Pursuit:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ states gave up and returned to the Union. That much they understood from the meeting because Lincoln had not permitted any notes to be taken to produce an official transcript as to who said what and who offered what to whom.

      It had been a promising meeting where peace was discussed, but the Confederate commissioners returned to Richmond knowing no matter what the Union had offered, Davis would not agree to surrender the idea of the Confederacy as a separate nation from the Union. He was committed to an independent Confederacy.

      On the evening of February 6, 1865, not long after the commissioners had returned, the president addressed a large crowd in the auditorium of Richmond’s African Church, a church that slave owners had built so that their people could worship in the city. On every other day but Sunday, the African Church was a favorite speaking spot for politicians because it featured a large auditorium, larger than any white church in the city.

      Davis, a man normally taciturn in his dealings with the public, came alive with a rousing, extemporaneous speech condemning Lincoln for demanding the surrender of the Confederacy.

      At one point Davis exclaimed:

      We must lock shields together and go forward to save our country, or sink together to honorable graves…. If our disagreements result from passion we must exorcise it, and make the good of our country our sole aim. If we will all do our duty, we shall reap a brilliant reward. If the absentees from our armies will return, and if the local assistance be rendered which may be readily afforded, the noble Army of Northern Virginia will read General Grant a yet severer lesson than it taught him from the Rapidan to the James; while the gallant Beauregard will cause Sherman’s march across Georgia to be his last.

      Immediately after hearing Davis’s speech, Vice President Stephens left Richmond for his Georgia home. He did not share Davis’s optimism that the South could rise again. In his 1870 book, A Constitutional View of the War, Stephens remarked that Davis’s speech was “not only bold and undaunted in tone, but had that loftiness of sentiment and rare form of expression, as well as magnetic influence in its delivery by which the people are moved to their profoundest depths.”

      Stephens was not the only person inspired by Davis, who previously had a reputation for giving slow-moving policy speeches. The president’s off-the-cuff remarks were wildly applauded by the audience and reported favorably by newspapers that usually criticized the administration’s handling of the war.

      Stephens himself refused to offer any rousing speeches.

      Stephens said:

      I could not undertake to impress upon the minds of the people the idea that they could do what I believed to be impossible, or to inspire in them hopes which I did not believe could be realized.

      While Stephens remembered being impressed with the speech in his 1870 book, he made an earlier assessment of it while languishing as a political prisoner in the summer of 1865 in Fort Warren, a cold stone fort in Boston’s harbor. Stephens twice wrote in his diary that he thought Davis must have lost his mind to be so optimistic when the nation’s capital was almost cut off from the rest of the Confederacy. One diary entry recorded on June 21, 1865, reads: “When he made that speech in Richmond, brilliant though it was, I looked upon it as nothing short of dementation.”

      BY APRIL 2, 1865, the burst of Confederate patriotism bolstered by Davis’s widely reported February speech had faded with the reality that talk did nothing to throw back the armies of Grant and Sherman. In the fifty-five days since Davis had given his African Church speech, at one point predicting that “before another summer solstice falls upon us, it will be the enemy that will be asking us for conferences,” the Confederacy had been dealt even more blows. It would be a long, cold, hard spring before the solstice Davis predicted would arrive.

      In those fifty-five days, the war in the upstate of the Carolinas, a section of the South that had seen few battles or even scouting forays by the Federals, turned heavily against the Confederacy. Sherman had crossed the Savannah River into South Carolina and then slashed his way northward, burning farms and towns until he captured the state capital of Columbia on February 17. Much of the capital city burned to the ground that same night. On that same day, Charleston, the city where the war had started, surrendered after nearly two years of constant shelling of its civilian population.

      North Carolina was not faring any better. Wilmington surrendered on February 22. After securing the town, another Union force was on the march west toward the interior of the state, intending to link up with Sherman’s forces. Sherman burned the armory at Fayetteville, and then headed north. Along the way he defeated the Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s cobbled-together forces at the three-day Battle of Bentonville from March 19 to 21. Johnston’s army limped away to the west after the battle, lucky that it was not totally destroyed.

      Now, three weeks later, nothing stood between Sherman and North Carolina’s capital at Raleigh but the battered and bruised forces of Johnston. His men could not survive another battle with Sherman. Both generals knew that fact.

      Confederates in Virginia were also fighting losing battles. On March 2, the last of the Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley was defeated. There was so little Confederate opposition left in the Valley that Union general Phillip Sheridan abandoned the region and moved east to join Grant for the final assaults on the Army of Northern Virginia.

      Grant, who had lost tens of thousands of men assaulting Confederate lines over the past year as Lee slowly retreated toward Richmond, was now content to starve the Confederates into submission as they lay in their muddy trenches. Grant knew Lee’s men still had fight left in them. On March 25 Lee’s men briefly broke through Grant’s lines at Fort Stedman near Petersburg, but they were pushed back, effectively demonstrating to Lee that Grant’s army was too strong to be defeated.

      The end was near. Everyone but Davis could sense it, could feel it, and could see it.

      THE FINAL FATE of the Confederacy was sealed an hour before the sun rose on April 2, 1865, when Grant ordered an assault on the Confederate trenches on the south side of Petersburg. At 4:40 a.m. the Union Sixth Corps under Major General Horatio Wright boiled out of the ground like yellow jackets in the direction of the Confederate trenches along the Boydton Plank Road. The 10,000 Federals rushing the Confederate trenches were grateful for the darkness. It made them harder targets.

      Though some Union men suspected this to be the last big fight they would ever have with the Confederates they had been harassing for more than a year, others believed it was just one more futile attack on a well-dug-in enemy. The Federals had been told repeatedly over those last nine months that one day soon the Confederates would give up because the Petersburg civilians were demoralized by the constant shelling. They had been told the Confederates were starving, reduced to eating rats for meat, and boiling their own shoe leather for soup.

      But each day of the first three months of 1865 had passed without any sign of a white flag being raised over the Confederate trenches.

      These Sixth Corps men were going to be careful with their lives. All it would take was one hard, concentrated volley from the Confederate trenches, and the first wave of the assault would drop dead on the ground like harvested, blue-clad wheat.

      But as the corps rushed forward over the shell-pocked, grass-barren ground, there was no concentrated musket volley from the Confederate trenches, no hailstorm of canister coming from Lee’s cannons. Confederate deserters had confessed to Grant and Wright that their trenches were barely manned after months of siege, disease, and desertions. The Confederate defenders were standing ten feet apart rather than shoulder to shoulder, as they should have been.

      To their surprise and relief, Wright’s corps swept over and СКАЧАТЬ