Our One Common Country (10 page)

Lincoln listened courteously and began to work a deal. He was willing to consider reaching out for a peaceful reunion, he said, but he wanted some Democrats on his side on the Constitutional amendment banning slavery. Cox had been listening too. The election had made it clear that human bondage was out of favor. More than a few defeated Democrats who had voted against abolition in June were thinking again in December. A few had decided to leave the public stage on the right side of history. Others hoped to return in 1867 and could read the political winds. Cox promised to help garner votes for the abolition amendment if Lincoln made a sincere attempt at peace. If it failed, he said, many mainstream Democrats would turn their backs on the South. Slavery would be banned with Cox's vote and theirs, and the war would be pursued with bipartisan vigor. Lincoln took it in.

In a separate meeting with Seward, the governor told Cox he was putting the horse before the cart. A Constitutional amendment was needed
before
peace talks were broached. Nothing could help bring peace like abolition. With slavery gone, the cause of disunion would be gone as well. Cox came away convinced that Seward and the president “considered this amendment worth an army. Whether they were right or not, the amendment was not pressed until just before the negotiations at Hampton Roads.”

On December 27, the Confederate State Department sent a letter to John Slidell, Richmond's man in Paris. When it surfaced after the war, Lincoln's aides John Nicolay and John Hay called it a cry of despair. The South was fighting France's battles against the United States, it said, and England's too. Their failure to pitch in made it only fair for the South to seek terms. If London and Paris would recognize the Richmond government “under any conditions” (an allusion to emancipation, if not some form of subordination of the Confederacy's very sovereignty), let them say so now. Slidell quickly learned that Europe was not interested.

That afternoon, “some black-hearted artillery man” on the Petersburg siege line dropped a pair of spherical case shells on some blue-coated pickets heading back to the lines of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry. Dozens of lethal balls burst over their Yankee heads. Corporal Charles W. Gilman, “an excellent man,” was killed on the spot. Henry Lenkorf died in a field hospital. Gilman was the luckier of the two. In fairness, their regimental historian would later say, the sportsmanship was arguable. The incident was reviewed on the picket line and “loudly condemned on both sides as a breach of the tacit agreement not to fire during the day,” but these were pickets talking, and “the author of the deed would probably reply that the understanding had reference only to the pickets, and not to the artillery and mortars, which opened whenever they saw game worth the powder.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I Do Not Think I Would Get Back

On December 28, Savannah having fallen, Preston Blair came back to Lincoln and told him he had an idea that he thought could lead to peace, and he wanted to take it to Richmond. Lincoln cut him off, as he had the first time. “If you choose to go, I will not stop you,” his collaborator said, but the President of the United States did not want to know what he would say or do when he got there. “You will have no authority to speak for me in any way whatsoever.” The president went to his pigeonhole desk, scribbled on a card no bigger than a laundry ticket, and handed it to his guest: “Allow the bearer, F. P. Blair, Sr., to pass our lines, go South, and return. December 28, 1864. A. Lincoln.” It was the bearer's only credential. Whatever F. P. Blair Sr. might say or do in the South would not be attributable to A. Lincoln. The president expected little if any result from the old man's trip, but the Sage of Silver Spring would surely bring to Richmond a thicker Kentucky accent than he left with, and return with what Lincoln coveted: a canny expert's read on the mood in the Rebel capital.

In the meantime, Lincoln kept it to himself. He may have informed Seward, but the rest of the Cabinet was not told. If Blair confided in anyone but his fellow Blairs, no record of it survives; but he claimed a few months later that the object of his trip, though conceived and undertaken on his own, was not without some “indefinite understanding with friends in power in Washington,” an allusion that surely included the most powerful friend of all.

Whoever may have been in on it, it was too late for Private George Deutzer of the 48th Pennsylvania Volunteers. He lost his life that night to a shell lobbed into Fort Hell.

In his element on a mission of intrigue, the Old Gentleman must have crossed back over Pennsylvania Avenue with a spring in his step. He had been suffering from a toothache and a general sort of weakness, but the pass in his pocket revived him and dulled his pain. The house was full of holiday guests as his fretting wife and daughter packed cold Christmas leftovers for the two-day trip to Richmond, no easy thing in winter for a feeble old man with a bad tooth. He would steam down Chesapeake Bay to Fort Monroe—the massive stone-built citadel at Hampton Roads, Virginia, that had never left federal control—then on to Grant's headquarters at City Point, then up the James River on the Union flag-of-truce boat, then overland by coach three miles north to Richmond through the enemy fortifications. The Blairs had struck a bargain. Their patriarch would go to the enemy capital, but he would not go alone. His black servant Henry would go with him. Montgomery would come along as far as City Point.

They embarked the next morning on the paddle wheeler
Baltimore,
Preston and Montgomery in comfortable quarters, Henry and the baggage elsewhere. The trip down Chesapeake Bay took a day. Overnighting at Fort Monroe, they steamed past Jamestown in the morning. Several hours up the twisting river, nine miles east of the siege line, high on a steep plateau, City Point came into view. Next to nothing had been here six months ago. Now it was a military metropolis, its waterfront choked with vessels of every description, including a steam-driven fleet of paddle wheelers hauling generals, politicians, and war profiteers to Washington City and back. Steep wooden stairs ran up the bluffs to the army's nerve center, where tens of thousands of men assembled the tools of war in some three hundred buildings of every size and utility, all of it under the wing of Ulysses S. Grant.

It was hard not to like Grant, impossible not to respect him. Stanton's Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana, a sharp-eyed newspaperman fresh from Horace Greeley's
Tribune,
thought Grant was the most
modest, honest, fearless man he ever knew. “Not a great man, except morally; not an original or brilliant man, but sincere, thoughtful, deep,” fond of a good joke, “ready to sit up with you all night, talking in the cool breeze in front of his tent.” Possessed of a certain wit, Grant had once said that he only knew two songs. One was “Yankee Doodle” and the other wasn't. A superb horseman, he was fit and athletic but smaller than most of his men, with sloping shoulders, brown hair and beard, and “a foxy tinge to his moustache.” Bereft of a warrior lineage, the general was a tanner's son, born in a two-room house, raised in rural Ohio. The most powerful man in the army at the age of forty-two, he was unselfconsciously plain. “He talks bad grammar,” an admirer said, “but talks it naturally, as much as to say, ‘I was so brought up, and if I try fine phrases I shall only appear silly.' ”

For all of his simplicity, Grant was a presence close up. His square-cut features seemed “carved from mahogany,” set off with blue-gray eyes, lion's eyes, Dana called them, that could stare down the devil or shine with pure benevolence. An aide said no coarse language was uttered in his presence and none “passed his lips, and if by some rare chance a story a little broad was told before him, he blushed like a girl.” Unfailingly courteous to men of all ranks and women of all stations, there was “no noise or clash or clangor in the man.” There was no need for any. When Ulysses S. Grant talked, people listened.

Now he welcomed the Blairs to City Point. Preston's younger son, Frank, serving further south with Sherman, was one of Grant's favorite generals. The Blairs who stood before him needed no introduction. They were awed by the might laid before them, impressed by Grant and his officers and their talk of catching Hood. The odds are more than good that Preston charmed the general as he charmed almost everyone else; Montgomery, not so much. Like the Blairs, Grant was a former Democrat, and had lived in St. Louis, Montgomery's home ground, quite enough for Preston to work with. When the pleasantries were done, the Old Gentleman handed Grant two sealed letters addressed to Jefferson Davis. The general had them sent up the James immediately on the Union flag-of-truce boat,
City of New York.
Both letters asked for leave to come to Richmond, and both gave a reason, one true, one false.

The first letter said that Blair was in search of documents taken by “some persons who had access to my House” when General Early's army were in possession of it (a polite way to put it), and he wished to come to Richmond to look for them.The second letter said that the first would answer any bureaucrats' questions about his visit. The truth he would share with Davis alone. He had come to explain his views on the state of “our country,” to help repair the ruin that the war had brought on “the nation” and, rather cryptically, to “promote the welfare of other nations that have suffered from it.” He would bring no official message, merely his government's leave to make his own suggestions. Nor would he divulge them to anyone in Washington unless Davis thought something might come of them. Their conversation would be unbalanced. “I will confidentially unbosom my heart frankly and without reserve. You will on your part, of course, hold in reserve all that is not proper to be said to one coming as I do merely as a private citizen, and addressing one clothed with the highest responsibilities.” Both letters reached Davis that day.
4
*

On the following day, a blustery New Year's Eve, Davis had his cheerless Secretary of War James Seddon send Blair a pass through the lines with a cover note restricting him “to the purposes indicated in his letter of application.” Whether Davis showed Seddon both letters or only the pretext is unclear, but word got around the War Department that Blair was coming, on his honor to confine himself to a search for missing papers.

Late on New Year's Day, Seddon's letter came to Union forces “below Chaffin's Bluff,” to which it had mistakenly been sent. The letter reached Grant on January 2, but Preston had left for home with Montgomery and Henry, thinking himself rebuffed. Despite his disappointment, Preston had enjoyed a “very pleasant trip,” his daughter Lizzie said, “seeing and hearing much that was of great interest to him,” and returned “in the finest spirits possible,” hoping Davis might yet see him. The same could not be said of Davis's Secretary of War. When the War Department clerk
John Jones came to work that day, Seddon “had his head between his knees before the fire.” It was not an inspiring sight. “Affairs are gloomy enough,” Jones thought. “The question is how Richmond and Virginia shall be saved. General Lee is despondent.”

Inevitably, rumors of Blair's journey were afoot in Washington City, but most of Lincoln's circle pleaded innocence with a clear conscience. The
Times
reported that if Blair had gone to Richmond, “he has done so without the knowledge of high officials here.” The highest official was preserving his ignorance. As a Cabinet meeting broke up, Gideon Welles noticed “Old Mr. Blair” sitting in an adjoining room. His appointment with the president was canceled.

Blair had already briefed Horace Greeley, who came down from Manhattan for the occasion. Not without reason, the old man shared a suspicion that Stanton, the fiercest of all hawks, had sabotaged his mission, out of enmity for the Blairs, for peace negotiations, or both. In 1862, when Secretary of War Stanton was being vetted for the Cabinet, Montgomery had described him to Lincoln as an able lawyer, faint praise for a prospective Secretary of War, especially with the addendum that Stanton was corrupt. Whether Stanton got wind of this particular slander or not, others had come to his attention.

On Wednesday, January 4, Greeley's
Tribune
ran a special dispatch from Washington, the accuracy of which “we have no doubt.” Blair's mission had died at City Point, it said, because the Secretary of War had told General Grant he did not approve of it, which the
Tribune
much regretted. “We do not know, and at no time have felt confident, that the rebels are yet prepared to agree to any terms of pacification that our Government either would or should deem acceptable; but we can imagine no possible harm that could result from ascertaining precisely what they are ready to do.” The “recognized object of war, at least among civilized and Christian nations, is an honorable and satisfactory peace.”

By the time the story ran, Grant had forwarded Seddon's letter to Blair, predicting to a colleague that “Mr. B may be looked for back again by Friday next.” Greeley duly ate crow in the
Tribune.

Embarassed though he may have been by the manner in which it reached him, Blair had his pass to Richmond and was eager to put it to use. He made another appointment with Lincoln. The White House canceled it too. The Old Gentleman inferred that the president wanted to hear no more about his amateur diplomacy but merely to see him launch it, a perfectly fair deduction. Lizzie wrote to her husband, Phil. “Father sets out tomorrow. If he had been more patient & [in] less of a hurry to get back home he would have been spared this double trip.”