Bloody Crimes (5 page)

Not all of the residents dreaded the fall of the city. Bands of thieves, drunkards, and worse were waiting for the moment when the last Confederate troops would leave Richmond and take with them all vestiges of law and order. Mallory called them “the rabble who stood ready to plunder during the night.” From darkness until Union troops arrived at dawn, the capital would be theirs.

A
mong the blacks of Richmond, the mood on the eve of their day of anticipated liberation was electric. At the African church it was a day of jubilee. Worshippers poured into the streets, congratulated each other, and prayed for the coming of the Union army. The next morning they would be slaves no more.

When Davis got to the station, he declined to board the train. He wanted to delay the departure until the last possible moment. Perhaps the fortunes of war had turned in the Confederacy’s favor that night. Perhaps Lee had confounded the enemy as he had done so many times before and reestablished defensive lines protecting Richmond. At 10:00
P.M.
Davis and Breckinridge walked into the office of the Richmond and Danville Railroad and waited for a miracle—a telegram from Robert E. Lee retracting his counsel to evacuate Richmond. For an hour Davis held the loaded and waiting train in the hope of receiving good news from Lee.

Nothing—no telegram ever came. The Army of Northern Virginia could not save the beleaguered city. It would be imprudent, even dangerous, to tarry any longer. The Yankees could arrive in just six or seven hours, and further delay might allow them to cut the railroad line below Richmond, blocking the only route for Davis’s escape train.

Dejected, Davis and Breckinridge left the railroad office and the president boarded his car. Captain William Parker, a naval officer on special duty at the train depot that night, observed the scene: “While waiting at the depot I had an opportunity of seeing the President and his Cabinet as they went to the cars. Mr. Davis preserved his usual calm and dignified manner, and General Breckinridge…Who had determined to go out [of Richmond] on horseback, was as cool and gallant as ever—but the others…Had the air (as the French say) of wishing to be off. General Breckinridge stayed with me some time after the President’s train had gone, and I had occasion to admire his bearing under the circumstances.”

This was not a private, luxurious sleeping car constructed for a head of state. The Confederate railroad system had never equaled the scale, resources, and power of the United States Military Railroad. Jefferson Davis took his seat in a common coach packed with the heads of the cabinet departments, key staff members, and other selected officials. The departure was without ceremony. No honor guard, no well-wishers, and no martial band playing “Dixie” bade the president’s train farewell. Jefferson Davis gave no speech from the station platform, or from the rear of the last car, as Abraham Lincoln had done on February 11, 1861, the morning he left Springfield, Illinois, for his journey to Washington to become president.

Captain Parker watched the train gather steam and creep out of the station at a slow speed, no more than ten miles per hour. The train groaned down the track. Parker noticed that it was loaded: “Not only inside, but on top, on the platforms, on the engine,—everywhere, in fact, where standing room could be found; and those who could not get that ‘hung on by their eyelids.’” It was a humbling, even ignominious departure of the Confederate president from his capital city.

Postmaster John Reagan, riding on that train, pitied those left behind in Richmond. The fleeing government had abandoned not only a place but its people. A number of citizens had asked for his
advice: Should they remain in their homes and “submit to the invading army,” or should they flee? Reagan knew that most had no choice anyway and could not escape if they wanted to.

Throughout the day and into the night, countless people had fled the doomed city by any means possible—on foot or horseback; in carriages, carts, or wagons. Some rushed to the depot, but there was only a single rail line left open, and the small number of locomotives and cars had been commandeered by the government to transport the president, the cabinet, various officials, the Confederate archives, and the funds of the Confederate treasury to safety. The postmaster general knew the truth: Circumstances had “left but small opportunity for the inhabitants to escape.”

As Davis’s train rolled out of Richmond, most of the passengers were somber. There was nothing left to say. Mallory captured the mood around him. “Silence reigned over the fugitives. All knew how the route to Danville approached the enemy’s lines, all knew the activity of his large mounted force, and the chances between a safe passage of the Dan [River] and a general ‘gobble’ by Sheridan’s cavalry seemed somewhat in favor of the ‘gobble.’ ”

Few spoke as the government in exile crossed the bridge leaving the city, and Richmond came into panoramic view. Mallory studied his fellow fugitives. “The terrible reverses of the last twenty-four hours were impressed upon the minds and hearts of all as fatal to their cause…Painful images of the gigantic efforts, the bloody sacrifices of the South, all fruitless now, and bitter reflections upon the trials yet to come, were passing through the minds of all, and were reflected…upon every face.”

The city was still dark, but the fires would come soon. They would not be set by Union troops. The Confederates would, by accident, set their own city ablaze when they burned supplies to keep the goods out of Union hands. This improvident decision would reduce much of the capital to ruins. The flames would spread out of control and devour Richmond, enveloping it with a bright, unnatural, yellow-orange
glow that would illuminate the heavens. Jefferson Davis was spared, at least, from witnessing the conflagration.

“It was near midnight,” John Reagan remembered, “when the President and his cabinet left the heroic city. As our train, frightfully overcrowded, rolled along toward Danville we were oppressed with sorrow for those we left behind us and fears for the safety of General Lee and his army.”

The presidential train was not the last to leave Richmond that night. A second one carried another precious cargo from the city—the financial assets of the Confederacy, in the form of paper currency, and gold and silver coins, plus deposits from the Richmond banks. Earlier on April 2, Captain Parker had received a written order from Secretary Mallory to have the corps of midshipmen report to the railroad depot at 6:00
P.M.
When Parker learned that Richmond was to be evacuated, he went to the Navy Department office, where Mallory ordered him to take charge of the Confederate treasure and guard it during the trip to Danville. Men desperate to escape Richmond and who had failed to make it onto Davis’s train climbed aboard their last hope, the treasure train. The wild mood at the depot alarmed Parker, and he ordered some of his men—some of them only boys—to guard the doors to the depot and not allow “another soul to enter.”

Once Davis was gone, and the night wore on, Parker witnessed the breakdown of order. “The scenes at the depot were a harbinger of what was to come that night. The whiskey…was running in the gutters, and men were getting drunk upon it…Large numbers of ruffians suddenly sprung into existence—I suppose thieves, deserters…who had been hiding. To add to the horror of the moment…we now heard the explosions of the vessels and the magazines, and this, with the screams and yells of the drunken demons in the streets, and the fires which were now breaking out in every direction, made it seem as though hell itself had broken loose.”

If the rampaging mob had learned what cargo Parker and his midshipmen guarded, these looters, driven mad by greed, would have
descended upon the cars like insatiable locusts gorging themselves, not on grain but on gold. Parker was prepared to order his men to fire on the crowd. Before that became necessary, the treasure train got up steam and followed Davis, and the hopes of the Confederacy, into the night.

Back in Richmond, the darkness loosened the restraints of civilization, and the looters went wild. One witness recalled the mood: “By nightfall all the flitting shadows of a Lost Cause had passed away under a heaven studded by bright stars. The doomed city lay face to face with what it knew not.” And, in the evening, “ominous groups of ruffians—more or less in liquor—began to make their appearance on the principal thoroughfares of the city…as night came on pillage and rioting and robbing took place…Richmond saw few sleeping eyes during the pandemonium of that night.”

Union troops outside Richmond saw the flames and heard the explosions. An army officer, Captain Thomas Thatcher Graves, observed: “About 2 o’clock on the morning of April 3d bright fires were seen in the direction of Richmond. Shortly after, while we were looking at these fires, we heard explosions.”

A
t about 3:00
A.M.,
while en route to Danville, Davis’s train stopped at Clover Station, about sixty miles northeast of its destination. A young army lieutenant, eighteen-year-old John S. Wise, saw the train pull into the station. Through one of the train’s windows, he spotted Davis, waving to the people gathered at the depot. Later, Wise witnessed the train carrying the Confederate treasury pass, and others too. “I saw a government on wheels,” he said, “the marvelous and incongruous debris of the wreck of the Confederate capital…indiscriminate cargoes of men and things. In one car was a cage with an African parrot, and a box of tame squirrels, and a hunchback.” From one train a man in the rear car cried out, to no one in particular, “Richmond’s burning. Gone. All gone.”

As Davis continued his journey, Richmond burned and Union troops approached the city. Only a few miles away, Lincoln and Admiral Porter heard incredible explosions, and Lincoln feared that some U.S. Navy guns had exploded. But Porter reassured him that the thundering booms were far off, evidence, no doubt, that the Confederates were blowing up their own ironclad warships to save them from capture. U.S. Army scouts closing in on Richmond noticed a bright glow painting the sky above the city like a luminous dome. The scouts knew it was too pronounced to be the result of a celestial phenomenon or gaslight streetlamps. The city must have been on fire.

Around dawn a black teamster who had escaped Richmond reached Union lines and reported what Lincoln, Porter, Grant, and others suspected. The Confederate government had abandoned the capital during the night, and the road to the city was open. There would be no battle for Richmond. The Union army could march in and seize the rebel capital without firing a shot.

The first Union troops entered the outskirts of Richmond shortly after sunrise on Monday, April 3. They marched through the streets, arrived downtown, and took hold of the government buildings. They also began the work of extinguishing the fires, which still burned in some sections of the city. When Lincoln’s army raised the Stars and Stripes over the fallen capital, it signaled, for many Southerners, the end of the world. And then, scant hours after Davis had left it, the Union seized the White House of the Confederacy, pressing it into service as the new headquarters for the army of occupation.

The population of Richmond had endured a night of terror. The ruins and the smoke presented a terrible sight. “By daylight, on the 3d,” witnessed Captain Sulivane, “a mob of men, women, and children, to the number of several thousands, had gathered at the corner of 14th and Cary streets, and other outlets, in front of the bridge, attracted by the vast commissary depot at that point; for it must be remembered that in 1865 Richmond was a half-starved city, and the
Confederate Government had that morning removed its guards and abandoned the removal of the provisions, which was impossible for want of transportation. The depot doors were forced open and a demoniacal struggle for the countless barrels of hams, bacon, whisky, flour, sugar, coffee…raged about the buildings among the hungry mob. The gutters ran whisky, and it was lapped up as it flowed down the streets, while all fought for a share of the plunder. The flames came nearer and nearer, and at last caught in the commissariat itself.”

Union officer Thomas Thatcher Graves entered the city in the early morning, when it was still burning. “As we neared the city the fires seemed to increase in number and size, and at intervals loud explosions were heard. On entering the square we found Capitol Square covered with people who had fled there to escape the fire and were utterly worn out with fatigue and fright. Details were at once made to scour the city and press into service every able-bodied man, white or black, and make them assist in extinguishing the flames.”

Constance Cary ventured outside to bear witness to the ruined and fallen city. Horrified, she discovered that Yankees had desecrated the Confederate White House merely by their presence. “I looked over at the President’s house, and saw the porch crowded with Union soldiers and politicians, the street in front filled with curious gaping negroes who have appeared in swarms like seventeen year locusts.” The sight of ex-slaves roving freely about disgusted her. “A young woman has just passed wearing a costume composed of United States flags. The streets fairly swarm with blue uniforms and negroes decked in the spoils of jewelry shops…It is no longer our Richmond…one of the girls tells me she finds great comfort in singing ‘Dixie’ with her head buried in a feather pillow.”

The gloom suffocating President Davis’s train vanished with the morning sun. Secretary of State Benjamin, Secretary of the Treasury Trenholm, and the president’s aides all contributed to the change in mood. Benjamin, a larger-than-life epicurean and bon vivant, talked
about food and told stories. “His hope and good humor [were] inexhaustible,” recalled Secretary Mallory.

With a playful air, Benjamin discussed the fine points of a sandwich, analyzed his daily diet given the food shortages that plagued the South, and showed off, as an example of his “adroit economy,” his coat and pants, both tailored from an old shawl that had kept him warm through three winters. Mallory, who appointed himself unofficial chronicler of the evacuation train, admired Benjamin for his “never give up the ship air” and took notice when Benjamin “referred to other great national causes which had been redeemed from far gloomier reverses than ours.”