On the night of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis boarded a train out of Richmond as word reached the Confederate capital that Robert E. Lee could no longer hold the lines. Behind him rode what remained of the Confederate treasury, gold, silver, and bullion that Captain William H. Parker, who commanded the convoy, put at roughly five hundred thousand dollars, plus nearly half a million more in Richmond bank gold riding along for safekeeping.
By early May the convoy had reached Washington, Georgia, and the money started disappearing in pieces. A hundred and eight thousand dollars went to the soldiers still escorting it, as final pay. Two naval officers were handed eighty six thousand dollars to smuggle to Britain, and it simply vanished, one researcher later calling it money that was basically just stolen. Federal soldiers recovered part of the bank gold after a camp raid at Danburg Crossroads. Davis himself was captured near Irwinville on May 10 with only a few dollars left in his pocket.
One piece was never accounted for at all. Thirty nine kegs of Mexican silver dollars, more than nine thousand pounds of coin, had been hauled as far as Danville, Virginia before the wagons had to move faster than that weight allowed. Researchers believe it was buried there rather than carried on, and ground surveys have detected what looks like buried caches in the search area ever since, in ground nobody has been permitted to dig.
Makes you wonder what a government on the run does with a fortune it can no longer afford to carry.
Buried under a Virginia graveyard, or gone for good?
