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with your talents, because marriage these days was not a haven from the world. It was not the safety net; it was the tightrope.
    Margaret MacPherson’s gaze fell upon the family portrait, framed and hanging over the sofa. That could go in the attic, she thought. She could put another picture there reflecting the status of her new life—just as soon as shefigured out what that was. She was brooding again. Time to get busy. Do the dishes, then, to keep occupied. She walked into the kitchen to tackle the day’s dishes, only to find that she had already done them.
    On the way to Appomattox, the ghost of an army
    Staggers a muddy road for a week or so
    Through fights and weather, dwindling away each day.
    â€” STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT,
John Brown’s Body,
Book 8

    DANVILLE—APRIL 9, 1865
    C OMPARED TO THE fair city of Richmond, Danville was a piddling town, Gabriel Hawks reckoned. Perhaps the place was a mite bewildered to be suddenly elevated to the capital of the Confederate States of America and simultaneously flooded with refugees from the former capital. Its citizens had scurried to find suitably grand accommodations for the sudden rush of Confederate dignitaries who had taken up residence in the little Dan River mill town now that Richmond was a smoldering ruin. President Davis and two of his cabinet officers were guests in the home of Colonel W. T. Sutherlin, but there were too many refugees for Danville to accommodate, so some of the lesser folk were quartered in railroad cars switched off on a side track, where they subsisted on what commissary rations could be spared for them.
    It seemed that most of the navy had fetched up in Danville. Gabriel had never seen so many captains, commanders, surgeons, and engineers, all milling around with nothing to do. They mostly congregated at the naval store set up by Paymaster Semple. There they’d pass the time sitting on bread barrels, tying fancy sailor’s knots, and swapping sea yarns about past glories. But they were fish out of water. How could they still be in the war high and dry miles from the sea, their ships destroyed, their ports captured? But they simply had to wait it out, like the rest of Danville.
    Tom Bridgeford had said that it was madness to have put the capital in Richmond to begin with, with all the vast territories of the Confederacy to choose from. Why not the grand port cities of New Orleans or Charleston? Why put the heart of your country a hundred and ten miles from the enemy’s seat of government? One of the Richmond boys tried to explain to him that if the navy gunboats could have held off the Union fleet upriver, then the Allegheny Mountains would have forced any invading army down a hundred-mile corridor that would be made a death trap by the defending Army of Northern Virginia. The swamps and the forests ought to have swallowed them up, and indeed they did for three long years, but the trouble was the Union never ran out of soldiers. Theyjust kept coming. No matter where you put the capital, they’d have just kept coming.
    But Bridgeford wouldn’t talk sense. It was all those damned Virginians’ doing, he insisted. The Confederacy was top-heavy with them: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, A. P. Hill, J. E. B. Stuart—at least a hundred generals out of the four hundred altogether.
And
a raft of the government officials, all from the Old Dominion. President Davis was a Mississippian, but no doubt he was outvoted by all those Virginia gentlemen who demanded the honor of the seat of government for their precious Richmond—and common sense be damned. Well, look where it had got them, Bridgeford railed. After spending most of the war fending off the Federals from an endless succession of attacks on Richmond, they’d finally lost her and been forced to flee to this backwater place, whose only virtue, according to Bridgeford, was its proximity to the North Carolina line. Pride goeth before a