A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [424]
Word of Lee’s surrender spread quickly throughout the South. “We were brought into the 4 mile camp at Vicksburg and I was lying there when news came of General Grant’s great victory,” wrote James Pendlebury of the 69th New York Irish Regiment. He had survived three months of relentless marching from one makeshift prison to another until his rescue by Federal troops. Sick and weak as he was, Pendlebury dragged his emaciated frame to the Vicksburg courthouse and rang the bell, which was answered by a volley of cannon fire off the surrounding hills. But in Richmond, the one-hundred-gun salute was ignored by the long shuffling lines of residents queuing at U.S. Sanitary Commission depots for their rations. Francis Dawson had regained consciousness, although he was incapacitated by the bullet wound to his shoulder. “What would you think of me were I to return to England, poorer than when I left her shores?” he wrote to his mother. He felt not just the defeat of the Confederacy but a sense of personal failure: “My life has been a useless one, productive only of grief to others whom I love the best and remorse to myself.” He had always promised his mother that his absence from London would not leave her in want; however, his “worldly possessions” now consisted of “a postage stamp and what was left of a five dollar greenback that a friend in Baltimore had sent me.”18
Farther south, at Danville, Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and an escort of sixty midshipmen from the Confederate naval academy boarded their trains again, this time for Greensboro, North Carolina, where the armies of Beauregard and Johnston were said to remain intact. “People in the army wonder at my good spirits,” Feilden wrote to Julia from his makeshift camp at Hillsborough, North Carolina, “for all that I cannot shut my eyes to our condition, though perhaps after all it is more philosophic to try and not think, but to float down with the current.”19 But, like Dawson, Feilden was prepared for a prolonged resistance to Federal rule. “To tell the truth,” he wrote, “I would sooner be killed in this war than leave the country in its present distress of my own accord.” Davis shared his sentiments, and when he reached Greensboro, the Confederate president became indignant with Beauregard and Johnston for telling him there was no alternative to asking Sherman for his terms of surrender. Davis insisted that the war was by no means over, not when there remained two undefeated Confederate armies—Johnston’s in North Carolina and General Edmund Kirby-Smith’s west of the Mississippi.20 Driven by Davis’s determination to fight on—and a fear that they would all be hanged for treason if caught by the Federals—the remaining members of the Confederate cabinet began making preparations to leave Greensboro on April 14. They were being hunted by Federal forces, but one determined seeker had already found them, though he was a friend: Frank Vizetelly, who had been trying to catch up with Davis since the fall of Richmond, was the only journalist to reach him.
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Abraham Lincoln had been in Washington for five days on April 14 when he convened the cabinet to discuss the terms for readmitting the Southern states to the Union. The only member not at the meeting was William Seward, who was bedridden after suffering a carriage accident on April 5 that had left him with a dislocated shoulder and a broken jaw. His wife and daughter, Frances and Fanny, were nursing him. “His face is so marred and swollen and discolored that one can hardly persuade themselves of his identity,” Frances wrote to her sister, nor was he able to communicate except by grunting.21 Bereft of his closest ally, Lincoln found it much more difficult to persuade the cabinet of the wisdom of showing clemency toward the South. He even advised the war secretary, Edwin Stanton, to allow the Confederate plotters in Canada to escape to Europe. Stanton wanted Jacob Thompson