April 2, 1865---“We’ll see you in hell first!”

APRIL 2, 1865:  
                 

“We’ll see you in hell first!” --- Confederate infantry upon being asked to surrender

I

The Battle of Five Forks ends at sundown on April 1^st. Robert E. Lee is grim. He knows that Richmond and Petersburg have to be evacuated. Ulysses S. Grant has flanked him, and now can roll up his line all the way from south of the Appomattox River to the banks of the James. As the sun goes down he sends a telegram to Jefferson Davis saying that Richmond will almost certainly fall.

When Davis receives this telegram he quickly makes arrangements for his wife and children to travel down to Charlotte, North Carolina. He will stay behind, to go on to Danville, Virginia, if and when the fall of Richmond seems unavoidable. The little ones are sobbing as their father puts them on the train. They fear they will never see him again. The First Lady of the Confederacy looks deep into her husband’s eyes. She sees there defiance, not defeat, and is reassured. The train, packed with many hundreds of passengers who choose not to await the official word to evacuate, pulls away with a blast of its whistle. 

Varina Davis and the Davis children, 1865

L. to R.: Jeff, Maggie, Varina (Piecake) and Willie. Only Maggie lived to adulthood.

 

The Confederate President returns to his office. He intends to work all night. It is a quiet night, perhaps too quiet. The boom of guns, as familiar now as the never-ending roar of the Fall Line cataracts, is absent. Davis looks at the sky, which is clearing. A few stars twinkle. 

The Fall Line of the James River

It is the calm before the storm. Forty miles away, Ulysses S. Grant reviews the day’s events, utters a quiet, “Good,” and orders a bombardment all along the line to begin at midnight. 

When it comes, it shatters the false calm around Petersburg. The Appomattox Campaign has begun. Lee, in the house on Edge Hill, knows this is it. His defenses are paper-thin, even translucent. After the loss at Five Forks he has had to empty the trenchlines around Richmond and rush those men south to face the threat at Petersburg. He has no reserves at all.

On the Union side, word of what will be a full frontal assault on Lee’s lines is met with despair. The Union troops have had enough --- at Antietam, at Fredericksburg, at Gettysburg, at Cold Harbor. One man says, with false jocularity, “Well, goodbye boys; this means death.”

For four hours the cannons blast at Lee’s positions. The ground rocks. Men’s ears bleed from the concussive force. Petersburg trembles on its foundations. 

Lee moves quickly to finalize all his orders, to ensure that his troops are where they will do the most good, to send last-minute updates to Richmond. His Orders are to hold the railroad at all costs. Somehow, his men will, even when all else fails around them.

At 4:00 A.M. a Union wave smashes into Lee’s lines, firing as they come. “Surrender!” cry the Union men. “We’ll see you in hell first!” comes the Confederate answer. The deadly crackle of cartridges freed from their paper and mated with powder fill the air. Soon, the darkness turns white with smoke. Men with axes hack through the abatis and other obstructions in front of the Confederate earthworks. 

The Confederates, with single shot muskets and rifles, marshal their limited ammunition. Rebel fire is less frequent than the Union’s, but more accurate. The Union troops, however, are armed, most of them, with Spencer repeating rifles, seven shot weapons of great accuracy. 

At the redoubt known as Fort Mahone, the Confederates fire double canister artillery shells pointblank at the advancing Union ranks. The fort is thinly-defended but manned by zealots, and the 5,600 men on the line make the Yankees pay for every inch of ground. In Union lore, the place is already known as “Fort Damnation” and it lives up to its name. Blue soldiers vanish in red and pink puffs of mist. The attack on “Fort Damnation” lasts until 11:00 A.M., and it is another Bloody Angle. 

Further along the line, the Federals do not bog down. The Confederate line cracks just at the juncture held by the 28^th and 37^th North Carolina Regiments, and the Yankees pour through. The battle becomes one of bayonets, combat knives, ramrods used as epees and rifles used as clubs. It is bloody and it is fierce, but the weight of numbers and the power of repeating rifles begins to tell. Slowly, the Southerners are being pushed back toward the Boydton Plank Road.  In just an hour, the Confederates along the road are “swept away and scattered like chaff before a tornado.”

Just after the 5:00 A.M. breakthrough, General James Longstreet comes thundering up to Lee’s HQ on his horse. He finds Lee felled by a sudden bout of angina (which Lee thinks is “the rheumatism”), and informs his commander of the breakthrough. Somehow, Lee finds it in himself to get to his feet and rap out orders to his staff. 

At that moment, his aide, Colonel Taylor bursts in. “General, you had better come see this.”

The three men walk out to the porch. Away in the distance, Lee can see shadows moving quickly, and they seem to be approaching. “Are those our men?” the General asks.

“I don’t know sir,” Taylor answers. 

A few minutes pass by. The, Lee says, “It’s Those People.” 

A few minutes more, and the blue uniforms are recognizable in the early morning murk. 

General A.P. Hill salutes Lee. “I’m going down to my men, General,” he says. Mounting his horse, he rides off to his death.

General A.P. Hill C.S.A. always wore a red shirt into battle

Lee knows he only has a few minutes. To hold back the Yankees he orders that a battery of six cannons be set in the yard of Turnbull House, and he takes direct command of the battery as his staff gathers up every last minute thing they can. One final telegram is sent to Jefferson Davis: “I think it is absolutely necessary that we should abandon our position tonight.”

Lee is the last to leave his HQ, riding, as always, on Traveller. As he rides away, a shell smashes through the roof of the house and it begins to burn to the ground. For one of the few times in the war, Lee becomes truly angry at the loss of the fine old house.

The chimneys of Turnbull House after the battle

Lee goes down to the battle. His very presence puts heart into his men, who, though they are utterly outnumbered and outgunned, straighten their backs and redouble their resistance. Lee tells them to hold as long as possible. 

At Fort Gregg, 300 Confederates withstand an assault by 3000 Federals, and hold for hours. The attack costs the Union over 700 men. 90% of the Confederates at Fort Gregg die in the defense of Petersburg and their capital. The outcome is inevitable. After 294 days the Union breaks the defenses at Petersburg. 

II

At a little before ten A.M. Jefferson Davis is listening to the homily of Father Charles Frederick Ernest Minnigerode (1814-1894), Episcopal Pastor of St. Paul’s Church in Richmond. Father Minnigerode, like the Church he leads, is a Richmond institution. One has to listen carefully to the soft-spoken Westphalian in order to understand his sometimes idiosyncratic English. 

The Rev. C.F.E. Minnigerode

On this Sunday morning the sky has cleared and the sun is beating down. It even feels like it may become hot, a welcome change from the winter’s cold and the tormented weather of the last week. It is said that Minnigerode is preaching the Last Supper as a messenger enters the church, rushing to the Presidential pew with a message. Davis looks down, reads the message, and with his face “ashen” rises to leave the church, followed by a few staffers and military men. 

Richmond's spectacular equestrian statue of George Washington with St. Paul's Episcopal Church in the background

Minnigerode, who is one of Jefferson Davis’ few true intimates, knows that trouble has been brewing, and he knows, as Davis leaves without preamble, that it has come to a boil. Minnigerode is so distracted that he begins to preach in his native German after taking a deep steadying breath, switching back to English after an embarrassed look at his parishoners.   

Davis goes to his office.

The Presidential office at the Confederate White House (also called "The Gray House")

The President’s abrupt departure disturbs the congregation and they begin filing out in small groups. Minnigerode cuts short his homily, and advises everyone to go home calmly. 

An equestrian portrait of Jefferson Davis, modeled on Richmond's Washington statue

By the time services end at St. Paul’s, the streets are already full. Somehow, word of Grant’s breakthrough has already reached the city. Many people do head home, some to pack and some to wait. The unbelievers, finally convinced, rush the banks and the markets. Others grab prepacked trunks, call for their coachmen, and ride down to the railroad station. 

The Confederacy's Presidential Train

Davis stays in his office, writing orders and signing crucial last-minute documents. As he works, he can hear outside his window a growing hubbub in the streets. Assistants come and go, intent on their tasks. Sometime during the day, a Colonel appears, advising his President that 3,000 soldiers of the Confederacy --- held back to the last and all volunteers --- have been assigned as the Presidential bodyguard to accompany Davis to Danville, the new capital of the Confederacy. At around 2:30 P.M. or so, Davis issues an evacuation Order for the city, which by 4:00 o’clock is printed and posted and being distributed as a handbill on the city streets. The chaos in Richmond increases as the reality that the Yankees are coming! sinks into the popular mind.   

  

People who can’t reach a train clamber aboard a packet boat that will take them up the James into supposedly secure territory.

Davis smokes a cigar. He says a few words to his staff, to his Cabinet Secretaries who are coming and going, and he gazes out the window thoughtfully. He speaks with John C. Breckinridge, his latest Secretary of War, a former C.S.A. general officer, and an ex-Vice President of the United States. Breckinridge has arranged for extra rolling stock to be added to the consist of the Presidential train --- cars for the volunteer Presidential bodyguard and cars to carry horses so that the Government has an alternative form of transportation if the train breaks down or the Danville Line is cut. 

There is a brief meeting with the Garrison Commanders and the City Fathers. A decision is taken to destroy all the alcohol in the city, and to burn whatever may be of use to the Yankees. These well-meant and ill-considered orders will have a terrible impact on Richmond. 

Finally, around five P.M. the first and last President of the Confederacy neatens his desk saying, “Lest the Yankees think we’re slovenly,” and he departs for the railroad station, where a train awaits, after pushing in his chair. Jefferson Davis has no way of knowing that in thirty six hours the President of the United States will be sitting in that selfsame chair.

The railroad depot is a scene out of Dante’s Inferno. People are pushing and shoving to get aboard the trains. Conductors are insisting, “Whites only!” forcing Masters to emancipate their slaves right there on the platform. Hawkers are hawking, pickpockets are picking, beggars are begging. Fainting women are being unceremoniously dumped in their seats by irked husbands and impatient conductors. A detachment of the newly-formed Presidential Guard hustles Davis aboard the Government train.

Davis’ train is a mongrel, thrown together from whatever stock remains in the rail yard. The various cars have crudely handwritten signs --- Treasury Department, War Department, The President. There are few Congressmen onboard, most having left Richmond after Congress adjourned in mid-March, but of course the Cabinet Secretaries (who are pro forma members of Congress under an Article of the Confederate Constitution), and a handful of others are climbing aboard the train. Confederate specie is being loaded aboard in strongboxes.

Although all is ready by 7:00 P.M., the pandemonium in the station means that the train cannot leave Richmond until 11:00 P.M. By then, trouble has started. The order to dispose of all alcohol in the city is being taken quite literally as the dram shops are being broken into. Casks and bottles are being smashed, but more are being stolen, to be sold for gold or imbibed. Desperate street people scoop whiskey in their hands from the manure-stained cobblestones, and drink it down. Huge stacks of Confederate documents are being set alight in front of every official building, and palettes of now almost completely worthless Confederate money are burning.  

Military supplies, including such things as bandages, sheets, crutches, bottles of iodine and alcohol and patent medicines, are being consumed in huge bonfires. 

The Richmond Arsenal goes up, and a sudden heart-stopping blast rocks the entire city consuming surrounding streets in one terrible flash. Shot and shell crack and boom and ping and scream, ricocheting all night in a deadly fusillade. 100,000 rounds explode that night, enough for many a battle. 

General Richard Ewell, the head of the City Garrison, and General James Kemper, the head of the State Militia order that the city’s cotton and tobacco warehouses be burnt. In truth, there is no sense to this order. The cotton has minimal military value, the tobacco nil; but these two commodities are so crucial to the South’s economy that they appear to have value. But Ewell and Kemper do not order the destruction of the Tredegar Iron Works, the Confederacy’s largest single industrial plant, grown ever larger these past four years. Tredegar remains untouched, and within 48 hours is turning out ordnance for the Union armies.

The firing of the warehouses is the lighting of a symbolic pyre: The Confederacy is dying in smoke and fire.

The "Burned District"

 

The Tredegar Iron Works were barely damaged by the fire

The highly-combustible cotton roars into flame --- and the fire, fanned by a steady breeze, consumes much of the riverfront. The tons of burning tobacco add a tang to the air. In the smoky darkness, fleeting shapes begin smashing shop windows and grabbing whatever they can as fast as they can. Antique clocks, silk dresses, silver pocket watches from pawn shops; it doesn’t matter. A madness has gripped Richmond. Gunshots echo through the streets. The townhome residents of the district flee into the night, but there is nowhere to go.  The looting is near-universal and only stops when the warehouse fires reach the downtown commercial district. The many old colonial era buildings just disappear. How many people die is never known as the fire claims all the night, a night with no darkness, a night of the lurid light of Hades.

With terrible tearing sounds, the James River crossings collapse into the river one after another.  

Central Richmond is devoured, an area twenty blocks by twenty blocks. At midnight for the Confederacy, the residents of its proud capital discover what the people of Atlanta, Charleston, Columbia and Wilmington already know. There are those Richmonders who will later blame the fire on Yankees or Unionists, but the fire is ultimately of their own creation.  The fire does not stop its spread until it reaches the foot of Capitol Square. The Parthenon-like Capitol, both of State and Nation, designed by Thomas Jefferson, and the model for all official buildings in Washington D.C., stands untouched above the fire. Nero could have done no better. 

III

As Richmond is being evacuated, Robert E. Lee struggles desperately for time. The Union assault is so overwhelming in numbers and in brute force that Lee is forced to sacrifice many of his best men in order to hold the line long enough to allow the greater part of The Army of Northern Virginia to escape. With the taking of the Boydton Plank Road, the Southside Railroad is the last link between the Richmond-Petersburg pocket and the rest of the Confederacy. Lee knows he needs to hold the rail line long enough to move men and supplies away from Petersburg.  Grant knows that if he can cut the rail line, the war will effectively be over, with Lee bottled up. 

The two sides meet at Sutherland Station, a stop on the Southside Railroad. What is left of four Confederate brigades stops an entire Union Division dead in its tracks for almost twelve critical hours as Lee moves his men out of Petersburg. The fighting at Sutherland’s Station is terrible, hand-to-hand, bayonet and combat knife work. The Southerners are fighting with their backs to the wall and they know it. The men at Sutherland’s Station also know that they will not be evacuating with Marse Robert, and are prepared to lose their lives to save their commander’s. It is a matter of honor. 400 Federal soldiers die at Sutherland’s Station before the Union takes the rail line. Six hundred Confederates lose their lives and 1,000 are taken prisoner. But they have managed to delay the Union victory for a precious half-day. Lee slips the noose that Grant has knotted for him.

As his rearguard fights and dies at Fort Gregg and Sutherland’s Station, Lee’s army begins to move west, moving in four columns spread over the forty mile front between Richmond and Petersburg. Lee has a motley army; many of the men look like scarecrows in rags. Many have no shoes. Some are shouldering empty muskets. A large number are the walking wounded from Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, men who have decided to join Lee despite their wounds, men who would rather fight than surrender. Among them are one-armed amputees. Altogether they number perhaps 21,000. They are skeletally thin, most are carrying enough rations for one day, some maybe two, a very few at the furthest stretch three, but their eyes shine. They are Lee’s unconquered remnant, and they will make history.

Lee's Retreat and the Union pursuit

The four columns are on converging courses that will lead them to the little town of Amelia Court House, where Lee intends to refit his army and carry on the fight by joining up with Joe Johnston’s army in North Carolina.  

Lee has been wise. By ordering his men to travel in four columns he ensures that the Federals must divide their forces to pursue him. And he has chosen to march down narrow country lanes. In places, Lee’s columns are strung out in single file for miles, men marching, horses plodding along pulling wagons full of supplies --- almost everything his men could grab. Everything, that is, except adequate food. There simply wasn’t any available --- or so Lee believes. 

The rolling countryside is a boon to Lee. It will be harder for an enemy to flank or envelop his lines, and massed attacks cannot happen. 

At first, Ares seems to smile on Lee. After the sun rises on April 2^nd, the weather is fine, clear, sunny, and cool, making for perfect marching weather. The columns are moving well. Men are even singing. The inevitable Dixie, of course, and Home Sweet Home, and there is laughter and good cheer --- and relief that they are out of those damnable trenches. 

Ten months in the trenches have worn Lee’s men down. Although their morale is high, and rising with each eastward step, there is no way not to see the emaciated, even cachectic, condition of the men. And, chivvy them as their commanders may, the men simply cannot move quickly. The wagon trains are particularly slow, the weakened horses struggling to pull their loads. When the first day ends, Lee is nowhere as far along toward Amelia Court House as he had planned. The men make do, sharing what food there is. Today was good; tomorrow will be better. 

IV

The Federal Army of The Cumberland has been divided into several commands, each of which is moving through a different area of the middle South, waging what General William Tecumseh Sherman U.S.A. has taken to calling “hard war.” Town after town in inland Mississippi and Alabama is going up in flames. Today one of the columns reaches the town of Selma, Alabama. 

The Selma Naval Foundry in operation

In 1865, Selma was reasonably large town of 10,000 souls. It is one of the more significant towns in the “Little Rust Belt” of the Confederacy, the area of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia where is concentrated that industrial infrastructure quickly built by the South during the war. Many of the towns in the area have a single textile mill, or a shoe factory, or a number of gunsmiths. Selma has a Naval foundry, a munitions factory, a supply dump, and an arsenal, making it a key town, It also has extensive earthworks and other defenses. What it does not have is a true garrison. The defenses are built for 20,000 defenders and manned by maybe a thousand local militiamen ranging in age from 12 to 18 and from 45 to 75.  

Selma’s one advantage in the battle is that General Nathan Bedford Forrest C.S.A. has taken command of the city’s defenses. The Wizard wins almost all his battles. The Selma force draws confidence from this. 

The Selma Naval Foundry after the battle

Forrest has been fighting the Yankees, and winning, all along, disrupting the various marching columns, striking in lightning hit-and-run attacks. He arrives in Selma early in the morning, “horse and rider covered in blood” from an overnight skirmish, and immediately contacts his Commander, General Richard Taylor C.S.A., advising Taylor to leave Selma quickly. The approaching Union column is 14,000 strong, and Forrest has 2,000 men total, including the city garrison. It is going to be an unequal fight. 

Forrest sends cavalry to hit the Union ammunition train, deducing correctly that an army without ammunition cannot fight. However, the rearguard protecting the ammunition is larger than the raiding force, and is turned aside. As this is happening, the Federals launch a full-scale attack on Selma. The town’s strong but woefully undermanned defenses do nothing to hold back the attack. 

Surprisingly, the old men and young boys do not break. They inflict 400 or so casualties on the North before they are almost all completely captured. Forrest and Taylor flee with only a few hundred men. The Wizard suffers his worst defeat, and Selma’s business and industrial areas are razed. After burning and looting the town, the Federals turn toward Montgomery, the one-time capital of the Confederacy.