Norfolk Highlights 1584 - 1881
By George Holbert Tucker
Chapter 48
A Norfolk Girl Told President Davis
Contrary to the well-known story told for years by the little old lady
who was a guide in Richmond's historic St. Paul's Episcopal Church,
a courier from General Robert E. Lee was not the first person to notify
Confederate President Jefferson Davis that Richmond had to be evacuated.
Miss Elizabeth Selden (Bettie) Saunders, the fiancee of Norfolk-born
Colonel Walter Herron Taylor, Lee's aide-de-camp, was, according to
a well-authenticated tradition handed down in her family, the first
person to give President Davis the bad news.
Miss Saunders, a daughter of United States Navy Captain John L. Saunders
and Mrs. Martha Bland Selden Saunders, lived during the war with the
family of Lewis D. Crenshaw in Richmond, where she worked in the Confederate
Mint and the Confederate Medical Department.
It was to the Crenshaw house that Colonel Taylor, to whom she was engaged,
sent a special messanger either on Saturday night, April 1, 1865, or
early on Sunday morning, April 2, to notify her that the Confederate
capital had to be evacuated.
Colonel Taylor had instructed his fiancee to go as soon as possible
to St. Paul's Episcopal Church and ask the rector to be at the Crenshaw
house Sunday night at midnight to perform the marriage ceremony.
Before sending the messanger, Colonel Taylor had received special permission
from General Lee to go to Richmond to give Miss Saunders "the protection
of his name."
Miss Saunders went to the church just before the morning service was
about to begin and met Dr. Charles Minnigerode, the rector, on the church
portico. While she was talking to him, President Davis arried for Morning
Prayer. Overhearing the conversation, Davis asked for more details.
And according to the story as it has been handed down in the Taylor
family, Miss Saunders told him, "Walter would hardly have bothered
to send a special messenger to me if conditions didn't warrant it."
Davis, greatly disturbed by the news, went into the church and took
his seat in the Presidential Pew. A few minutes later, General Lee's
official courier walked down the aisle and whispered to Davis, who arose
and left abruptly.
That night after midnight, on April 3, 1865, while the evacuating Confederates
fired the city and looters ran wild in its streets, Colonel Taylor and
Miss Bettie Saunders were married in the parlor of the Crenshaw house.
Because of wartime inflation, the bride's wedding shoes cost three hundred
dollars.
Poor rail connections and high water brought on by the spring rains
had almost prevented the groom from arriving on time for the ceremony.
Afterward, Lewis Crenshaw accompanied Colonel Taylor as far back toward
the Confederate lines as safety permitted.
One week after Appomattox, Colonel Taylor returned to Richmond, picked
up his bride, and drove her back to Norfolk in a buggy.
 Chapter
49
Norfolk's Two Civil War Monuments
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