Dixie Betrayed (40 page)

Varina Davis had been increasingly ill-tempered as the tension had risen in the capital—a family visitor dubbed her “the tigress”—and
by the end of March, Davis had sent his wife and their children, Davis’s secretary Burton Harrison, Varina’s sister Margaret,
and Treasury Secretary George Trenholm’s daughters fleeing southward to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then on to Abbeville,
South Carolina, home of a family friend. Varina carried a Colt pistol given to her by her husband. If captured, Davis told
his wife, “force your assailants to kill you.”
³⁶
This would save the family from humiliation in captivity.

“If I live, you can come to me when the struggle is ended,” Davis said, “but I do not expect to survive the destruction of
constitutional liberty.”
³⁷
Now, on the run, he wrote to Varina. “I am unwilling to leave Va and do not know where within her borders the requisite houses
for the Depts and the Congress could be found,” he told his wife. “May God bless preserve and guide you.”
³⁸
His wife could reply only in shell-shocked horror:

The news of Richmond came upon me like the “abomination of desolation,” the loss of Selma like the “blackness thereof.” Mrs
Joe Johnston is here living with the cashier of the bank and his family and keeps a very pretty fancy carriage and horses.
. . . The Wigfalls are staying I believe with Mrs Johnston also. They arrived yesterday. I heard a funny account of Wigfalls
interview with Beauregard it seems he went to see him on his way to this place, and then the news of the evacuation of Richmond
came, and that the enemy had not yet entered the town. The Genl said Oh they do not understand the situation it is or ought
to be a plan of Lees to keep between Richmond and the enemy, if Grant attempts to throw troops between his army and Richmond
Lee can whip them in detail with which plan Wigfall was immensely satisfied.
³⁹

It was fantasy.

On April 7 Lee reached Farmville, west of Petersburg and halfway to Lynchburg, where his starving army received rations and
a short rest, but nearby, at High Bridge, the Federal army struck again at his rear guard. On this day Lincoln, who was at
City Point, wrote to Grant, “General Sheridan says ‘If the thing is pressed I think that Lee will surrender.’ Let the thing
be pressed.”
⁴⁰

The thing was pressed. By April 9 Lee was exhausted and surrounded at Appomattox Court House, with Sheridan’s cavalry and
the infantry of Maj. Gens. Edward O. C. Ord and Charles Griffin blocking his forward movement and the mass of Grant and Meade’s
army behind him. The jig was up. Lee was forced to meet Grant to discuss surrender terms in the village, and the officers
decided on the front parlor of the home of local Wilmer McLean as the best available place. “Shortly comes the order, in due
form, to cease firing and to halt,” wrote Brig. Gen. Joshua L. Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, “but the habit was too strong;
they cared not for points of direction, it was forward still,—forward to the end; forward to the new beginning; forward to
the Nation’s second birth!”

Deep irony attended the location: Grant and Lee would meet in the home of a man who had been driven from his house in Manassas,
Virginia, after First Bull Run. Wilmer McLean could state that the war began in his backyard and ended in his front parlor.
Lt. Col. Horace Porter, Grant’s aide, described encountering Lee before the meeting:

Lee . . . was fully six feet in height, and quite erect for one of his age, for he was Grant’s senior by sixteen years. His
hair and full beard were a silver-gray, and quite thick, except that the hair had become a little thin in front. He wore a
new uniform of Confederate gray, buttoned up to the throat, and at his side he carried a long sword of exceedingly fine workmanship,
the hilt studded with jewels. . . . His top-boots were comparatively new, and seemed to have on them some ornamental stitching
of red silk. . . . A felt hat, which in color matched pretty closely that of the uniform, and a pair of long buckskin gauntlets
lay beside him on the table.
⁴¹

Years of war, mountains of skulls, an ocean born of tear ducts, and now this, an end.

Grant’s generous terms were accepted by Lee, and as the Federal commander returned to the field, he admonished Union soldiers
celebrating the Rebels’ defeat. “The war is over—the rebels are our countrymen again,” said Grant. Lee bade farewell to his
beloved army and made plans to return to Richmond, like his soldiers, a paroled prisoner. “With an increasing admiration of
your constancy and devotion to your country,” he wrote to them, “and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration
of myself, I bid you an affectionate farewell.” “How can I write it?” wrote North Carolina diarist Catherine Edmondston. “How
find words to tell what has befallen us?
Gen Lee has surrendered!
. . . We stand appalled at our disaster! . . . [That]
Lee,
Lee upon whom hung the hopes of the whole country, should be a prisoner seems almost too dreadful to be realized!”
⁴²
There could be no colder water.

D
ESPITE
the fact that Lee’s army was just one of several left in the field, its surrender signaled an obvious end to the conflict.
Just five days later a symbolic ending seemed to come with the raising of Old Glory over Fort Sumter, the war’s starting place.
“The ceremony began with a short prayer by the old army chaplain who had prayed when the flag was hoisted over Fort Sumter
on December 27, 1860,” wrote Mary Cadwalader Jones, who witnessed the event. “Next a Brooklyn clergyman read parts of several
Psalms. . . . Then Sergeant Hart, who had held up the flag when its staff was shot through in the first attack, came forward
quietly and drew the selfsame flag out of an ordinary leather mail bag. We all held our breath for a second, and then we gave
a queer cry, between a cheer and a yell.”
⁴³

And then, just as the celebrations were gaining steam across the North, the unthinkable happened. On April 14 Abraham Lincoln
was assassinated by actor John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre in Washington. Lincoln died across Tenth Street, in the Petersen
House, at 7:22 the next morning. “The giant sufferer lay extended diagonally across the bed, which was not long enough for
him,” wrote Navy Secretary Gideon Welles. “He had been stripped of his clothes. His large arms, which were occasionally exposed,
were of a size which one would scarce have expected from his spare appearance. His slow, full respiration lifted the clothes
with each breath that he took. His features were calm and striking.”
⁴⁴

Lincoln’s death marked the end of any possibility of a smooth, peaceful reconciliation with the former states in rebellion.
Now, radical Republicans would rise to influence and help administer a stern era of Reconstruction. The heartaches of Reconstruction
would spread over the coming years: for now the war had to wind down. On April 17 at Durham Station, North Carolina, Maj.
Gen. William T. Sherman forced Gen. Joe Johnston’s army into an armistice. Nine days later, after managing the terms and negotiations
with the intervention of Grant and the War Department, Sherman received Johnston’s formal surrender at Bennett Place, a farm
at Durham Station. Johnston’s capitulation was the first of the series of smaller surrenders that followed Lee’s. On May 4
Lt. Gen. Richard Taylor, son of the twelfth U.S. president, surrendered his force at Citronville, Alabama. Six days later
Federal cavalry caught up with the flight of the official party from Richmond, which included Jefferson Davis and his family,
at Irwinville, Georgia. An overcoat hastily thrown over Davis’s form as he attempted escape incited nasty press in the North
about Davis’s supposed attempt to impersonate a woman. Also on March 10 Maj. Gen. Samuel Jones surrendered his force at Tallahassee,
Florida. The next day Col. M. Jeff Thompson, the famed partisan ranger, gave up his men at Chalk Bluff, Arkansas.

On May 12-13, at Palmito Ranch, Texas (near Brownsville), the last engagement of the Civil War was fought. The action, between
a few hundred soldiers on each side, ironically resulted in a decisive Confederate victory. But it was the last gasp of a
dead military effort. No more actions of significance took place, and on June 2 in Galveston, Texas, Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith
finally surrendered. The Confederacy was gone. “And now, with my latest writing and utterance, and with what will be near
to my latest breath, I here repeat, and would willingly proclaim, my unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule,” wrote Edmund Ruffin,
the fiery South Carolina secessionist, on June 18, “to all political, social, and business connection with the Yankees, and
to the perfidious, malignant, and vile Yankee race.”
⁴⁵
He then killed himself.

In Washington, despite the loss of their beloved commander, Northerners celebrated the war’s conclusion by marching their
two victorious armies through the streets of the capital city. On May 23, as the new President Johnson, Grant, and numerous
other officials and military officers watched, Meade’s Army of the Potomac, some eighty thousand strong, marched through the
city and down Pennsylvania Avenue. The next day Sherman’s Army of Georgia and Army of the Tennessee, together some sixty-five
thousand strong, marched the same route. The contrast between the well-dressed easterners and the dirty, exhausted westerners
(who had just undertaken a two-thousand-mile march) was striking. Bunting and other decor for the fallen president adorned
the whole triumphant city. Across the South Jefferson Davis was in captivity, and the Confederate army was out of commission.
The wishes of many a Confederate politician, many of those in the House and the Senate, many army officers, many bureau chiefs,
and even the vice president had come true. Jefferson Davis had lost his power as Confederate president—but not before the
whole cause of the Confederacy was also lost. Dixie was betrayed.

A
S
Sgt. John Worsham would remember it, the morning of April 2, 1865, had witnessed a soft haze settling over Richmond. It had
been a Sunday, and the Sabbath was marked by a clear blue sky and the occasional ringing of church bells. A visitor plunked
down within the city limits would have had no conception that a great war raged around the city and that its capture by Yankee
troops would come at any moment.

Northwest of Capitol Square, in his pew at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, had sat Jefferson Davis. The Confederate president,
along with many others in the city’s limits, had arrived to celebrate the sacrament of Communion.

At Seventh and Broad streets, just two blocks north of where Davis sat in church, Worsham had lain in his bed. He was not
derelict in duty or absent without leave; young Worsham, who had fought so well at the battle of the Wilderness with the Twenty-first
Virginia Infantry, had been wounded later in the tumultuous year of 1864. In the Shenandoah Valley, at the second battle of
Winchester, on September 19, a bullet had shattered Worsham’s left knee, sending him home to Richmond. “I cannot say that
I saw or heard much of what went on outside our house,” wrote Worsham, “as there was not a man on the place at the time except
myself, and the women were too much alarmed to go out.”
¹

Nonetheless, Worsham, unable to leave his bed except for brief moments spent on crutches, had heard a flurry of rumors on
that Sunday afternoon. About midnight on Monday morning, April 3, the house had awoken when a visitor called, and Worsham’s
room suddenly was invaded by family members and servants talking to a soldier, a friend of the family who had stopped to bid
them all good-bye. Shocked, the Worshams had learned that Jefferson Davis and his family had fled the city. The president’s
cabinet and other government officials of the Confederacy also had left. The Confederate archives had been carted away. Everything
had been loaded onto boxcars on the Richmond & Danville Railroad and sent south. The Confederate government had fled the capital
city—lock, stock, and barrel.

Moving in and out of sleep, Worsham had spent a restless night. Shortly before dawn, “a flash of light came into my room,
brighter than the brightest lightning,” he recalled. “It was accompanied immediately by a loud report that rumbled and shook
the house, and by a crash that sounded as if the front had fallen!”
²
The ladies of the house had run into Worsham’s room, followed by the servants. Thinking that a great quantity of powder had
exploded in the city’s warehouse district, the family had explored the house to find shattered windows letting in the sounds
of pandemonium from outside.

About sunrise the ladies of the family had discovered that a great fire was raging through Richmond. Fearing the whole city
would be up in flames before long, the Worshams had received a friend who stopped by to inform them that the rear guard of
General Lee’s army had set fire to the tobacco warehouses along Shockoe Slip, down by the river. Stores of military supplies
in the arsenals and magazines, along with goods in the Shockoe, Myers, Anderson, and public warehouses, had fueled the fires
so voraciously that the flames had spread to adjacent buildings, and the whole district south of Capitol Square was in danger
of going up in smoke.

Shouting and screaming on the streets had characterized the chaos that now was spreading throughout Richmond. Glass had been
broken, homes and stores looted. Fearful of Union savagery, citizens had taken all the liquor they could find and dumped it
in the streets.

Still early in the morning, a small African American child had brought Worsham his breakfast and then had asked, “Marse John,
let me run down to the corner and see if I can see any of the Yankees.” Returning a little while later, he had said, “Marse
John, they is here.”
³

All hell had broken loose. An enormous pall of smoke hung low over the city, illuminated from beneath by the warm glow of
orange fire. Worsham recalled that “large chunks of fire were falling on our house and in the yard.” The Worsham house had
actually caught fire several times, and each time the fire had been extinguished by a watchful house servant. The smoke around
the Worsham house had been so dense, he remembered, that the sun had not been visible for most of the day.