A Disease in the Public Mind (40 page)

“I shall never bear arms against the Union,” Lee replied. “But it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in defense of my native state.” He was apparently thinking of the threats Virginia had received from the cotton-states firebrands.
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Already it was obvious that many people were concerned about Colonel Lee's role in the looming conflict. He probably suspected his summons to Washington had not a little to do with this large fact. At the beginning of the year, General Winfield Scott had sent a pamphlet to Texas advising his officers on how to deal with the crisis. He had ordered it shown to Lee's commander, General David Twigs, and then to Colonel Lee.

The officer who delivered the document remarked good humoredly, “Ah! I know General Scott fully believes that God Almighty had to spit on his hands to make Bob Lee.” In Virginia, an Arlington neighbor put the issue more explicitly: “For some the question of ‘What will Colonel Lee do?' was second only in interest to ‘What will Virginia do?'”
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•      •      •

In Massachusetts, John Albion Andrew, the man who had helped the Secret Six escape prosecution for backing John Brown, had just been elected governor. He had only one thing on his mind: war. He wrote fiery letters to other New England governors, telling them that southern society would have to be totally reorganized to remove their slave-owning mindset. “We must conquer the South,” he declared. “To do this we must bring the Northern [public] mind to a comprehension of this necessity.”

Andrew decided to visit Washington to assess the situation there. He met with Charles Francis Adams, son of Old Man Eloquent. Adams was recoiling from the prospect of a civil war, but he feared the South was going to start one. He told Andrew that there was a good chance Southerners would seize the capital and prevent Lincoln's inauguration. Adams introduced Andrews to Virginia Senator James M. Mason, who had headed the committee that investigated John Brown. Perhaps recalling Andrew's role in advising John Brown's backers, Mason told the governor that the South would never rejoin a Union in which Massachusetts, led by people like him, was a member.

Andrew retreated to the company of Republicans such as Senator Charles Sumner. He had recovered from his beating and was back in Congress, more South-hating than ever. On Christmas Eve, Andrew joined a Republican congressional conference, which concluded that the nation's future depended on preserving the integrity of the Union—and destroying The Slave Power—“though it cost a million lives.” No one realized these words were a prophecy.
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•      •      •

Another Virginian watched the rush to secession with mind and heart at least as troubled as Colonel Lee's. In Sherwood Forest, his plantation in Charles City County on the lower James River, seventy-one-year-old ex-president John Tyler told a friend, “We have fallen on evil times. . . . Madness rules the hour and statesmanship . . . gives place to a miserable demagogism.” Unlike Lee, Tyler had been living in Virginia since he left the White House in 1845. In these fifteen years, he had seen the state's slave population continue to grow. In his home country, blacks now outnumbered whites more than two to one.

This mounting imbalance was the root of the national crisis, as Tyler saw it. Virginia, he told his friend in the same letter, “will never consent to have her blacks cribbed and confined within proscribed and specified limits—and thus be involved in all the consequences of a war of the races in some 20 or 30 years. She must have expansion . . . But no more slave states has apparently become the shibboleth of Northern political faith.”

Few people, North or South, have so succinctly stated the hidden heart of the crisis between the two sections. No more slave states meant James Madison's idea of diffusion as a step to the eventual elimination of slavery had become impossible as a way to calm the South's fears.
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What to do? As an ex-president, Tyler's devotion to the Union remained intense. He decided to risk his health—and his political reputation—by proposing a solution to the crisis. On December 14, 1860, he issued a call for a peace convention composed of delegates from twelve border states, six slave and six free. These states, he explained to his old friend Caleb Cushing, were the ones most interested in keeping the peace. “If they cannot come to an understanding, then the political union is gone.”
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Over the next few weeks, Tyler's idea acquired weight as other proposals for compromise were voted down in Congress. Arkansas and Missouri had also elected for their conventions a majority of delegates opposed to secession. North Carolina and Tennessee voters rejected calling a convention, so strong was their Union sentiment.

In the North a surprising Tyler ally emerged—Senator William Seward. He had abandoned the irrepressible conflict and higher-law side of his persona and become an apostle of a peaceful solution. “Every thought we think,” he told president-elect Lincoln, “should be conciliatory.” A dubious Lincoln went along, but his reply, if John Tyler had read it, would have instantly terminated the peace convention. Lincoln told Seward that conciliation must not include a compromise “which assists or permits” the extension of slavery. Free soil for free (white) men was still the linchpin of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the politicians in Richmond turned John Tyler's brainchild into a grotesque abortion. The legislature issued a call for a peace convention of delegates from
all
the states still in the Union. Tyler instantly saw that this idea would produce nothing but bedlam. With seven southern states in secession, the North would have a majority on every question. Tyler rushed a plea for his original idea to the
Richmond Enquirer
, which he bolstered with a searing description of what a race war would do to the nation.

Virginia's legislature stuck to its call for all the states to send delegates. Tyler agreed to become one of Virginia's five spokesmen and was soon in Washington, DC, with his wife, Julia. She was delighted to be returning to the scene of her first-lady triumphs. But Tyler grew more and more discouraged as Texas and Louisiana joined the cotton states in secession, and Arkansas, Tennessee, and Virginia warned President Buchanan that they would secede if the Federal government attempted to “coerce” the departed states. The nadir was a meeting with Buchanan in the White House at which the exhausted president whined that the South had rewarded all his efforts on their behalf with base ingratitude. Their seizure of federal forts along their seacoast had made him look inept and impotent.
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Things only got worse when the peace convention met in a hall next to Willard's Hotel on February 4, 1861. There was no shortage of political skill and experience in the conclave. Among the 132 delegates were 6 former presidential cabinet members, 19 former governors, 14 ex-senators, and 50 ex-congressman. But almost all these men were near Tyler's age, and many were in precarious health. The newspapers dubbed them “the Old Gentleman's Convention.” Tyler was elected president. One reporter said he was an apt choice, calling him “a tottering ashen ruin.”
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There was some truth to those harsh words. Tyler's health was not good; he suffered from a debilitating stomach disorder that caused severe indigestion and an almost continuous pain in his abdomen. Nonetheless, he opened the proceedings with a rousing speech, calling on everyone to join him in achieving “a triumph over party.” The convention immediately began failing to obey this noble injunction. The sessions were marred by bickering, irrelevant speech making and not a little sectional hostility.

Several times Tyler lost all control of the proceedings and sat helplessly while delegates shouted insults at each other. The problem was the one he had foreseen: too many delegates from too many states. Spokesmen from New York and Massachusetts had no interest in a compromise. They simply reiterated the Republican Party's resistance to any extension of slavery, anywhere.

A private letter from Julia Tyler on February 13 gives a glimpse of how the hopes of both Tylers were sinking. She deplored the way New York and
Massachusetts were trying to “defeat this patriotic effort at pacification.” The only consolation was the belief that even if the convention failed, Virginia would “have sustained her reputation” as a national leader. The Old Dominion would be able to “retire with dignity” and “join without loss of time her more southern sisters.”
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•      •      •

When President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived in Washington, DC, for his inauguration, ex-President John Tyler arranged a meeting with him. He brought along a delegation from the peace convention. A Virginia member, James A. Seddon, ignored Lincoln's attempts at cordiality and dared him to explain why he had backed a murderer like John Brown and a mischief maker like William Lloyd Garrison, whose writings were spread through the South to inspire slave insurrections.

Lincoln's cordiality vanished. “Mr. Seddon,” he said. “I will not suffer such a statement to go unchallenged, because it is not true. A gentleman of your intelligence should not make such assertions.”

A wealthy New York delegate, William E. Dodge, warned Lincoln that it was “for you to say whether the whole nation shall be plunged into bankruptcy . . . and the grass shall grow in the streets of our commercial cities.”

Lincoln's voice remained cold. He told Dodge that his question seemed to ignore the fact that he was about to take an oath to preserve and defend the Constitution. “Not the Constitution as I would like it, but as it
is.
”

Even more dismaying to Tyler, Lincoln insisted that he would not consider the Constitution preserved and defended until it was “enforced and obeyed in every part of every one of the United States.”
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The meeting resolved John Tyler's growing doubts about the value of the peace convention. The ex-president changed from a unionist to a secessionist who stubbornly clung to a hope for ultimate peace. As he now saw it, Virginia's best choice was departure from the Union. If she did it with the aplomb of a leader, there was a good chance that she would bring the rest of the slave border states—Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, and Delaware—with her. Possibly even some free border states such as Pennsylvania would follow her lead. That would create a southern confederacy
strong enough to discourage any northern attempt to resolve the crisis with bayonets. Once force was removed as an option, perhaps negotiation could achieve peace without bloodshed or permanent disunion.

This imaginary, improbable balance of power was the ironic remnant of John Tyler's hopes for his peace conference. He watched, more or less passively, as the delegates, after additional days and nights of wrangling, produced a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would allow slavery to be extended to the Pacific coast along the 36′30 line of the old Missouri Compromise. South of the line any state could vote to legalize slavery if her citizens wanted it. The idea was not much different from proposals already presented and rejected by the Republican-dominated Congress.

Tyler dutifully sent this message up to Capitol Hill, where it was ignored by both Democrats and Republicans. The ex-president returned to Virginia and on February 28 gave a speech on the steps of Richmond's Exchange Hotel, calling for immediate secession. To his consternation, nothing happened. The convention delegates and the voters who had sent them were still heavily pro-Union and were waiting to hear what President Lincoln had to say at his inauguration on March 4.
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Nine months later a weary ex-President Tyler died gazing into his wife's eyes, after a massive heart attack. His last words were: “Perhaps it is best.”
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CHAPTER 22

The Anguish of Robert E. Lee

In the nine days Abraham Lincoln spent at the Willard Hotel before he took his oath of office, he faced pressure from two directions. The abolitionists, led by Senator Charles Sumner, exhorted him to concede nothing. They were ready, even eager for war. “I am in morals, not politics,” Sumner liked to say. Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio talked freely of the need for some “bloodletting.” He kept a sawed-off shotgun in his desk on the Senate floor to make sure no Southerner gave him a Sumner-style beating. The conciliators, led by William Seward, now included Charles Francis Adams. “On which side would Lincoln be allied, that, north and south, was the question,” wrote his son, Charles Francis Adams Jr.

The younger Adams had written an article, “The Reign of King Cotton,” which he had just published in
The Atlantic Monthly
, New England's favorite magazine. In it he demonstrated that if war could be avoided, global economics would diminish cotton's imperial power—and with it the South's secessionist arrogance. Adams argued that India was rapidly overtaking the South in the production of cotton, at far less cost per bale. Not yet developed, but certain to appear in the near future, would be cotton plantations
in British colonies in Africa, such as Egypt. A surplus of cotton would cause a drop in the price, making the South's plantations, burdened by their four million slaves, a losing proposition. The postwar price of cotton did in fact plunge by 50 percent, but the reasons were far more complex than young Adams foresaw. His argument might have convinced thoughtful men. But they were pathetically few in the swelling frenzy that confronted President-elect Lincoln.
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