April 5, 1865---“You May Keep The Champagne . . . but you must return the Negro”

APRIL 5, 1865:                   

“You May Keep The Champagne . . . but you must return the Negro” --- William H. Seward

 

I

In Washington D.C., Secretary of State William H. Seward is thrown from his carriage and sustains a broken jaw and severe facial lacerations. He is knocked unconscious, and for a time it is feared that he will die.  A message is telegraphed to President Lincoln at City Point, Virginia; by the time it reaches him in Richmond, Seward has regained consciousness and is out of danger. At first, Lincoln makes plans to return to Washington, but when he gets word of Seward’s awakening, decides to remain in Virginia. Seward is bedbound for several weeks and must wear a grotesque jaw split of metal and leather. He is fed opiates for the pain, which is excruciating.

II

Prior to receiving word of his Secretary of State’s injuries, Abraham Lincoln has had a constructive day in Richmond. After a good night’s sleep on the well-guarded U.S.S. MALVERN (which has at last forced its way to Richmond past the Confederate mines and obstructions in the James River) Lincoln decides to pay several social calls before he returns to City Point. His first visit is a courtesy call on Anna Lee. The Confederate General-in-Chief’s wife, who offers tea, is cool but gracious to the President, who likely shared with her the idea of a pardon for Robert E. Lee if only he would lay down his arms. Lee, of course, is not there to either accept or decline. 

President Lincoln’s second call of the day is paid on new mother Sallie Pickett, another General’s wife. Lincoln is a good friend of the Picketts, and as a Congressman arranged for George Pickett’s admission to West Point back in the 1850s. Taking the newborn in his arms, he coos to the baby, also named George, “And if you’re good, I will arrange a full pardon for your Daddy.” 

The third call is the most businesslike, and Lincoln is there by invitation. John A. Campbell, a former Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was one of the three Confederates who attended the Hampton Roads Conference in February. Campbell, now the Confederate Assistant Secretary of War, is the highest-ranking Confederate official remaining in Richmond. 

Although the Hampton Roads Conference was a failure, Campbell was the most amenable of the three Commissioners to a peace closest to Lincoln’s terms (the overall demeanor of the participants was such that Seward afterward sent each man a case of champagne by special courier with a note reading, “You may keep the champagne, but you must return the Negro”). 

Lincoln is hopeful that Campbell may have ideas about ending the war quickly and with no further agony, and indeed Campbell does not disappoint. Campbell suggests that he can call the Confederate State Legislature into session in order to pass a rescission of Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession. With Virginia out of the Confederacy and back in the United States, the tottering Danville Government will lose all credibility and the Legislature can demand that the Army of Northern Virginia cease operating within the State’s borders. The war will effectively be over. 

Lincoln is so anxious for peace that he agrees to the idea, but reminds both Campbell and himself that he needs to discuss it with his Cabinet. 

III

 Of all the men who march with Robert E. Lee it is the Union Prisoners of War who have it worst. When there was little food for the Johnny Rebs the Billy Yanks got less. Now there is none for anyone. The starving Confederates have begun to follow the example of their prisoners, boiling roots and leaves into thin, mostly indigestible, soups. Like the Yankees they have begun to dig for insects and earthworms to supplement their transparent diets. To still desperate hunger pangs, they have taken to gnawing on twigs and bark --- anything to stop the screaming of their stomachs. The most recent P.O.W.s are still relatively hale compared to their captors, but those who have been prisoners the longest are beginning to show signs of noma, a wasting disease in which the flesh recedes from the jaws exposing the bone beneath, and a sign of mortal starvation. For such men, taking more than just the slightest sustenance is usually fatal.

According to the histories, Robert E. Lee’s face was “grave” that morning at Amelia Court House. Strangely enough, little else has been recorded about that day. No one recorded what the men of the Army of Northern Virginia were thinking or saying amongst themselves. Lee’s own later recollections are terse, the pain more inferred than evident. Others’ memoirs are clinical, almost detached in tone. Speculation based on limited evidence is the only tool available to the writer dedicated to describing the scene. 

It is not beyond possibility that Robert E. Lee shivered as he surveyed the boxcars of the train waiting on the siding at Amelia Court House. Perhaps --- for a bitter and dark moment quickly put aside --- Lee even contemplated the idea of surrender. Perhaps his logical and often steely military mind suffered a collapse into confusion, even panic, as boxcar door after boxcar door slid noisily back on its tracks to reveal ---

Ninety-six caissons bursting with small arms and howitzers, 200 crates of ammunition, and 164 crates of horse tack ---

but not a scrap of food. No beans, no cornmeal, no bread, no hardtack; no bacon, no beef, no pork; no coffee, no bread, no sugar. Nothing to eat at all. 

Lee has been a maestro, conducting a four-part symphony, and now, suddenly, just as his composition is reaching its crescendo, it is as if the string section has gone deathly silent. How can he carry on a war without food for his men?

At first there is the inevitable uncertainty. Rumors fly:  The food train has been diverted to Farmville; no, Burkeville; no, Burke’s Station. The food train is still expected to arrive; it is just delayed. But perhaps, other voices counter, it never left Richmond at all. 

Modern Amelia Station

Perhaps Lee would have quailed had he known that among the warehouses that burned in Richmond were several packed with food earmarked for the army. But he does not know that. What he does know is that he must feed his starving men.  

A Richmond warehouse

Quickly, he organizes men to collect whatever food there is in the village. There is little enough. Amelia Court House is not much of a place, and foodstuffs are in short supply here as everywhere in the region after the hard winter. The town cannot sustain an additional population of 20,000 for any period of time; indeed, the residents were hoping they could restock their shelves from the army’s stores. Still, each man gets a mouthful of something. 

While this is going on, Lee dispatches wagons to travel through the countryside on foraging expeditions, collecting whatever they can from the local farmers. Most of the wagons return nearly empty.

Others do not return.

The Battle of Amelia Springs:

The food train may be at Burkeville; but, wisely, in the growing fog of war, someone in Richmond before its fall was thoughtful enough to dispatch a wagon train as well as an iron horse to the rendezvous point. Moving slowly, even more slowly than the struggling army, by other roads the wagon train has reached the little town of Painesville, just outside the slightly larger town of Amelia Springs, ten miles west of Amelia Court House, but only two miles north of Union-held Jetersville. 

Upon receiving word of the appearance of an unexpected wagon train, the Union command in Jetersville deduces --- correctly --- that it is a Rebel supply train, and dispatches cavalry to deal with it. The Union troops do not just raid the train or wreck it. They burn it, and the Army of Northern Virginia’s last remaining local food supply goes up in smoke. Even though General Fitzhugh Lee C.S.A.’s cavalry drives off the marauders in blue, little of the food is salvageable. And instead of returning directly to Jetersville, the Union cavalry makes a long arc through the area, seizing and burning some of Lee’s foraging wagons. 

Lee has to know that he is running out of time. Union units are now moving alongside him, and a few have gotten in front of him. The jaws of a trap are beginning to close. But for twelve critical hours Lee does nothing.

Many historians have wondered why Lee did not move out of Amelia Court House very quickly rather than spending time in the town overnight. There are numerous theories. One is that he was awaiting the completion of a pontoon bridge over the Appomattox River, which meandered both in front of and behind his line of march. Another is that he was awaiting the arrival of the missing food train. A third is that he was awaiting the return of his foragers. But perhaps the most obvious and simplest reason was sheer exhaustion. His desperately hungry men just as desperately needed rest, as did Lee himself. His recurrent “rheumatism” (in truth angina) had redoubled its pain once he discovered that there was no food waiting for his men at Amelia Court House. The fifty-eight year old Commander was, for once, pushed beyond his limits. 

There have been many armies throughout history. All armies have natural limits beyond which they break. Undoubtedly, Lee feared that his great Army of Northern Virginia had reached that point at Amelia Court House. For four years the outgunned, undersupplied and poorly fed army had performed literal miracles in the field against its far mightier opponent. Lee had begun to believe his men were truly invincible, but this belief was not confirmed until that day at Amelia Court House. 

For against all odds, the starving army elected to keep marching. Lee made no grand speeches that day. But such was his mens’ faith in him that when Lee asked them to move even further west, they did. If any of Lee’s men elected not to go with him, they were few and their names are lost to history. But on the morrow, the Army of Northern Virginia would exhibit a kind of superhumanity --- for they would not only march with their belt buckles scraping their spines, they would also fight. 

IV

The Early County (Georgia) News publishes a bitter editorial about the war: 

This has been 'a rich man's war and a poor man's fight.' It is true that there are a few wealthy men in the army, but nine tenths of them hold positions [that allow them to] always get out of the way when they think a fight is coming on, and [they] treat the privates like dogs . . . There seems to be no chance to get this class to carry muskets.

While the clock ticks against Lee in Virginia, and Confederate citizens lose heart in Georgia, Confederate forces at Cowpen’s Landing, North Carolina seize and burn a Union supply ship loaded with food and weapons. Other Confederate troops put the troop transport U.S.S. MYSTIC to the torch.