I advise that all preparation be made for leaving Richmond tonight. The president appeared to Reagan to be distracted and unmoved by the news, continuing on to church. I have given all the necessary orders on the subject to the troops, and the operation, though difficult, I hope will be performed successfully.
I have directed General Stevens to send an officer to Your Excellency to explain the routes to you by which the troops will be moved to Amelia Courthouse, and furnish you with a guide and any assistance that you may require for yourself. Upon receiving the message, Davis rose quietly from his seat and left church, walking a block down 9th Street to his office in the War Department, and gave the necessary orders for evacuation of the city.
By midafternoon the peaceful Sunday was shattered by visible preparations for evacuation. Government clerks frantically loaded boxes on wagons or piled them up and burned them in the street. Army wagons rushed furiously to and fro on the streets. A pile of new, unsigned money fed a bonfire in front of the Capitol building.
Officials opened the supply depots all over the city in an attempt to prevent their capture by the invaders. Matron Phoebe Pember of Chimborazo Hospital, home to some 5, wounded Confederates, recalled watching people lugging hams, bags of coffee, flour and sugar from the commissary department.
Invalid soldiers even got out of their sickbeds to join in the spree. He was contacted shortly after noon by Major D. Moreover, the railroads from the city were built on different grades and without connecting tracks, so the problem of supplying all the trains needed in this great and sudden demand was a most serious and perplexing one. The crews and trains were in number far below what was needed. The train stations were sealed off to everyone except those with military passes.
The people were rushing up and down the streets, vehicles of all kinds were flying along, bearing goods of all sorts and people of all ages and classes who could go beyond the corporation lines. We tried to keep ourselves quiet.
When the McGuires tried to hire a servant to go to Camp Jackson to fetch their sister they were brusquely told that their money was worthless.
Fearing mob violence, they asked that the two city regiments, the 1st and 19th Second Class Militia, be retained for the protection of the city.
It was further resolved that all liquor be destroyed, with government receipts given to the owners. At about the same time, Admiral Rafael Semmes, of the James River Fleet, received orders from Navy Secretary Stephen Mallory to destroy his fleet under cover of darkness and outfit his men for infantry duty with Lee.
Sixty naval cadets off the training ship Patrick Henry were sent to guard the treasury shipment out of Richmond. With the fall of night, the troop withdrawal from the trenches began. The sight of the army retreating through the streets of Richmond was disheartening to inhabitants, and what had been during the day a confused but mainly orderly populace turned into an unruly and dangerous mob as the night wore on. Stragglers and deserters were joined by prisoners abandoned by their fleeing guards.
The mob became further incited, as many had feared, when Lt. Richard Ewell began to carry out his orders to set fire to all tobacco, cotton and munitions warehouses, as well as machine shops and other government buildings, to prevent their capture by the enemy. The mob set more fires indiscriminately, and with a strong breeze fanning the flames, they soon spread. Men and women were seen throwing sacks of flour out one side of the Gallego Flour Mill while flames danced out from the windows of the opposite side.
There were plenty of straggling soldiers about who had too much whiskey; rough women and many negroes were drunk. The air was filled with yells, curses, cries of distress, and horrid songs. The train itself was as loaded down as possible, with passengers on top of the carriage and hanging from every conceivable hold on the platforms and stairs.
The entire Cabinet was on board except for Breckinridge, who was to remain behind and finalize the evacuation, then join Lee and bring a report to wherever Davis and the government might be at that time. All were in a somber mood except Judah Benjamin, ever the optimist, who espoused historical examples of causes that had survived setbacks worse than they were now experiencing. Trenholm shared a demijohn of peach brandy he had brought to ease the pain of his neuralgia. It was about midnight when the wagon bearing A.
Powell Hill waited. The body was without benefit of coffin. The two Hills set out to find one and found the government stores on 12th, 13th, Main and Cary streets broken into, and in many instances sacked and fired.
Sometime after 2 in the morning, the James River Fleet was set afire by Semmes, after which he led his men on a desperate search for an escape route, finally commandeering a locomotive from a siding for their escape. The flagship CSS Virginia , loaded with munitions, exploded mightily, sending rockets with lighted fuses out in all directions and lighting up the sky for many minutes.
Just as the troops reached the bridge, however, the arsenal, reputed to have contained , loaded projectiles, exploded over their heads. As the first streak of dawn heralded the day a vast column of dense black smoke shot into the air, a huge, rumbling earthquake-like reverberation rent the ground, and the store of gunpowder garnered in the city magazine passed out of existence.
Glass was falling all around. The 4th Massachusetts Cavalry came down Osborne Pike right behind. Another and another sprang up, as if out of the earth, but still all remained quiet.
The heat of the flames in the city forced the cavalrymen to change their route from Main Street to 14th Street. When they reached Capitol Square, they found it jammed with people seeking refuge from the flames, huddled under the linden trees for protection from the sparks.
Furniture and possessions were stacked and scattered in every direction, family treasures that some had managed to save from the flames. Brigadier General George F. Shepley was appointed military governor of Richmond, since he had occupied a similar position in New Orleans after its capture in Union troops were immediately put to work putting out the rampaging fires.
This was mainly accomplished by tearing down complete rows of buildings to create firebreaks. The mobs were dispersed at bayonet point, and guards were posted to prevent further looting. All or part of at least 54 blocks were destroyed, according to Furgurson. Weitzel wrote "The rebel capitol, fired by men placed in it to defend it, was saved from total destruction by soldiers of the United States, who had taken possession.
At City Point a few miles downstream, U. President Abraham Lincoln had learned of Richmond's capture and was eager to visit the city. His gunboats, flags flying, lined the river and the sailors cheered as Lincoln, in Porter's flagship, the Malvern , sailed upstream. The trip, however, was not as smooth as the admiral would have liked.
The Malvern encountered sunken Confederate boats in the James River. He transferred the president into a barge, which was tugged upstream. But then the tug encountered another Confederate obstruction. The ropes were thrown off the tug and the sailors leaned into their oars. They pulled against the current until they came to the rapids. The sailors jumped into the river, freed the boat, and headed toward the first safe landing spot they could find.
The barge landed at Rocketts, two miles from their destination, Capitol Square. No Union soldiers met them, but those on the shore recognized the tall man. A crowd, many recently freed slaves, formed as they strode along the streets. Recalled one contemporary: "Every window was crowded with heads.
But it was a silent crowd. There was something oppressive in those thousands of watchers without a sound, either of welcome or hatred. I think we would have welcomed a yell of defiance. They tried to grab Lincoln's hand and kiss his boots.
The sailors formed a guard around him. Admiral Porter and his men were anxious; the crowd could crush his president or an assassin could come close without ever being seen. The sailors cleared the way with bayonets until, at last, a cavalry party met them and escorted the president to what had been the Confederate Executive Mansion.
According to Carl Sandburg,. Soon afterward Lincoln set out on a sightseeing tour of the burned-out, sad-looking Confederate capital with General Weitzel as his guide and a large cavalry escort to protect him. He visited Libby Prison and Castle Thunder, the two prisons where not long before Union soldiers had suffered. They rode to Camp Lee where the U. Colored Troops had set up their camp. They drove around the burned out business district. Weitzel asked President Lincoln for guidance: how should he treat the people of the city?
After the afternoon tour, the presidential party returned to Porter's flagship, to Admiral Porter's relief. Word of Richmond's fall had been telegraphed across the United States.
Newspaperman George Townsend wrote, "This town is the rebellion. It is all that we have directly striven for; quitting it, the Confederate leaders have quitted their sheet-anchor, their roof-tree, their abiding hope. Its history is the epitome of the whole contest, and to us, shivering our thunderbolts against it for more than four years, Richmond is still a mystery. And so, at noon, while Lincoln toured the city, a one-hundred-gun artillery salute was fired at all military posts, arsenals and naval bases.
And four days after that, Lincoln was assassinated. Johnston surrendered his army to Sherman on April Lee had gambled that the Confederacy could survive the fall of its capital--that leaving Richmond would offer him a freedom of movement that could spell hope. But hope died when Richmond fell. Civil War Article. Reaction to the Fall of Richmond. General view of the burned district of Richmond Library of Congress.
General view of the burned district of Richmond Library of Congress On May 20 [], the Confederate Congress voted to move the government to Richmond With that, Virginia's capital had become the very symbol of the Confederacy, and the ultimate prize in a bloody war. Furgurson, Ashes of Glory Robert E. Lee When the Confederate government moved from Montgomery, Alabama to Richmond, Virginia, the quiet, prosperous Virginia state capital was transformed into a noisy, crowded metropolis that, as Furgurson notes, was capital, military headquarters, transportation hub, industrial heart, prison, and hospital center of the Confederacy.
We know when and where many of the events of April 2, 3, and 4 occurred. Given their importance, some participants and observers recorded to the minute exactly when certain events happened. But for others we have ambiguous or even contradictory evidence. For instance, we know that looting was widespread on the night of April 3, but we don't know exactly when and where most individual acts of looting happened.
It probably is wishful thinking to hope that drunken looters would have kept detailed and accurate diaries. To create this animated map we have considred a substantial number of sources and used our best judgment as to where to exactly to place events in time and space. The work of journalist Charles Coffin presents what little we know of slave trader Robert Lumpkin's efforts to evacuate his human property: his "Late Scenes in Richmond" in the June issue of the Atlantic and his Freedom Triumphant.
0コメント