On this day 160 years ago, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured in Irwin County, Georgia, wearing his wife Varina’s clothes. It was more than three weeks after Lincoln was assassinated, and though the Civil War was over, the traitorous leader not yet been captured, much less brought to justice. That would change, thanks to soldiers in the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry and the 4th Michigan Cavalry, which included our 1st cousin 5x removed, John Spencer Torrance. (He is on the Lucy (Cross) Baer branch of the family tree; Lucy’s mother was a Torrance.)
Torrance was a 19-year-old farmer from Brandon Township, Oakland County, Michigan when he mustered into the 4th Michigan Cavalry at Detroit on August 12, 1862—a private. He would see action at the battles of Stones River (Murfreesboro, Tennessee) and Missionary Ridge (Chattanooga), and participate in the four-month Siege of Atlanta.
On August 26, 1864, near the end of the Atlanta campaign, he entered a Union regimental hospital in Marietta, though it is unclear if he was wounded or ill. Whichever the case, he was back with his regiment by the end of the year.
In the final month of the conflict, on April 2, 1865, the 4th Michigan Cavalry fought at the Battle of Selma, Alabama, where 2,700 Confederates were captured, wounded, or killed (mostly captured). Selma was home to the Confederate States Naval Foundry, which Union forces emptied of useful armaments and burned to the ground.
Torrance and the 4th Michigan Cavalry then rode on to Montgomery, where Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated president in 1861. They captured the city without much of a fight. Next, they headed east into Georgia, reaching Macon just before they learned that Robert E. Lee had surrendered at Appomattox Court House.
The regiment was still encamped at Macon in early May when Union officers were informed that Jefferson Davis and his entourage were trying to escape through the area, bound for Texas. Lieutenant Colonel B. D. Pritchard selected 135 4th Michigan soldiers to join him in pursuit of Davis. Was Torrance one of them? I don’t know, but he had a one-in-three chance. (There were about active 400 soldiers left in the regiment at the time.)
This was a lucrative assignment—there was a $100,000 reward for Davis’s capture. Not only that, rumors were circulating that the Rebels were transporting a cache of gold from the defunct Confederate treasury. Gold!
Another detachment, this one from the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry, joined in the search as well. On May 9 the Union detachments learned from newly liberated Black locals that a mysterious camp had been set up in the woods north of Irwinville. The story was described in American Heritage’s “Was Jefferson Davis Captured in a Dress?” (Fall 2010):
Pritchard left Abbeville [on May 9] and positioned his men about half a mile from the mysterious encampment. “Impressing a negro as a guide,” Pritchard recalled, “I halted the command under cover of a small eminence and dismounted twenty-five men and sent them under command of Lieutenant Purington to make a circuit of the camp and gain a position in the rear for the purpose of cutting off all possibility of escape in that direction.”
Pritchard told Purington to keep his men “perfectly quiet” until the main body attacked the camp from the front. Although, tempted to charge the camp at once, Pritchard decided to wait until daylight: “The moon was getting low, and the deep shadows of the forest were falling heavily, rendering it easy for persons to escape undiscovered to the woods and swamps in the darkness.”
At 3:30 a.m., Pritchard ordered his men to ride forward: “Just as the earliest dawn appeared, I put the column in motion, and we were enabled to approach within four or five rods of the camp undiscovered, when a dash was ordered, and in an instant the whole camp, with its inmates, was ours.”
Still inside Varina’s tent, Davis heard the gunfire and the horses in the camp and assumed these were the same Confederate stragglers or deserters who had been planning to rob Mrs. Davis’s wagon train for several days. “Those men have attacked us at last,” he warned his wife. “I will go out and see if I cannot stop the firing; surely I still have some authority with the Confederates.” He opened the tent flap, saw the bluecoats, and turned to Varina: “The Federal cavalry are upon us.”
Davis had not undressed this night, so he was still wearing his gray frock coat, trousers, riding boots, and spurs. He was ready to leave now, but he was unarmed. His pistols and saddled horse were within sight of the tent. He was a superb equestrian and certain that he could outrace any Yankee cavalryman half his age if he could just get to a horse. Seconds, not minutes, counted now.
Before he left, Varina asked him to wear an unadorned raglan overcoat, also known as a “waterproof.” She hoped the raglan might camouflage his fine suit of clothes, which resembled a Confederate officer’s uniform. “Knowing he would be recognized,” Varina later explained, “I pleaded with him to let me throw over him a large waterproof which had often served him in sickness during the summer as a dressing gown, and which I hoped might so cover his person that in the grey of the morning he would not be recognized. As he strode off I threw over his head a little black shawl which was round my own shoulders, seeing that he could not find his hat and after he started sent the colored woman after him with a bucket for water, hoping he would pass unobserved.”
“I had gone perhaps between 15 or 20 yards,” Davis recalled, “when a trooper galloped up and ordered me to halt and surrender, to which I gave a defiant answer, and, dropping the shawl and the raglan from my shoulders, advanced toward him; he leveled his carbine at me, but I expected, if he fired, he would miss me, and my intention was in that event to put my hand under his foot, tumble him off on the other side, spring into the saddle, and attempt to escape. My wife, who had been watching me, when she saw the soldier aim his carbine at me, ran forward and threw her arms around me. . . . I turned back, and, the morning being damp and chilly, passed on to a fire beyond the tent.”
[Another version of events, published in Michigan History Magazine (May/June 2000), tells a less gallant story of Davis’s capture: “After Pritchard galloped off, Varina Davis
conned trooper Andrew Bee, who was guarding her tent, to allow her
‘old mother’ to go for water. As Bee stepped away, Mrs. Davis and a person dressed in a woman’s
overcoat and a black head shawl left the tent. Noticing that the person was
wearing men’s riding boots with spurs a trooper shouted,
‘There goes a man
dressed in women’s clothes!’
Dickinson and Corporal George Munger rode over to
the pair and order them to halt. The couple ignored the command until they were
surrounded by several troopers. Dickinson removed the shawl, revealing the Confederate
president.”]
Some of the cavalrymen started tearing apart the camp in a mad scramble. They searched the baggage, threw open Varina’s trunks, and tossed the children’s clothes into the air. “The business of plundering commenced immediately after the capture,” observed Harrison. The frenzy suggested that the search was not random. The Federals were looking for something: every Union soldier had heard the rumors that the “rebel chief’ was fleeing with millions of dollars in gold coins in his possession.
Pritchard and his officers heard firing behind the camp and soon discovered that their men were fighting other Union soldiers of the 1st Wisconsin Cavalry, and they were killing each other. Greed for gold and glory contributed to the deadly and embarrassing disaster. The firing between the two regiments created tensions on both sides. Their failure to capture the expected Confederate treasure exacerbated their anger and humiliation. They blamed each other for the fratricide, accused each other of appropriating leads about Davis’s whereabouts during the chase, and fought over the reward money.
It was only after the deadly skirmish that Pritchard realized he had captured the president of the Confederate States of America. One member of Davis’s party later described the captive’s rough treatment: “A private stepped up to him rudely and said: ‘Well, Jeffy, how do you feel now?’”
Probably not so well. Davis was shackled and shipped to Fortress Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. He was charged with treason, but never faced trial. Like the J6 rioters, he was later pardoned and sashayed away.
If there was a punishment for Davis, it was to be ruthlessly mocked by the Northern press for being captured wearing his wife’s clothes. Hundreds of illustrations showed the former president in a hoop dress, bonnet, and shawl. Here are a few of my favorites:
Southerners complain that the story is a lie, but Varina Davis confirmed that he was sporting her raglan overcoat and shawl—not a full hoop dress, certainly, but lazy drag is still drag.
And who received the reward for Davis’s capture? According to a regimental history of the event:
There having been a reward, of 100,000 dollars, posted for the capture of Davis, the men of the 4th were naturally elated at their good fortune, however, the War Department appointed a commission that decided that the men of the 4th were indeed entitled to the money, but when Congress approved the appropriation, a claim was immediately put forth by the men of the 1st Wisconsin. It was not until July of 1868 that a bill authorizing the payment was passed, and at that time Congress felt the reward be shared by both the 4th Michigan and the 1st Wisconsin.
When the money was distributed, it was shared equally by all men who had participated in the expedition.
Did John Spencer Torrance receive any of the reward money? I have found no evidence that he did. He mustered out at Nashville on July 1, 1865, and returned to Michigan. In 1872, he married Aletha J. Crane of Ionia, and the couple had three children—Olive Rose (1873–1962), Garfield H. (1880–1946), and Mabel (1882–1921). He died on August 25, 1902, age 59, and was buried in the Pine Plains Cemetery in Big Rapids. Aletha lived until 1930.
A final note: since learning about Davis’s ill-fated drag performance, Jim has been making scenes every time we visit a Southern Civil War site with a gift shop. He’ll walk up to an unsuspecting clerk, usually a guy with a stern countenance and a close-cropped beard, and loudly ask, “Do you have a history of Jefferson Davis’s life as a drag performer?” When they look back quizzically, Jim launches into a detailed retelling of Davis’s decision to don a dress when danger lurked. Meanwhile, I observe the shenanigans from a safe distance, peeking out over a display of miniature commemorative spoons . . .
UPDATE, June 2026:
We recently had a chance to visit Torrance's grave on a trip to Charlevoix, Michigan:
No comments:
Post a Comment