Upon the Altar of the Nation (74 page)

On March 2 Lee wrote Grant proposing an “interview” to discuss peace “by means of a military convention.” In other words, he suggested that the warrior priests should settle the fates of their countries by themselves. On the same day, he confessed to Davis his belief “that [Grant] will consent to no terms, unless coupled with the condition of our return to the Union.”
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Clearly generals continued to matter greatly at this stage of the conflict—in particular Lee and Grant—but Grant was not yet ready to act as a statesman. He refused on the grounds that only the president had the authority to make such negotiations. One month later, Grant would change his mind and represent his nation in arranging a peace with Lee. Until a clear prospect of defeat and unconditional surrender appeared, conversations would go nowhere. In prior discussions among Secretary of War Seldon, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, who had earlier participated in the ill-fated Hampton Roads Conference, and General Lee, the Confederate leaders came to the consensus that defeat was inevitable. Yet no one was willing to tell President Davis.

 

On March 1 0, 1865, the Confederacy observed what would be its last national fast. In Richmond, the observance was sincere beyond all precedent. Newspaper accounts marveled at how all stores and shops closed, and religious services were “more marked in Richmond than any previous occasion of its kind.”
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In an unpublished sermon preached at Castle Craig Episcopal Church in Virginia, John Blair Dabney turned to Job 13:15: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.” Until then, millennial rhetoric had been tied to nationalism in both the North and the South. But if God had elected defeat as the fate of his chosen nation, it might be a sign that history itself was about to end. By observing the fast, Confederates might indeed be playing their strongest hand for, to Dabney’s increasingly apocalyptic sensibilities, “[i]t is an awful reflexion, that the final issue of this war may probably depend on the manner and the spirit, in which our people discharge the duties of this day.”

Then, anticipating the question on everyone’s mind, Dabney asked why, when “our cause is a just one,” does God not reward us with success? The answer, plain to all listeners familiar with the jeremiad, was that God required repentance and reformation of his chosen Southern people. The fight must go on because the war was just. For those who were waffling, Dabney invited them to think of a Southern defeat and reconstruction that would bring with it “a deluge of black, foreign, and Yankee emigrants who will lord it over us, take us from our homes, and revel in the enjoyment of all that we possess.”
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If the Confederacy’s future hinged on a proper observance of the fast, it was clear by late March that their sincerity must have been insufficient. The bad news continued. Again, at Castle Craig Episcopal Church, Dabney returned to apocalyptic themes with a sermon on Hebrews 6:4-6, preached on March 26, and once more on April 2 at Hopewell Church. The times, he noted, were portentous, “when every hour is big with important events.” For all in attendance, life was uncertain in the face of a foe who did not discriminate between soldiers and civilians. No one knew “what unspeakable wretchedness, what a sudden ... and horrible death may be in store for them.” To those who thought they would be spared as civilians, he asked: “Do they dream that the public enemy, so unsparing to others, will spare them? Let them then prepare for the terrible catastrophe, with which we are threatened, by making their peace with God.”

In one profound sense, 1865 was different than 1860. Increasingly downbeat Southern moralists evidenced apocalyptic sensibilities. Being in the moral right no longer guaranteed deliverance. Defeat might come, and if it did, it could only mean the end of history. References to the “man of sin”—a mysterious figure who prefigures the end times in the apostle Paul’s letters—appeared more frequently as battles were lost. Until then, the South, like the North, incarnated its millennial speculations into nationalism and global salvation in this world. Apocalyptic thoughts about the end of history were thoughts of defeat and worlds to come.

Because no guilt fell on the head of the South, and because things seemed to be going so badly, Dabney wondered if the end of history was dawning in a premillennial reign of terror by the “man of sin” who would, in turn, spark Christ’s Second Coming:

I
n the field, the continued inability of the Confederate War Department to feed and supply Lee’s army was growing acute. In a letter to Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, Lee outlined the sorry state of military affairs everywhere, but highlighted the imperative to feed his starving army. If his men were fed and supplied, the war would continue, because ultimately it was neither Davis’s war nor Lee’s war: “Everything in my opinion has depended and still depends upon the disposition and feelings of the people.”
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Lee was half right. President Davis meant relatively little to the future of the armies, but Lee meant everything to the armies and to the people. If Lee was not the sacred totem of the Confederacy, he was the closest of any human to being one, and as long as he survived and joined the fight, the South would not surrender.

Now wholly caught up in last ditch schemes of desperation, Lee ordered General John B. Gordon to lead an assault on Federal forces at Hare’s Hill (Fort Stedman) in the early morning of March 25. If Gordon’s sharpshooters and following infantry could exploit the vulnerable point and break through, they might have a chance to move south and allow Lee to link up with Johnston’s pitifully reduced “army” of 13,500. With great spirit but little hope, Gordon penetrated the Federal lines and succeeded in overrunning Fort Stedman, moving on toward Grant’s headquarters at City Point. Then Grant’s superior numbers took over. The captured works were recaptured and Gordon was forced to retreat. In the process, Lee lost four thousand men he could ill afford to lose. Worse, the failed assault shortened the intervening distance for a counterattack, for which Grant planned immediately.
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Sensing blood, Grant pushed on all fronts. On April I, he ordered the combined forces of Sheridan’s cavalry and Gouverneur Warren’s Fifth Corps to smash through Pickett’s right wing near Five Forks. On April 2, Longstreet joined up with Lee from north of the James River, bringing the bulk of Lee’s army to support the endangered right wing. By then, Lee’s exhausted war-crazed troops were literally starving, but still they soldiered on under Lee’s charismatic command. Again, the day belonged to Grant, as his early morning assault carried the enemy’s lines in the center and on Lee’s left. Grant was so pleased, he drove out to observe the progress.
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This was what he had waited for all those months, and what his commander had been waiting four years to witness. For his part, Lee knew his situation was desperate and in a memo to Breckinridge conceded, “Our only chance, then, of concentrating our forces, is to do so near Danville railroad, which I shall endeavor to do at once. I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight.”
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That evening, Lee sent out urgent orders to all his generals, commanding them to “abandon our position” immediately and break out to rendezvous at Amelia Courthouse on the Danville railroad line. At 11:30 p.m. Lee left Petersburg for Amelia Courthouse, muttering to his aide, “This is just what I told them at Richmond. The line has been extended until it snapped.”

By the afternoon of April 2, a triumphant General Grant informed Lincoln that Petersburg was his and invited the president to visit him in the city the next morning. Instead of pursuing Lee’s fleeing army, Grant surmised Lee’s destination and determined to get there ahead of him and block his retreat with minimal bloodshed. The Danville Road was virtually the only escape route Lee had, and Sheridan’s cavalry beat him to the punch.

 

Sunday morning, April 12, found churches in Richmond packed with worshippers. Most of those in attendance were women in mourning; a few men entered on crutches, pale and worn with fever. Of St. Paul’s, where President Davis sat in attendance at his customary pew, no. 63, the memoirist Cooper DeLeon later observed:

The morning service had been concluded, and the Reverend Minnigerode was preparing for communion when the sexton walked down the aisle, stopped at the president’s pew, gently tapped him on the shoulder, and handed him a piece of paper. One communicant, sitting behind Davis, was “so near that I plainly saw the sort of gray pallor that came upon his face as he read.” Without a word, Davis rose and walked out. An “uneasy whimper ran through the congregation,” and soon word was out that the administration must evacuate Richmond. Immediately, “the vast congregation rose en masse and rushed towards the door.”

The Davis administration quickly packed their offices and entered trains that evening. Panic broke out in Richmond. As he prepared to rejoin his unit, an ailing Colonel George Alexander Martin witnessed men, women, and children ransacking commissary stores even as others clogged the streets rushing to leave town. Despite orders to destroy the whiskey, the liquors had been “liberated” and flowed freely into the throats of “skulking men and coarse, half-drunken women gathered before the stores.”
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That evening (April 2-3) the drinking and plundering continued unabated. Fires broke out all over the city. As the Shockoe warehouse erupted in flames, fires spread to the houses. LaSalle Pickett observed how the flames “stretched out burning arms on all sides and embraced in deadly clasp the stately mansions which had stood in lofty grandeur from the olden days of colonial pride. Soon they became towering masses of fire.”

On Monday morning Federal troops under General Godfrey Weitzel announced the occupation of the city and proclaimed, “The people of Richmond are assured that we come to restore to them the blessings of peace, prosperity, and freedom, under the flag of Union.” Soon thereafter Union troops from Vermont and New Hampshire led the first brigade up Franklin Street. They were soon followed in orderly fashion by an endless stream of company after company, marching to bands and singing the “Battle Cry of Freedom.” The proudest moment for the Union came as Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr., a descendant of two United States presidents—both opposed to slavery—led the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, an all-black regiment, into the city. Adams later remarked that it was “the one event which I should most have desired as the culmination of my life in the army.”

The sides of Richmond’s streets were crowded with people, mostly black. Federal Major N. D. Stoodley observed, “They shouted, they danced, cried, prayed, sang, and cut up all manner of wild capers.” A black band played the “Year of Jubilee” to great applause from soldiers and bystanders alike. Richmond’s white inhabitants stayed indoors, still not quite believing what they were viewing and fearing a repeat of the sack of Columbia. Among the litter in the aftermath lay that morning’s edition of the
Richmond
Whig, which was defiant to the end. Even as Lee marched out, faith in his army remained, because God was on their side. The editorial announced: “One has only to read the records of battle and campaigns in which the bible abounds to see how frequently, how generally indeed the weaker party in numbers and materiel of war came out victorious.”
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On April 3 a triumphant Grant notified Lincoln from Richmond that the capital city was now in Federal hands and invited him down from City Point for a visit. Like Columbia, Richmond lay in flames, but not as a result of invading Federal armies. Richmond diarist Sallie A. Putnam described the destruction unleashed by an “exploding arsenal” of several hundred railroad cars carrying loaded shell that had been left behind. “At every moment the most terrific explosions were sending forth their awful reverberations, and gave us the idea of a general bombardment. All the horrors of the final conflagration, when the earth shall be wrapped in flames and melt with fervent heat, were, it seemed to us, prefigured in our capital.” Then, when things couldn’t possibly get any worse, a cry went out: “The Yankees! The Yankees are coming!” Union soldiers immediately raised the Stars and Stripes over the city capital and “now only the most bitter and crushing recollections awoke within us, as upon our quickened hearing fell the strains of ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ For us it was a requiem for buried hopes.”

But all was not dark. This Union army would show mercy instead of vengeance, and Richmond would be spared the drunken destruction of Columbia. To save as much of the city as possible, Weitzel sent all unneeded Union troops back to camp, retaining a corps of forty-five hundred officers and soldiers. These stacked their arms and formed fire squads, speeding to all points of the city where help could be rendered. Terrified residents marveled that “no attempt at plunder [was] reported!” Cooper DeLeon reported: “Military training never had better vindication than on that fearful day; for its bonds must have been strong indeed, to hold that army, suddenly in possession of a city so coveted—so dehant—so deadly, for four long years.” In West Point terms, this was the way a defenseless city in flames should have been treated.