Chapter 77: Davis Is Captured and the Remaining Rebels Surrender

May 10, 1865

After leaving Richmond, the Confederate President heads 140 miles southwest by train to Danville, Virginia where he stays for nine days, learning on April 10 of Lee’s surrender. His next move is a 45 mile train ride to Greensboro, North Caroline, where he meets with Generals Beauregard and Johnston with his plans to fight on. At that point their forces are down to only 25,000 men and both officers think that Davis is delusional. Johnston thus begins talks with Sherman about terms for a surrender.

The President’s small party leaves Greensboro on horseback and travels 90 more miles to Charlotte, where he stays until April 26. In the interim he hears about Lincoln’s assassination, and also reluctantly acquiesces to the surrender of Johnston’s army which takes place outside Greensboro on April 26.

Still Davis flees south another 335 miles to Irwinville, Georgia, holding out a thread of hope to escape by boat to Texas and join up with his remaining Trans-Mississippi soldiers. But this plan vanishes quickly, and on May 10, Davis and his wife Varina are captured by two Union Cavalry units.

He is soon in shackles at Ft. Monroe where he remains for two years while Andrew Johnson tries to figure out what to do with him. In the end he is released, travels to Canada, Cuba, and Europe before settling back home in Mississippi. He writes his history of the Confederacy and dies at eighty-one on December 6, 1889. Varina follows him in 1909 at age eighty.

Word of the end of the war, and of slavery, doesn’t reach Galveston, Texas until June 19, 1865 – a date later celebrated in Black history as “Juneteenth.”