The meeting went off quietly and in order. The Confederates agreed to cease resistance, following the terms Sherman had granted to Johnston at Durham Station. Gillem accepted and informed Martin that he would return his division to Tennessee. To prevent the Federals from foraging on their return trip, Martin agreed to give them what supplies he had. On April 25, Brown’s and Miller’s brigades began the long ride back. Gillem himself turned to other duties, leaving the column to join the Tennessee legislature, which was then assembling. The war, it seemed, had finally come to an end for the Cavalry Division of the District of East Tennessee.

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Mysteriously, though, the Federals returned to Asheville on April 26 and sacked it. Martin said that he ‘had heard of no worse plundering anywhere.’ General George Thomas, it turned out, had notified Stoneman that Abraham Lincoln had rejected the terms of surrender between Sherman and Johnston. Stoneman’s cavalry was to ‘do all in its power to bring Johnston to better terms.’

The raid, after this last act of destruction, came to a close. Yet fate had something else in store for these veteran Union horse soldiers. The shooting war had ended, but Jefferson Davis and the remains of the Confederate government were still in flight–and they were close to Stoneman’s troopers. On April 23, Palmer was notified of Lincoln’s assassination and ordered to pursue Jefferson Davis to ‘the ends of the earth.’ Palmer, breveted to general and placed in command of the division, began moving his brigades south. He sent one by way of Spartanburg and the others from their position near Asheville, planning to join them at the Savannah River in South Carolina.

The grand chase was on. Moving through Anderson, S.C., where the Federals captured and ‘disposed of’ 300 bottles of wine, the division crossed the Savannah River and entered Georgia. As Palmer’s men moved through the state, they barely missed capturing the fugitive president on several occasions. In consolation, the division did capture four brigades of Confederate cavalry and General Braxton Bragg and his wife (who were on their way to be paroled at the time). Finally, on May 15, Davis was captured in Irwin, Ga., by another Federal unit, the 4th Michigan Cavalry.

Stoneman and his cavalry division thus passed out of the war and into local legend. The raid had been a powerful one. A force of only 6,000 men had destroyed uncountable tons of supplies and miles of railroad tracks, shocked the local citizens with the reality of war, traveled more than 600 miles through enemy territory, and assisted in the capture of Jefferson Davis. Stoneman, one historian appraised, had utilized the methods of Sherman in a’splendidly conceived, ably executed attack upon the war potential and the civilian population of the South.’ Sherman himself, the author of the concept of total war, admiringly referred to Stoneman’s raid as ‘fatal to the hostile armies of Lee and Johnston.’ Stoneman and his men, beyond any doubt, had amply fulfilled their orders ‘to destroy.’

This article was written by Chris Hartley and originally appeared in the May 1998 issue of America’s Civil War. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to America’s Civil War magazine today!

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