Pursuit:. Clint Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ fall, Benjamin had even infuriated General Samuel Cooper, the ranking general in the Confederate army who had never taken a field command. Cooper walked into the secretary of state’s office to find Benjamin’s clerks packing boxes of records. Instead of helping sort through the valuable and the mundane, Benjamin was sitting on top of a box singing and whistling an improvisational tune he called “The Exit from Shockhoe Hill.” Cooper was incensed that the secretary of state would be cracking jokes about the impending flight of high-ranking Confederates from the city they had sworn to protect.

      Benjamin’s jolly appearance was really a front to hide his nervousness about what would happen to the Confederate cabinet if and when it fell into the hands of the United States. After the war, the French counsel to the Confederacy, Alfred Paul, wrote that the last time he saw Benjamin was immediately after the cabinet meeting.

      “I found him extremely agitated, his hands shaking, wanting and trying to do and say everything at once,” Paul recalled.

      The jolly demeanor Benjamin had posed in front of his fellow cabinet officers was gone in front of a single friend.

      Reagan of Texas, 46, was a postmaster general and a master administrator though he too had little to do with more of the South falling into Union hands every day. Not only had Reagan built a postal system from scratch that could deliver a letter from one end of the Confederacy to the other in a few weeks, it also made money for the Confederate government. He too was a former U.S. congressman.

      Trenholm, fifty-eight, had been secretary of the treasury less than a year. He knew how to make money in his civilian life as he had built a personal fortune running goods into the South from a fleet of blockade-runners. On the other hand, Trenholm’s skills at managing a system of collecting taxes and setting up realistic government budgets had bested him as it had previous treasury secretaries. Though the government still had considerable hard assets in the bank vaults of Richmond, his duties were more important than ever if the government was to survive. Unfortunately, Trenholm was very ill. He suffered, like Davis, from neuralgia, a neurological condition that would frequently send shockwaves of paralyzing pain into his face without warning.

      Rather than hold up the meeting, Davis sent an aide to inform the missing Attorney General George Davis (no relation to the president) to be at the train station that night. Davis, 45, was a reluctant secessionist from North Carolina but a good lawyer. Like Trenholm, he had not held a high elective office in the United States government before the formation of the Confederacy. But again like Trenholm, Attorney General Davis proved to be a valuable asset because he gave unbiased advice based on his experience as a private businessman. All the other cabinet members were politicians who gave fawning advice filtered through years of public service of pandering to other officeholders and to a fickle voting public.

      Davis called the meeting to order and quickly got to business. He read Lee’s telegram and told his cabinet to pack all critical papers and be prepared to leave that night. The meeting was over in a matter of minutes.

      Few of the men were surprised that the evacuation of Richmond as a Confederate capital had come. Davis himself had spent the previous night helping aides box records so that they would be ready to be transported or destroyed on his order.

      The cabinet’s choice of where to flee was limited to one direction. Since the Southside Railroad just west of Petersburg had been captured, that left only the recently completed Richmond & Danville Railroad leading to Danville, Virginia, 140 miles to the southwest. That city was on the North Carolina border, linked by rail to Greensboro, about 40 miles south of Danville. At that moment Johnston’s army, shattered and demoralized after the Battle of Bentonville two weeks earlier, was encamped at Smithfield, North Carolina, about 110 miles or five days march to the east of Greensboro. That army, as weak and recently defeated as it was, would play into Davis’s vision of continuing the fight for the Confederacy.

      Once Davis dismissed the meeting, the sickly Trenholm and other clerks rushed to pack what was left of the Confederate treasury. At least $600,000 in gold was packed into wooden boxes. Most of the money was in gold coins minted in both Mexico and the United States. The coins had been deposited into the treasury early in the war by merchants and financiers confident in the long-term survival of the Confederacy. They exchanged their coins for paper notes so that the Confederate treasury could honestly tell its citizens that the paper money and bonds being issued were backed by hard assets of gold and silver held in vaults in the Confederate capital.

      Davis went back to the Confederate White House where he told the servants to pack up the valuables of the residence and to give them to neighbors for safekeeping. Though he did not want to leave behind anything of true value, Davis also ordered that they do the stripping carefully. Always a perfectionist, Davis wanted the house to look presentable to any Union officer who would occupy it. It was what Southern gentlemen of his generation had been taught—to be polite even to your enemies.

      He gave his servants precise instructions, including removing the family cow from the backyard so that she would not be butchered by the invading Federals. Davis followed through on a promise to Varina by crating a bust of him that she favored. That bust was sent to a neighbor who promised to hide it. Another neighbor refused to take Varina’s carriage out of fear that Union troops would harm his family or property if Davis’s possessions were discovered in his care.

      Though the servants were confused over what to pack and what to leave, Davis coolly kept his head, even taking time to think of people who might benefit from some of the things he wanted removed from the house. He sent his favorite easy chair to the Franklin Street home where Mrs. Robert E. Lee had been living for the past several months. Crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, Mrs. Lee needed a wheel-chair to get around. Davis thought she would welcome the addition of an easy chair to her home.

      Into the midst of the maelstrom of activity at the Executive Mansion arrived former U.S. senator Clement Clay, of Alabama. When Davis expressed surprise at seeing his former Senate colleague, Clay, 48 years old and heavily bearded, joked: “I am probably the last man in the Confederate service to seek to enter Richmond. The trend of Confederate travel seems to be in just the opposite direction.”

      While the thought apparently never crossed his mind, Davis might have more closely considered his immediate offer to Clay to join the Confederate cabinet on the escape from the city. His association with Clay throughout 1864 and now at this late date of the war would give the U.S. government reason to believe the two old friends were more like criminal collaborators.

      While the first leg of the cabinet’s escape would be by rail, escape from the Confederacy by ocean had been an occasional topic with Davis. Before Varina had left with the children, her husband told her to “make for the Florida coast and from there board a ship to a foreign country.”

      It may not have been by chance that two of the men who would be accompanying Davis to Danville had skills that could come in handy should the party make it to a coast.

      One was Confederate navy commander John Taylor Wood, Davis’s nephew by his first wife and grandson of former president Zachary Taylor. The 34-year-old Taylor, a Minnesota native, had declined to follow his father into the army. Instead, he joined the United States Navy as a 17-year-old midshipman. He later won an appointment to the United States Naval Academy, graduating in 1853. He spent the next eight years at sea chasing slave-trading ships and as an instructor at the academy. In 1861 he resigned from the United States Navy and joined the Confederate navy as one of its most experienced officers.

      After early, wasted appointments commanding shore batteries, Taylor was assigned to the CSS Virginia, the ironclad that fought the USS Monitor. After leading several raids to capture Union vessels in 1862, exploits so dangerous and successful that he won the rare official thanks of the Confederate Congress, Taylor was invited by his uncle to be a military aide. Davis rewarded his nephew with the rank of colonel СКАЧАТЬ