Davis would often work through lunches and suppers without eating anything unless she personally brought the food to him and berated him into eating to keep up his strength. One day in March 1865, she walked in on a conference with Lee and heard her husband discussing the lack of supplies in the east and then saying that “beef and supplies of all kinds were abundant” in the Trans-Mississippi. Foreseeing the end in Virginia, the president was already thinking ahead and looking for uncaptured regions of the Confederacy where the government could move so the nation could live on to fight another day.
Varina assumed that all the Davis family, including Jefferson, would be leaving the city when he chose to evacuate. It came as a shock when her husband took her aside on the morning of March 30, 1865 and spoke quietly into her ear so the children and the servants would not overhear:
“You must leave here today. My headquarters must be in the field, and your presence will only embarrass and grieve me rather than comfort me,” he said. “I have confidence in your capacity to take care of our babies, and understand your desire to assist and comfort me, but you can do this in but one way, and that is by going yourself and taking our children to a place of safety.”
To her horror, her husband then placed into her hands a small Colt revolver, one of the items he had requested a day earlier from Ordnance Department general Josiah Gorgas.
“You can at least, if reduced to the last extremity, force your assailants to kill you,” her husband said.
As he talked, Davis demonstrated how to load the Colt, tearing a paper cartridge and pouring the black powder into one of the revolver’s cylinder chambers. It was while loading the pistol, a type of weapon she had probably never fired, that Davis also told her to “make for the Florida coast,” a vague request which he would not elaborate on with her or with his cabinet on their own journey south.
Varina was speechless as her solemn husband continued his demonstration of how to work the loading lever to jam the round lead balls down on top of the powder in each of the Colt’s six chambers. She tried to protest that she would need no revolver, but her husband held up one hand to silence her. His next words chilled her. She had heard him say nothing like it over the past four years:
If I live you can come to me when the struggle is ended, but I do not expect to survive the destruction of constitutional liberty.
Varina’s eyes grew wide with fright and comprehension over what was happening. In twenty years of marriage, her husband had never before even displayed a firearm in her presence. Now he had handed her a loaded revolver, instructing her to defend their children to her own death. He then told her in an almost casual tone of voice that he might soon die. He had not made clear if he meant that his enemies would kill him or if he would take his own life rather than submit to capture.
The First Lady knew that nothing she could say would change the President’s mind about the family leaving his side. His first obligation was to make sure that his family was safe, but his second obligation was to continue being president of the Confederacy. As strong willed as she was, Varina knew her husband’s mind was already made up. She and the children would be leaving the city, just as he insisted. And despite her pleas that he should accompany them out of town, she also knew that he would refuse. He had another bigger job to do.
Almost uncontrollably excited after having her husband talk about both their deaths, Varina began rushing around the Executive Mansion deciding what to pack. She moved first for the silverware. Her husband stopped her, explaining that she must travel light in the event that she would have to switch from the train in which she would leave Richmond to wagons later in her journey. He kept shaking his head and telling her no as she reached for favorite house adornments such as the life-size bust of him.
“Then food. I must pack those barrels of flour,” she said, turning for the basement steps. She had used the money made from selling her dresses to buy flour that she had always intended on taking with her on any flight from the capital city.
The president took her arm: “No. You cannot remove anything in the shape of food from here. The people want it, and you must leave it here.”
Food had been chronically short in the capital for more than two years. Davis realized it would only cause further panic among the people if they saw his wife loading flour, bacon, and soft bread aboard a train. Few people in the city could still afford to buy the flour that Varina had been purchasing and hoarding for the past year for just the sort of hungry circumstances that were finally gripping the city.
“Only clothes. Take only clothes for you and the children and Jim Limber,” Davis said. “Leave everything else behind. It can all be replaced in time.”
The children were Maggie, the oldest at 8; Jefferson, Jr., at 7; Willie, 4; and the newest addition to the family, nine-month-old Varina Anne, whom everyone called “Pie Cake.” One other member of the Davis family who would be leaving was a four-year-old named Jim Limber. The last name of Limber may have been made up by him or the Davises because a limber during the Civil War was a two-wheeled ammunition wagon on which artillery pieces were hitched.
Jim Limber was a black child whom Varina had rescued the previous year from the streets of Richmond when she saw him being beaten by an older black man. She scooped up the child, put him in her carriage, and took him home to the Executive Mansion where he blended in with the children as a brother and playmate. Though no court papers were apparently filed to make his adoption legal, the Davis family treated Jim Limber as just another child in the household, even to the point of having his photograph taken. The president, the First Lady and the Davis children all considered Jim Limber to be as much a Davis as anyone in the family. He would not be left behind on any flight to safety.
THE ONLY DAVIS CHILD who would be left behind in Richmond this day was Joseph.
On a Saturday evening eleven months before, 5-year-old Joseph Davis had fallen to his death from the second-floor balcony of the Confederate White House. Joseph, named for the president’s older brother, had reportedly been following his own older brother, Jefferson, Jr., as the 6-year-old dared his younger sibling to join him in a game of follow the leader. The boys’ Irish-born nurse, Catherine, was tending to the younger Davis daughter and had not noticed that the two boys had slipped out the door of their nursery and onto the balcony. It was a twenty-foot drop to a granite walkway where Joseph cracked his skull and broke both legs. Catherine did not learn of the accident until neighboring women rushed into the house carrying Joseph bleeding from his mouth and nose.
Within minutes a messenger delivered an urgent note from neighbors to the president at his office three blocks away. Varina was also there begging her husband to eat his supper rather than work on into the night as was his custom. When both read the note, food was forgotten. They rushed to the side of their son.
Joseph died two hours later with his shocked and grieving parents at his bedside. Davis, always the stoic in public, stood silently during the wake, watching over his youngest son. He said nothing, only nodding as neighbors and friends patted him on the back and whispered condolences. That night, in the privacy of his bedroom above the dining room, visiting close friends heard the tread of the president’s feet walking back and forth in his bedroom. For the first time, they heard Davis remark on the loss of his willful son Joe who Varina told everyone in earshot was most like his father of all their children.
“Not mine, O Lord, but thine,” Davis said repeatedly to himself and his God from behind his closed door. Sending his son to Heaven was the only comfort the president could find in the tragedy. He took that comfort alone in his room while his wife watched over her son’s body one floor below.
The next day, Monday, Joseph was buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, surrounded by hundreds of child mourners who already knew after three years of war in the South what death was about. One little girl boldly walked up to Mary Chesnut, the wife of a general and a keen observer of political and personal goings-on in Richmond, to ask that she cover Joe’s body with her bouquet because she knew him so well.
That afternoon,