Pursuit: The Chase, Capture, Persecution and Surprising Release of Confederate President Jefferson Davis
by Clint Johnson
Published by Kensington Publishing (May 27 release)
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Reviewed by Paul Markowitz
At the tail end of the Civil War, as General Robert E. Lee’s troops were being badly mauled by Grant’s army in the battle of Petersburg, it became apparent that the Confederate government located in nearby Richmond would have to retreat or immediately surrender. Reluctantly Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, chose to move the government south to Danville, Virginia and later on to North Carolina, South Carolina, and ultimately to Georgia.
Davis’s retreat started out slowly as it meandered south with some 4,000 men. In fact, there was little reason to hurry, since both Lincoln and General Sherman were largely ignoring him, and privately hoping that Jefferson Davis would quietly slip out of the country, thus resolving some difficult decisions as to the ultimate fate of the defeated Confederate leadership. But Davis’s slow progress was largely due to the fact that he still believed he could link up with viable remnants of the Confederate army in various parts of the south.
All that changed rather dramatically with the assassination of Lincoln, the 10-day manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators, their capture, trial and execution. The fate of Jefferson Davis was suddenly priority number one of the Andrew Johnson presidency, since it was commonly believed that Davis himself devised the plot that led to Lincoln’s death and the near-fatal stabbing of Secretary of State William Seward. Now suddenly the chase was on as 15,000 cavalrymen were assigned the task to hunt down Jefferson Davis before he could leave the country.
In this meticulously researched and well-written narrative we follow the trail, the capture and finally the trial of this amazingly self-assured figure that held this most critical role in the hierarchy of the Confederacy. In describing this nearly five-week sojourn and the following two-year imprisonment, we learn a great deal about this complex, contradictory and little-known figure Jefferson Davis.
Armchair Interview says: Clint Johnson has written numerous books on both people and events in our country’s history.
Author’s Web site: Site under construction for May release http:/www.ClintJohnsonBooks.com