Bloody Crimes (7 page)

In Danville, Davis and his cabinet’s first night of exile began a strange, anticlimactic interlude. These high officials might have regained their morale, but they had little to do. No Confederate army had encamped there, awaiting Davis’s orders to go into battle. Yes, Davis and his department heads could busy themselves writing dispatches, issuing orders, and seeking news, and so they did. But the future course of the war in Virginia depended upon Robert E. Lee. Davis expected news from Lee on April 4 but none came. Speculation abounded, remembered Stephen R. Mallory, “more or less based upon a thousand rumors.”

Davis hated being in this passive position. He craved action: He wanted to rally armies, choose points of strategic concentration, and continue resistance. Instead, he busied himself inspecting the defensive earthworks being thrown up around Danville and awaited word from the Army of Northern Virginia. Had Davis been interested in fleeing to save his own life, this was the time to push deeper south, into North Carolina and beyond. Tarrying in Danville increased his risk of capture or death. But he still hoped to win the war, not just save his own skin. Should Lee send news of victory, or just even word that he had escaped Yankee encirclement by swinging his army toward Danville, Davis could reunite with his most reliable commander and continue the fight. But if Davis left Virginia, he might be too far from the action to rejoin Lee.

“April 4 and the succeeding four days passed,” noted Mallory, “without bringing word from Lee or Breckinridge, or of the operations of the army; and the anxiety of the President and his followers was intense.” Judah Benjamin tried again to revive the spirits of his colleagues. “No news is good news,” he chimed, but Mallory could see that the secretary of state’s optimism had been unconvincing this time.

Refugees from Richmond carried to Danville, along with their most precious remaining possessions, wild rumors. “Some asserted, upon the faith of a very reliable gentleman ‘just in,’ that Lee had won a glorious victory, held his army well in hand, and was steadily pursuing Grant. Others declared that Lee was too busy fighting to send couriers, and that the wires were down.” Davis ignored the rumors. Meanwhile, more refugees from Richmond clogged Danville. Many, including a bridal party, lived in railroad cars. Mallory recalled the surreal scenes: “Thus were passed five days. To a few, a very few, they were days of hope; to the many they were days of despondence, if not of despair; and to all, days of intense anxiety.”

CHAPTER TWO
“In the Days of Our Youth”

O
n April 4, Abraham Lincoln experienced one of the most thrilling days of his life, one that was a culmination of his work and his presidency. But he did not gloat. “Thank God that I have lived to see this! It seems to me that I have been dreaming a horrid dream for four years, and now the nightmare is gone. I want to go to Richmond.”

Admiral Porter agreed to take him there on the
River Queen,
“if there is any of [Richmond] left. There is black smoke over the city.” Porter told the president that before they could go up the river, he must order all the “torpedoes” (mines) removed from the water so that they did not blow up the
River Queen.
Her sister ship had already struck a mine and been blown up. The admiral described the journey: “Here we were in a solitary boat, after having set out with a number of vessels flying flags at every mast-head, hoping to enter the conquered capital in a manner befitting the rank of the President of the United States, with a further intention of firing a national salute in honor of the happy result.”

OIL PORTRAIT OF LINCOLN AS HE APPEARED ON THE EVE OF VICTORY.

Porter was embarrassed that he could not deliver his commander in chief to the captive city in style. Lincoln said not to worry, and he told a funny story to make the admiral feel better. “Admiral, this brings to mind a fellow who once came to me to ask for an appointment as minister abroad. Finding he could not get that, he came down to some more modest position. Finally he asked to be made a tide-waiter. When he saw he could not get that, he asked me for an old pair of trousers. But it is well to be humble.”

The river leading into Richmond had become too shallow for big boats, and as they got close to the city, Porter transferred the president, Tad, and Captain Penrose to his personal craft, the “admiral’s barge.” Despite the fancy name, it was no more than a spacious, glorified rowboat Porter used to travel between his flagship and other U.S. Navy warships, or between ship and shore. When they reached the riverfront, Porter and his crew had trouble spotting a landing and they had to continue along the edge. The city looked eerie. Lincoln and Porter peered at the rebel capital but saw no one—only smoke from the fires. The only sound was the creaking of the oars. “The street along the river-front was as deserted,” Porter observed, “as if this had been a city of the dead.” The Union army had occupied the city for a day, but “not a soldier was to be seen.”

Then the current lodged the barge on a rock, and the oarsmen rowed for the first landing they saw. Lincoln stepped onto the wharf. They had landed at Rocketts, a shady waterfront district. Admiral Porter described what happened next:

There was a small house on this landing, and behind it were some twelve negroes digging with spades. The leader of them was an old man sixty years of age. He raised himself to an upright position as we landed, and put his hands up to his eyes. Then he dropped his spade and sprang forward. “Bress de Lord,” he said, “dere is de great Messiah! I knowed him as soon as I seed him. He’s bin in my heart fo’ long yeah, an’ he’s cum at
las’ to free his chillum from deir bondage? Glory, Hallelujah!” And he fell upon his knees before the President and kissed his feet. The others followed his example, and in a minute Mr. Lincoln was surrounded by these people, who had treasured up the recollection of him from a photograph, and had looked up to him for four years as the one who was to lead them out of captivity.

The adulation embarrassed Lincoln. He was a simple man with plain tastes who had, during his entire presidency, eschewed pomp and circumstance. He had no patience for politicians who behaved like royalty. He did not want to enter Richmond like a king. He spoke to the throng of slaves. “Don’t kneel to me. That is not right. You must kneel to God only, and thank him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy. I am but God’s humble instrument; but you may rest assured that as long as I live no one shall put a shackle on your limbs, and you shall have all the rights which God has given to every other free citizen of this Republic.”

Before allowing Lincoln to leave them and proceed on foot into Richmond, the freed slaves burst into joyous song:

Oh, all ye people clap your hands,
And with triumphant voices sing;
No force the mighty power withstands
Of God, the universal King.

The hymn drew hundreds of blacks to the landing. They surrounded Lincoln, making it impossible for him to move. Admiral Porter recognized how foolish he had been to bring the president ashore without a proper military escort. “The crowd immediately became very oppressive. We needed our marines to keep them off. I ordered twelve of the boat’s crew to fix bayonets and surround the President…but the crowd poured in so fearfully that I thought
we all stood a chance of being crushed to death. I now realized the imprudence of landing without a large body of marines; and yet this seemed to me…the fittest way for Mr. Lincoln to come upon the people he had redeemed from bondage.”

The crowd became increasingly wild. Some rushed forward, laid their hands upon the president, and collapsed in ecstatic paroxysms. Some, too awed to approach Father Abraham, kept their distance and just stared at him. Others yelled for joy and performed acrobatic somersaults. Admiral Porter said the people were so excited that some of them appeared “demented.” Lincoln spoke to them: “My poor friends, you are free—free as air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it…Liberty is your birthright…But you must try to deserve this priceless boon. Let the world see that you merit it, and are able to maintain it by your good works. Don’t let your joy carry you into excesses. Learn the laws and obey them…There, now, let me pass on; I have but little time to spare. I want to see the capital.”

Porter ordered six men to march ahead of the president and Tad, and six behind them, and with that the landing party walked toward downtown Richmond. Lincoln stopped briefly to look at the notorious Libby Prison, a place of suffering for thousands of Union prisoners of war. “We will pull it down!” screamed voices in the crowd. But Lincoln said no, that they should “leave it as a monument.” The streets were dusty and smoke from the fires still hung in the air. Lincoln could smell Richmond burning as he walked through it. By now thousands of people, blacks and whites, crowded the sidewalks.

A beautiful girl, about seventeen years old, carrying a bouquet of roses, stepped into the street and advanced toward the president. Porter watched her struggle through the crowd. “The mass of people endeavored to open to let her pass, but she had a hard time in reaching him. Her clothes were very much disarranged in making the journey across the street. I reached out and helped her within the circle of the sailors’ bayonets, where, although nearly stifled with dust, she grace
fully presented her bouquet to the President and made a neat little speech, while he held her hand…There was a card on the bouquet with these simple words: ‘From Eva to the Liberator of the slaves.’ ”

Porter spotted a sole cavalryman and called out to him: “Go to the general, and tell him to send a military escort here to guard the president and get him through this crowd!”

“Is that old Abe?” the trooper asked, before galloping off.

Thomas Thatcher Graves, aide-de-camp on the staff of General Weitzel, approached the president and his group, and Lincoln asked him, “Is it far to President Davis’s house?”

Graves accompanied the president to the Confederate White House. “At the Davis house, [Lincoln] was shown into a receptionroom, with the remark that the housekeeper had said that the room was President Davis’s office. [It was Davis’s first-floor study, not his second-floor office.] As he seated himself he remarked, ‘This must have been President Davis’s chair,’ and, crossing his legs, he looked far off with a serious, dreamy expression.”

This was the closest Lincoln had ever come to Jefferson Davis during the war. Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, and not Davis, had represented the Confederacy at the Hampton Roads peace conference in February 1865, where Stephens and Lincoln discussed how to end the war.

Lincoln knew the Confederate president had been in this room no more than thirty-six hours earlier. As one witness remembered, Lincoln “lay back in the chair like a tired man whose nerves had carried him beyond his strength.” The journalist Charles C. Coffin observed on the president’s face a “look of unutterable weariness, as if his spirit, energy and animating force were wholly exhausted.” Sitting in the quiet study of the Confederate president, perhaps Lincoln weighed the cost—more than 620,000 American lives—paid to get there. He did not speak. Then he requested a glass of water.

I
t is not surprising that the paths of the two presidents had not crossed before the Civil War, even though they both had lived briefly in Washington, D.C., at the same time. Davis and Lincoln lived very different lives and moved in different circles. Lincoln became a giant, but in antebellum America he was considered inferior to Jefferson Davis in education, social status, military and political experience, national reputation, influence, fame, and prospects. Indeed, before Lincoln’s run for Senate and the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, few Americans north or south knew anything about him. Many had never heard the name Abraham Lincoln. Most knew the name of Jefferson Davis, a man who many people expected would be a future president of the United States. Today, nearly one hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, Lincoln’s fame obscures Jefferson Davis. Davis’s presidency of a slave empire that fought the deadliest war in American history has tainted, even swept away, the memory of anything that was good about him.

Davis is often remembered as a grotesque caricature: a humorless, arrogant, inflexible, racist, slave-owning traitor who tried to overthrow the Constitution but failed to win Southern independence and who then vanished from history. In reputation, Lincoln and Davis stand as polar opposites, as emancipator and slave master, as two men who could not have been more different from each other. The truth is more complex. In some ways, Lincoln and Davis had nothing in common. In others, some profound, they shared striking similarities and experiences.

Born in 1808, Jefferson Davis attended private academies and universities, and then, with the sponsorship of his prosperous older brother, Joseph, attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was a fine equestrian, and he cut a splendid, elegant figure in the saddle. Serving as an army officer on the western frontier, he undertook long and arduous cross-country journeys that gave him great knowledge of the American continent. In Mississippi, his brother set
him up as a planter. He was elected to the U.S. Congress; fought gallantly in the Mexican War as colonel of an infantry regiment, the Mississippi Rifles; was wounded in battle but refused to leave the field; and then came home a hero. He was a fervent nationalist who believed that North and South, by working together, could conquer the continent.