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survivors of General Joe Johnston’s. He ordered his commanders to head forty miles west, toward the courthouse at Amelia Springs, where the scattered fragments of the Army of Northern Virginia could regroup and distribute supplies for the long journey ahead. But Grant was in pursuit, his forces moving so swiftly that Quartermaster Sergeant James Horrocks (since his promotion in March) returned from his furlough in New York to find his camp deserted. Not knowing where the 5th Battery, New Jersey Artillery had gone, he walked into Richmond and spent the night on the floor in one of the bedrooms in the Confederate White House. “So I had the honor of sleeping in the house of Jeff Davis,” he wrote to his brother, “if there is any honor in that.”30

THIRTY-EIGHT

“A True-Born King of Men”

Lincoln in Richmond—Appomattox Court House—A final salute—From actor to assassin—Punch apologizes—The American example—Flight to the interior—Vizetelly’s £50 note

On April 5, 1865, Abraham Lincoln spent his second day in Richmond riding about in an open carriage. His bravery terrified the presidential retinue, but it no doubt contributed as much to the city’s return to order as any overt display of arms. The aftermath of Richmond’s burning was also observed by Thomas Kennard, an English railway engineer, who was so eager to be a part of the momentous events in Virginia that he had chartered a private yacht to take him and a small group of British and American tourists along the James River to the Confederate capital. They wandered through the streets, shocked to find “that nearly half the city has been reduced to ashes,” though they thought the Federal soldiers’ behavior was exemplary:

No pillage or destruction of property had taken place [wrote Kennard], and, to the great honour of the Federal arms be it fairly said, never before did cities like Petersburg and Richmond, entered by excited troops after years of siege, suffer to so trifling an extent. Tobacco was the only temptation that could not be resisted. There was not a whisper amongst the inhabitants conversed with, other than that they had been treated in the most humane and proper manner. We can all certify to the fact that out of the thousands upon thousands of troops we have seen only one man has been detected the worse for drink. This is accounted for by the fact that spirits are forbidden both in the army and navy on service. One could not fail to remark the deep mourning worn by the ladies moving about the streets, or the careworn expression of their countenances. The “darkie” element, on the contrary, was decidedly jubilant.1

Lincoln stopped at Capitol Square on his way to General Weitzel’s headquarters in the former Confederate White House and addressed a crowd of newly freed slaves: “My poor friends, you are free,” he said, “free as the air. You can cast off the name of slave and trample upon it.… Liberty is your birthright.” But later, at the close of his meeting with Weitzel, Lincoln urged the general to treat the defeated white population with tact: “If I were in your place,” the president told him, “I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.”2

Lincoln was impatient for peace, and he urged General Grant, in a telegram on April 6, to finish off Lee’s army before it escaped to Georgia: “Nothing … is to delay, hinder, or interfere with your work.”3 Grant had heard from Sheridan that the Confederates had massed at Amelia Court House, forty miles west-northwest of Petersburg, and were desperately foraging for food in the surrounding countryside, as their supplies had failed to arrive. Grant realized immediately that his adversary had only one course of action: “It now became a life and death struggle with Lee to get south to his provisions.”4 More than a million and a half rations of bread and meat were waiting for the famished Confederates at Danville, a hundred miles away on the Virginia–North Carolina border. “The soldiers are in a dreadful state from hunger,” Welly wrote in his diary on the sixth. Lee had heard that the road to Danville was blocked, but there