If the chosen few of the president’s escort had come this far, now that their numbers had dwindled to less than thirty, from a force of several thousand men, they could be trusted to fight to the death to save the president and his family. If there was a fight, then Davis, unless captured at once, could escape into the woods while it was dark.
The arrangement was perfect, but for one oversight. Tonight the camp posted no guards to keep vigil through the dawn. A handful of cavalrymen, led by Captain Givhan Campbell, were out scouting instead of guarding the camp. As the members of the little caravan began to fall asleep, they faced two dangers in the night: attack from ex-Confederate soldiers—ruthless, war-weary bandits bent on plunder—or an attack from the Union cavalry, on the hunt for President Davis. It was no secret that bandits had been shadowing Varina Davis’s wagon train for several days, and they could strike anytime without warning. That was the reason Davis had reunited with Varina, instead of pushing on alone.
Davis’s aides knew that it was too dangerous for him to continue traveling with his wife’s slow-moving wagon train. “Fully realizing that so large a party [of nearly thirty people] would be certain to attract the attention of the enemy’s scouts, that we had every reason to believe [that they] were in pursuit of us,” recalled Governor Lubbock, “it was decided at noon [May 9] that as soon as we had concluded the midday meal the President and his companions would again bid farewell to Mrs. Davis and her escort.”
Davis did not plan to spend the night of May 9 camped with his wife and children near Irwinville. Unless he abandoned the wagon train and moved fast on horseback, accompanied by no more than three or four men, he had little chance of escape. By this time the Union was flooding Georgia with soldiers and canvassing every crossroads, guarding every river crossing, and searching every town. Furthermore, the federals had recruited local blacks with expert knowledge of back roads and hiding places, to help in the manhunt for the fugitive president of the slave empire. The former slaves relished the task and its irony. Even if Davis did not know it, by May 9 he was at imminent risk of capture, and possible death. Thus, remembered Lubbock, “we halted on a small stream near Irwinville…and dinner over, saddled our horses, and made everything ready to mount at a moment’s notice.”
Burton Harrison spoke for the entire inner circle when he said that Davis needed to separate from the wagon train and entourage:
We had all now agreed that, if the President was to attempt to reach the Trans-Mississippi at all, by whatever route, he should move on at once, independent of the ladies and the wagons. And when we halted he positively promised me…that, as soon as something to eat could be cooked, he would say farewell, for the last time, and ride on with his own party, at least ten miles farther before stopping for the night, consenting to leave me and my party to go on our own way as fast as was possible with the now weary mules.
Harrison proposed that the president take Lubbock, Wood, Johnston, and possibly Reagan with him, and that Harrison remain with Mrs. Davis, the children, and the rest of the wagon train personnel. Davis told his aides that he would leave the camp sometime during the night. “The President notified us to be ready to move that night,” affirmed Reagan.
Davis told him that he would eat dinner, stay up late, and leave on horseback after it was dark. He was dressed for the road: dark felt, wide-brimmed hat; signature wool frock coat of Confederate gray; gray trousers; high, black leather riding boots, and spurs. His horse, tied near Varina’s tent, was already saddled and ready to ride, its saddle holsters loaded with Davis’s pistols.
Harrison felt sick and retired early. “After getting that promise from the President,” he remembered, “and arranging the tents and wagons for the night, and without waiting for anything to eat (being still the worse for my dysentery and fever), I lay down upon the ground and fell into a profound sleep.”
Harrison was certain that when he awoke, Davis would be gone. Captain Moody stretched a piece of canvas above Harrison’s head and lay down beside him. Several of the men, including Reagan, stayed up late talking, waiting for Davis to give the order to depart. It never came.
The delay puzzled Lubbock: “Time wore on, the afternoon was spent, night set in, and we were still in camp. Why the order ‘to horse’ was not given by the President I do not know.”
“For some reason,” Reagan said, “the President did not call for us that night, though we sat up until pretty late.”
Wood and Lubbock fell asleep under a pine tree no more than one hundred feet from Davis’s tent, with Johnston, Harrison, and Reagan sleeping somewhere between them and Davis.
CHAPTER TEN
“By God, You Are the Men We Are Looking For”
Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Davis’s camp, a mounted Union patrol of 128 men and 7 officers—a detachment from the Fourth Michigan Cavalry regiment—led by regimental commander Lieutenant Colonel B. D. Pritchard, was closing in on Irwinville.
Pritchard reached Wilcox’s Mills by sunset of May 9, but the horses were spent. He halted for an hour and had the animals unsaddled, fed, and groomed. Then he pushed on in the dark. “From thence we proceeded by a blind woods road through almost an unbroken pine forest for a distance of eighteen miles, but found no traces of the train or party before reaching Irwinville, where we arrived about 1 o’clock in the morning of May 10, and were surprised to find no traces of…the rebels.”
Pritchard ordered his men to examine the conditions of the roads leading in all directions, but they saw nothing to suggest that a wagon train or mounted force had passed that way. Pritchard left most of his men on one side of town and rode ahead with a few men to the other side where his main body had not been spotted and, posing as Confederate cavalrymen, they questioned some villagers. “I learned from the inhabitants,” Pritchard recounted, “that a train and party meeting the description of the one reported to me at Abbeville had encamped at dark the night previous one mile and a half out on the Abbeville road.”
At first Pritchard suspected it was a Union camp—he knew firsthand from an earlier encounter with them that men from the First Wisconsin Cavalry regiment were in the region hunting for Davis too—but then he realized that mounted federals would not be moving with tents and wagons. Whoever was in that camp, they were not Union men. Pritchard left Abbeville and positioned his men about half a mile from the mysterious encampment. “Impressing a negro as a guide,” Pritchard recalled, “…I halted the command under cover of a small eminence and dismounted twenty-five men and sent them under command of Lieutenant Purington to make a circuit of the camp and gain a position in the rear for the purpose of cutting off all possibility of escape in that direction.”
Pritchard told Purington to keep his men “perfectly quiet” until the main body attacked the camp from the front. Tempted to charge the camp at once, Pritchard decided to wait until daylight: “The moon was getting low, and the deep shadows of the forest were falling heavily, rendering it easy for persons to escape undiscovered to the woods and swamps in the darkness.” The men of the Fourth Michigan were in place by about 2:00 A.M. For the next hour and a half, they waited in the dark, undetected.
At 3:30 A.M., Pritchard ordered his men into their saddles and to ride forward: “[J]ust as the earliest dawn appeared, I put the column in motion, and we were enabled to approach within four or five rods of the camp undiscovered, when a dash was ordered, and in an instant the whole camp, with its inmates, was ours.” Pritchard’s men had not fired a shot. Pritchard exaggerated the speed with which his men had captured the camp. “A chain of mounted guards was immediately thrown around the camp,” Pritchard claimed, “and dismounted sentries placed at the tents and wagons. The surprise was so complete, and the movement so sudden in its execution, that few of the enemy were enabled to make the slightest defense, or even arouse from their slumbers in time to grasp their weapons, which were lying at their sides, before they were wholly in our power.”
But Pritchard was not omniscient. He could only see
what events transpired in front of his own eyes. Throughout the camp, individual human dramas unfolded simultaneously as the Fourth Michigan charged the tents and wagons. Before Pritchard’s men could gain full control of the camp, and before the colonel even verified that this was Jefferson Davis’s camp, gunfire broke out where Pritchard had stationed Lieutenant Purington and twenty-five men. It was a rebel counterattack, Pritchard feared. He spurred his horse past the tents and wagons and rode to the sound of the gunfire.
As Purington faced Davis’s camp, awaiting Pritchard’s signal, he heard mounted men approaching him from his rear. He stepped out from cover to halt them, and they called out that they were “friends.” But they refused to identify themselves and would not ride forward when Purington ordered them to. In response to his repeated command that they identify themselves, one of them shouted, “By God, you are the men we are looking for” and began to ride away. Purington ordered his men to open fire. The First Wisconsin fired back.
Lieutenant Henry Boutell of the Fourth heard the gunfire and rode toward Purington. “Moving directly up the road,” said Boutell, “I was met with a heavy volley from an unseen force concealed behind tree…and from which I received a severe wound.” Another man from the Fourth was shot and killed. As the battle continued, a third man from the Fourth was wounded, and several Wisconsin men were also shot. In the dark they could not see that they wore the same uniform, Union blue cavalry shell jackets decorated with bright yellow piping.
The shooting woke Jim Jones, Davis’s coachman, and he gave the alarm. He roused William Preston Johnston, whom the charging horses had not awakened.
“Colonel, do you hear that firing?” Jim asked.
Johnston sprang up and commanded, “Run and wake the president.”
Jones also woke Burton Harrison: “I was awakened by the coachman, Jim Jones, running to me about day-break with the announcement that the enemy was at hand!”
As Harrison sprang to his feet, he heard musket fire on the north side of the creek. He drew his pistol just in time to confront several men from the Fourth Michigan charging up the road from the south. Harrison raised his weapon and took aim.
“As soon as one of them came within range,” he remembered, “I covered him with my revolver and was about to fire, but lowered the weapon when I perceived the attacking column was so strong as to make resistance useless, and reflected that, by killing the man, I should certainly not be helping ourselves, and might only provoke a general firing upon the members of our party in sight. We were taken by surprise, and not one of us exchanged a shot with the enemy.” William Preston Johnston didn’t hear any more gunfire and began to pull on his boots. He walked out to the campfire to ask the cook if Jim had been mistaken.
“At this moment,” Johnston reported, “I saw eight or ten men charging down the road towards me. I thought they were guerillas, trying to stampede the stock. I ran for my saddle, where I had slept, and began unfastening the holster to get out my revolver, but they were too quick for me. Three men rode up and demanded my pistol, which…I gave to the leader…dressed in Confederate gray clothes…One of my captors ordered me to the camp fire and stood guard over me. I soon became aware that they were federals.”
Lubbock was up too. “We sprang immediately to our feet.” Lubbock pulled his boots on, stood up, and secured his horse, which had been saddled all night and was tied near where the governor had laid down his head. It was too late. “By this time the Federal troopers were on us. We were scarce called upon to surrender before they pounced upon us like freebooters.”
Lubbock put up a fight, resisting an attempt by two of the cavalrymen to rob him. Reagan saw it all:
When this firing occurred the troops in our front galloped upon us. The major of the regiment reached the place where I and the members of the President’s staff were camped, about one hundred yards from where the President and his family had their tents. When he approached me I was watching a struggle between two federal soldiers and Governor Lubbock. They were trying to get his horse and saddle bags away from him and he was holding on to them and refusing to give them up; they threatened to shoot him if he did not, and he replied…that they might shoot and be damned, but that they should not rob him while he was alive and looking on.
A Union officer spotted Reagan and spurred his horse toward the only member of the Confederate cabinet who had volunteered to remain with the president. The postmaster-general readied his pistol.
“I had my revolver cocked in my hand, waiting to see if the shooting was to begin,” he remembered. “Just at this juncture the major rode up, the men contending with Lubbock had disappeared, and the major asked if I had any arms. I drew my revolver from under the skirt of my coat and said to him, ‘I have this.’ He observed that he supposed I had better give it to him. I knew that there were too many for us and surrendered my pistol.”
Pritchard rode up to Harrison and demanded to know the source of the shooting. “Pointing across the creek, [he] said, ‘What does that mean? Have you any men with you?’ Supposing the firing was done by our teamsters, I replied, ‘Of course we have—don’t you hear the firing?’ He seemed to be nettled at the reply, gave the order, ‘Charge,’ and boldly led the way himself across the creek, nearly every man in his command following.”
Still inside Varina’s tent, Davis heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp and assumed these were the same Confederate stragglers or deserters who had been planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train for several days.
“Those men have attacked us at last,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.”
He opened the tent flap, saw the bluecoats, and turned to Varina: “The Federal cavalry are upon us.”
Jefferson Davis had not faced a cavalry charge for two decades. The last time he was in battle, he was in command of his beloved regiment of Mississippi Rifles at the Battle of Buena Vista in the Mexican War. There he encountered one of the most frightening sights a man could see on a nineteenth-century battlefield—massed lancers preparing to charge. The lance was not a toy, and at close quarters it could be more deadly than a pistol or saber. Napoleon’s lancers had been feared throughout Europe, and Mexican lancers had slaughtered American soldiers with ease in California and Mexico. Indeed, Colonel Samuel Colt had perfected his dragoon revolver for the express purpose of shooting down charging Mexican lancers. At Buena Vista, Davis’s regiment was outnumbered and at risk of being overrun in moments. Davis ordered his men form an inverted formation of the letter V, allow the Mexicans to charge into the open V and, at the last moment, unleash a devastating rifle volley into them. It worked, and the Mississippi Rifles broke the charge. That victory made Davis a hero, and, in a circuitous route, his military fame two decades earlier had led him to this camp in the pinewoods of Georgia. But this morning he had too little advance warning and not enough men to resist the charge of the Fourth Michigan.
Davis had not undressed this night, so he was still wearing his gray frock coat, trousers, riding boots, and spurs. He was ready to leave now, but he was unarmed. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. If he could just get to that horse, he could leap into the saddle, draw a revolver, and gallop for the woods, ducking low to avoid any carbine or pistol fire aimed in his direction. He knew he was still a superb equestrian and was sure he could outrace any Yankee cavalryman half his age. Seconds, not minutes, counted now, and if he hoped to escape he had to run for the horse.
ON THE MORNING OF HIS CAPTURE, JEFFERSON DAVIS WORE A SUIT OF CONFEDERATE GRAY AND NOT ONE OF VARINA’S HOOPSKIRTS.
John Taylor Wood got free of the cavalry and tried to help Davis: “I went over to the president’s tent, and saw Mrs. Davis. [I] told her that the enemy did not know that he was present and during the confusion he might escape into the swamp.”
Before Jefferson left, Varina asked him to wear an unadorned raglan overcoat, also known as a “wat
erproof.” Varina hoped the raglan might camouflage his fine suit of clothes, which resembled a Confederate officer’s uniform. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina explained, “I plead with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat and after he started sent the colored woman after him with a bucket for water, hoping he would pass unobserved.”
Jefferson Davis described what happened that morning:
As I started, my wife thoughtfully threw over my head and shoulders a shawl. I had gone perhaps between fifteen or twenty yards when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and the raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him; he leveled his carbine at me, but I expected, if he fired, he would miss me, and my intention was in that event to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into the saddle, and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching me, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. Success depended on instantaneous action, and recognizing that the opportunity had been lost, I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent…
Even before the gun battle ceased, some of the cavalrymen started tearing apart the camp in a mad scramble. They searched the baggage, threw open Varina’s trunks, and tossed the children’s clothes into the air. “The business of plundering commenced immediately after the capture,” observed Harrison. The frenzy on the part of the cavalry suggested that the search was not random. The Yankees were looking for something.