coast and still loyal to the Confederacy would know where boats and ships capable of open-sea travel would be hidden up small creeks and canals. If the cabinet’s boat could hug the coast disguised as a fishing vessel, they could escape detection all the way to finding Taylor’s army.
The hard part facing the cabinet was getting to Florida. The state line lay 600 miles from Richmond. The sparsely settled Gulf Coast, the ideal starting point for a voyage to Mobile, was another 150 miles beyond the border. An unimpeded, continuous trek by train, wagon, and horse would take nearly a month.
One wild card was available in the deck of the last game the Confederacy was playing that could be thrown on the table by the Union at any time. If it landed close to him, Davis would have to fold.
That wild card was the month-long, 6,000-man cavalry raid of Union major general George Stoneman who had left Knoxville, Tennessee on March 25 and who was now somewhere in the North Carolina mountains. Stoneman’s horse soldiers were burning Confederate warehouses and factories. No one in the Confederacy had any idea where Stoneman’s men might turn up or how quickly. Both Grant’s and Sherman’s armies were tied down by slow-walking infantry, but Stoneman’s cavalry could cover up to 50 miles in a day. If a Union telegram or a courier reached Stoneman detailing that Davis and the cabinet were moving south and had not yet even entered North Carolina, an interception would have been possible.
If Davis had given any thought or planning to how quickly the cabinet would move from one location to another, he kept it to himself. All his cabinet and the public knew was that they would be leaving Richmond on the night of April 2. The cabinet gathered at the rail station around 6:00 p.m., along with scores of Richmonders, all of whom heard that the cabinet was leaving the city and who hoped that they too would be able to take a refugee train out of town. It soon became clear to the citizens, however, that only two trains would be leaving the city that night. Only important government employees would be joining the cabinet’s flight. Average citizens would have to face whatever wrath the Yankees intended to inflict on the city.
There were some thirty locomotives left in the city by the end of the war but few that were fully operational. Most had been taken out of service due to lack of parts. The best locomotives and rolling stock had already been evacuated or captured by Union cavalry raiders. The one selected for evacuating the cabinet seemed to be the best of the worst left in Richmond. Its wood-fueled firebox leaked, as did its boiler, meaning it took longer to make enough steam to pull any cars. Under normal circumstances the locomotive assigned to pull the cars carrying the cabinet would have been dismantled for parts, but the railroad president had no choice. It would have to be pressed into service to rescue the Confederate government. A second engine was found to pull the treasury train loaded with the gold and bills that had been gathered from Richmond’s banks.
Perhaps surprisingly, no military escort was gathered to protect the train on which the Confederate nation’s most important officials would be traveling.
While either Davis or Breckinridge could have ordered an escort to be put together, Lee, who sent the telegram suggesting the cabinet leave Richmond, never offered any of his 30,000 troops scattered between Richmond and Petersburg for the job. All of Lee’s messages to his generals in Richmond revolved around how they should rendezvous with the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia leaving Petersburg somewhere to the west of both cities.
Lee knew that Davis and the others would be using the railroad line as an escape route as Breckinridge had asked him in one telegram how much longer the Danville Railroad would be open.
“I think the Danville Road will be safe until tomorrow,” was Lee’s terse if indefinite reply in his only known telegram that seemed to have anything to do with the pending evacuation of the cabinet.
In reality, Lee had no idea if the Danville Railroad was safe. His troops had lost control of Five Forks and Sutherland Station in successive days. By midnight on April 2, a time when the cabinet train might be passing through Amelia Court House, no one in the Confederate army could guarantee that Union cavalry would not be astride the Danville tracks, waiting to see what they could capture from any trains passing their way. On the morning of April 2, the way toward the Danville line was wide open if the Federals chose to move on it.
With his lines broken at Petersburg, Lee did not have time to contemplate the fate of his boss, President Davis. Lee just wanted to evacuate his army. Lee’s last telegram to Breckinridge read: “All troops will be directed to Amelia Court House,” a railroad station some forty miles to the southwest, a two-day march for troops.
Amelia Station was on the Danville line, and the cabinet would pass through the small town that night on its escape, a fact that Davis would have to deal with in a postwar controversy involving getting food to Lee’s army.
At a time when Davis could have been working with Breckinridge to find military units in the city who could cover his escape, he was more interested in packing up or dispersing the family’s personal possessions to keep them out of the hands of advancing Federals. Davis seems to have given little thought to his own safety.
There was cavalry available in Richmond who could have ridden in front of, and beside, the Danville-bound train Davis had already decided would be the cabinet’s best option for leaving the city. Brigadier general Martin Gary, a thin, bald man who had been given the nickname “The Bald Eagle” for his high-pitched voice that could be heard above all battle noise, commanded at least 1,000 fully equipped cavalrymen made up of the remnants of cavalry regiments from South Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia. Gary, a Harvard-educated trial lawyer before the war, had been one of South Carolina’s legislators who had carried the state out of the Union in December 1860. He was one of the few officers still alive and still unwounded who had fought in virtually every major battle in Virginia starting with First Manassas in July 1861. Gary remained an ardent secessionist in 1865 and presumably would have welcomed the opportunity to escort the president of the Confederacy to safety—if only he had been asked.
The only troops specifically assigned to leave Richmond as part of the cabinet’s entourage would not be on the same train as Davis, nor would they be soldiers. They were not even men.
The first military escort even close to Davis on the escape south would be little more than teenaged boys who had never faced Union forces. At the cabinet meeting earlier in the day, Mallory volunteered the services of the sixty midshipmen of the Confederate Naval Academy to be assigned as escorts—not for the president and the cabinet—but for the Confederate treasury that would leave Richmond on a separate train.
Mallory’s volunteering of the midshipmen—most between the ages of 14 and 18—at least gave him something constructive to do in his cabinet post in the waning days of the Confederacy. Most of the Confederate navy’s coastal and river-based ironclads and ocean-going commerce raiders had been either sunk by their own crews or captured. One of the few surviving ships was the side-wheeler CSS Patrick Henry, the naval academy school ship on which the boys practiced their seamanship.
The midshipmen had no warning that they would soon be real land soldiers rather than practicing blue water sailors. Their 39-year-old commander, Lieutenant William H. Parker, a native New Yorker who resigned his United States Navy lieutenancy at the beginning of the war, must have suspected something was up when he found Mallory on April 1 pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of his house practicing the cocking and firing of a revolver. Suspicious at the naval secretary’s behavior, Parker asked about any war-front news, but Mallory assured him that “the news that day from General Lee was good, and that affairs around Petersburg looked promising.” Parker, satisfied, then asked to spend the night in town, which Mallory granted.
The next day, April 2, Parker was back on board the CSS Patrick Henry when he received a vague order from Mallory for the cadets to report to the Danville train depot at 6:00 p.m. A curious Parker started walking
