Our One Common Country (37 page)

In 1898, Julia Grant recalled a chat with Lincoln at City Point while the peace talks were in progress, a conversation that never happened. When the conference took place, Lincoln was not at City Point and Mrs. Grant
was not at Hampton Roads. She seems to have mixed two memories, thirty-three years after the fact—her disappointment when she learned that the conference had failed in February, and a discussion with Lincoln in March or April. “Why, Mr. President,” she recalled telling him, “are you not going to make terms with them? They are our own people, you know.”

“Yes, I do not forget that,” Lincoln said, and read her the terms he had proposed. Julia was amazed that they were not accepted. Her memory had faded years later, but she had the essence right.

After Lee's attack on Fort Stedman failed, Davis put his wife and children on a train to Charlotte, much against their wishes. Varina could see that it nearly killed him. He would soon be in the field, he told her, where their presence would be a worry, not a comfort. “Mr. Davis gave me a pistol,” Varina later recalled, and showed her how to use it. “He was very apprehensive of our falling into the hands of the disorganized bands of troops roving about the country.” He told her to make every effort to escape, but now that she was armed, “You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you.”

On Saturday, April 1, in a charge led by General Sheridan, Union forces took Five Forks, a vital crossroads near Petersburg, cutting off the Danville train, Richmond's lifeline and Lee's, inflicting three thousand casualties. That and the next day's attack on Lee's center left him helpless to hold on. He sent word to Davis that his army would withdraw that night. Richmond would be taken within hours. In a message to Congress five months earlier, Davis had proclaimed that “not the fall of Richmond, nor Wilmington, nor Charleston, nor Savannah, nor Mobile, nor all combined” could destroy the Confederacy. His theory would be tested now. With the single exception of Mobile, they were all in federal hands, and so was Mobile Bay.

Davis and his Cabinet moved to Danville on the last open rails, to continue the war from there. Judah Benjamin told a French diplomat it
was “simply a measure of prudence. I hope that we will return in a few weeks.” The Frenchman could not tell whether the remark was delusional or mendacious. Either would have been in character. After a frantic afternoon of panic and packing, Davis and his Cabinet, the Confederacy's critical papers, and what remained of its gold were loaded onto cars marked
state department, war department
, and the rest. The train was rolling south before midnight. When a crowd cheered their president at the Clover station, he smiled and waved, “but his expression showed physical and mental exhaustion.”

In the words of Gideon Welles, every senior Confederate official but one had fled, “with heavy hearts and light luggage.” Judge Campbell alone remained, to “renew my obligations to the United States” and “abide the fate of Richmond.” His son, two sons-in-law, and a nephew, all of them soldiers, had left with Lee's army. Every effort he had made to advance a peaceful reunion having failed, “I could only await the ruin certain to arrive.” No other Southern leader had the courage to remain in the fallen capital, represent his people before their conquerors, and do what he could for them. He knew he was draping a noose around his neck.

What was left of the Army of Northern Virginia vanished in the night and started moving west toward food, supplies, and Johnston. The next morning, before the blue army walked into Petersburg, the
New York Herald
's
correspondent rode in ahead of them and encountered some old men whose flag of truce “looked suspiciously like a dirty tablecloth.” They gave him an awkward salute and tried to surrender the city to him. Sarah Pryor soon watched a column of bony prisoners being marched down the street like walking scarecrows, “a forlorn body of ragged, hatless, barefoot men.” Brokenhearted women stood in their doorways as the beaten men passed, giving them all they had, “smiles and encouraging words.”

Up in Richmond, military stores that could not be carried off were opened to the people. Thousands of hungry, threadbare citizens snatched them up. Before the army left, warehouses storing cotton, tobacco, and ammunition were torched, to deny them to an enemy with an affluence of all three. Mounds of government papers were set alight in the streets.
Enraged by the discovery of speculators' hoards of food and supplies, shouting people looted them and set fire to the empty hiding places. Some fifty square blocks of homes and businesses were soon in flames, the
Enquirer,
the
Examiner,
the
Sentinel,
and the
Dispatch
among them.

Having burned the heart of their capital, the Confederacy's fleeing leaders left its eighty-year-old mayor to drive out the next morning with a letter addressed “to the General Commanding the United States Army in front of Richmond,” respectfully requesting that he take possession of it, “to preserve order and protect women and children and property,” endangered as they were by fire and mobs of drunken felons escaped from unguarded prisons.

When the victors marched in, Richmond was a city of ghosts, veiled in smoke and ash. Hardly a white man of military age remained. Almost all of their families were behind closed doors, leaving the streets to liberated slaves. The 4th Massachusetts Cavalry was the first to clatter down Main Street, well mounted and well fed. An interval ensued and on came regiment after regiment of infantry. Within hours the old flag was flying everywhere.

In the words of a Rebel officer, the behavior of the occupying army was “beyond all praise.” To the astonishment of the city's defenseless people, Northern bucket brigades subdued the fires; homeless citizens were sheltered and fed; a guard was posted at the home of General Lee; conquerors in blue treated the conquered with respect; officers made courtesy calls at the homes of old friends, meeting sisters, wives, and daughters dressed in mourning. A Richmond lady said they “could not be made to understand that their presence was painful.”

Two days after he fled—with nothing much left but his life, and that in imminent peril—Jefferson Davis released a message to his people. “We have now entered upon a new phase of the struggle. Relieved from the necessity of guarding particular points, our army will be free to move from point to point, to strike the enemy in detail far from his base. Let us but will it, and we are free.” Richmond, for the moment, was lost, but Virginia was not. “If, by the sheer stress of numbers, we should ever be compelled to a temporary withdrawal from her limits, or those of any other border state, we will return until the last baffled and exhausted enemy shall
abandon in despair his endless and impossible task of making slaves of people resolved to be free.”

Spring had come to Richmond on Wednesday, April 4, a gorgeous, sun-kissed day, but for the smell of burning. “I walked around the burnt district this morning,” said the War Department clerk John Jones. “Some seven hundred houses, from Main Street to the canal, comprising the most valuable stores, and the best business establishments, were consumed.” So were hundreds of homes and much of the meager food supply. Thousands of helpless civilians were homeless and hungry. Most whites were despondent. Many blacks, delighted as they were with their freedom, had not yet absorbed their circumstances.

In command of the occupying army, General Godfrey Weitzel was responsible for their welfare. A West Point cadet when Lee was superintendant, Weitzel had grown close to him, and had spent much time in his home. He was handsome and full-bearded, with a receding hairline and penetrating eyes. Not yet thirty, the general was acquainted with suffering. Three weeks after their wedding, his young wife had burned to death when her dress caught fire as she walked by a hearth. Now some 25,000 citizens of Richmond had no food and many had no homes. From his headquarters at the Executive Mansion, Weitzel ordered rations distributed to anyone who took an oath of allegiance. Early that morning, Judge Campbell went over to see Weitzel's chief of staff, General George Foster Shepley of Maine, who had argued before him in the Supreme Court. The judge was the supplicant now. He surrendered himself to Shepley as the only senior Confederate official still in Richmond, and said he would be pleased to see President Lincoln. Shepley said the president was at City Point. Campbell said he would be pleased to go there. Shepley let the judge go home, and told him he would seek General Weitzel's consent to wire the president for instructions.

On that same Wednesday morning, April 4, Lincoln sailed up the James to Richmond on the
River Queen
with Tad, preceded by Admiral
Porter on his flagship
Malvern,
a captured blockade runner converted to a gunboat. The president walked a mile uphill to the Executive Mansion on a hot, dusty day with his son at his hand, the admiral at his side, and an armed knot of sailors, fanning himself with his stovepipe hat. Porter would later say that the street was as empty as a city of the dead until they came upon some black men digging a ditch. Their foreman recognized Lincoln, dropped his spade, and ran to him, hailing “the great Messiah,” falling on his knees, kissing the president's feet. “Do not kneel to me,” Lincoln told him gently. “You must kneel to God only, and thank Him for the liberty you will hereafter enjoy.” The rest of the way up the hill, waves of newly freed slaves broke over him, joined by some cheering whites. “The streets seemed to be suddenly alive with the colored race,” Porter said, the elderly singing hymns, children turning somersaults, everybody shouting. Some poor whites joined in. The admiral needed his guard to keep the president from being overwhelmed. Silent white citizens stood at open windows as Lincoln's party passed.