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The following day, March 26, Conolly went to church, where the vicar’s sermon put him to sleep; “I hate argument, I like faith much better!” Conolly was oblivious to the fact that the city was emptying around him. Jefferson Davis had overridden his wife’s protests and instructed her to take the family to Charlotte, North Carolina, three hundred miles to the southwest, and to go farther if necessary. Their furniture was sent to auction, and Varina distributed various mementos to friends and servants. Davis also asked his private secretary to accompany the family to safety. He gave Varina all his gold save for one five-dollar piece and a small Colt pistol, which she was to use in the “last extremity.”

CSS Georgia’s former lieutenant James Morgan met the Davis family at the station. In his wildest dreams he had never imagined himself as personal guard to a mother and her small children. When summoned by the Confederate navy secretary, Stephen Mallory, to the Navy Department, he thought it was for some infraction: “I at once began to think of all my sins of commission and omission. To my surprise, he told me that I was to accompany Mrs. Jefferson Davis south, and added, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, that the daughters of the Secretary of the Treasury [George Trenholm] were to be of the party.” (Morgan had become engaged to Trenholm’s younger daughter, Helen, whom he met in Charleston the night of his introduction to Matthew Fontaine Maury.)

As Morgan observed the parting between Jefferson and Varina, he realized that the Davises were behaving as though it was their final moment together as a family. The two eldest children clung to their father, crying to stay with him. Davis kissed them all again, stroked the baby that lay asleep on a bench, embraced his wife, wished Morgan and the Trenholm girls a safe journey, and walked heavily down the carriage steps. What should have been a six-hour train journey took more than four days. When the creaking train pulled into Charlotte, a furious mob surrounded the carriage:

I closed the open windows of the car so that the ladies could not hear what was being said [recalled Morgan]. We two men were helpless to protect them from the epithets of a crowd of some seventy-five or a hundred blackguards, but we stationed ourselves at the only door which was not locked, determined that they should not enter the car. Colonel Harrison was unarmed, and I had only my sword, and a regulation revolver in the holster hanging from my belt. Several of the most daring of the brutes climbed up the steps, but when Colonel Harrison firmly told them that he would not permit them to enter that car the cowards slunk away. When the disturbance had quieted down Mrs. Davis, her sister, and her children left the train.

The city’s residents were frightened of showing courtesy to Varina and furious with her husband for mismanaging the war. “Mrs. Davis would have been in a sad plight if it had not been for the courage and chivalric courtesy of a Jewish gentleman, a Mr. Weil,” wrote Morgan, “who hospitably invited her to stay at his home until she could make other arrangements. May the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless him wherever he is!”18

Jefferson Davis waited anxiously in the Confederate capital while Lee sought to delay Grant’s encirclement of Petersburg. The Army of Northern Virginia had dwindled to no more than 35,000 men, while Grant’s Army of the Potomac had grown to over 125,000. President Lincoln was less than twenty miles from Richmond, having traveled from Washington on the River Queen to visit Grant’s headquarters at City Point on the James River. (Mary and Tad accompanied him for the first days, but Mary behaved so strangely—raving at the slightest provocation—that she was encouraged to stay in her cabin.) Lincoln’s greatest concern was that peace, which seemed so close now, should not be a pyrrhic victory for the North. “I want no one punished,” he told Sherman and Grant. Their armies were to be restrained from violence or vengeance. When asked