamin’s smile often irritated those who believed he was unwilling to tell Davis bad news. Mallory looked at Benjamin and noted that the secretary of state’s casual expression made him resemble “the last man outside of the ark, who assured Noah of his belief that it would not be such a hell of a shower, after all.”
On the previous evening of April 1 when it was obvious even before the receipt of the Lee telegrams that Richmond would soon fall, Benjamin had even infuriated General Samuel Cooper, the ranking general in the Confederate army who had never taken a field command. Cooper walked into the secretary of state’s office to find Benjamin’s clerks packing boxes of records. Instead of helping sort through the valuable and the mundane, Benjamin was sitting on top of a box singing and whistling an improvisational tune he called “The Exit from Shockhoe Hill.” Cooper was incensed that the secretary of state would be cracking jokes about the impending flight of high-ranking Confederates from the city they had sworn to protect.
Benjamin’s jolly appearance was really a front to hide his nervousness about what would happen to the Confederate cabinet if and when it fell into the hands of the United States. After the war, the French counsel to the Confederacy, Alfred Paul, wrote that the last time he saw Benjamin was immediately after the cabinet meeting.
“I found him extremely agitated, his hands shaking, wanting and trying to do and say everything at once,” Paul recalled.
The jolly demeanor Benjamin had posed in front of his fellow cabinet officers was gone in front of a single friend.
Reagan of Texas, 46, was a postmaster general and a master administrator though he too had little to do with more of the South falling into Union hands every day. Not only had Reagan built a postal system from scratch that could deliver a letter from one end of the Confederacy to the other in a few weeks, it also made money for the Confederate government. He too was a former U.S. congressman.
Trenholm, fifty-eight, had been secretary of the treasury less than a year. He knew how to make money in his civilian life as he had built a personal fortune running goods into the South from a fleet of blockade-runners. On the other hand, Trenholm’s skills at managing a system of collecting taxes and setting up realistic government budgets had bested him as it had previous treasury secretaries. Though the government still had considerable hard assets in the bank vaults of Richmond, his duties were more important than ever if the government was to survive. Unfortunately, Trenholm was very ill. He suffered, like Davis, from neuralgia, a neurological condition that would frequently send shockwaves of paralyzing pain into his face without warning.
Rather than hold up the meeting, Davis sent an aide to inform the missing Attorney General George Davis (no relation to the president) to be at the train station that night. Davis, 45, was a reluctant secessionist from North Carolina but a good lawyer. Like Trenholm, he had not held a high elective office in the United States government before the formation of the Confederacy. But again like Trenholm, Attorney General Davis proved to be a valuable asset because he gave unbiased advice based on his experience as a private businessman. All the other cabinet members were politicians who gave fawning advice filtered through years of public service of pandering to other officeholders and to a fickle voting public.
Davis called the meeting to order and quickly got to business. He read Lee’s telegram and told his cabinet to pack all critical papers and be prepared to leave that night. The meeting was over in a matter of minutes.
Few of the men were surprised that the evacuation of Richmond as a Confederate capital had come. Davis himself had spent the previous night helping aides box records so that they would be ready to be transported or destroyed on his order.
The cabinet’s choice of where to flee was limited to one direction. Since the Southside Railroad just west of Petersburg had been captured, that left only the recently completed Richmond & Danville Railroad leading to Danville, Virginia, 140 miles to the southwest. That city was on the North Carolina border, linked by rail to Greensboro, about 40 miles south of Danville. At that moment Johnston’s army, shattered and demoralized after the Battle of Bentonville two weeks earlier, was encamped at Smithfield, North Carolina, about 110 miles or five days march to the east of Greensboro. That army, as weak and recently defeated as it was, would play into Davis’s vision of continuing the fight for the Confederacy.