Our One Common Country (32 page)

Arriving in Richmond on Saturday evening, the commissioners went directly to the Executive Mansion to brief Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin in detail. Stephens thought “everybody was very much disappointed, and no one seemed to be more so than Mr. Davis.” Careful with words, Stephens is unlikely to have chosen
seemed
haphazardly. Benjamin scoffed at Lincoln's terms, dismissing out of hand “the weakness,” “the folly, the suicidal folly” of any thought of accepting them. Davis concurred, and accused Mr. Lincoln of disowning the Mexican plan in bad faith. Mr. Blair had assured him it would have Mr. Lincoln's support. Davis attributed the betrayal to the fall of Fort Fisher and the
closing of the last Confederate seaport after Mr. Blair's first visit to Richmond.
8
*

Stephens disagreed. If Davis was right, and the Mexican idea was Mr. Lincoln's, there was still hope. The conference's public disclosure was enough to explain its failure without assigning bad faith to Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Blair. Nothing had been accomplished, but nothing had been foreclosed. The conference had confirmed that the United States desired peace, and the way was open for a settlement. He had asked Mr. Lincoln to reconsider. Mr. Lincoln had said he would, though he was unlikely to change his mind. He might be heard from again, quietly, through the military, after the “hubbub” subsided.

Judge Campbell told Davis that reunion and abolition were inevitable. He should send the commissioners back, or send new ones, to propose specific terms and take the best the South could get, including emancipation “upon suitable arrangements.” In this he agreed with Stephens, surely thinking of Lincoln's remarks about compensation for the slaves and shared responsibility. As Campbell describes how Davis replied, one can almost see him swelling. “Mr. Davis, with the air of a sage, declared that the Constitution did not allow him to treat for his own suicide. All that he could do would be to receive resolutions and submit them to the sovereign States.” His personal honor did not permit such a settlement, he said. Campbell replied that he had raised with Mr. Lincoln the idea of treating with the states, and Mr. Lincoln had rejected it.

Campbell would later say that Davis “had no capacity to control himself to do an irksome, exacting, humiliating, and in his judgment dishonoring act, however called for by the necessities of the situation. He preferred to let the edifice fall into ruins, expecting to move off with majesty before the event occurred.” Now he informed his emissaries that they had “probably fallen into a trap” by accepting Seward's rule that the conference would be confidential and undocumented, leaving Seward free to lie. He would probably have his minister in Paris use the Mexican scheme
“to interfere with whatever good feeling the Emperor of the French had for us.”
9
*

Davis asked the commissioners to submit a written report to Congress and the people. Stephens protested. A disclosure of the conference's “
real objects
[the Mexican scheme] could not, with propriety, then be made,” and to leave them out would be misleading. Davis insisted, and the others concurred. Stephens agreed reluctantly to put his name on the report, thinking its omission would be misconstrued and do more harm than good.

Davis told his envoys that Mr. Lincoln's declarations made it plain that there could be no peace short of unconditional submission by the Southern people, with “an entire change of their social fabric.” The only remaining hope of escaping calamity was to rouse them to desperate efforts to resist their degradation and save themselves and their institutions. As Stephens saw and heard it, he “seemed more determined than ever to fight it out on this line,” to put everything at risk on turning Grant back from Richmond. Stephens could hardly absorb what Davis yet believed—that Grant and Sherman could be defeated in open battle, that Richmond could be defended, that the cause could be won without a change in policy.

Campbell was past believing that policy mattered. In his heart, so was Hunter, but the anger and humiliation he had borne on the
River Queen
still burned.

When Davis sent his commissioners to Lincoln, he had empowered them to agree to any “treaty” that did not include reunion. Now he told a friend that their mission had “no diplomatic character.” They had merely gone informally to see “whether negotiations were possible.” He told his Secretary of the Navy he was “bitterly hostile” to the terms laid down at Hampton Roads, and the Senate was strongly opposed. He would not let them say he surrendered while he had the means to resist.

After the war, Davis would tell Varina that his lack of authority to dissolve the Confederacy absolved him from any blame for rejecting
Lincoln's terms, while “any dolt whose blunders necessitated frequent conviction, and whose vanity sought for someone on whom to lay the responsibility for his failures, could readily, and if mean enough, would
now
ascribe them to me.” No specific dolts were named, but Little Alec matched the description. It had gotten back to Davis that Stephens had told some friends that Lincoln offered terms “not humiliating to the South.” No such terms were reported to
him,
Davis said. The commissioners would have had to “conceal” them from him. Humiliation was in the eye of the beholder. As Davis beheld it, what Stephens called the “good terms of reconstruction” that Lincoln had put on the table, including a payment for the slaves, were a Yankee plan to “encourage treason” and incite the Southern people to ignore their elected leader.

Late into the night on the day the commissioners returned, Judge Campbell unburdened himself to James Seddon, his newly resigned superior as Secretary of War. In 1863, the War Department clerk John Jones had called Seddon a “dead man galvanized into muscular animation.” Twenty months of suffering had passed since then. Now Campbell briefed Seddon on the peace conference. The judge thought a reasonable arrangement to free the slaves could be had—that Davis should stop the war now and lead the South back to the Union on the best terms he could get. Both men knew that there was no sensible alternative. Both men knew that Davis would not agree.

Outside Washington City, where the 1st Wisconsin Heavy Artillery was encamped, Corporal Richtmyer Hubbell and his friends awaited the newspaper eagerly until it reported that the conference had failed. Having read that the Rebels had demanded independence, Hubbell was glad that the president had rejected it, and glad that peace talks had been tried. Their failure would persuade the people to support a more vigorous war.

A young Rebel named David Johnston had the same idea. The conference disappointed the 7th Virginia Infantry, but David and his friends had no quit in them. “There is nothing left us but to fight it out. The cry is for war, war to the knife.” Brave words from a teenage boy, but some of his elders had had enough. Davis received a letter that day from “many
soldiers” with the remnants of Jubal Early's beaten army in the Shenandoah Valley. They had heard about the peace talks and implored their president “to strive every way in your power to settle our troubles by arbitration. Most of us have fought our last battle. Our property has all been lost to us, our wives and children are bound to suffer, if not starve, in the next six or eight months, and we beg you to enable us to quit this war with honor.” Davis inscribed their letter and sent it to Early: “It is to be hoped that this is not a fair sample of the feeling of the ‘Army of the Valley.' ” General George Armstrong Custer's men would find it in a wagon when they captured Early's headquarters in March.

Richmond's Sunday morning was clear and cold as Judge Campbell composed the commissioners' report. Hunter and Stephens endorsed it, and a messenger brought it to Davis. There was no invective in it, just a stark recitation of Lincoln's formal terms. No treaty could be made with the Confederate states, collectively or separately. Their sovereignty would be recognized “under no circumstances.” Individuals “might rely upon a very liberal use” of the president's clemency, but the authority of the United States must be restored with “whatever consequences may follow.” It was “brought to our notice” that the Congress of the United States had adopted a Constitutional amendment banning slavery.

Nothing was said of Lincoln's confession about a shared responsibility for slavery, his support for an immediate restoration of the Southern states' rights, his tolerance for a gradual emancipation, or a $400 million payment for the slaves. No mention was made of Grant's commitment to a general prisoner exchange, or Seward's observation that the South could block the Thirteenth Amendment by returning to the Union. None of the friendship, courtesy, and respect that the commissioners had been shown from the moment they crossed the siege line made it into their report—no reference to the Northern soldiers' cheers; Grant's welcoming dinner on the
Mary Martin;
Seward's gifts at Hampton Roads; Lincoln's liberation of Stephens's nephew; his promise to reconsider his position; or the many Northern leaders, military and civilian, who remembered Southern friends.

Davis was not satisfied. He sent for Judge Campbell and demanded more, to “influence the people.” The report should declare that Lincoln and Seward demanded the South's immediate acceptance of abolition and insulted Southern honor. Campbell would say no such thing. So long as he remained a reluctant member of the Davis administration, he thought himself bound to follow its policies and not “encourage treason,” as Davis called it, by giving any hint that reunion might be palatable or Yankees fully human, but he would not arm his president with a garment-rending screed. The report “stated the exact result of the conference,” Campbell said. It described Lincoln's terms accurately, as opposed to his hopes and dreams. Stephens told some friends that Lincoln's musings about paying for the slaves were omitted so as not to damage him politically.

That evening, Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter called on Davis together. He pressed them again to embellish their report, which they refused to do. Years after the war, he would say it was too meager to explain what he called “their failure and the reasons for it.”

Senator William Graham of North Carolina was a widely respected friend and ally of Campbell and of Hunter. “The situation is critical,” Graham told a friend that day, “and requires a guidance beyond human ken.” He would find no such guidance from the lips of Jefferson Davis. “I have a very strong conviction,” the senator would soon say, “that there has been very great duplicity towards a large portion of the Southern people displayed in this little drama. It is most offensive to me.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

You Are All Against Me

Lincoln held on like a drowning man to a last thin hope for peace. He had listened on the
River Queen
as the Southerners asked to be treated with rather than conquered. He had heard Hunter say that he offered them nothing but humiliation, nothing that could help them stop the killing. He had taken it in. He had talked it out with Seward. Now he spent the Sabbath at work on something he could give.

Sometime that day, he brought his son Tad to Alexander Gardner's photographic studio at Seventh and Pennsylvania with its sign hawking
views of the war
. Almost all of his photographs were somber. He smiled for one faintly that day, as White House messengers fanned out over Washington City with invitations to his Cabinet to assemble at seven o'clock. For reasons now unclear, Seward did not attend.

When the rest of the Cabinet had been seated around the table, Lincoln read aloud by the gaslight chandelier the product of his work, a message to his “Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives” that sought their authorization to tender to the slave states, whether loyal or in rebellion, $400 million in government bonds, half to be paid if all resistance to the National Authority were abandoned before April 1, the other half if the Thirteenth Amendment were ratified by July 1. All political offenses would be pardoned, all forfeited property except slaves released, except where third parties had acquired it. Liberality would be recommended on all points beyond presidential control.

As Lincoln read his draft, his genial Secretary of the Interior John Usher was thinking of Robert Schenck, a radical Ohio congressman with a right arm crippled at Second Bull Run. After the word was out that
Lincoln and Seward were talking peace in Virginia, Usher's Assistant Secretary William Otto had run into Schenck, who said nothing of Lincoln but abused Seward violently. He hoped the Rebels would catch him and put him in Libby Prison. Otto had seen Schenck again this very day. “I suppose now, General, you have changed your mind.” But Schenck had only repeated himself. Seward was a damned devil who ought to be put in Libby. Of Lincoln he again said nothing.

Now Usher listened hard as the president read his draft, pardoning all these traitors, giving them back their lands, paying for their human property, proposing liberality in what he did not control, promising it in what he did. If he sent that message to Congress, Usher thought, men like Schenck would turn on him. It might even weaken his ability to get men and money for the war. Usher had been his friend for twenty years. Now he sensed that Lincoln would take his plan to Congress, explosive though he knew it would be, if his own inner circle gave him any encouragement at all. “I think his heart was so fully enlisted in behalf of such a plan that he would have followed it if only a single member of his Cabinet had supported him in the project.”

Not a single member did.

The president defended his proposal as a matter of fiscal policy. Apart from “all the blood which will be shed” if the killing went on, he said, “How long has this war lasted, and how long do you suppose it will still last?”

No one answered.

“We cannot hope that it will end in less than a hundred days. We are now spending three million a day, and that will equal the full amount I propose to pay, to say nothing of the lives lost and property destroyed. I look upon it as a measure of strict and simple economy.”

No one agreed. According to Usher, the discussion didn't last ten minutes. With a sadness familiar to his friend, Lincoln “simply brought a long sigh” and folded up his Proclamation. “You are all against me.”

Lincoln's secretaries Nicolay and Hay thought the peace offer had been “nearest his heart.” After the meeting adjourned, he wrote a note to posterity on his folded draft: “February 5, 1865. To-day these papers, which explain themselves, were drawn up and submitted to the Cabinet and unanimously disapproved by them.”

Gideon Welles told his diary that Lincoln's desire to conciliate was plain, “but there may be such a thing as so overdoing. . . . In the present temper of Congress the proposed measure, if a wise one, could not be carried successfully,” and Welles saw no wisdom in it. “The Rebels would misconstrue it if the offer was made. If attempted and defeated it would do harm.”

It had taken Stanton by surprise. Unpleasantly so. With victory in sight and the Thirteenth Amendment on its way to ratification, there was no need to bargain for peace. According to the Jacobin Charles Sumner, the only man Lincoln disliked, Stanton said “peace can be had only when Lee's army is beaten, captured, or dispersed, and there I agree with him.”

Secretary of the Treasury William Pitt Fessenden, a flinty former senator from Maine, was a critic of men and ideas. “Querulous and angular,” Uncle Gideon called him. Before the war, when Davis had said on the Senate floor that the South would secede if need be, Fessenden had accused him of intimidation. The stenographer recorded what followed:

 

Mr. Davis: I try to intimidate nobody; I threaten nobody; and I do not believe, let me say it once for all, that anybody is afraid of me, and I do not want anybody to be afraid of me.

Mr. Fessenden: I am. [Laughter].

Mr. Davis: I am sorry to hear it, and if the Senator is really so, I shall never speak to him in decided terms again.

 

Jefferson Davis had spoken decidedly too often for Fessenden, who inscribed a note on his invitation to the Cabinet meeting. “It was evident by the unanimous opinion of the Cabinet that the only way to effectually end the war was by force of arms, and that until the war was thus ended no proposition to pay money would come from us.” Few of the Cabinet's secrets were better kept, say Nicolay and Hay. Congress never heard that the subject had been raised.

Earlier that day, Union forces crossed a stream called Hatcher's Run and attacked a Rebel wagon train near Petersburg. As Confederate troops
drove them back, the handsome young general John Pegram, newly married to the stunning Hetty Cary, took a bullet in the chest. He died in the arms of a youthful wedding guest, Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas. An hour later, with Pegram laid out dead on Douglas's bed in Petersburg, Douglas glanced out his window to the sound of passing wheels. Hetty was being driven to their honeymoon cottage. No one had broken the news to her.

John Pegram had been a patron of Sarah Pryor's library and a favorite of her boys. In 1905, his death was an unhealed wound. Sarah counted him in her memoirs “among the first of those martyrs whose lives were sacrificed after the leaders
knew
there was no more life in the cause for which they died.” She had never forgiven them for it.

On Monday, February 6, a young Rebel officer went straight from the Washington depot to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and walked unimpeded to an anteroom upstairs. An attendant asked for his card. Having none, he identified himself in ink on a slip of paper. Lieutenant John A. Stephens. His name was taken next door, and then he was shown in.

The President of the United States was draped across the Cabinet table with his elbow on its surface and his chin in his palm, conversing with his secretary of state. He pulled himself to his feet and put out his hand, the tallest man John Stephens had ever seen. Lincoln told Seward who their visitor was and offered him a chair. Then he told the young man he had recently seen his uncle and had promised to send him his nephew. His uncle was well and so were his mother and sister. “You have the freedom of the city as long as you please. When you want to go home, come back and let me know, and I will pass you through the lines.”

Nearly speechless with gratitude, the lieutenant would stay in the capital another five days, gaining strength and putting on weight through the hospitality of friends.

If Lincoln's trip south had accomplished little else, it had satisfied many War Democrats. According to Sunset Cox, some Copperheads debunked it as a military intelligence operation in which Blair had been a scout.
Cox thought otherwise. He offered a resolution that day that bestowed on the president “the gratitude of a suffering and distracted country” for pursuing peace and reunion, urged him to keep it up, and asked him to enlighten the House with a report on the conference at Hampton Roads. The resolution passed easily, but thirty-one Republicans voted no. In private, Cox heard from many others who felt constrained to support it but were “furious in their opposition to any effort toward peace except through war.”

Before he set sail for his banishment to England, Henry Foote, the frustrated fugitive from the Rebel Congress, wrote again to his old friend Seward. He had read about Hampton Roads. Stephens and Campbell, if not Hunter, were ready for peace on “almost any honorable terms,” he said, though Davis had no doubt tied their hands. Secession had become odious to the people of the South. Davis would never give in, but the people were prepared for a “counterrevolution” and would surely respond to an appeal from President Lincoln to return to the Union with amnesty and their old political rights. Seward showed the letter to Lincoln.

The midwinter thaw on the siege line was over. There was snow and sleet and freezing rain, and a Georgian froze to death. “He was on picket duty,” a brother in arms would say, “and had to keep still to keep the Yanks from seeing him.”

General Meade wrote home to his wife again. General Warren had attacked the Rebels, and after much success was “compelled to retrace his steps in great disorder.” It was day number two of three days of mayhem at Hatcher's Run.