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route to Danville approached the enemy’s lines, all knew the activity of his large mounted force, and the chances between a safe passage of the Dan [River] and a general ‘gobble’ by Sheridan’s cavalry seemed somewhat in favor of the ‘gobble.’ ”
    Few spoke as the government in exile crossed the bridge leaving the city, and Richmond came into panoramic view. Mallory studied his fellow fugitives. “The terrible reverses of the last twenty-four hours were impressed upon the minds and hearts of all as fatal to their cause…Painful images of the gigantic efforts, the bloody sacrifices of the South, all fruitless now, and bitter reflections upon the trials yet to come, were passing through the minds of all, and were reflected…upon every face.”
    The city was still dark, but the fires would come soon. They would not be set by Union troops. The Confederates would, by accident, set their own city ablaze when they burned supplies to keep the goods out of Union hands. This improvident decision would reduce much of the capital to ruins. The flames would spread out of control and devour Richmond, enveloping it with a bright, unnatural, yellow-orangeglow that would illuminate the heavens. Jefferson Davis was spared, at least, from witnessing the conflagration.
    “It was near midnight,” John Reagan remembered, “when the President and his cabinet left the heroic city. As our train, frightfully overcrowded, rolled along toward Danville we were oppressed with sorrow for those we left behind us and fears for the safety of General Lee and his army.”
    The presidential train was not the last to leave Richmond that night. A second one carried another precious cargo from the city—the financial assets of the Confederacy, in the form of paper currency, and gold and silver coins, plus deposits from the Richmond banks. Earlier on April 2, Captain Parker had received a written order from Secretary Mallory to have the corps of midshipmen report to the railroad depot at 6:00 P.M. When Parker learned that Richmond was to be evacuated, he went to the Navy Department office, where Mallory ordered him to take charge of the Confederate treasure and guard it during the trip to Danville. Men desperate to escape Richmond and who had failed to make it onto Davis’s train climbed aboard their last hope, the treasure train. The wild mood at the depot alarmed Parker, and he ordered some of his men—some of them only boys—to guard the doors to the depot and not allow “another soul to enter.”
    Once Davis was gone, and the night wore on, Parker witnessed the breakdown of order. “The scenes at the depot were a harbinger of what was to come that night. The whiskey…was running in the gutters, and men were getting drunk upon it…Large numbers of ruffians suddenly sprung into existence—I suppose thieves, deserters…who had been hiding. To add to the horror of the moment…we now heard the explosions of the vessels and the magazines, and this, with the screams and yells of the drunken demons in the streets, and the fires which were now breaking out in every direction, made it seem as though hell itself had broken loose.”
    If the rampaging mob had learned what cargo Parker and his midshipmen guarded, these looters, driven mad by greed, would havedescended upon the cars like insatiable locusts gorging themselves, not on grain but on gold. Parker was prepared to order his men to fire on the crowd. Before that became necessary, the treasure train got up steam and followed Davis, and the hopes of the Confederacy, into the night.
    Back in Richmond, the darkness loosened the restraints of civilization, and the looters went wild. One witness recalled the mood: “By nightfall all the flitting shadows of a Lost Cause had passed away under a heaven studded by bright stars. The doomed city lay face to face with what it knew not.” And, in the evening, “ominous groups of ruffians—more or less in liquor—began to make their appearance on