Our One Common Country (30 page)

It was a clever piece of positioning. Campbell's nimble mind suspected on the spot that the commissioners had been held at the lines until the amendment passed the House. It gave Lincoln and Seward leverage. The Southerners had come to Hampton Roads thinking slavery would end with the war. Now they had reason to think it might not, if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union with its Constitutional powers restored.

Seward remarked that he thought before the war that forty or fifty years of agitation would be required to bring the public around to abolition. Now it was at hand. Campbell heard a threat in the word
agitation,
little knowing that nearly a century would pass before it was carried out. Until now, Campbell said, all of the agitation had been confined to emancipation. Did Mr. Seward think that agitation about the
political
relations between the races would end when the blacks were freed? “Perhaps not,” Seward said. “Possibly not.”

Now Stephens picked up the thread that Campbell had been pulling. What would happen politically if the Confederate states rejoined the Union? Would they retake their seats in Congress with all of their old rights?

Lincoln answered promptly. In his “own individual opinion,” they should;
he
thought they would, but he could not stipulate to it. Only Congress had that power. That said, he was struggling to preserve the Union, and there could be no Union unless all of its states were represented. Millions of Northerners sympathized with the Southern people (a frank admission for their commander in chief to make), and the sympathy would grow if Congress kept them out. Northern voters would raise “a clamor on their behalf.” He could give no guarantees, but better to rejoin the Union now than continue the war and deepen the bitterness in Congress. The time might come when the residents of the South would
not be considered an erring people, to be invited back to citizenship, but defeated enemies, to be subjugated and ruined or worse.

When Stephens pressed for a specific understanding that the returning states' rights would be restored, Lincoln went back to first principles. He would never treat with armed Rebels as if they were a foreign power, he said, another government inside the one of which he was president. To do so would be to recognize their legitimacy—“what you have long asked Europe to do, in vain, and be resigning the only thing the armies of the Union have been fighting for.” The only grounds on which he could rest the justice of the war, with his people and the world at large, was that it was not a war for conquest, “for the States had never been separated from the Union.”

Judge Campbell suggested that if Washington would not treat with Richmond, a convention of the states would make a better peace than one imposed by conquest. His hosts were unmoved. “They left no opening for any convention,” Campbell later said. “Everything was to be settled by the laws of Congress and the decisions of the courts.”

Senator Hunter asked about West Virginia, carved away from his constituency while the Civil War raged, a newly created state composed of mountain folk, free-labor folk, mostly loyal to the Union. Would Virginia be restored to “her ancient limits” in a reunited country? Lincoln replied that this too was a question for Congress and the courts. In his own opinion, West Virginia should survive, but the issue was not up to him.

Typically slow to anger, Hunter was angry now, but calm enough not to say what he was thinking: that what Hunter perceived as Lincoln's demand for unconditional surrender, his refusal to treat with the South, his demand to submit to his mercy, was as cruel as it was unwise. Hunter was thinking that the two senior officers of the National Authority were treating with Rebels
now,
because
they were in arms, but he summoned the will not to say so. Instead he cited history. Many governments had negotiated with armed rebels. In the English Civil War, Charles the First had often parlayed with them. The Confederacy must be granted “some recognition” before peace could be negotiated.

The point was astute, but Lincoln spotted its flaw. With his face lit up by what Stephens recognized as “that indescribable expression that often
preceded his hardest hits,” he laughed and delivered the jibe of the day. “Upon questions of history I must refer you to Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don't pretend to be bright. My only distinct recollection of the matter is that Charles lost his head.”

Stephens saw Hunter blanch. As Stephens would later say, the president had “crushed him and his precedent.” To his credit, the senator hit back cleanly. Charles lost his head because he refused to
settle
with rebels, not because he negotiated with them. But Hunter had been wounded and everyone could see it. Lincoln's wit had deflated his erudition. It had also stoked his anger. In an effort to defuse the tension, Stephens said that government-to-government negotiations could be avoided entirely. If Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation under his war powers—and the Constitution could not support it on any other ground—he could use them to
end
the war by restoring the Confederate states to their former status.

Now Lincoln felt compelled to explain himself on abolition, almost apologetically, according to Alec Stephens. An aide would later recall the animation that came over him when he discussed compelling issues with people he respected, “a wonderful power of expression” that lit his homely features “by the great soul within.” This was such a time.

He would never have issued the Emancipation Proclamation had he not been “compelled by necessity” to preserve the Union. He had hesitated for some time, perplexed by many questions. He had acted only when driven to it. He had always favored emancipation, but not
immediate
emancipation, even by the states themselves. It would lead to many evils. He did not intend in the beginning to interfere with slavery in the states. He had wanted to ban it in the territories. He had thought the federal government had no peacetime power over it in the states, and now that events “have taken us where we are,” a gradual emancipation, perhaps over five years, would better enable the races to work out their “codes and designs for living together” than “emancipation at one sweep.”

Then he paused for a moment, as Stephens would later recall, with his head “rather bent, as if in deep reflection.” Everyone else was silent, waiting for him to go on. As Stephens would later tell it, Lincoln raised
his head, rose from his chair, and spoke gently to his old friend, towering over the room.

“Stephens, if I were in Georgia, and entertained the sentiments I do—though I suppose I should not be permitted to stay there long with them—but if I resided in Georgia, with my present sentiments, I'll tell you what I would do if I were in your place. I would go home and get the governor of the State to call the legislature together and get them to recall all of the State troops from the war, elect Senators and Members to Congress, and ratify this Constitutional amendment prospectively, so as to take effect, say in five years. Such a ratification would be valid, in my opinion. I have looked into the subject, and think such a prospective ratification would be valid. Whatever may have been the views of your people before the war, they must be convinced now that slavery is doomed. It cannot last long in any event, and the best course, it seems to me, for your public men to pursue, would be to adopt such a policy as would avoid, as far as possible, the evils of immediate emancipation. That would be my course, if I were in your place.”

According to Stephens, Seward seconded this. A gradual end to slavery would be palatable if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union freely. If not, the Thirteenth Amendment would end it abruptly, with the Southern states excluded from the process.

It was Hunter who replied. Campbell had owned no slaves for years, and Stephens treated his own like tenants, professing to hold none against their will. But Hunter was the voice of the slaveholding aristocracy. It was the voice of the past, and he knew it. He made no case for slavery. He did condemn the “cruelty” of freeing the slaves overnight. They could not provide for themselves, he said. In places like Eastern Virginia, where many Negro men had “absconded” to the Union Army, the old and infirm and the women and children were “a tax upon their masters.” They would find themselves helpless and suffering if the North freed them suddenly. They were accustomed to working only by compulsion. They would not work at all if the compulsion stopped. Slave and master would starve alike.

Lincoln looked at Seward but the governor said nothing, so the president turned to what Stephens recognized as “his chief resort in conveying
his ideas upon almost every question,” an endless supply of “exceedingly pointed” parables of a distinctly rustic sort and an entertainer's knack for recounting them. This one, Stephens thought, would not have made “a list of his best and most felicitous hits.” Seward tried to interrupt him, impatient if not annoyed by the old familiar preamble, “This reminds me of a little story,” but there was no stopping him now.

“Mr. Hunter,” Lincoln said, “you ought to know a great deal better about this argument than I, for you have always lived under the slave system. I can only reply to your statement of the case that it reminds me of a man out of Illinois by the name of Case, who undertook a few years ago to raise a very large herd of hogs. It was a great trouble to feed them, and how to get around this was a puzzle to him. At length he hit on the plan of planting an immense field of potatoes, and when they were sufficiently grown, he turned the whole herd out into the field, and let them have full swing, thus saving not only the labor of feeding the hogs, but also that of digging the potatoes. Charmed with his sanguinity, he stood one day leaning on a fence, counting his hogs, when a neighbor came along.

“ ‘Well, well,' said he. ‘Mr. Case, this is all very fine. Your hogs are doing very well just now, but you know out here in Illinois the frost comes early, and the ground freezes for a foot deep. Then what are you going to do?'

“This was a view of the matter which Mr. Case had not taken into account,” Lincoln said, and butchering time for hogs was away off in December or January. He scratched his head and thought about it. “ ‘Well,' he eventually said, ‘it may come pretty hard on their snouts,' but in the end it will be ‘root hog, or die.' ”

The fable fell flat. Stephens replied obsequiously—“That, Mr. President, must be the origin of the adage, ‘Root pig, or perish' ”—but the story came across as callous, toward the slaves and also, to Southern ears, toward the whites who would also suffer. Seward was visibly displeased. Stephens thought the parable out of place in Lincoln's repertoire, but he understood its point. The slaves and poor whites could take care of themselves when slavery was gone. Though nothing would be easy, they would survive and eventually flourish as self-made men and women, as Lincoln and Stephens had. Freedom and poverty were better than slavery and security.

But Hunter was deeply offended. For the planter elite, the “inferior race” depended on noblesse oblige. It made the system respectable to its guilt-ridden beneficiaries, the hallmark of “our Southern civilization.” Lincoln's story mocked it, mocked
Hunter as the senator was hearing it, for the second time that morning. His red-faced rage boiled over as he summed up the president's position.

“You offer nothing to the Confederate States and their people but unconditional submission.” No treaty, no agreement, not even terms of surrender. Nothing but absolute, unconditional submission, with a “wish” of only one branch of government to avoid an unrestricted taking of
landed
property and no promises even as to that.

Seward's reply was quick. He tried to make it soothing. No words like
unconditional submission
had been used, he said, or anything implying degradation or humiliation to the Southern people. “This should be borne in mind.”

Hunter demanded to know what else could be made of it. No treaty. No stipulations. No agreement with the Confederate states, or any of them—not even a promise of their safety or their status in the Union. “What is this but unconditional submission to the mercy of conquerors?”

“We are not conquerors,” Seward said, “further than we require obedience to the laws.” Force had only been used to preserve the federal authority to execute them. To yield to them, with Constitutional guarantees, was nothing like unconditional submission, and surely no conquest. If they chose to return to the Union, the Southern states and people would return to its Constitution, with all of their rights secured like the people of the other states.

Seward had gone further than Lincoln had, and Hunter called him on it. “But you make no agreement that these rights will be so held and secured!”

The president could not give orders to Congress or the courts, Lincoln said, but the power to enforce the penal laws was his. “Perfect reliance” could be placed on his leniency. Only Congress could restore property already seized, but the executive had the power to bar more seizures, and if peace were restored, persons subject to the law's pains and penalties might rely on a very liberal use of his power to remit them. There was no
need to add that he was talking to three such persons. He told them he would use his public influence on the South's behalf as well as the power of his office. He was giving them more assurance, he said, than a victor had ever given rebels at the point of their destruction.

In what might have been a joke if a joking man had uttered it, Campbell replied that he had never thought his neck was in danger. Lincoln
was
a joking man, but his equanimity vanished. He would lose his temper only once today. Now was the time.

“There are a good many oak trees about the place where
I
live,” he said, “the limbs of which afforded many convenient points from which
I
might have dangled in the course of this war.” In 1860, his own party's leaders had wanted someone else there. (Seward recalled it well.) Now some very hard men in its leadership were pressing him for retribution. Indeed, the conduct of certain Rebel leaders had exposed them to “the punishment prescribed for the highest crime known to the law.”