First Lady Of The South: The Life Of Mrs. Jefferson Davis by Ishbel Ross

Author:Ishbel Ross [Ross, Ishbel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786258533
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Golden Springs Publishing
Published: 2016-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

14—A PRESIDENT IS CAPTURED

SHORTLY before dawn, as stifling mists rose from the nearby swamps, shots crackled through the stillness that enfolded the camp where Varina and Jefferson Davis slept. Their tents were pitched close to a little stream bordered with a narrow thicket and some trees that shut them off from the road. Wagons, horses, and the other tents were some distance away, across the road.

Jim Jones, who was on guard as he washed Winnie’s things at the campfire, roused the President, who had intended to leave the night before. His horse waited by a tree. His pistols were in their holster attached to his saddle. Varina explained that he had been bilious and was so worn out from constant traveling that he had decided to stay where he was until morning.{435}

Since they were all on the alert for the expected marauders, Varina’s first thought was that they were being raided. But when the President stepped to the tent flap and watched the movements of the horsemen, his experienced military observation persuaded him, even through the morning mists, that they were enemy cavalry and not raiders. He turned back and told Varina that he believed them to be Northern troops. Actually two detachments of Union men, Wisconsin and Michigan cavalry, were on the scene, unconscious of the prize awaiting them.

Varina reacted at once in her impulsive way, and begged him to flee. She instantly saw the menace to him, but did not believe that she or the children would be in danger if they stayed. Unwilling to leave his family, Davis hesitated, “and lost a few precious moments before yielding to her importunities,” he later commented.{436}

There are many versions of what occurred after that, but a letter written by Varina to Francis P. Blair from Savannah on June 6, 1865, gave her most immediate impressions of the agonizing hours that followed. She wrote:

“Knowing he would be recognized I pled with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer season for a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat and after he started sent my colored woman after him with a bucket of water, hoping that he would pass unobserved.”{437}

It was an impulsive act and one for which both paid dearly. It led to national ridicule, to cartoons of Jeff Davis in petticoats and poke bonnet, to gibes that wounded them deeply. In the last year of her life Varina was still protesting that her husband had no intention of disguising himself, and that in throwing the shawl over his head she was doing no more than any wife might have done under similar circumstances. “Could the tortures wantonly inflicted when he was a helpless prisoner,

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