upper-crust ladies of St. Paul’s had known through their own grapevine that Mrs. Davis had been planning an evacuation weeks before she actually left. She had put her finest possessions such as her collection of silk dresses and leather gloves on consignment in the shops in the city that specialized in fine ladies attire. Richmond’s leading matrons, many of whom had never liked the Mississippi native, suspected those actions hinted that the Confederacy’s First Lady had no plans to return to Richmond and reclaim her prized possessions.
Standing in St. Paul’s pulpit was the thin-faced, diminutive Reverend Dr. Charles Minnigerode. Minnigerode had emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1839 when he began to suspect that his activism against the land-hoarding feudal system would result in his eventual death at the hands of lords who were not interested in having their subjects rebel against them. He had taken a job as a language professor at William & Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1842 and had been ordained a priest in 1847.
It was while acting as a private tutor in Williamsburg that Minnigerode, homesick for Germany, started an American tradition. Coaxed by the children he was teaching to tell them about how he celebrated Christmas back in Germany, Minnigerode went into the forest, cut down a pine tree, and brought it into his employer’s house to decorate with paper ornaments and lighted candles. By 1860 decorating Christmas trees was already an American tradition in the North and the South.
Minnigerode became rector at St. Paul’s in 1852. He had always been an advocate for secession and a strong supporter of the Confederacy. Under his leadership the church had grown in numbers and influence in the city. The man himself had become something of a tourist attraction, attracting out-of-towners to standing-room-only services. One diarist once counted fourteen generals seated in two pews, including noted Presbyterian Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Minnigerode had officiated at the graveside service for General J.E.B. Stuart in May 1864, and then both the wedding and funeral several days later of General John Pegram after he was killed in combat south of Petersburg.
Davis had been baptized by Minnigerode in 1862. Since then Davis had attended church regularly. He enjoyed the rector’s rousing, challenging sermons, which always supported his role as president. Just three months ago, a month before Davis had made his African Church speech, Minnigerode had asked his congregation:
What is it that makes the present crisis so painful?
Our reverses? No, Brethren! For great as they have been (and no honest man would hide their extent), we have had reverses before, and God always has blessed them to us, made them the source of greater harmony among ourselves, roused us to new and greater exertions, and taught us to bear them and repair them as men. What makes the present crisis so painful and so perilous lies not in what the enemy has done to us with his armies, but in what our own coward, faithless, selfish hearts may do.
Davis liked this reverend and his sermons. That message of pushing ahead with a cause no matter how many people were against it resonated with the president.
The service had just begun with a hymn and a prayer, when an excited clerk from the War Department yanked open the huge doors and rushed into the vestibule. He started to walk down the aisle when a sexton stopped him with a hand to the chest. The prayer was still underway. When Minnigerode finished, the sexton took the folded paper from the messenger’s hand and strode down the aisle to Davis’s pew.
Davis read the note. It was the second telegram from Lee that morning, the one an irritated Lee had written after being admonished by Davis that “many valuables would be lost.”
“I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight. I will advise you later, according to circumstances,” Lee had written.
Lee had not even bothered addressing Davis’s earlier admonition that the general had not given the government time to pack its “valuables.”
Without saying a word to Lubbock, or even nodding an apology to Minnigerode, Davis rose from his seat, turned up the aisle, and walked quickly out of church. The congregation turned and watched. Unknowing of what the note said and unsure as to how they should react to their president rudely walking out of a church service, they exchanged worried glances and whispers. What could be so important that the president of the nation could not wait an hour before disrupting church?
Opinions differed among the congregation as to how Davis reacted when he read the telegram.
Constance Cary, the fiancée of Burton Harrison, Davis’s private secretary, remembered that the president’s “cold calm eye, the sunken cheeks, the compressed lip, were all as impenetrable as an iron mask.”
But another member of the church said, “I plainly saw the sort of gray pallor that came over his face as he read a scrap of paper.”
One person recalled that Davis “was noted to walk unsteadily out of the church.”
But another watched Davis rise from his seat and walk “softly down the aisle, erect and quiet.”
When Davis walked out of the church clutching the telegram in his hand, he glanced to his right toward the Virginia State Capitol lawn. What he saw would have troubled the president of any other nation: clerks building bonfires of paper money and bonds. Much of the remaining wealth of the Confederacy was either burning to ashes or blowing down the street, but no one bothered to rescue any of the $50 bills that featured Davis’s idealized portrait showing an unlined, youthful, pleasant, clean-shaven face.
The real Davis, skeletal in frame, blind in one eye, and pale, with a face sometimes paralyzed by neuralgia, should have been furious at the destruction of the assets of the Confederate treasury. He had not ordered it—at least not yet. But the president seemed curiously unmoved watching bills emblazoned with his face being consumed by the fire.
CHAPTER 2
“The Direful Tidings”
BAD NEWS TRAVELS FAST. Before Davis had even completed his two-block walk from the church to his office and before he could summon his cabinet, the people of Richmond were reacting to the news that Lee was abandoning Petersburg.
The newspaper the Richmond Whig reported this on the following day: “Suddenly, as if by magic, the streets became filled with men walking as though for a wager, and behind them excited Negroes with trunks, bundles, and baggage of every description. All over the city it was the same—wagons, trunks, bandboxes, and their owners, a mass of hurrying fugitives.”
John B. Jones, the ever-observant clerk who had a good grasp of military matters (A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary), recognized the military predicament in which the Confederacy now found itself.
“General Lee may not have troops sufficient to defend both the city and the Danville Road [railroad] at the same time,” Jones noted to himself that Sunday. Jones also observed the reaction of some other interested parties when they heard the news: “The negroes stand about mostly silent, as if wondering what will be their fate. They make no demonstrations of joy.”
Jones was probably misreading the reactions of the slaves. Slaves rarely displayed their emotions. Showing joy that the South was losing the war or even feigning fear that Federals were approaching might irritate their owners. Some may have feared for their lives after hearing stories that slaves faired poorly when captured and used by Union forces. The slaves in Richmond kept their emotions in check. They waited to see which side prevailed.
Jones, normally accurate in his diary entries, was not above recording wild rumors even if he was the only intended audience: “The President told a lady that Lieutenant
