Captain Halbach discussed the implications of the papers with fellow members of his unit, but, so far as the record shows, the only other person to read them that morning was his immediate superior, Captain Richard Hugh Bagby. Bagby, a minister, later made a verbal affidavit as to their contents.¹³ At 2 o’clock that afternoon, Lieutenant Pollard joined Halbach’s party and saw the Dahlgren papers. It was quickly agreed that the papers should be taken to Richmond, and Halbach turned them over to Pollard on the promise of faster delivery than the semi-weekly mail the captain relied on. By evening Lieutenant Pollard had the papers in the hands of his superior, Ninth Virginia Colonel Richard L.T. Beale, along with his report of the ambush of Dahlgren’s party and, by way of confirming identification, Dahlgren’s wooden leg. After reading the papers, Beale ordered Pollard to take them straight to Richmond the first thing the next morning. By his own decision, however, Beale held on to the pocket notebook. Apparently he thought it would furnish clues to additional raiders not yet captured. By not sending the notebook along with the other papers he delayed the process of confirming their authenticity.¹⁴

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It was close to noon on March 4 when Lieutenant Pollard reached Richmond and delivered Dahlgren’s papers and his wooden leg to cavalry Maj. Gen. Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of the Army of Northern Virginia’s commander. Having led the ambush of the Dahlgren party, Pollard gave General Lee a full briefing on the finding of the papers and their identification. ‘Upon ascertaining their contents,’ Lee recalled, ‘I immediately took them to Mr. Davis.’ In the president’s office he found Davis in consultation with Secretary of State Judah Benjamin. Davis listened to Lee’s briefing and then read aloud from the two documents, the address, and the set of instructions. He made no comment until he reached the instruction ‘once in the City it must be destroyed & Jeff. Davis and Cabinet killed.’ At that, he remarked with a laugh, ‘That means you, Mr. Benjamin.’ Apparently dismissing the matter from his mind, the president told Lee to deliver the papers to the War Department and General Samuel Cooper, the Confederacy’s adjutant general, for filing.

By now it was well into the afternoon, and as the Dahlgren papers were passed around and their import discussed at the War Department, anger and indignation began to grow. Davis may have taken the threat of assassination lightly, but the officials of his government were of a very different mind. The message they read in these papers was war without quarter–war fought under the black flag. Had Dahlgren managed to carry out his plan, it was agreed, the consequences for Richmond would have been arson, pillage, the heads of government put to death, and the unlicensed brutality of vengeful prisoners of war visited upon the citizenry. The decision was made, apparently by Secretary of War James A. Seddon, to call in the newspapers and go public with this stark evidence of Northern barbarism.

First, of course, it was necessary to go back to President Davis and persuade him to approve the plan to expose the details of the papers. Then, the editors of Richmond’s newspapers had to be sent for and copies of the documents made for them. When the newsmen finally arrived at the War Department, a briefing was required to acquaint them with the circumstances of Colonel Dahlgren’s death and the discovery of the papers. It was well into evening now, and the editors hurried back to their papers with their stories and copies of the Dahlgren documents in time to meet the deadline for publication in the morning editions of March 5.¹⁵

Richmond’s editorial writers availed themselves of the opportunity to dip their pens in vitriol. The Richmond Dispatch headed its story, ‘The Last Raid of the Infernals: Their Plans Unveiled,’ and went on to describe the ‘diabolical plans’ of the raiders in detail. Nothing, said the Dispatch writer, could have tempted ‘any of the band of robbers and thieves to forgo the booty and butchery, the robbing and marauding that would inevitably fall to the lot of the braves who swept through the city of Richmond.’ The Richmond Whig asked if these men were warriors: ‘Or are they assassins, barbarians, thugs who have forfeited (and expect to lose) their lives? Are they not barbarians redolent with more hellish purposes than were the Goth, the Hun or the Saracen?’ The Richmond Inquirer offered a prediction: ‘Decidedly, we think that these Dahlgren papers will destroy, during the rest of the war, all rosewater chivalry, and that Confederate armies will make war afar and upon the rules selected by the enemy.’¹⁶

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