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It was a small party, consisting only of Varina; the children; Maggie Howell, Mrs. Davis’s sister; Burton Harrison, Davis’s personal secretary; two daughters of Secretary of the Treasury George Trenholm; two trusted black servants named Ellen and James Jones; and a young midshipman named James Morgan, who would act as the sole armed guard for the party. Though Federal forces were threatening the capital city and Union cavalry was roaming the countryside, Davis did not assign a military escort to protect his family. Varina, biographer of her husband, never speculated in print as to why the family did not rate a guard of soldiers when it would be venturing close to enemy-held territory. The president may have thought two things: if a military train was leaving Richmond with his family, it could create more notice and potential public panic, and second, if the train was approached by Union cavalry and the Confederate escort resisted, the Union soldiers might indiscriminately fire on the train without realizing that it carried only women and children.
Davis knelt and warmly embraced his children, showering them with kisses. The few bystanders standing on the station’s landing were shocked at his behavior. In public Davis was always reserved, barely acknowledging strangers and expressing reluctance even to shake hands. But in the presence of his own family or in the privacy of the Executive Mansion, he was an attentive, affectionate father, instantly on his knees to be eye to eye with his children. At home Varina had repeatedly admonished him to change out of his dress suits before rolling on the floor with his children. He had worn out many pairs of expensive dress pants crawling around on all fours playing with his children.
As the president stood and regained his public face, a tearful Maggie wrapped herself around his leg, begging him to come along with them, not to leave them alone. Jefferson, Jr., grabbed the other leg, begging to stay in Richmond with his father so he could help fight back the Yankees that even the small boy knew were coming soon. Jefferson, Jr., saw the fighting in the trenches at Petersburg and knew what death meant. Though he was only 7, he wanted to be a man. He wanted to stay behind and help his father save the Confederacy.
Davis, fighting back his own tears, hugged his children again and whispered in their ears that he would see them again soon. He pulled out his purse and emptied it into Varina’s handbag. He kept only a five-dollar gold piece for himself. In his pocket was an uncashed check for $28,000, money Varina had raised by selling off most of her good jewelry and dresses in Richmond’s stores. There had been no time to cash it before the banks closed that day. The check would never be cashed.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m. The rain continued down in torrents, making final, whispered good-byes impossible because the rain crashing into the clay tiles of the train station’s roof made quiet conversation difficult.
As the train chugged away, belching smoke from the green, un-seasoned wood its crews were forced to burn because all the dried wood had long since been burned or captured, Davis waved at his family. A rare smile was on his face as he tried to convince his family they would soon be reunited. While the children might have been fooled, Varina was not.
“He looked as though he was looking his last upon us,” she remembered.
Davis pulled his raglan overcoat around him and then trudged alone back to the Executive Mansion, slipping and sliding up the flooding, clay streets.
What Davis did not learn until more than a month later when he rendezvoused with his family was that Varina’s train had barely made it twelve miles before stopping for the night. The engine’s steam power was so weak, probably from a combination of a leaking firebox and boiler and from the green wood, that it could not negotiate a slight grade in the driving rain. The engineer decided to wait until morning when he hoped the sun would dry the tracks so the engine could get enough traction to top the grade.
At some point, either immediately before leaving Richmond or on board the leaky baggage car, Varina wrote a letter to General John S. Preston, a friend who had suffered much public criticism because his duty was to enforce the 1863 conscription law that drafted thousands of men into the ranks who had not volunteered earlier in the war. The letter, apparently misdated either by accident or by design if Varina was trying to conceal the date she actually left Richmond, reveals a woman at once in fear for her country and for her husband’s continued welfare now that she was no longer at home to care for him. It is also remarkable for its vagueness as to whom she is speaking about.
In the letter Varina mentions “Mr. Davis” only twice deep in the text, which she signed with a false name. Her use of a pseudonym in writing the letter was employed in the event she was captured on the way south. Varina hoped to keep her own identity secret, and if any Union officer actually read the letter, she hoped he would miss the passing references to her husband’s name of Mr. Davis rather than President Davis. In the letter it is clear that while Varina’s husband was publicly insisting the Confederacy could live on, his wife knew better than to hold on to an impossible dream.
Varina wrote:
My heart is sadder today than I can readily communicate to you at this distance. Affairs seem darker, the spirit of the people daily more depressed, women tremblingly come to me and beg me to say what I can to comfort them. All I can say is that my husband will never cry for quarter [mercy] and all we can hope for is that the spirit of the people may enable him to defend the women and children of our unhappy land…. Mr. Davis look sworn and exhausted, prays without ceasing and hopes for better than I can foresee arguing from the signs of the times.
She ended the letter on a sad note: “Excuse this scrawl; I am so depressed and uncertain of our future that I cannot successfully arrange my thoughts.”
THAT SAME NIGHT of March 30, 1865, back at the Executive Mansion, now empty of children’s laughter, Davis sat down to write his own remarkable letter to one of his oldest friends, General Braxton Bragg. During the Mexican War Davis’s regiment had saved Bragg’s artillery battery from capture or annihilation at the Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847. The crucible of war in those few minutes of hot combat had made the two fast friends for life. He opened up to Bragg: “We both entered into this war at the beginning of it; we both staked everything on the issue, and lost all which either public or private enemies could take away,” Davis wrote.
To a close friend—but not to the Confederacy’s citizens—Davis had just admitted that the war was lost. Publicly, Davis took the opposite tack. Over the next month, the president would declare to everyone who would listen that the Confederacy could still—and would—win the war.
Davis apparently made no other plans in advance for his and the cabinet’s own escape. For the next three days, he worked from his official office three blocks away or from his home office in the Confederate Executive Mansion. He was constantly checking reports from Lee and from distant battlefields in Alabama. Without Varina around to force him into a healthy schedule of work followed by relaxation, he ate little and slept little. She had undoubtedly forced him to make a promise to her that he would eat more, but when she was not around, he always broke that promise. Davis had never eaten much, but had never made any connection that his lifelong poor health and regular attacks of neuralgia may have been linked to his poor diet.
When the sun rose on April 2, 1865, he had no idea that by the end of the day he would be a president on the run. The end of the Confederacy was obvious to all who would look and listen, but Davis, true to form, had made no plans for running.
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