The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (169 page)

Four days ago, at the time of Lee’s latest warning that Richmond was to be given up, he had told her she must prepare to leave without him. “My headquarters for the future may be in the field, and your presence would embarrass and grieve me instead of giving comfort.” Though she begged to stay and help relieve the tension, he was firm in refusal. “You can do this in but one way: by going yourself and taking the children to a place of safety. If I live, you can come to me when the struggle is ended,” he said: adding, however, that he did not “expect to survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.” Regretfully she began her preparations for departure, hampered by his insistence that she not ask friends to look after the family silver, lest they be “exposed to inconvenience or outrage” when the Yankees took the city. So she sent the silver, together with some of the furniture, to an auctioneer for sale under the hammer. Then she “made the mistake,” as she later said, of telling her husband that she intended to take along several barrels of flour she had bought — at the going price of $1500 a barrel — to help withstand the expected siege. He forbad this, saying flatly: “You can’t take anything in the shape of food from here. The people need it.” Saddened, she turned to packing what little was left, mainly clothes for herself and the four children, who ranged in age from ten years to nine months.

Others had done what Varina Davis was doing now, though with less conscientious interference by their husbands with regard to such household items as flour and silver. Since early February, foreseeing that the end of winter meant the end of Richmond, men of substance had been sending their wives and children to outlying estates, north and west of the threatened capital, or to North Carolina towns and cities so far spared a visit from Sherman. All through March the railway stations were crowded with well-off “refugees” boarding trains to avoid the holocaust at hand. Having no choice, those with nowhere to go (and no money either to pay the fare or live on when they got there) remained, as did the heads of families whose government duties or business interests required their presence; with the result that by the time the First Lady started packing, alerted for a sudden removal to
Charlotte, where Davis had rented a house for her and the children, Richmond’s population was predominantly black and poor and male. A sizeable group among these last had been composed of the 105 congressmen and 26 senators, most of them eager for adjournment so they too could get aboard the cars rattling westward, away from the seven-hilled capital and the blue flood lapping the earthworks east and south — muddy dikes buttressed only by the scarecrow infantry under Lee, who was rumored to have given the government notice that they would not be there long.

In any case, these 131 elected representatives of the people felt that they had done all they could by March 18, when they adjourned and scattered for their homes, those who still had them. And, indeed, they had done much this term: including the unthinkable. After long and sometimes acrimonious debate, the House on February 20 and the Senate on March 8 authorized the enlistment of Negroes for service in the armies of the Confederacy. On March 13 a joint bill to that effect was forwarded for approval by the Chief Executive, who promptly signed it despite objections that it fell considerably short of what he — and Pat Cleburne, fifteen months ago — had wanted. For one thing, the recruits must all be volunteers, and at second hand at that; only “such able-bodied slaves as might be patriotically rendered by their masters” were to be accepted, although the President was authorized to call on the states to fill their respective quotas, limited in each case to no more than one fourth of its male slaves between the ages of eighteen and forty-five. Moreover, while it was stipulated that Negro soldiers were to receive the same pay, rations, and clothing as other troops, no mention was made of emancipation as a reward for military service, and it was even stressed in a final rider that nothing in the act was “to be construed to authorize a change in the relation which the said slaves shall bear toward their owners, except by the consent of their owners and of the states in which they may reside.” Mainly, though, Davis regretted the extended debate that had kept the bill so long from his desk. “Much benefit is anticipated from this measure,” he remarked, “though far less than would have resulted from its adoption at an earlier date, so as to afford time for organization and instruction during the winter months.”

Grim as the warnings leading up to passage of the act had been, the fulminations that followed were even grimmer. “If we are right in passing this measure,” Robert Hunter told his fellow senators, “we were wrong in denying the old government the right to interfere with the institution of slavery and to emancipate slaves.” Howell Cobb agreed, writing from Georgia: “Use all the Negroes you can get, for the purposes for which you need them” — cooking, digging, chopping, and such — “but don’t arm them. The day you make soldiers of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution. If slaves will make good
soldiers our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” Even Robert Kean, head of the Bureau of War, who knew better than most the urgent need for men in the ranks of the nation’s armies, saw nothing but evil proceeding from a measure which, he noted in his diary, “was passed by a panic in the Congress and the Virginia Legislature, under all the pressure the President indirectly, and General Lee directly, could bring to bear. My own judgment of the whole thing is that it is a colossal blunder, a dislocation of the foundations of society from which no practical results will be reaped by us.” Robert Toombs, after his brief return to the service during Sherman’s march through Georgia, was strongest of all in condemnation of this attempt to convert the Negro into a soldier; a Confederate soldier, anyhow. “In my opinion,” he wrote from his plantation in Wilkes County, where he had put down a full crop of cotton last year in response to a Davis proclamation calling on planters to shift to food crops, “the worst calamity that could befall us would be to gain our independence by the valor of our slaves.… The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.”

Toombs need not have fretted about the prospect of disgrace to his former comrades, either in Virginia or elsewhere. For though the army, by and large, had favored adoption of the measure (144 out of 200 men in an Alabama regiment, for example, signed a petition addressed to Congress in its favor, and the proportion was about the same in a Mississippi outfit) the legislation failed in application: not so much because of the shortness of “time for organization and instruction,” of which Davis had complained, as because of a lack of support by the owners of prospective black recruits — and possibly by the slaves themselves, though of the latter there was little chance to judge. Some few came or were sent forward to Richmond before the end of March; new gray uniforms were somehow found for them, and there was even a drill ceremony in Capitol Square, performed to the shrill of fifes and throb of drums; but that was all. Small boys jeered and threw rocks at the paraders, not one of whom reached the firing line while there was still a firing line to reach.

Nor was it only on this side of the Atlantic that the proposal to invoke the assistance of the Negro in the struggle which so intimately concerned him failed to achieve its purpose. Judah Benjamin, ever willing to play any last card in his hand, had written to Mason and Slidell in late December, instructing them to sound out the British prime minister and the French emperor, respectively, as to what effect a Confederate program for emancipation — “not suddenly and all at once, but so far as to insure abolition in a fair and reasonable time” — might have on their views with regard to recognition of the Confederacy and possible intervention in the war. Napoleon rather blandly replied that slavery had never been an issue so far as France was concerned,
and Lord Palmerston said much the same of England in an interview on March 14 with Mason, who wrote Benjamin that he was “satisfied that the most ample concessions on our part in the matter referred to would have produced no change in the course determined by the British government.” Twelve days later, in conversation with the Earl of Donoughmore, a Tory leader friendly to the South, the Virginian’s view was confirmed by a franker response to the same question. If the proposal had been made in midsummer of 1863, while Lee was on the march in Pennsylvania, the earl did not doubt that recognition would have followed promptly. But that was then. What about now? Mason asked, and afterwards informed the Secretary: “He replied that the time had gone by.”

It would have been at best a deathbed conversion, and as such would have lacked the validity of conviction and free will. Meantime, opponents of the earlier and more limited proposal — to induct blacks into the army, even without the promise of freedom as a reward for any suffering short of death — were no doubt pleased that, in practical application, the Lost Cause was spared this ultimate “stain” on its record. In any case the Confederacy’s chief opponent, Abraham Lincoln, professed not to care one way or another about the success or failure of the experiment. “There is one thing about the Negro’s fighting for the rebels which we can know as well as they can,” he remarked, “and that is that they cannot at the same time fight in their armies and stay home and make bread for them. And this being known and remembered, we can have but little concern whether they become soldiers or not.” Something else he saw as well, and when news of the action by the Richmond lawmakers reached Washington he expressed it in an address to an Indiana regiment passing through the capital on March 17, six days before he set out down the coast for City Point. “I am rather in favor of the measure,” he told the Hoosiers, “and would at any time, if I could, have loaned them a vote to carry it. We have to reach the bottom of the insurgent resources, and that they employ or seriously think of employing the slaves as soldiers gives us glimpses of the bottom. Therefore I am glad of what we learn on this subject.”

Davis by now had caught more than “glimpses” of the scraped bottom. Yet for all his West Point training and his regular army background, both of which contributed to the military realism that had characterized his outlook as Commander in Chief — and paradoxically, because of his unblinking recognition of the odds, had made him a believer in long chances and a supporter of those generals who would take them — it was also in his nature, as the leader of his people, to deny, even to himself, the political consequences of whatever of this kind he saw, even with his own eyes. “I’d rather die than be whipped,” Jeb Stuart had said at Yellow Tavern, ten months back. So would Davis, but he took this a step further in his conviction that no man was
ever whipped until he admitted it; which he himself would never do. Earlier this month, writing to thank a Virginia congressman for support “in an hour when so many believed brave have faltered and so many esteemed true have fallen away,” he declared his faith in survival as an act of national will. “In spite of the timidity and faithlessness of many who should give tone to the popular feeling and hope to the popular heart, I am satisfied that it is in the power of the good man and true patriots of the country to reanimate the wearied spirit of our people. The incredible sacrifices made by them in the cause will be surpassed by what they are still willing to endure in preference to abject submission, if they are not deserted by their leaders. Relying upon the sublime fortitude and devotion of my countrymen, I expect the hour of deliverance.”

His resolution was to be tested to the full before the month was out. Gordon’s failure at Fort Stedman prompted Lee to state unequivocally next day that he would have to give up Richmond before Sherman and Grant effected a junction he could do nothing to prevent, and two days later, March 28, in response to a query from Breckinridge as to how much notice the capital authorities could expect — “I have given the necessary orders in regard to commencing the removal of stores, &c.,” the Secretary wrote, “but, if possible, would like to know whether we may probably count on a period of ten or twelve days” — Lee replied: “I know of no reason to prevent your counting upon the time suggested.” So he said. But next morning he learned that Grant had begun another crablike sidle around his thin-stretched right. Both infantry and cavalry were involved, and the movement was across Monk’s Neck Bridge, over Rowanty Creek just below the confluence of Hatcher’s and Gravelly runs; their initial objective seemed to be Dinwiddie Courthouse, a scant half-dozen miles beyond, which would give them a clear shot north at Five Forks, a critical intersection out the White Oak Road, about the same distance west of Burgess Mill, the right-flank anchor of Lee’s line. Five Forks, defended now by no more than a handful of gray vedettes, was within three miles of the Southside Railroad, whose loss would interfere grievously — perhaps disastrously — with the army’s projected withdrawal, not only from its lines below the James but also from those above, since the Richmond & Danville would also be exposed beyond the Appomattox.

Informed of this, Davis requisitioned from Gorgas ammunition for the pistol he gave his wife next day, along with instructions on how to use it. By that time Lee had troops in motion westward to meet the threat, which further reports had identified as substantial; Sheridan was at Dinwiddie with his cavalry, and two blue corps had also crossed the Rowanty, apparently to lend heft to the roundhouse left Lee believed was about to be thrown at Five Forks. Unable to stretch his line that far, lest it snap, the gray commander detached Pickett from Longstreet,
reinforcing his division to a strength of 6400, and posted him there, four miles beyond the farthest reach of the intrenchments on that side of Hatcher’s Run. Fitzhugh and Rooney Lee’s divisions, as well as Rosser’s, lately arrived from the Valley — a total of 5400 troopers; all but a handful of all the army had — were called in from roundabout and sent to bolster Pickett. Nor was that all Lee did. Aggressive as always, he visited the outpost position the following morning, March 30, and ordered an advance toward Dinwiddie the following day, hoping thus to seize the initiative and throw the flankers into confusion, despite odds he knew were long. This done, he rode back to Petersburg. “Don’t think he was in good humor,” a young lieutenant entered in his diary.