Pursuit:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ he noted Union prisoners being transported in daylight rather than at night, which had been the custom throughout the war. Within a block he stopped a panicked government clerk who told him that the cabinet was leaving. On his own, without any orders from Mallory, Parker evacuated all the midshipmen from the Patrick Henry and ordered it burned later that night to keep it out of the hands of the Federals. He then put his cadets on the march toward the train station. He had not anticipated that Mallory’s order meant the cadets would be leaving Richmond and the muskets, with which they had probably rarely trained, were to be used to protect the Confederacy’s last stocks of wealth.

      Parker was struck by how quiet the city seemed to be, particularly since everyone knew the Yankees would soon be entering it.

      “Perhaps the pale, sad faces of the ladies aided to bring it about [the ‘peculiar quiet’]. They knew it was impossible for them to leave, and they prepared to share the fate of their beloved city with the same heroism they had exhibited during the past four years,” Parker wrote.

      The midshipmen guarded the treasure train with the fierce determination of youth, keeping curious citizens and potential thieves back with all the looks of seriousness they could muster on their whiskerless faces. All the boys had been told what was in the wooden boxes, but they had no thoughts of stealing it. They were more interested in winning their place in the history of the war.

      Parker and the boys waited at the station for the departure of the first train in line that would be carrying the cabinet. He observed that Davis “preserved his usual calm and dignified manner” and that Breckinridge “was as cool and gallant as ever,” but the rest of the cabinet’s nervousness was showing: “[They] had the air of wishing to be off.”

      Finally, around 11:00 p.m. on the night of April 2, more than three hours after the deadline Lee had set for the cabinet to leave the city, Davis’s train pulled out of the station. The treasury train was delayed until all of Richmond’s banks had loaded their paper money. Parker warned his boys to be ready for trouble because the social order of the city was breaking down as deserters and street ruffians sensed that no one in authority was left to keep them from breaking into warehouses.

      Someone in authority ordered that the city’s whiskey barrels be broken and turned over to prevent just the sort of unruliness that was starting to sweep the city. Parker watched in disgust as men and women used their own shoes and boots to scoop up whiskey flowing down street gutters.

      Just before his train was ready to leave, Parker heard a series of explosions that marked the end of the James River Squadron, including his own CSS Patrick Henry. Not long after the explosions, Parker noticed that fires had begun to break out around the city, a result of the insistence by General Richard Ewell, commander of the Confederate forces protecting the city, that cotton bales stored in the city’s warehouses be burned rather than just pouring turpentine over them to make them worthless.

      Finally, four hours after the cabinet’s train had left, Parker’s treasure train pulled out of the station.

      Left on the platform were Richmonders who now knew they would have to return to their homes and face the Yankees who were expected to arrive at any minute. Parker described it as a “horror” to leave so many friends behind to an unknown fate.

      Among those still standing on the platform were fifty slaves. Just before the second train left, a slave trader named Lumpkin approached the platform with a chain gang of fifty black men and women that he hoped to sell to someone down the line. When Lumpkin was turned away at rifle point by the midshipmen, the man simply unlocked the chains and shooed his happy former property into the darkness. At a prewar cost of at least $1,000 per able field hand, Lumpkin had just given up more than $50,000.

      Within a few minutes of the treasure train passing over the rail bridge over the James River and within a few hours of the Confederate cabinet leaving the city, civilization seemed to dissolve in Richmond.

      As the Seventh South Carolina Cavalry, part of Gary’s cavalry brigade rear guard, pushed through the Rocketts section of Richmond on its way to the southwest side of the city to cross the James, Lieutenant Colonel Edward M. Boykin noted:

      The peculiar population of that suburb were gathering on the sidewalk; bold, dirty looking women, who had evidently not been improved by four years’ military association, dirtier (if possible) looking children, and here and there skulking, scoundrelly looking men, who in the general ruin were sneaking from the holes they had been hiding in.

      As he rode, Boykin noted “bare-headed women” looting warehouses as he watched:

      A scene that beggars description, and which I hope never to see again—the saddest of many of the sad sights of the war—a city undergoing pillage at the hands of its own mob, which the standards of an empire were being taken from its capitol, and the tramp of a victorious enemy could be heard at its gate.

      Richmond had collected within its walls the refuse of the war—thieves and deserters, male and female, the vilest of the vile were there, but strict military discipline had kept it down. Now, in one moment, it was all removed—all restraint was taken off—and you may imagine the consequences.

      As he rode down Franklin Street (past the house where Mrs. Robert E. Lee was living), Boykin sadly observed:

      At the windows we could see the sad and tearful faces of the kind Virginia women, who had never failed the soldier in four long years of war and trouble, ready to the last to give him devoted attendance in his wounds and sickness, and to share with his necessities the last morsel.

      As Gary himself passed over the Mayo Bridge, he called out to the man assigned to demolish the bridge: “Blow her to Hell!”

      As generals Gary and Ewell rode away, they stopped on a high plain on the south bank of the James and watched as fires seemed to spring up at dozens of places within the city. Ewell’s orders to burn the military warehouses had been carried out, but as the citizens feared, the fires were already getting out of control and spreading to the residential areas. Richmond, the city that had withstood numerous Union campaigns that brought the blue-coated enemy so close they could hear the city’s church bells, had not fallen to an enemy attack. It was set ablaze by the men who had spent the last four years defending the capital city.

      The Union soldiers would put out the fires and push into the city within hours of the last Confederates passing over the bridges. Among the first Union soldiers to put down their muskets and pick up fire hoses and axes would be several regiments of United States Colored Troops, freed slaves who had joined the Union army to free other blacks. Instead of letting the Confederate capital burn to the ground, these black men who had every reason to hate Richmond helped save it.

      With the two escaping trains huffing and puffing down the Danville line into the darkness with its unknown dangers, Davis and the Confederate cabinet were now officially on the run. The attempt to continue the war without a capital city to defend had begun.

      CHAPTER 3

      “My Husband Will Never Cry for Quarter”

      BEFORE HE LEFT FOR THE TRAIN STATION that Sunday night, April 2, President Jefferson Davis took time out of completing his official duties to attend to some personal business. Even with tens of thousands of Union soldiers marching on Richmond and with all the details of evacuating the cabinet and the Confederate treasury to be tended to, Davis sat down at his desk to write a letter to his wife, Varina.

      Davis loved writing and receiving letters, and he expected everyone in his family to share his desire to communicate. The written word helped him express thoughts and emotions that he often could not—or СКАЧАТЬ