The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (189 page)

Not that there were no repercussions. There were, and they came fast — mostly from disaffected radicals who contended that secession had been a form of suicide from which no state could be resurrected except on conditions imposed by them at the end of the struggle now drawing rapidly to a close. Differing from Lincoln in this, or at any rate on what those terms should be, they believed they saw clearly enough what he was up to. Congress would not meet again until December, and he had it in mind to unite the people behind him, between now and then, and thus confront his congressional opponents with an overwhelming majority of voters whom he would attract to his lenient views by a series of public appeals, such as the one tonight from the high White House window or last month’s inaugural, adorned with oratorical phrases as empty as they were vague. “Malice toward none” had no meaning for them, as here applied, and “charity for all” had even less; for where was the profit in winning a war if then you lost the peace? They asked that with a special urgency now that they had begun to suspect the Administration of planning to neglect the Negro, who was in fact what this war had been about from start to finish. Lincoln’s reference tonight to a possible limited extension of the franchise to include those who were “very intelligent” only served to increase their apprehension that the cause of the blacks was about to be abandoned, possibly in exchange for the support of certain reactionary elements in the reunited country — not excluding former Confederates — in putting together a new and powerful coalition of moderates, unbeatable at the polls for decades to come. One among those perturbed was Chase, who had written this day to his former chief of his fears in regard to that neglect. The most acceptable solution, he said, was “the reorganization of state governments under constitutions securing suffrage to all citizens.… This way is recommended by its simplicity,
facility, and, above all, justice,” the Chief Justice wrote. “It will be hereafter counted equally a crime and a folly if the colored loyalists of the rebel states shall be left to the control of restored rebels, not likely in that case to be either wise or just, until taught both wisdom and justice by new calamities.”

Lincoln found the letter on his desk when he came into the office next morning, and Chase followed it up with another, that same Wednesday, midway of Holy Week, suggesting an interview “to have the whole subject talked over.” Others had the same notion; Charles Sumner, for example. He had not heard the speech last night, but his secretary reported that it was “not in keeping with what was in men’s minds. The people had gathered, from an instructive impulse, to rejoice over a great and final victory, and they listened with respect, but with no expressions of enthusiasm, except that the quaint simile of ‘the egg’ drew applause. The more serious among them felt that the President’s utterances on the subject were untimely, and that his insistence at such an hour on his favorite plan was not the harbinger of peace among the loyal supporters of the government.” The Massachusetts senator felt this, too, and regretted it, his secretary noted; “for he saw at hand another painful controversy with a President whom he respected, on a question where he felt it his duty to stand firm.” Already his mail was filled with urgings that he do just that. “Magnanimity is a great word with the disloyal who think to tickle the President’s ear with it,” a prominent New Yorker wrote. “Magnanimity is one thing. Weakness is another. I know you are near the throne, and you must guard its honor.” A Boston constituent knew where to fix the blame: on Lincoln, whose reconstruction policy was “wicked and blasphemous” in its betrayal of the cause of freedom by his failure to take the obvious next step after emancipation. “No power but God ever has or could have forced him up to the work he has been instrumental of, and now we see the dregs of his backwardness.”

Mainly these were old-line abolitionists, men with a great capacity for wrath. Ben Wade, for one, expressed the hope that such neglect would goad the southern blacks to insurrection. “If they could contrive to slay one half of their oppressors,” he asserted, “the other half would hold them in the highest regard, and no doubt treat them with justice.” But even this was mild compared to the reaction that followed disclosure that Lincoln had authorized John A. Campbell to reassemble the Virginia legislature, composed in part of the very men who had withdrawn the Old Dominion from the Union in the first place. As it happened, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War was down at Richmond now, aboard the steamer
Baltimore
, and one of its members went ashore this morning to get the daily papers. He came back, much excited, with a copy of the Richmond
Whig
, which carried an Address to the People of Virginia by some of the legislators then about to
assemble. Moreover, Weitzel had indorsed it, and Wade went into a frenzy at this evidence of official sanction for the outrage. Fuming, he declared — “in substance, if not in exact words,” a companion afterwards testified — “that there had been much talk of the assassination of Lincoln; that if he authorized the approval of that paper … by God, the sooner he was assassinated the better!” Others felt as strongly about this development, which seemed to them to undo all they had worked for all these years. Zachariah Chandler, according to the same report, “was also exceedingly harsh in his remarks,” and none of the other members took offense at the denunciations.

In Washington, the Secretary of War was apparently the first to get the news. He went at once to Lincoln, then to Sumner, who wrote Chase: “I find Stanton much excited. He had a full and candid talk with the President last eve, and insisted that the proposed meeting at Richmond should be forbidden. He thinks we are in a crisis more trying than any before, with the chance of losing the fruits of our victory. He asks if it was not Grant who surrendered to Lee, instead of Lee to Grant. He is sure that Richmond is beginning to govern Washington.”

But Lincoln by then had revoked his authorization for the Virginians to assemble. At a cabinet meeting the day before, he had found Stanton and Speed vehement in their opposition, and none of the rest in favor of creating a situation in which, as Welles pointed out, “the so-called legislature would be likely to propose terms which might seem reasonable, but which we could not accept.” To these were added the protests of various other advisers, by no means all of them die-hard radicals. Lincoln considered the matter overnight — aside, that is, from the time he spent delivering his speech from the balconied window — and though, as he said, he rather fancied the notion of having the secessionists “come together and undo their own work,” at 9 o’clock Wednesday morning he telegraphed Weitzel a question and a suggestion: “Is there any sign of the rebel legislature coming together on the basis of my letter to you? If there is any sign, inform me of what it is; if there is no such sign you may as [well] withdraw the offer.”

Although it was true he had no wish just now for a knockdown drag-out fight with either wing of his party, his decision to revoke what he called his ‘offer’ was in fact less political than it was practical in nature. The conditions under which it had been extended no longer obtained; the gains sought in exchange had since been won. His purpose in approving Campbell’s proposal, just under a week ago, had been to encourage Virginia’s legislators, in return for certain “remissions” on his part, to withdraw her troops from the rebel armies and the state itself from the Confederacy. Grant had accomplished the first of these objectives on Palm Sunday — the formal surrender ceremony was getting under way at Appomattox Courthouse even as Lincoln’s telegram went over the wire to Weitzel — and the second scarcely mattered,
since there was no longer any sizeable body of armed graybacks within the borders of the Old Dominion. So much for that. As for the problem of keeping or breaking his promise to Campbell, that was merely personal; which was only another way of saying it didn’t count. “Bad promises are better broken than kept,” he had said in his speech the night before, with reference to assurances he had given those who set up the provisional Louisiana government. “I shall treat this as a bad promise, and break it, whenever I shall be convinced that keeping it is adverse to the public interest.” And so it was in this case; he simply labeled the promise ‘bad’ — meaning profitless — and broke it.

When he heard from Weitzel that afternoon that “passports have gone out for the legislators, and it is common talk that they will come together,” Lincoln wired back a definite order that their permission to assemble be revoked. He prefaced this, however, with some lawyerly explication of the events leading up to his decision, which he said was based on statements made by Campbell in a letter informing certain of the prospective legislators what their task would be in Richmond. He had talked the matter over with the President on two occasions, the Alabama jurist declared, and both conversations “had relation to the establishment of a government for Virginia, the requirement of oaths of allegiance from the citizens, and the terms of settlement with the United States.” Lincoln flatly denied this in his sundown wire to Weitzel. “[Judge Campbell] assumes, as appears to me, that I have called the insurgent legislature of Virginia together, as the rightful legislature of the state, to settle all differences with the United States. I have done no such thing. I spoke of them not as a legislature, but as ‘the gentlemen who have
acted
as the Legislature of Virginia in support of the rebellion.’ I did this on purpose to exclude the assumption that I was recognizing them as a rightful body. I dealt with them as men having power
de facto
to do a specific thing; to wit, ‘to withdraw the Virginia troops and other support from resistance to the general government.’… I meant this and no more. Inasmuch however as Judge Campbell misconstrues this, and is still pressing for an armistice, contrary to the explicit statement of the paper I gave him, and particularly as Gen. Grant has since captured the Virginia troops, so that giving a consideration for their withdrawal is no longer applicable, let my letter to you and the paper to Judge Campbell both be withdrawn, or countermanded, and he be notified of it. Do not allow them to assemble; but if any have come, allow them safe-return to their homes.”

Word of this revocation spread rapidly over Washington and out across the land, to the high delight of those who lately had seethed with indignation: particularly the hard-war hard-peace Jacobins, who saw in the action near certain proof that, in a crunch, the President would always come over to their side of the question — provided, of course, the pressure was kept on him: which it would be. James Speed,
who had no sooner been confirmed as Attorney General than he went over to the radicals all-out, presently wrote to Chase that Lincoln “never seemed so near our views” as he did now, with Holy Week drawing rapidly toward a close.

*  *  *

Davis by then was in Greensboro, North Carolina, just under fifty miles south of the Virginia line. Once more “a government on wheels,” he and his cabinet had left Danville late Monday night in a driving rainstorm that only added to the depression and confusion brought on by the arrival of simultaneous reports, no less alarming for being unofficial and somewhat vague, that Lee had surrendered to Grant the day before, near Appomattox Courthouse, and that a heavy column of enemy cavalry was approaching from the west. Nothing more was heard for a time about the extent of Lee’s removal from the war — that is, whether all or only part of his army had been surrendered — but the other report was soon confirmed by word that a detachment from the column of blue troopers, some 4000 strong under Stoneman, had burned the Dan River bridge a few hours after the fugitive President’s train rattled across it and on into Carolina. Informed of his narrow escape from capture, Davis managed a smile of relief. “A miss is as good as a mile,” he remarked, and his smile broadened.

Such pleasure as he took from this was soon dispelled by the coolness of his reception when the train crept into Greensboro next morning. Though news of his coming had been wired ahead, no welcoming group of citizens turned out to greet him or even acknowledge his presence, which made their town the Confederacy’s third capital in ten days. For the most part, like many in this Piedmont region of the Old North State, they had never been enthusiastic about the war or its goals, and their pro-Union feeling had been considerably strengthened by reports, just in, that Stoneman’s raiders were headed in their direction and that Sherman had begun his advance from Goldsboro the day before, first on Raleigh, with Johnston known to be falling back, and then on them. Fearing reprisal for any courtesy offered Davis and his party, they extended none — except to the wealthy and ailing Trenholm; he and Mrs Trenholm were taken in by a banker who, it was said, hoped to persuade the Secretary to exchange some gold from the treasure train for his Confederate bonds. Davis himself would have had no place to lay his head if an aide, John T. Wood — former skipper of the
Tallahassee
and the President’s first wife’s nephew — had not had his family refugeeing in half of a modest Greensboro house. Despite protests from the landlord, who feared that his property would go up in flames as soon as Stoneman or Sherman appeared, Wood’s wife had prepared a small upstairs bedroom for the Chief Executive. While Trenholm was being made comfortable in the banker’s mansion across
town, the rest of the cabinet adapted themselves as best they could to living in the dilapidated coaches, which had been shunted onto a siding near the depot.

Beauregard and his staff were similarly lodged in three boxcars parked nearby. He had arrived the previous night, en route to Danville in response to a summons from the Commander in Chief, and now he crossed the tracks to report aboard the presidential coach. Davis greeted him cordially, eager for news of the situation around Raleigh. Dismayed, the Creole told of Johnston’s hurried evacuation of Smithfield, under pressure from Sherman, and of his present withdrawal toward the state capital, which he did not plan to defend against a force three times his size. In short, Beauregard said, the situation was hopeless. Davis disagreed. Lee’s surrender had not been confirmed; some portion of his army might have escaped and could soon be combined with Johnston’s, as originally intended. The struggle would continue, whatever the odds, even if it had to be done on the far side of the Mississippi. Beauregard was amazed, but by no means converted from his gloom, when Davis got off a wire instructing Johnston to come at once to Greensboro for a strategy conference. “The important question first to be solved is what point of concentration should be made,” the President declared. He had no intention of giving up the war, and he wanted the Virginian to be thinking of his next move before they met, though he was frank to admit that “your more intimate knowledge of the data for the solution of the problem deters me from making a specific suggestion on that point.”