iron railing, and marches up the steps into the Confederate White House.
He is shown into a small room with floor-to-ceiling windows and crossed cavalry swords over the door. “This was President Davis’s office,” a housekeeper says respectfully.
Lincoln’s eyes roam over the elegant dark wood desk, which Davis had so thoughtfully tidied before running off two days earlier. “Then this must be President Davis’s chair,” he says with a grin, sinking into its burgundy padding. He crosses his legs and leans back.
That’s when the weight of the moment hits him. Lincoln asks for a glass of water, which is promptly delivered by Davis’s former butler—a slave—along with a bottle of whiskey.
Where Davis has gone, Lincoln does not know. He has no plans to hunt him down. Reunification, however painful it might be to southerners, is within Lincoln’s grasp. There will be no manhunt for the Confederate president, nor a trial for war crimes. As for the people of Richmond, many of whom actively conspired against Lincoln and the United States, Lincoln has ordered that the Union army command the citizenry with a gentle hand. Or, in Lincoln’s typically folksy parlance: “Let ’em up easy.”
He can afford to relax. Lincoln has Richmond. The Confederacy is doomed. All the president needs now is for Grant to finish the rest of the job, and then he can get to work. Lincoln still has miles to go before he sleeps.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5, 1865
AMELIA COURT HOUSE, VIRGINIA
NOON TO MIDNIGHT
Wave after wave of retreating Confederate soldiers arrive in Amelia Court House throughout the day of April 4. They have marched long and hard, yanked forward on an invisible rope by the promise of a long sleep and a full belly. But it was a lie, a broken promise, and a nightmare, all at once. Without food they have no hope. Like the sailors who quit the march from Richmond because their feet hurt, many Confederate soldiers now find their own way to surrender. Saying they are going into the woods to hunt for dinner, they simply walk away from the war. And they keep on walking until they reach their homes weeks and months later—or lie down to die as they desert, too weak to take another step.
Lee’s optimism has been replaced by the heavy pall of defeat. “His face was still calm, as it always was,” wrote one enlisted man. “But his carriage was no longer erect, as his soldiers had been used to seeing it. The troubles of these last days had already plowed great furrows in his forehead. His eyes were red as if with weeping, his cheeks sunken and haggard, his face colorless. No one who looked upon him then, as he stood there in full view of the disastrous end, can ever forget the intense agony written on his features.”
His hope rests on forage wagons now out scouring the countryside in search of food. He anxiously awaits their return, praying they will be overflowing with grains and smoked meats and leading calves and pigs to be slaughtered.
The wagons come back empty.
The countryside is bare. There are no rations for Lee and his men. The soldiers become frantic, eating anything they can find: cow hooves, tree bark, rancid raw bacon, and hog and cattle feed. Some have taken to secreting packhorses or mules away from the main group, then quietly slaughtering and eating them. Making matters worse, word now reaches Lee that Union cavalry intercepted a column of supply wagons that raced out of Richmond just before the fall. The wagons were burned and the teamsters taken prisoner.
Lee and his army are in the great noose of Grant’s making, which is squeezing tighter and tighter with every passing hour.
Lee must move before Grant finds him. His fallback plan is yet another forced march, this one to the city of Danville, where more than a million rations allegedly await. Danville, however, is a hundred miles south. As impossible as it is to think of marching an army that far on empty stomachs, it is Lee’s only hope.
Lee could surrender right then and there. But it isn’t in his character. He is willing to demand incredible sacrifice to avoid the disgrace of defeat.
A cold rain falls on the morning of April 5. Lee gives the order to move out. It is, in the minds of one Confederate, “the cruelest marching order the commanders had ever given the men in four years of fighting.” Units of infantry, cavalry, and artillery begin slogging down the road.