"I's glad to see you. I'm been trying and wishing and praying dat de Lord would help me get to de Yankees, and now dey has come into dis yere city," said another. The citizens of the place, also, were in the streets, amazed and confounded at what had happened. Provost General Macy, of Massachusetts, established a guard to prevent depredations and to save the army from demoralization. The Rebels, before retreating, destroyed their commissary stores and set all the tobacco warehouses on fire. I took a hurried survey of the Rebel works in front of Fort Steadman, and found them very strong. The ground was honeycombed by the shells which had been thrown from the mortars of the Ninth Corps.
General Grant was early in the town, cool, calm, and evidently well pleased with the aspect of affairs; and President Lincoln, who was at City Point, visited Petersburg during the day. He went up in a special car. The soldiers at Meade Station caught a sight of him, and cheered most heartily. He acknowledged the enthusiasm and devotion of the soldiers by bowing and thanking them for the glorious achievement of their arms. On Friday he looked care-worn, but the great victory had smoothed the deep wrinkles on his brow.
Reaching City Point at noon, I was soon in the saddle, galloping towards Richmond; crossing the Appomattox at Broadway, riding to Varina, crossing the James on the pontoons, and approaching the city by the New Market road, overtaking a division of the Twenty-Fifth Corps on the outskirts of the city. It was a hard, exhausting ride. Two miles out from the city my horse fell, and I found myself turning a summersault into the ditch; without broken bones, however, but I was obliged to moderate my speed for the remainder of the distance.
Before entering upon the narrative of my own observations, let us take a look at events transpiring in the city on Sunday.
"We are," said the Sentinel of Saturday evening, "very hopeful of the campaign which is opening, and trust that we are to reap a large advantage from the operations evidently near at hand.... We have only to resolve that we never will surrender, and it will be impossible that we shall ever be taken."
"My line is broken in three places, and Richmond must be evacuated," was Lee's despatch to Jeff Davis. The messenger found him in Rev. Dr. Minnegerode's church. He read the despatch, hurried to the Executive Mansion, passed up the winding stairway to his business apartment, sat down by a small table, wrote an order for the removal of the coin in the banks to Danville, for the burning of the public documents, and for the evacuation of the city. Mrs. Davis had left the city several days previous.
Rev. Dr. Minnegerode, before closing the forenoon service, gave notice that General Ewell desired the local forces to assemble at 3 P. M. There was no evening service. Ministers and congregations were otherwise employed. Rev. Mr. Hoge, a fierce advocate for slavery as a beneficent institution, packed his carpet-bag. Rev. Mr. Duncan was moved to do likewise. Mr. Lumpkin, who for many years had kept a slave-trader's jail, had a work of necessity on this Lord's day,—the temporal salvation of fifty men, women, and children! He made up his coffle in the jail-yard, within pistol-shot of Jeff Davis's parlor window, and a stone's throw from the Monumental Church. The poor creatures were hurried to the Danville depot. This sad and weeping fifty, in handcuffs and chains, was the last slave coffle that shall tread the soil of America.
Slavery being the corner-stone of the Confederacy, it was fitting that this gang, keeping step to the music of their clanking chains, should accompany Jeff Davis, his secretaries Benjamin and Trenholm, and the Reverend Messrs. Hoge and Duncan, in their flight. The whole Rebel government was on the move, and all Richmond desired to be. No thoughts now of taking Washington, or of the flag of the Confederacy flaunting in the breeze from the dome of the national Capitol! Hundreds of officials were at the depot, waiting to get away from the doomed city. Public documents, the archives of the Confederacy, were hastily gathered up, tumbled into boxes and barrels, and taken to the trains, or carried into the streets and set on fire. Coaches, carriages, wagons, carts, wheelbarrows, everything in the shape of a vehicle, was pressed into use. There was a jumble of boxes, chests, trunks, valises, carpet-bags,—a crowd of excited men sweating as never before: women with dishevelled hair, unmindful of their wardrobes, wringing their hands, children crying in the crowd, sentinels guarding each entrance to the train, pushing back at the point of the bayonet the panic-stricken multitude, giving precedence to Davis and the high officials, and informing Mr. Lumpkin that his niggers could not be taken. O, what a loss was there! It would have been fifty thousand dollars out of somebody's pocket in 1861, and millions now of Confederate promises to pay, which the hurrying multitude and that chained slave gang were treading under foot,—trampling the bonds of the Confederate States of America in the mire, as they marched to the station; for the oozy streets were as thickly strewn with four per cents, six per cents, eight per cents, as forest streams with autumn leaves.
"The faith of the Confederate States is pledged to provide and establish sufficient revenues for the regular payment of the interest, and for the redemption of the principal," read the bonds; but there was a sudden eclipse of faith, a collapse of confidence, a shrivelling up like a parched scroll of the entire Confederacy, which was a base counterfeit of the American Union it sought to overturn and supplant, now an exploded concern, and wound up by Grant's orders, its bonds, notes, and certificates of indebtedness worth less than the paper on which they were printed.
Soon after dark the commissaries, having loaded all the army wagons with supplies, began the destruction of what they could not carry away. In the medical purveyor's department were several hundred barrels of whiskey, which were rolled into the street and stove in by soldiers with axes. As the liquor ran down the gutter, officers and soldiers filled their flasks and canteens, while those who had no canteen threw themselves upon the ground and drank from the fiery stream. The rabble with pitchers, basins, dipped it up and drank as if it were the wine of life. The liquor soon began to show its effects. The crowd became a mob, and rushed upon the stores and government warehouses. The soldiers on guard at first kept them at bay, but as the darkness deepened the whiskey-maddened crowd became more furious. By midnight there was a grand saturnalia. The flour in the government stores was seized. Men were seen rolling hogsheads of bacon through the streets. Women filled their aprons with meal, their arms with candles. Later in the night the floating débris of the army reached the city,—the teamsters, servants, ambulance-drivers, with stragglers from the ranks, who pillaged the stores. First attacking the clothing, boot, and hat stores, then the jewellers' shops and the saloons, and lastly the dry-goods establishments. Costly panes of glass were shivered by the butts of their muskets, and the reckless crowd poured in to seize whatever for the moment pleased their fancy, to be thrown aside the next instant for something more attractive.