Our One Common Country (11 page)

The next day, Gustavus Vasa Fox, Gideon Welles's Assistant Secretary of the Navy, married to a sister of Montgomery's wife, sent a wire to Grant. Mr. Blair would sail for Richmond on Saturday morning, expected off City Point around noon. “As he goes by consent of the President, at the request of Mr. Davis, I ask for Mr. Blair that you will make arrangements to get him through comfortably as early as practicable, and as secretly.” Fox had arranged to send the old man to Grant on a naval vessel to avoid the public exposure that a passenger ship would bring. With the navy at his service, there was no need for Montgomery to come.

Other arrangements were made that day for a passage through the Rebel lines. A Union brevet major took a flag of truce to the enemy and delivered the remains of a captain of the 40th Virginia to General Lee's designee. Approached by the young man's mother, Lee had sent a personal request to Grant to return him to his family. On Grant's particular orders, “a diligent search” had found him.

Blair's preparations for his second trip to Richmond were unknown to the world at large, but the first had inspired talk of peace, and the weight of opinion was negative. On January 5, Henry Raymond's
New York Times
misinformed its readers that Grant had put a stop to Blair's “irresponsible errand.” Ready as Raymond had been to sacrifice abolition last summer, he now declared—with Atlanta in ashes, Lee under siege, and Lincoln reelected—that the North would not barter away the “glorious results” of the sacrifices it had made to win them. No mission to the Southern people could dispel their delusion that the North would subject and degrade them if they gave up their cause. The Rebel leaders to whom
the missionaries would be sent knew otherwise, and would not let their people be evangelized. “Our armies are the only effective propagators of the truth.”

On the subject of truth and its propagators, the Jacobin Thaddeus Stevens and the Democrat Sunset Cox went head to head in the House that day as a month of debate began on the Constitutional amendment banning slavery. The galleries were filled with abolitionists, but the talk on the street was of peace, and peace trumped abolition in the minds of many Democrats. There was nothing but unconditional surrender in the mind of Thaddeus Stevens. Understating the case, a contemporary said the look of the man was “not sympathetic,” peering maliciously at the world over a cruel mouth and chin as he limped across the floor with a foot deformed at birth, belittling overmatched Democrats in a voice “devoid of music.” Richard III in a Prince Albert suit. Noah Brooks called him “the ablest man in congressional life.” A Southern counterpart called him “this wicked man, whose terrible wretchedness gapes frighteningly at him from the hopeless grave upon whose brink he stands . . . this demon who will soon leave an immortality of hate and infirmity for an eternity of unutterable woe . . . this malicious, pitiless, pauseless enemy of an entire nation . . . this viperous, heartless, adulterous beast. . . . This living sepulcher of all hideous things, upon whose body in his mother's womb was fixed hell's seal of deformity.” Things of that nature.

For the historic first day of debate on the Thirteenth Amendment, Horace Greeley and Montgomery Blair were admitted to the floor as guests. If Thaddeus Stevens spoke in his usual style, he linked his hands loosely before him, dropping sentences “as though each one weighed a ton.”
He praised Lincoln's annual message as the best in sixty years. It was “easy to see what perplexities surrounded him” in crafting it (perplexities in which Stevens did not include himself). The president's refusal to beg “parricides and rebels” for peace and reconciliation embraced the public will. So “hateful to the people was the cowardly suggestion that we should lay down our arms” to traitors that even patriotic Democrats (i.e., Sunset Cox) had been beaten in November, poisoned by their Copperhead infestation. The president had rebuffed some of “his own leading friends” (i.e., Greeley and the Blairs), who beseeched him to “humble the nation before defiant
traitors and ask a compromise.” Instead he “took counsel of his own wiser judgment, stood firmly erect, and saved the nation from disgrace.”

Taking none of this lying down, Sunset Cox stood up, drawing laughter as he spoke. Horace Greeley would soon vote for President Lincoln in the Electoral College, the Ohioan told the House, and here he was among them “in reference to a
projet
of peace.” Cox had the clerk read the
Tribune
's praise for Blair's mission. Would the gentleman from Pennsylvania “reproach the leading editor of his own party for holding precisely the same opinions entertained by members upon this side?” Why did the gentleman not “denounce that editor who is now conferring with his brother Republicans about peace?” Why did he not have the rules of the House read, “and drive him as an interloper from this Chamber?” Why did the gentleman confer with Mr. Blair, “the suppositious ambassador, who even now as I speak, is also present in the Chamber?”

Before the House acted on the gentleman's wish, Cox said, turning somber now, “before he asks us to change the organic law of this land for seventy years, I beseech him that he will at least try to ascertain, formally or informally,” whether the insurgents might agree to rejoin the Union. Jefferson Davis might demand independence, “but I say, in the language of this able, distinguished, and patriotic editor, let us at least ‘take some means to ascertain that fact.' ” If Davis proved intransigent, it would “inspire a more healthful and united sentiment among the people”; but he might accept reunion. And what if he asked for something in return? The South would never rejoin a country in which slavery was a crime. So many sacrifices had been made in this war, would the gentleman from Pennsylvania not make one now? “Give up his doctrine of negro equality? Give up his idea of breaking down State institutions by Federal law?”

Stevens replied indignantly. “The gentleman will allow me to say that I never held to that doctrine of negro equality.”

“Then I understand the gentleman from Pennsylvania not to hold that all men are created equal?”

“Yes, sir, but not equality in all things, simply before the laws, nothing else.”

“I ask the gentleman to give up his idea of equality of the black and white races before the law.”

“I won't do it,” Stevens said, drawing laughter of his own.

A few minutes later, Sunset Cox had another idea. An alternative might be found to sending Montgomery Blair “and his venerable father to Richmond. Perhaps it would be best to send the distinguished gentleman from Pennsylvania.”

“Oh, no,” Stevens said, rocking the House with hilarity. “I do not think I would get back.”

CHAPTER NINE

As Once a Friend and Still, I Hope, Not an Enemy

In the winter of 1848, seventeen years before the House of Representatives held its roll call vote on slavery, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and other great men whose celebrity would fade with time were holding the nation in thrall in the Senate. With the notable exception of John Quincy Adams, less illustrious names were encountered in the House, names like Asa W. H. Clapp, John H. Lumpkin, and Abraham Lincoln. On February 2, 1848, the lightly regarded newcomer from Illinois wrote home to his law partner from his desk on the House floor. “I just take up my pen to say that Mr. Stephens of Georgia, a little slim, pale-faced, consumptive man with a voice like Logan's, has just concluded the best speech of an hour's length I ever heard. My old, withered, dry eyes are full of tears yet.” Lincoln's eyes were thirty-eight years old, and Alexander Hamilton Stephens, three years his junior, had just condemned the Mexican War as a naked bid for conquest unworthy of the American people. It was Lincoln's view precisely. Standing together literally and figuratively in the unpopular antiwar movement, the feisty little Georgian and the six-foot-four-inch rail-splitter made a memorable pair.

When the war ended gloriously if not nobly, with several new states in the bag, Lincoln and Stephens cofounded the Young Indians, a club of congressional Whigs promoting the presidential candidacy of General Zachary Taylor, whose limited qualifications consisted of a knack for killing Mexicans, an ignorant silence on the issues of the day, and a consequent ability to unite Whigs. Lincoln and Stephens liked Mexican War
heroes better than Democrats. Their friendship was cut short in 1849, when Lincoln's congressional career ended after a single undistinguished term, and revived in 1865 when they tried once again to end a war, this time with Lincoln in the White House and Stephens as Vice President of the Confederate States of America.

Alec Stephens's early life was much like Lincoln's. Born poor in rural Georgia, he was put behind a plow as soon as he could handle one, lost his mother as a child, and was left with a father “never much given to mirth.” When Alec was fourteen, his father and stepmother died of fever in the same week. Like a scene from a Victorian novel, his luck took a near-miraculous turn when a wealthy benefactor got him admitted to Franklin College, Judge Campbell's alma mater, and paid for it. Like Campbell, Stephens graduated first in his class and learned the law by reading it.

In physique he was less fortunate. To put the matter plainly, Alec Stephens was an odd-looking man. He was five-foot-seven, just a little under average for the day, but never weighed as much as a hundred pounds. Fondly or otherwise, many Georgians called him Little Alec. To one appalled observer he resembled “a boyish invalid escaped from some hospital.” Another was put in mind of “a refugee from a graveyard,” and his health was as poor as it looked. His chronic disabilities alone included rheumatoid arthritis, a pinched nerve, colitis, hives, migraine headaches, aching teeth, bladder stones, and cervical disk disease. Together they afflicted his head, neck, back, hands, arms, legs, and innards almost constantly, compelled him to walk with a cane, and often left him bedridden for days. An abscessed liver and several bouts of pneumonia nearly killed him one by one. A friend said he “never looked as if he had two weeks' purchase on life.” The tortures he endured to treat his ailments rivaled them: drawing fluids with suction cups from incisions cut in his side, blistering his chest, imbibing extract of liverwort. Unremarkably, he dosed himself with whiskey. He took it by the spoonful but may have been an alcoholic, though he never would have known it, let alone admitted it.

His voice matched his childlike frame. An admirer called it “shrill but musical” and “singularly pleasing.” A crueler reviewer called it a squeak, but insisted that his listeners would “cease to be annoyed when energized
by his ideas.” Horace Greeley, who rarely shared his views, remarked before the war that “you forget you are listening to the most eloquent man in Washington, and only feel that he is right.” The Senate's great men found time to cross the Rotunda to hear him speak. His memoir's declaration that he was friendly with Lincoln “anterior to the war” is a typical ornamentation, but such was the style of the day. Still and all, Little Alec's elocution was more decorative than most, even in everyday speech.

Though his feeble, even freakish appearance could hardly be called an advantage (“Oh what I have suffered from a look!”), it gave him the curious power of an animated corpse, an image often invoked. The
Charleston Courier
's correspondent watched him speak on the floor of the House, “a shrunken and spectral figure” with a quality that the camera could not see. If Rembrandt could only paint him, the “pallor of the grave should sit upon his face,” conveying “an expression of ghostly power,” with flashing black eyes and parchment skin. A Northerner was impressed by a speech he gave in Pennsylvania and astonished to see it delivered by a well-preserved mummy.

Despite his afflictions, he appreciated humor. “Coffee is one of three things of which I have long considered myself a judge,” he said. “The other two are lizards and watches.” Books and ideas were his passion, the weightier the better. The flesh held little interest. He enjoyed a good cigar and a generous slice of pie but professed a rank disgust for the very existence of sexuality. He never married or had a requited love, and probably died a virgin.

Not surprisingly, he was a lonely, self-pitying man. “Weak and sickly I was sent into the world with a constitution barely able to sustain the vital functions. The torture of body is severe. I have my share of that; most of the maladies that flesh is heir to. But all these are slight when compared with the pangs of an offended and wounded spirit. The heart alone knoweth its own sorrow. I have borne it these many years. I have borne it all my life.” A student of Shakespeare, he was bitter enough to describe himself as “a malformed, ill-shaped, half-finished thing,” taking comfort in his rectitude. As a newly minted congressman, he regarded his colleagues as the “grandest set of blockheads” who ever failed to grasp an idea. Returning to Washington City in 1844, he wrote to his beloved half
brother, Linton, with something less than uncontained joy. “I am once more in this great sewer of political filth.”

A “proud, independent, unyielding spirit” was his model of a man, and for this Alec Stephens was a paradigm, ready to sacrifice everything to the unshakable conviction that he was right. To step back on a matter of principle for the sake of eventual progress, as Seward would crisply do, was unthinkable for him.

In 1848 he was told that a judge named Cone had called him a traitor to the South for killing a popular bill, abetted by Northern votes. When they met at a political barbecue, Cone denied that he had said it. Stephens let him know that he would have slapped him if he had. Cone chose to take it as a joke, but the story spread, and the judge grew tired of being asked if he would need help if Little Alec slapped him. They ran into each other in Atlanta on the piazza of Thompson's Hotel. Judge Cone was as big as two Little Alecs. His Honor had a knife; Stephens had his cane. Cone called him “a miserable little traitor” or “a damned puppy.” Perhaps both. Stephens struck him with his walking stick. Cone counterattacked with his knife, severed a spurting artery, and threw his tiny victim on his back. With one hand on Stephens's forehead and his knife in the other, the judge demanded a retraction, “or I'll cut your damned throat!”

“No! Never! Cut!”

When the blade came down, Stephens caught it in his hand. Cone twisted the knife until bystanders pulled him away. Apart from the mangled hand, Stephens suffered six different wounds. The severed artery alone would have bled him out had an army surgeon not happened by. Cone was charged with attempted murder. Stephens refused to prosecute. His embarrassed assailant paid a fine. Stephens pronounced forgiveness. The whole thing burnished his résumé.

He never fought a duel, but not for lack of trying. He challenged three men, and none of them took him up on it. Little Alec was not to be trifled with.

The antebellum House in which he served eight terms held no more devoted believer than Alexander Stephens in the supremacy of states'
rights, a small federal government, and a moral foundation for “African slavery.” Resisting these things in every particular, Congressman John Quincy Adams, the irascible former president, admired the little Georgian, took an avuncular interest in him, and wrote him a sweet poem about their intersectional friendship as a model for their peers. It was found among Stephens's papers when he died.

Little Alec made his name in Congress as a North-South peacemaker, rose to national prominence helping Henry Clay save the Union with the Compromise of 1850, and retired in 1859, fed up with the swelling bile. As Stephens would later recall, his prediction of civil war was greeted with concern that “the weakness of my body was extending to my head.” When Lincoln was elected president, his old friend Alec Stephens addressed the Georgia legislature and decried the result as “a great public calamity,” but reminded his compatriots that Congress and the Supreme Court were still under Southern control, leaving Lincoln and those fanatics in New England equipped to do little harm. To abandon “our common country” for the loss of a fair election “would put us in the wrong.” He sat down “to great applause,” and Georgia soon left the Union.

Lincoln read his speech, wrote him from Illinois “as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy,” and asked for his help in averting civil war. Stephens replied that he was surely no enemy, but nothing on earth could “save us from the madness,” or so, he feared, it seemed.

After his fellow Georgians chose him to help pick an interim Confederate government, he was urged to seek the presidency and respectfully declined. He had not been part of “the movement,” he said, but agreed to accept a unanimous draft. The burden passed when Davis was chosen instead. His selection as vice president, a sop to his fellow moderates, was a distinction he neither sought nor relished.
Mary Chesnut attended a reception where he spread no cheer on the subject of the Confederacy's prospects. “I called him half-hearted and accused him of looking back.” On New Year's Day, 1864, Mrs. Chesnut contributed to her diary a list of leading Southerners who “never believed in this thing. Stephens, the Vice-President, is Number One.”

As Little Alec saw it, his acceptance of secession was a tragic necessity but not a struggle of conscience. He opposed it “with all my power,”
but came out of the Union unreservedly with Georgia, for his loyalty was to her. For him,
any
union of the states, federal, Confederate, or otherwise, was a union of “separate Political Societies,” dependent on consent. Indeed, the Southern people owed no allegiance to the Confederacy at all, its vice president said; only to their states. To maintain a legitimate union by force was preposterous. “Superior power may compel a union of some sort; but it would not be the Union of the old Constitution nor of our new; it would be that sort of union that results from despotism.”

As early as the capture of New Orleans, a year into the war, Stephens told a friend that the South was ruined irreparably, and he should never have taken his office. “I don't know how I came to make the mistake, but I hoped it would do good in the way of preserving harmony.” Harmony was not its result. If anything was a match for Alec Stephens's rigidity it was Jefferson Davis's own, and their differences could hardly have been sharper. Before the war, Davis called Stephens “the little pale star from Georgia,” mocking his moderation. Stephens would insist that he never bore Davis ill will, but was pleased to adjudge him an imbecile, and soon started calling him a despot. By April of 1864, Stephens would tell a friend that Davis was bent on absolute power, impeded by a defective character—“weak and vacillating, timid, petulant, peevish, obstinate, but not firm . . .” In contrast to Stephens's obsession with states' rights and small government, Davis was a nationalist, by habit and necessity. After a honeymoon ruined by Stephens's resistance to his leadership, he ignored his vice president in the time-honored American tradition, gave him nothing to do, told him little more, and ignored his views except to mock them in private and not infrequently in public. Their relationship declined from chilly to nonexistent. They did not speak at all in 1862.

Stephens addressed the Georgia legislature in 1864, attacking the draft and arrests of war resistors without trial, deploring the abdication of legislative powers to the Davis administration, of which he was second in command. Neither war nor the fight for independence could justify tyranny, he said. Like its readers, the Confederate press was split on these things, and on Stephens's insubordinate handling of them. The
Southern Recorder
inquired whether the Northern war effort would not be impaired
if the Vice President of the United States attacked the Lincoln administration in his home state of Maine.