Our One Common Country (7 page)

CHAPTER SIX

Who Will He Treat With, or How Commence the Work?

The crowd began to gather on the moonlit White House lawn an hour before the parade. “Every face was visible in the bright moonlight,” said the
Daily National Republican,
“and a more joyous and enthusiastic throng was never seen.” By the appointed hour of nine, when the sound of distant drums could be heard marching west down Pennsylvania Avenue from the foot of Capitol Hill, a sea of eager celebrants, well fed, well dressed, flush with the glow of victory, had overflowed the Executive Mansion's grounds and spilled into Lafayette Square, come to cheer the reelection of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln's friend Noah Brooks, a newspaperman who had covered him in Illinois, was watching from a White House window when the parade curled into view, “gemmed with colored lights,” bright with “illuminations.” A regimental band lent a military air to a cavalcade “gay with banners and resplendent with lanterns and transparencies.” The Sixth Ward contributed a band of its own. Hock's Drum Corps brought up the rear. As the marchers started down the White House carriageway, artillerymen in blue discharged a pair of cannon, blasting the crowd with excitement and the reek of half-burned powder. Assembled around the portico, the bands played “Hail, Columbia” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” punctuated by artillery. The president's eleven-year-old son, Tad, “the pet of the house,” a doting bodyguard called him, a lovable boy with a speech impediment, ran laughing from window to window, igniting illuminations of his own proud design, thrilled beyond words when the cannon concussed the windowpanes.

Having read his own obituaries, the president was grateful for his resurrection, but Noah Brooks thought that few who had known him in Illinois would recognize him now. He looked like a sick man. On the day before the parade, he confided in Brooks that he would have been “a little mortified” had the people turned him out, but the lifting of his burdens would have been worth the sting. He had said more than once that “nothing touches the tired spot,” and his triumphant reelection was no exception. Twenty-five states had voted. McClellan had carried three: New Jersey and the loyal slave states of Delaware and Kentucky. Lower down the ballot, many Copperheads had been smoked. Though the incoming Congress would be more Republican than ever, the Radicals had gained strength to overpower their temperate president.

But now his people were calling for him. When the moment seemed right, he showed himself at the open center window beneath the pillared portico where Jefferson and Jackson had spoken. According to the
National Republican
(a partisan source to be sure), the crowd cheered for minutes before they let him speak. Then their hero positioned his spectacles on the end of his nose and read a little speech in his high-pitched Western twang, his practiced voice carrying over the crowd.

A national election had been held in the midst of a civil war, he said. The world had not known that such a thing was possible. The voters had shown that “he who is most devoted to the Union and most opposed to treason” could win the most votes. But their president wished no man ill, and the war was not yet won. Would the voters now unite “to save the common country”? Buoyed by their cheers, he said a few more words of thanks and reconciliation, delighting the upturned faces in the bright November moonlight, then stepped away from the window and turned to his aide John Hay. “Not very graceful,” he said, “but I am growing old enough not to care much for the manner of doing things.”

Then the crowd rolled on to Seward's with torches, sparklers, and bands until the governor appeared at his own upper window. From Lincoln they looked for eloquence. From Seward they wanted a laugh. He gave them half a dozen, compared himself to Saint Paul, predicted that within a short time “you will have to look mighty hard” to find anyone in the South who admitted he had been a secessionist, thanked God for
bringing the end of the rebellion near, wished them luck the rest of the way. Basking in cheers and applause, his favorite kind of music, he exhorted the crowd to enjoy themselves, to visit his fellow Cabinet members and keep their spirits high. For hours to come, the revelers happily complied, keeping Washington City awake with bugles, drums, and torchlight.

Some five hundred miles to the southwest, Rome, Georgia, was lit by arson. Earlier that day, out of touch with the high command, having cut his own telegraph wires, General Sherman had marched his legions out of Rome, leaving a smaller force behind with orders to take whatever it might need and destroy that night all workshops, warehouses, depots, factories, bridges, and public property before moving on to join him, fulfilling his pledge to make Georgia howl. The exercise would be repeated for a month and a half to come, as sixty thousand men burned an ugly path to Savannah, sustaining themselves on the way, taking cattle, crops, and silver, crushing the heart of the South, bringing the war to her people, punishing them for starting it, pressuring them to stop. “Sherman's bummers,” they called themselves. Jefferson Davis and his generals had moved their warriors elsewhere, leaving nothing more formidable than isolated cavalry and ornery old men for the bummers to push aside. Their commander told a colleague, “I am going into the very bowels of the Confederacy, and propose to leave a trail that will be recognized fifty years hence.” William Tecumseh Sherman had begun his march to the sea.

Uniquely distinguished as a friend of Abraham Lincoln's and an unapologetic Copperhead with a brother in the Rebel Congress, James W. Singleton had been born into an old Virginia family and moved to Illinois. He had made himself wealthy in business and influential in Whig politics, forged ties to Lincoln, and kept them in good repair after he defected to the Democrats. In 1861, John Hay had called him the idol of his friends. Four months later, when Hay told the president that his friend was behaving badly, Lincoln called Singleton “a miracle of meanness.”
Railing against the war in the 1864 campaign, he had crossed a forbidden line. When Lincoln called him to task for it and told him that some were calling for his arrest, he said it was nothing personal.

On Thanksgiving Day, Singleton told Orville Hickman Browning, a former senator from Illinois and another old Lincoln man, that he had just come from Clay and Tucker, the Rebel agents in Canada who had charmed Horace Greeley but not John Hay. Now he was in Washington to see Lincoln about peace, Clay and Tucker having told him that the South would accept reunion if amnesty were given and slavery let alone. Lincoln had confided in him before the election, Singleton said, that after it was won he would not insist on abolition if the South rejoined the Union. He would leave it to the courts. His letter in the Niagara Falls fiasco, making the abandonment of slavery a condition of peace, had been a mistake, he said. Slavery would not prevent a settlement. Now that the election was over, Singleton was going to see him again.

Two days later, Singleton told Browning that he had not yet seen the president but had received a message from him, repeating that slavery would not stand in the way of an adjustment. After Congress reconvened in December, Singleton said, Lincoln would decide whether to send an envoy to Richmond. If anyone could influence “those people,” the president had told Singleton, “you are the man.”

Lincoln was struggling with his annual message to Congress. None of the others had troubled him so. To Gideon Welles it “seemed to dwell heavy on his mind.” With the election safely behind them, the victors were warring among themselves on whether to coax the Rebels home or simply to club them down, pitting Jacobins like Wade and Davis against moderates like Lincoln and Seward, and Democrats against both. It was plain to the Secretary of the Interior, John Usher, a potbellied man with heavy-lidded eyes who had ridden the judicial circuit with Lincoln in the 1840s, that his friend was weighted down by the disconcerting thought that many Republicans who had helped him win the war despised his plans to win the peace. On the issue of reconstruction, Usher said, there were “as many minds as there were men,” every one sure he was right, and passionate
about it, “without regard to the opinions of Mr. Lincoln or any one else; yet he felt that the responsibility all rested upon him.”

On Friday, November 25, Lincoln read his Cabinet an unimpressive draft of his message to Congress. Uncle Gideon heard “nothing very striking” in it, “and he evidently labors in getting it up.” With the war all but won, what seemed to try him most was how to end it quickly, how to stop the waste of lives and reconcile the people. The question of whom to deal with seemed to worry him most of all. “He says he cannot treat with Jeff Davis and the Jeff Davis government, which is all very well, but who will he treat with, or how commence the work?” If the war were to end short of abject conquest, if Southern voices were to be heard on the shape of the postwar future, someone must speak for the South. If not Jeff Davis, who?

Welles was pleased that the president refused to negotiate with the Rebel government, and the rest of the Cabinet agreed, but Uncle Gideon thought the states were different. “We are one country,” he said. Davis's government was illegitimate, “but the States are entities and may be recognized and treated with.”

On Saturday, Lincoln reconvened the Cabinet and read them another draft. Welles thought it much improved, and said so, but was not entirely satisfied. The president should invite the rebellious states to come home under their own powers, he said, appeal more earnestly to their people, assure them that they would not be outlaws—that their persons and property would be respected.

The humorless Edwin Stanton, the Jacobins' favorite Cabinet member, had decided to show up for the first time in a month and a half, with his nerve-chilling stare and his perfumed beard. Another former Democrat, he had served as James Buchanan's Attorney General. In three grim years as Lincoln's Secretary of War, he had done a formidable job. Lincoln sometimes called him Mars. Jefferson Davis called him venomous.

Every other Cabinet member had spoken, and the subject had been changed when the war god thundered on peace. The president should include no new offers or sentiments on the subject, Stanton said. He should merely say that the door was open, invite the ordinary people to return to their duties, ask them if they would not be better off if they had
taken his offer a year ago and come back to the Union with their lives, their liberty, and their property.

Lincoln did not disagree. But how was he to know what those ordinary people were thinking? There was no mail service between the North and South. What impressions the occasional traveler brought back were anecdotal. The Southern journalism that made its way above the Mason-Dixon Line was little more than fiction, belching fire about the people's will, but with almost no objective reporting. Many thousands of Southern soldiers were in Northern prisons. (In an effort to reach them, Southern papers ran notices of weddings, deaths, and missing men, accompanied by the legend, “New York papers, please copy,” which the New York papers did.) Still, no one knew much about the man in the Southern street, let alone the woman. Governor Francis Pierpont of “The Restored Government of Virginia” led a rump administration in a Washington suburb as if it were the real thing. Lincoln would soon tell Pierpont that he had no idea what the ordinary Southerner was thinking, implying inadvertently that Pierpont didn't either.