Pursuit:. Clint Johnson
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Davis dismissed the meeting, the sickly Trenholm and other clerks rushed to pack what was left of the Confederate treasury. At least $600,000 in gold was packed into wooden boxes. Most of the money was in gold coins minted in both Mexico and the United States. The coins had been deposited into the treasury early in the war by merchants and financiers confident in the long-term survival of the Confederacy. They exchanged their coins for paper notes so that the Confederate treasury could honestly tell its citizens that the paper money and bonds being issued were backed by hard assets of gold and silver held in vaults in the Confederate capital.
Davis went back to the Confederate White House where he told the servants to pack up the valuables of the residence and to give them to neighbors for safekeeping. Though he did not want to leave behind anything of true value, Davis also ordered that they do the stripping carefully. Always a perfectionist, Davis wanted the house to look presentable to any Union officer who would occupy it. It was what Southern gentlemen of his generation had been taught—to be polite even to your enemies.
He gave his servants precise instructions, including removing the family cow from the backyard so that she would not be butchered by the invading Federals. Davis followed through on a promise to Varina by crating a bust of him that she favored. That bust was sent to a neighbor who promised to hide it. Another neighbor refused to take Varina’s carriage out of fear that Union troops would harm his family or property if Davis’s possessions were discovered in his care.
Though the servants were confused over what to pack and what to leave, Davis coolly kept his head, even taking time to think of people who might benefit from some of the things he wanted removed from the house. He sent his favorite easy chair to the Franklin Street home where Mrs. Robert E. Lee had been living for the past several months. Crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, Mrs. Lee needed a wheel-chair to get around. Davis thought she would welcome the addition of an easy chair to her home.
Into the midst of the maelstrom of activity at the Executive Mansion arrived former U.S. senator Clement Clay, of Alabama. When Davis expressed surprise at seeing his former Senate colleague, Clay, 48 years old and heavily bearded, joked: “I am probably the last man in the Confederate service to seek to enter Richmond. The trend of Confederate travel seems to be in just the opposite direction.”
While the thought apparently never crossed his mind, Davis might have more closely considered his immediate offer to Clay to join the Confederate cabinet on the escape from the city. His association with Clay throughout 1864 and now at this late date of the war would give the U.S. government reason to believe the two old friends were more like criminal collaborators.
While the first leg of the cabinet’s escape would be by rail, escape from the Confederacy by ocean had been an occasional topic with Davis. Before Varina had left with the children, her husband told her to “make for the Florida coast and from there board a ship to a foreign country.”
It may not have been by chance that two of the men who would be accompanying Davis to Danville had skills that could come in handy should the party make it to a coast.
One was Confederate navy commander John Taylor Wood, Davis’s nephew by his first wife and grandson of former president Zachary Taylor. The 34-year-old Taylor, a Minnesota native, had declined to follow his father into the army. Instead, he joined the United States Navy as a 17-year-old midshipman. He later won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1853. He spent the next eight years at sea chasing slave-trading ships and as an instructor at the academy. In 1861 he resigned from the United States Navy and joined the Confederate navy as one of its most experienced officers.
After early, wasted appointments commanding shore batteries, Taylor was assigned to the CSS Virginia, the ironclad that fought the USS Monitor. After leading several raids to capture Union vessels in 1862, exploits so dangerous and successful that he won the rare official thanks of the Confederate Congress, Taylor was invited by his uncle to be a military aide. Davis rewarded his nephew with the rank of colonel of cavalry. The unusual dual rank in two different services, plus the fact that he was the president’s nephew, gave Wood a level of trust between him, politicians, and officers in the two services. It was in 1864 that Wood found his true calling as a formidable sea raider. While commanding the CSS Tallahassee, he took more than thirty-three Union vessels.
Not on the same train, but soon to follow the cabinet to Danville was the most famous of sailors for both the North and the South, Admiral Raphael Semmes. Semmes was a 55-year-old native of Maryland who practiced looking flamboyant by keeping a waxed mustache whose ends sprang several inches from each side of his face. He had gone to sea with the United States Navy when he was 14 and had spent more than 35 years in the service of his country, including winning commendations for trying to save his ship during a violent storm off Mexico in 1846. Early in 1861 he resigned his commission as a commander and cast his lot with the Confederacy.
Semmes was famous in the South and infamous in the North for his command of first the CSS Sumter and later the CSS Alabama, two fast raider ships designed to run down Northern commercial vessels such as cargo and whaling ships. In the course of two years, Semmes’ two commands accounted for the capture of eighty-seven Union vessels. No Union ship captain left port without fearing that he would one day see Semmes’ sails rushing over the horizon toward him. Semmes was also a formidable foe when he had to do battle. He sank the warship USS Hatteras off Texas in a battle that lasted just thirteen minutes.
Semmes made the mistake of fighting the USS Kearsage off the coast of France on June 19, 1864, when the CSS Alabama was badly in need of an overhaul and fresh gunpowder. The Alabama had been at sea so long that she leaked at several points in her hull, and her powder was so damp that her cannons were not firing as hot as they should have been. When the Alabama’s stern was shot away, Semmes jumped into the sea, but he was quickly pulled from the water by a British ship. Eventually he returned to Richmond and continued to command the ships and ironclads making up the last remnants of the James River Squadron.
Not only were two of the South’s most famous sea captains planning to escape south with Davis, there were at least a dozen skilled ship captains and sailors, refugees from the James River Squadron, who were also retreating toward Danville. If Davis needed an experienced crew of sailors to go wherever he wanted in the world reachable by the seven seas, all he had to do was walk through the train cars and recruit from the flower of the Confederate navy.
As for his long-range plans after escaping from Richmond, Davis seemed determined to head for the vastness of the Trans-Mississippi Theater (Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, Indian Territory, and parishes of Louisiana west of the river) where he hoped to find troops still in the field who had not lost the will to fight. He intended to meet up with General Edmund Kirby Smith around Galveston, Texas, an island just a few miles from the coast from which blockade-runners still successfully slipped in and out of port. Ideally, Davis wanted to stop along the way to Texas and link up with another nephew, General Richard Taylor, who was leading a small army quartered near the coastal (but captured) city of Mobile, Alabama.
While Davis would never have admitted it, trying to reach Taylor and Kirby Smith by taking a land route would be virtually impossible because much of the territory between Virginia and Texas was already occupied by Union troops. The best way for the cabinet to reach both of these armies quickly would be by sea. But finding a fast ship large enough to accommodate the cabinet was no longer as easy as it had been just a few months earlier. The big blockade running ports of Charleston, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina, had been captured. Owners of many of the most successful blockade-runners that had routinely run back and forth to Bermuda and to Nassau, Bahamas, were now holding them in foreign ports, finally convinced that their profitable ventures of trading cotton for war material were over.
It was still possible but not promising to make for the Atlantic coast of the Carolinas. If a small party could slip between Grant’s army around Petersburg, Virginia, and Sherman’s army around Smithfield, North Carolina, they could make for the coastal network of numerous small rivers and streams. Once on the coast, they might find loyal citizens willing to give them a boat seaworthy enough to run to the Bahamas or Bermuda. A small craft, disguised as a fishing boat operating along the Carolina coast, might escape the attention of the Union blockaders who would be concentrating on watching