Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.on this day a telegram from General Robert E. Lee containing the stark warning "there is no more time, the Yankees are coming" prompted President Jefferson Davis to board a train, fleeing the Confederate Capital Richmond shortly before midnight.

But there was no escape from the "Yankees", and on 10th May he was arrested at Irwinville in Irwin County, Georgia. Unfortunately for Davis, Lincoln's inaugural commitment to treat the defeated South "with malice toward none, with charity for all" had been rather overtaken by the sensational events that had transpired since his flight from Richmond.

And in any case such warm words were somewhat imprecise in that Lincoln would never have considered the sentiment to extend to "the traitor" Jeff Davis even before the assassination attempt.

Because just two weeks after Davis train pulled out of Richmond, an officer on leave, Giles Nelson foiled an assassination attempt at the Ford Theatre. Nelson had noticed a suspicious character trying to sneak into the president's box and stopped him. After a brief struggle, he subdued the assassin, a Confederate agent John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln, decorating him later, called him "my personal saviour".

Details of a dastardly conspiracy would soon emerge. Not only would the evidence trace back directly to Jeff Davis, but it would also implicate the British Government who had been turning a blind eye to Confederate spies operating over the border in Canada. Cynics would later suggest that Lincoln had manipulated events in order to drive his own agenda, a further consolidation of federal powers to support the Hamiltonian "American System". Which fundamentally, didn't look much different in outlook from the British Empire that the Founding Fathers had defeated. And perhaps after all the hanging of Jeff Davis at Fort Monroe marked the bitter end of Virginian thought leadership in the new dictatorship of the United States.