Clint Johnson - Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution & Surprising Release of Jefferson Davis

A T THE DISMAL DAWNING of 1865, more than one quarter of the one million men who had enlisted in the Souths armies over the previous three years were dead. Another 125,000 were wounded, their shattered arms and missing legs virtually ensuring that they would be unable to return to their prewar occupations as farmers and laborers. Another quarter million Southerners were languishing in widely scattered prisoner-of-war camps like Hell-Mira in Elmira, New York, and 40 Acres of Hell in Camp Douglas, outside Chicago.

Southern civilians were not faring much better. The two largest cities in Virginia, Richmond and Petersburg, were slowly strangling, their communications and their food supplies being cut off by Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grants Army of the James and the Army of the Potomac. The Shenandoah Valley, once the breadbasket of the Confederacy, had been burned so completely that one Union general boasted to another that a crow flying over the devastated farms would have to pack his own lunch.

The situation elsewhere in the South was even worse. Western Confederate state capitals like Nashville, Tennessee; Little Rock, Arkansas; Jackson, Mississippi; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had been captured years earlier. Atlanta, Georgia, had been shelled into submission in the summer of 1864 and then burned to the ground when General William T. Sherman and his 63,000 angry young men left on their destructive March to the Sea. Savannah and its wealth of unshipped cotton were presented to President Lincoln as a gift at Christmas 1864 by Sherman just a few weeks earlier. Now Sherman was preparing to cross the Savannah River to unleash his battle-tested veterans in South Carolina, the state these Midwesterners blamed for starting the war.

Just up the coast from Savannah, a massive sea bombardment and land invasion force were bearing down on Wilmington, North Carolina, the wars most successful blockade-running port. Though Wilmington was still open despite four years of the smothering Union blockade, the government leaders in Richmond knew if Fort Fisher fell, the end of the Confederate nation would soon follow. That was an inevitable truth as most of the Army of Northern Virginias supplies came ashore at Wilmington and were loaded on railroad cars for off-loading in Petersburg. If that rail line was captured south of Petersburg, then the end of the war could come quickly because the army would run out of food and ammunition.

Disaster piled upon defeat throughout the South. There seemed to be no hope that anything could be salvaged from the piles of rubble that were already there and the even larger mounds of debris that soon would be.

Yet there was one man in the South who confidently, almost cheerfully, still believed the Confederate States of America would triumph in the four-year war with the North. He was Jefferson F. Davis, the seceded nations president.

February 6, 1865three weeks after the capture of Fort Fisher, North Carolinaan event Davis knew very well meant disaster for resupplying Lees army, Davis gave a morale boosting speech:

Does any one who has seen the Confederate soldiers believe they are willing to fail? If so, the suspicion is most unjust! Go to our camps; go to our guarded lines; go where our pickets hold their dangerous watch, and to the posts where our sentinels tread their weary rounds, and you will find in none of those the place for grumblings and complaints. The resolutions of our soldiers exclaim with Patrick Henry, Victory or death!

Those who knew Davis only casually might have thought his resolute, confident attitude about winning the war was a surprisingly sunny position for the president to take. After all, Davis had stepped onto the national stage of secessionist politics in a sour mood, warning both sides of the dangers of war between the regions.

Those who knew Davis well were not at all surprised that the president truly believed the war was still winnable. He had convinced himself years earlier that the war was politically ethical, morally right, and, most important of all, absolutely legal under the U.S. Constitution. He would die believing in his cause.

F ROM CHILDHOOD , Davis had displayed one personality trait that would stay constant in his life. That quirk would continually infuriate his parents, his brothers, his sisters, his wife, his personal friends, and his political enemies. He considered it strength of character.

Everyone else found it maddening.

Once Davis made up his mind that the course he had chosen in his politics, or in his personal or business affairs was correct, he never wavered from that decision. Once his decision was made, he never changed his mind despite the best efforts of his supporters to offer their own differing opinions.

Davis not only believed he was right all the time, he also believed he was the only person he knew who was prescient about the course of history. Sometimes he was tragically correct.

For at least three years preceding the opening of the war, Davis believed that a war between the North and the South was inevitable unless both sides listened to a voice of reason. He firmly, if humbly, believed that he was the one to voice those warnings, and if his voice was ignored, there would be hell to pay.

In an 1858 speech in Faneuil Hall to the citizens of Boston Davis hinted at civil war if the federal government continued to trample on the sanctity of states rights. Throughout the speech Davis coyly suggested that Massachusetts political heroes like Samuel Adams and John Hancock had invented the concept that states were the primary political unit in the nation. Such a view was in accordance with his belief that the Constitution was an instrument designed to govern a voluntary Union of all states.

Davis cleverly explained his bedrock belief in states rights over federal control of those states by reminding the Bostonians that Massachusetts Governor Hancock once refused to call on President George Washington who was visiting the state. Hancock believed that the nations president should defer to the assumed power of the state governor he was visiting and that Washington should have called, hat in hand, on him.

Davis warned that any action based on the belief that the federal government was superior to the states power would have dire consequences.