Poor Davis—he was not a modern man in any sense of the word but a conservative called to manage what was, in one sense, a revolution. Honor, perhaps, more than victory, was, in the midst of ill fortune, ineptitudes, and even stupidities, his guiding star, as it may have been that of Lee, Richard Taylor, and others who, though they may never have believed in victory, put their state loyalty first.

  WARS tend to be iffy. And there were undoubtedly ifs in the Civil War—historians are still engaged with them. But the modern men won, and from that moment all the ifs disappeared. Toward midnight on April 2, 1865, Davis and his government abandoned Richmond to flee southward. Lincoln came up river to view the blackened ruins of Richmond. Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, who was with a second party of Union dignitaries, appropriated the ivory gavel of the Confederate Senate. Returning to Washington, in a distinguished company that included the Marquis de Chambrun, Lincoln could see from shipboard the birthplace of Washington and of Lee—a symbolic panorama of the old nation that had died in 1861—and then felt an impulse to read Shakespeare to the party and to himself. Thus occurred the unforgettable moment that seemed to sum up his earlier succession of direfully predictive dreams in one passage:

  Duncan is in his grave;

  After life’s fitful fever he sleeps

  well....

  He read on, to the end:

  Nothing

  Can touch him further.

  He paused, and then repeated the passage. The ensuing silence was broken by his wife, who seems to have had an inimitable gift for the irrelevant. She firmly declared that Jefferson Davis ought to be hanged. Lincoln replied, “Judge not that ye be not judged”—a remark that he had earlier had occasion to make to the same statement, from another trivially patriotic mouth, and was to make again.

  Appomattox came. Lincoln had a recurrence of an old dream of being on a strange kind of vessel floating to a mystic shore, and recounted it to Gideon Welles, the Secretary of the Navy—presumably because he was handy, not simply because it fell into his department. Lincoln attended “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre and finally reached the mystic shore, dying on April 15 th, and leaving Vice-President Andrew Johnson, his successor, full of gall from his deprived childhood and hatred of the likes of Davis, to put a reward of a hundred thousand dollars on the head of the Confederate President as accessory to murder.

  Davis, with fewer and fewer companions, continued his flight. Heading west to cross the Mississippi and continue the war from Texas, his little party stopped for the night in South Georgia, where, near Irwinville, on May 10, 1865, they were captured by a hog-lucky detachment of federal cavalry. And there, with Davis wearing a shawl that his wife had thrown about his shoulders, began the myth that he had tried to escape in women’s clothes—an episode that, staged as a comic skit, was to enrich P. T. Bar-num and flatter the hearts of patriots. Barnum omitted the looting of the Davis baggage by heroes hunting for the remains of the Confederate Treasury which Davis was supposed to have made off with, and the sight of troopers in blue gobbling the meagre breakfast prepared for the Davis children. Davis is reported to have said to the colonel who had taken him, “The worst of all is that I should be captured by a band of thieves and scoundrels.” Though they found no treasure, the thieves and scoundrels were now prosperous: there was the Presidential reward to be divided.

  On May 22nd, Davis was in Virginia’s Fortress Monroe—”that living tomb,” as it was called by the New York Herald, which continued, not omitting to gloat over the libel of women’s dress: “No more will Jeff Davis be known among the masses of men. . . . His life has been a cheat. His last free act was an effort to unsex himself, and deceive the world. He keeps the character, we may say, in death, and is buried alive.” His cell was a specially prepared casemate of the fortress, with the water, at high tide, coming almost to the sill of the barred window. Within a grated door, two armed sentries were stationed, with two others just outside, and in that outer room an officer under orders to inspect the captive every quarter hour. The outer room was, in turn, secured by an outside lock, the key in the hands of the commanding officer of the guard, and the locked door under the immediate guard of two more sentries. Sentries, closely stationed, guarded all approaches to the region of the casemate, and there were similar sentry lines on the outside parapet and directly across on the glacis of the moat. A guardroom was established to each side of the prisoner’s casemate, in which a lamp burned perpetually.

  There Davis awaited the will of three men: President Johnson, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and General Nelson A. Miles, who commanded the fortress. As for the first, Johnson, illiterate until after his marriage, had not only a hatred of the class to which Davis had ascended but a personal resentment against Davis, who he felt had once insulted him in the Senate by a reference to tailors, Johnson having been a tailor before entering politics. To make matters worse, at the formal celebration in Washington when Richmond fell (Lincoln already on his visit there), Johnson, as Vice-President, on the speakers’ platform, answered a patriotic voice from the crowd that yelled for the hanging of Jeff Davis by bursting out, “Yes, I say hang him twenty times!” He would, he added, hang them all. Secretary Stanton had been the presence behind the medievally brutal tortures of the as yet unconvicted accused at the trial after Lincoln’s death—a legal procedure that remains a blot on American history.

  Stanton now expected, apparently, to try Davis in the same fashion. General Miles had risen, with four wounds in action, from captain to major general of volunteers. The wounds had helped, no doubt, but Miles had learned that valor and merit could be supplemented by skillful respect for and connivance with authority. Stanton’s department had directed that the prisoner should be put in irons if Miles thought it necessary. Miles immediately took the subtle suggestion. The ascent even of merit can be greased, and he was to become Major General Miles of the regular Army; a little later, he married a niece of Sherman; eventually,, he became commander-in-chief of the Army, following such stars as Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan; he died at a circus performance and, to complete the comedy, was buried in a hero’s tomb at Arlington.

  A slight difficulty was encountered, however, in the fettering of Davis. A captain entered the casemate, followed by two men holding a length of chain with shackles. There is some discrepancy in reports of the ensuing dialogue, but the captain later wrote a letter concerning the event. Upon Davis’s asking if he was to be shackled, the captain replied that such were his orders. Davis said, “Those are orders for a slave, and no man with a soul in him would obey such orders.” Upon the captain’s reiteration of his orders, Davis said, “I shall never submit to such an indignity.” When a demand to see General Miles was refused, Davis said, “Let your men shoot me at once.” In the end, it took four men to overpower the prisoner and flatten him on his cot for the fettering. Like Black Hawk, years earlier, Davis evidently preferred death to dishonor, but neither man was allowed the option.

  Secretary Stanton was having his way. What Lincoln’s way would have been is suggested by his answer, toward the end of the war, to a question about what fate awaited Davis. Lincoln began the tale of an Irishman who had signed the temperance pledge but later wondered if any harm would be done if he happened to take on a couple “unbeknownst to himself.” Then, no doubt after a pause, Lincoln wondered what harm would be done if Davis slipped out of the country “unbeknownst” to him.

  The torments went on—chiefly the ever-lighted lamp and the never-ending tread of the guard, which forbade sleep. The tale of the shackling was grist for the journalistic mill, but some resentment on the part of readers began to replace applause. Meanwhile, the one person of humane instincts with whom Davis came into contact was the prison doctor, John C. Craven, whose duty was presumably to preserve life in the body for the further torture of a military trial. Dr. Craven, who later wrote a book on Davis, saw the shackles as nothing but a danger to the survival of his charge, and as a result of his intervention—as well as some backfire from public opinion—they were removed after five days. Craven saw that the allaying of “cerebral excitement” was the first thing to consider in the condition of his patient, and when Craven found that a guard had laid claim to Davi’s pipe as a souvenir he provided pipe and tobacco. But Craven had trouble procuring changes of clothing for Davis at proper intervals—a fact that he regarded for Davis as “unmerited insult heaped on helplessness”—and with difficulty got him heavy underwear and a coat for winter. Only after a long period could he procure proper facilities and, finally, a change of quarters for the prisoner, who suffered from the dampness of the moat. Davis* s blind eye—blind for years now—prompted him, according to Craven’s account, to reach back into his memory for Milton:

  Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the

  blaze of noon;

  Irrevocably dark, total eclipse

  without the hope of day.

  And:

  Yet I argue not

  Against Heaven’s hand or will, nor

  bate a jot

  Of heart or hope: but still bear up

  and steer

  Right onward.

  It was just as well that Davis, in the lonely years of reading and study, had stocked his mind, and could find his heart spoken for him in lines like Milton’s, for he was allowed no books (except the Prayer Book and the Bible) and, of course, no newspapers. Craven wrote that “except for the purpose of petty torture there could be no color of reason for withholding’’ such items. But the greatest torture of all was the denial of communication between the prisoner and members of his family, who were now forbidden to leave Savannah, where they were friendless, but where Varina did her best, by correspondence, to excite a sense of justice for her husband. Meanwhile, bad health, especially erysipelas, weakened Davis—illness brought on chiefly, Dr. Craven reported, by the fear that he might die “without opportunity of rebutting in public trial” the charge of conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln. The will of Davis, his self-control, piety, generosity of spirit, and refusal to blame others won Craven’s admiration and heart. “Mr. Davis is remarkable for the kindliness of his nature and fidelity to friends,” he wrote. Elsewhere, he wrote that “there were moments ... in which Mr. Davis impressed me more than any professor of Christianity I had ever heard.” And “Let me here remark that, despite a certain exterior cynicism of manner, no patient has ever crossed my path who, suffering so much himself, appeared to feel so warmly and tenderly for others.”

  Over this period hung the grim image of what the farcical military trial and accompanying tortures for the plotters (and others) of Lincoln’s assassination had been. But the pendulum had begun to swing back. The London Times had come out for clemency, not because of sympathy for Davis but for the sake of the American Union. And as the state of affairs at Fortress Monroe became better known, and the early public approval began to fade, influential Northern lawyers, no secessionists but honest men devoted to the cause of law and justice—including Charles O’Conor, a nationally recognized ornament of the bar—began scrupulously to study the case. O’Conor wrote a letter to Davis, which did not reach the hands of the addressee until it had passed through those of General Miles, who, still eager to please, consulted higher authority before giving Davis permission to reply. All sorts of difficulties were made; O’Conor and others of repute were refused admittance to Davis (who, having no newspapers, could know nothing of what was going on). But meanwhile an irremediable split had now occurred between the vengeful President and the Republicans. For instance, even Representative Thaddeus Stevens, an advocate of stern Reconstruction policies, offered—no doubt for political purposes of his own—to become one of the defenders of Davis.

  To complicate matters, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, a well-known opponent of slavery, had declared that to try Davis for treason would be to condemn the North publicly, for by the Constitution itself, he said, secession was not treason. This would mean that the vindictive government would risk having the Supreme Court declare that the victors had waged war illegally. Worse was to come. When the easy way out seemed to be for a number of prominent men to support a petition to get Davis a pardon, which, if granted, would get the President and others off the hook, Davis was determined to let them hang there. To ask for a pardon was, he said, an admission of guilt, and he refused to put his name to the document. The trial was what he wanted, and the outcome of the trial seemed ever more certain as his indefatigable defenders found evidence of the government’s intention to try to connect Davis with poor Henry Wirz, the commandant of Anderson-ville prison, who was executed under the accusation of having starved his prisoners. The intention to connect Davis with Wirz was based on hope and delusion. (The defenders had already carefully considered all possible evidence on this point.)

  In spite of discomfiture, the government continued its tough policy, and forbade conferences between Davis and counsel, at the same time trying to agitate the old question of the embezzlement of the remains of the Confederate Treasury. And, in a last act of desperation, the private correspondence of the lawyers supporting Davis was seized and tampered with. Yet the idea of a military trial appeared more and more dangerous from the political point of view.

  All this time, the light in the cell was kept burning, and Mrs. Davis, without formal accusation of any kind, was held prisoner within the limits of Savannah, and not even allowed to visit Augusta, where she might have had the comfort of family. In addition, she had to endure the humiliation of seeing published extracts (“garbled,” according to her account) of letters to and from her husband found in their baggage by the original hunters for the Confederate treasure. By August of 1865, however, she had been allowed to go to New York, and had been welcomed there by George Shea, the first lawyer to undertake her husband’s defense. Clearly, the atmosphere was, under new influences, changing. Davis was allowed to receive the Confederate General J. Brown Gordon, who later said, from a public platform, that he had seen Davis in victory at the First Manassas and that “the vicarious sufferer” for his people locked in Fortress Monroe “was greater and grander still in the hour of his deepest humiliation.”

  The confusion in government circles was indicated by the fact that in May of 1866 an indictment was handed up against Davis in the Circuit Court of Norfolk. (Originally, Lee was also to have been indicted, but Grant protested that Lee was protected by the parole Grant had received.) The government seemed to have forgotten that a trial was exactly what Davis and his lawyers most wanted. Then, mysteriously, the record of the indictment was lost.

  Later that month, Mrs. Davis succeeded in gaining an interview with President Johnson, whose mendacity and evasiveness reached monumental heights, and who, grasping at a straw, himself suggested that all would be solved if Davis would only ask for a pardon. The answer was predictable. Chief Justice Chase, who had originally advised against futile prosecution for treason, accepted a suggestion that Davis might get bail by having some such important person as Horace Greeley—an enemy turned friend for the sake of justice, he was already a stout defender of Davis—sign the bail bond. Mrs. Davis presented the case to Greeley, who not only agreed to sign the bond but eloquently fought, through his paper, for an immediate trial.

  In the meantime, the rigors of prison had been relaxed (General Miles was assigned to another post), but the whole affair seemed again bogged down in political considerations and incompetence—or subject to undefinable forces. In the end, however, under the various pressures that had been accumulating, the District Court in Richmond issued a writ of habeas corpus directing the commandant of Fortress Monroe to “present the body” of the accused. On May 12, 1867, in Richmond, Mr. and Mrs. Davis occupied the same rooms at the Spots-wood Hotel as on his arrival as President of the Confederate States of America. The next day, after William M. Evarts, soon to be the Attorney General of the United States, had announced that the case was not to be raised at “the present term,” a bail bond was signed by ten men, including Horace Greeley, Cornelius Vanderbilt (by proxy), and—most fantastic of all—Gerrit Smith. Smith, an ardent abolitionist and one of the Secret Six who had backed John Brown for the raid on Harpers Ferry, later wrote, concerning his present motives: “I have ever held that a sufficient reason why we should not punish the conquered South is that the North was quite as responsible as the South for the chief cause of the war . . . the mercenary North coolly reckoned the political, commercial, and ecclesiastical profits of slavery, and held to it.”

  DAVIS had come out of the war with popularity diminished almost to the vanishing point, but when, free on bail, he emerged from the courthouse in Richmond, the rebel yell burst forth for the first time since the last few Southern bayonets had glittered in a futile charge. Back at the apartment in the Spots wood Hotel, Davis, his wife, and Dr. Charles Francis Minnegerode, his rector, retired into an inner room and knelt in prayer.

  The general situation in which Davis found himself was anomalous. He had been freed on bail by a civil court, with the implication, warranted by the President and the Chief Justice, that the law of peace prevailed. But Congress maintained that the South was still legally in a state of rebellion. Not able to pursue the hope of occupying a useful position in his own land while the indictment stood, and pursued, as he wrote, by “a spirit of vengeful persecution,” Davis still held his ground in refusing to consider any plan that involved the application for a pardon. His attitude was clearly stated by James Redpath—the same James Redpath who had been an ardent abolitionist in “Bleeding Kansas,” who, as a daring reporter, had sought out and interviewed John Brown in his hideaway after the Pottawatomie Massacre, who had written the first, and frantically laudatory, biography of Brown (“The Public Life of Captain John Brown”), and who had termed him a “Warrior Saint” and a “warrior of the Lord and of Gideon.” Now, years later, a somewhat more realistic reporter, he sought out another flinty old man, whom he described as “a statesman with clean hands and pure heart.” In summary, Redpath said of Davis, “He was true, all his life long, to the creed in which he had been reared; and hence it was impossible for him to ‘repent and recant.’ He could not repent of being honest, or recant what he believed to be true.” Davis had written, in fact, to the chairman of the congressional Committee on Amnesty that he did not wish any bill under its consideration to be endangered because he might be included in its provisions. Amnesty, like pardon, implied crime, and he admitted none.