The news had been expected at any moment by the Confederate leaders, but none the less it produced intense excitement. Away went Mr. Davis, in hot haste, also the members of his cabinet and of his congress, and the officials of the rebel State of Virginia, and, in short, every one who felt himself of consequence enough to make it worth his while to run away. The night was theirs, and beneath its friendly shade they escaped, with archives and documents which had suddenly become valuable chiefly for historical purposes. Grant had ordered that on the morning of April 3 a bombardment should begin at five o'clock, which was to be followed by an assault at six o'clock. But there was no occasion for either; even at the earlier hour Petersburg was empty, and General Grant and General Meade soon entered it undisturbed. A little later Mr. Lincoln joined them, and they walked through streets in which neither man nor animal, save only this little knot, was to be seen.[81] At quarter after eight o'clock, that same morning, General Weitzel, with a few attendants, rode into the streets of Richmond. That place, however, was by no means deserted, but, on the contrary, it seemed Pandemonium. The rebels had been blowing up and burning warships and stores; they had also gathered great quantities of cotton and tobacco into the public storehouses and had then set them on fire. More than 700 buildings were feeding a conflagration at once terrible and magnificent to behold, and no one was endeavoring to stay its advance. The negroes were intoxicated with joy, and the whites with whiskey; the convicts from the penitentiary had broken loose; a mob was breaking into houses and stores and was pillaging madly. Erelong the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, a negro regiment under Colonel C.F. Adams, Jr., paraded through the streets, and then the Southern whites hid themselves within doors to shun the repulsive spectacle. It may be that armed and hostile negroes brought to them the dread terror of retaliation and massacre in the wild hour of triumph. But if so, their fear was groundless; the errand of the Northern troops was, in fact, one of safety and charity; they began at once to extinguish the fires, to suppress the riot, and to feed the starving people.