Lincoln's Secret Spy by Jane Singer & John Stewart

Author:Jane Singer & John Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

13

Leaving Dixie

It was April 2, 1865: A day fraught with panic. A night of terror. The Yankees were coming. Frightened residents hastily packed foodstuffs and china, boxes and baggage. Flee. Die at the hands of the invaders. No one knew. Under the cover of darkness trains had left, carrying soldiers, government documents, officials, and their families who’d leapt aboard. Crowds thronged the streets, pressed against the Richmond & Danville Railroad depot doors, desperate to get on a train out. Others crammed into carriages and horse carts, dragging trunks and baggage, possessions, pets, all in a panicked horde, fleeing the city. Some jumped in the James River, trying to swim away. Crowds of slaves prayed that “Father Abraham’s” promise of freedom was truly theirs at last.350

It was 11:30 p.m. Another half hour and the chimes of midnight would ring. If Jefferson Davis’s train didn’t get out within the next few minutes, and across the Mayo Bridge into Chesterfield County, the president, the entire Confederate cabinet, dozens of officials, clerks, all the passengers on all the cars would all be stuck in the capital to await the occupying Union forces thundering toward Richmond.

Somewhere in the madness of the night the rebel capital died. William Alvin Lloyd, Virginia, Clarence, and Nellie joined panicked throngs in a crush to seek safety, somewhere . . . anywhere. Perhaps the Lloyd party was obscured by smoke, the dense black smoke that billowed from Engine Number 24 as it waited patiently for the president who had not yet arrived.

Early that morning, General Grant broke Lee’s lines at Petersburg, and at 10:40 the awful news arrived at the Confederate war department—the government would have to flee Richmond. Jefferson Davis called an emergency cabinet meeting at noon. An hour later the evacuation of the capital started. As Richmond diarist Sallie Brock tells us, terror penetrated into every house. “Union troops, no longer obstructed, streamed toward Richmond.” At 7 o’clock that evening, Richmond received the last in a series of telegrams from Lee, repeating his urgent advice: “I think it absolutely necessary that we abandon our position to-night.”351

And now, approaching midnight, where was Jefferson Davis? Time, there was no time. Finally, Davis and E. L. Harvie, president of the railroad, came out of the office where they’d been sequestered for the last hour with Secretary of War Breckinridge. Stay or go? Davis was fevered, conflicted, in denial. He’d lingered, praying, hoping for a turn of events that would never come. At last, Davis climbed aboard.

Like many others who would say they were on the car that carried the president away, William Alvin Lloyd claimed that he, Virginia, Clarence, and Nellie were there, though not in the presidential car, but in another car, one of a long line of cars.

And of what was happening in the city, “After nightfall,” Sallie Brock wrote, “Richmond was ruled by the mob.”352 Many government documents, the valuable leavings of a government abandoning its capital, were strewn about, pitched from windows or burnt to ash in great pyres.

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