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the Church. Then the same operation to one and a second member of the government, both follow suit; people begin to whisper … they rose in tens and 20s and left the Church, outside the secret was soon abroad.” Only the most faithful remained for communion. Conolly fought his way through the streets—“a regular stampede has begun”—to the home of his friends Mrs. Enders and “her nice pretty daughters.” He promised the distraught women he would spend the night, guarding the house for them. Having satisfied himself that they were safe for the moment, Conolly set off in search of Francis Lawley and found him packing his bags at the hotel: “We take a parting cup to our next merry meeting.”

Map.21 Petersburg and Appomattox, March 25–April 9, 1865

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Jefferson Davis was also packing. Trains were being laid on to take the government and the treasury to Danville, forty miles southwest of Richmond. There was pandemonium in the city. People were fighting and clawing at each other to escape the city, “on horseback, in every description of cart, carriage and vehicle,” wrote Lawley, “on canal barges, skiffs, and boats.” Stephen Mallory and Judah P. Benjamin were already at the station waiting for the rest of the cabinet. Mallory had sent an order to Raphael Semmes, who had been placed in charge of Richmond’s water defenses after his return to the South in November 1864, to destroy the fleet of nine ships on the James River and take his force to wherever Lee established his new headquarters. The Confederate navy secretary had not heard from James Bulloch in weeks. Each day he had waited for a telegram announcing the arrival of CSS Stonewall, but despite Bulloch’s efforts, the cruiser had only set sail from Spain on March 28. Mallory had no idea of the whereabouts of CSS Shenandoah (the raider was in the Pacific, near the Eastern Caroline Islands, south of Guam), nor did it matter now. Judah Benjamin was inscrutable, but he, too, had to accept that his final gamble had failed. Even if Duncan Kenner had succeeded in obtaining Southern recognition from Palmerston in exchange for emancipation—which Benjamin seriously doubted after receiving Lord Russell’s protest—it was too late for the Confederacy.

The trains began rumbling out of Richmond at eleven o’clock. First went the government train, followed by the treasury’s, and finally the government archives. Every car was crowded with refugees; more were riding on the roofs and clinging to the sides. Some of the guards on the trains were boys, barely in their teens. “Up to the hour of their departure from Richmond,” insisted Francis Lawley, “I can testify that Mr. Davis and the three most prominent members of his Cabinet went undauntedly forth to meet the future, not without hope that General Lee would be able to hold together a substantial remnant of his army.”23

Tom Conolly stood by the front window of the Enders family home, keeping watch while the women lay on the sofas behind him, “weep[ing] and sob[bing] till their hearts seem breaking.” Francis Lawley also remained awake. “During that memorable night there was no sleep in Richmond,” he wrote. “In front of every Government bureau, of every auditor’s office, around the Capitol, and upon each side of Capitol-Square, the glare of vast piles of burning papers turned night into day.” The last regiments to leave Richmond had orders to destroy the ordnance depots to keep them from enemy hands, and to dispose of the city’s liquor supply. In a well-intentioned but disastrous move, the Confederates emptied hundreds of whiskey kegs onto the streets. “Women and boys, black and white, were seen filling pitchers and buckets from the gutters,” wrote John B. Jones in his diary.24

Both Conolly and Lawley heard the explosions, which seemed to shake every building in Richmond to its foundations:

As I walked up between 5 and 6 in the morning of Monday, the 3rd, to catch the early train [wrote Francis Lawley], a vast column of dense black smoke shot into the air … as the eye ranged backwards along the James River,