Our One Common Country (13 page)

The emperor of France had more-aggressive dreams. After the populist Benito Juarez had installed a democratic government in Mexico City, Napoleon III defied the Monroe Doctrine while its proponents were at war with each other. In 1864, a French expeditionary force of 35,000 troops in red caps and trousers helped Juarez's enemies eject him from the capital to the northern part of the country, enthroning the Austrian archduke Maximillian as emperor of Mexico, Napoleon's obedient surrogate, supported by a few thousand Austrians. It was unwelcome news in the Army of the Potomac, where talk was often heard of attacking foreigners in Mexico after the war against Americans was won.

Like many of its veterans, Grant had always thought that the Mexican War was wrong, an aggression against a weaker country that had done his own no harm. It weighed on his conscience, and he spoke of making amends. When he mentioned to Lincoln and Stanton the thought of ousting the French, they seemed sympathetic but unwilling to act. When he brought it up with Seward, “One war at a time” was the governor's unexceptionable reply. Seward had not been working for years to deter a European intervention in America's civil war only to intervene
in Mexico's. Grant did not disagree, but after the Rebels were beaten, he said, a veteran American army might present itself on the Rio Grande “with a view to enforcing respect for our opinions concerning the Monroe Doctrine.” Seward wanted the French out too, he said, “but we don't want any war over it. We have certainly had enough of war.”

Word of Blair's peace mission was out in the North as well as in the South, and most of the press was bad. On January 10, induced by a driving rain that flooded their lairs with ice water, the pickets on the Petersburg siege line agreed to stack their arms and pace their miserable beats in open view of one another. Safe and warm in Manhattan, the editor of the
New York Post
was “sorry to see that so sensible a man” as Blair was making a trip to Richmond more likely to cause mischief than good. The North's best peacemakers were its warriors, and “the black-mouthed bulldogs by which they enforce their persuasions . . .”

On January 11, Blair and his servant Henry left City Point on the Union flag-of-truce boat and steamed eight miles up the James in clear and pleasant weather. In the heart of old Virginia, the
City of New York
passed Bermuda Hundred on the left, one of the earliest English settlements, and Shirley Plantation on the right. From the dock at Boulwares Landing, an escort in blue drove them up to Fort Harrison, lately captured from the Rebels, four miles short of Richmond. Darkness had fallen when they got there. For four chilly hours they waited to be cleared through the Rebel lines, attended by Captain Edward Parker Deacon of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, a wealthy Bostonian's son. Knowing who was coming and why, blue and gray pickets bantered in the dark with a warm joviality that lifted Blair's hopes. We can only guess what Henry was thinking, a freed black slave on his way to the Southern capital in the service of a Yankee.

Late that night, word came across from the Rebels that a pass had arrived. Captain Deacon entrusted the Old Gentleman to a captain from South Carolina. They all gave each other their hands, the Bostonian produced a bottle, and they drank to the South Carolinian's health. As Blair would soon recall, goodwill was exhibited all around.

In the view of Alec Stephens, the sagacious Mr. Blair was the Republican “master spirit,” whose arrival in Richmond put his name on every tongue. “What could have brought him there? And what was his business? These were the inquiries of almost every one.” Desperation fed the rumors, as General Lee made a public plea to Richmond's hard-pressed citizens to send his hungry army some part of their meager supplies.

While Richmond's threadbare people heard their hero plead for food, Blair “fared sumptuously every day,” so Lizzie would soon tell Phil, as a guest of Robert Ould, the Confederate Commissioner of Exchange. Sotto voce, it was said by some in Richmond that Ould brought Yankee delicacies back from Hampton Roads, where he traded prisoners of war at Fort Monroe. A soft-eyed Virginian with a well-trimmed beard, a friend of Blair's son Frank, Ould had been raised in Washington and had served as its district attorney. Blair chatted amiably with him, never deriding the Southern cause or its people. The old man spoke of Davis with affection and high regard, and insisted that peace was in the South's best interest. Richmond could not resist the federal armies, he said. Now was the time to accept good terms, for he feared, as a friend, that the South would be ground to powder.

On the day Blair arrived in Richmond, Congressman Henry S. Foote resigned from the Confederate House and took himself north toward Washington City, accompanied by Mrs. Foote on a freelance mission of peace, intending to tell Lincoln that the South would abolish slavery in return for readmission to the Union and a general amnesty. Foote was one of Davis's fiercest enemies and a fellow Mississippian. He planned to publish to the Southern people and their troops whatever terms Lincoln offered, whether “the personage now known as President of the Confederate States” liked it or not. Rebel cavalry overtook him on the banks of the lower Potomac and put him under arrest. It must have been at gunpoint.

As a sharp-tongued provocateur in the antebellum Congress, Foote had bucked the secessionist tide, provoking several duels, literally wrestling
with one disapproving colleague, and leveling a pistol at another, all on the Senate floor. In 1852, as the head of the Unionist Party, he had beaten Jeff Davis in a race for the office of governor, having beaten him with his fists in the parlor of their Washington boardinghouse in 1847. In the Rebel Congress, a contemporary said, Foote blew “clouds of vituperative gas” at the Davis administration. Now he wanted to see Lincoln, and Lincoln wanted to see him.

When a wire reached Washington reporting on his mission and its interrupted end, Lincoln inquired whether his captors could be overtaken, but Foote already resided in a Fredericksburg jail. The Confederate authorities let his wife proceed to the Yankee capital, where Seward, an old Senate friend, escorted her in a carriage to Willard's Hotel.

It was at or about this time that Judge Nelson received Judge Campbell's letter, proposing to sit down with mutual friends and see what might be done about peace. It had not gone ignored, as Campbell thought it had. Nelson had shown it to their mutual friend, Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who called it the most promising idea he had yet heard. He surely made Lincoln aware of it. But the president had “initiated a scheme,” Stanton said (a pointed choice of words), and Mr. Blair was executing it. Mr. Blair was in Richmond, and nothing could be done until the scheme was tried.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A New Channel for the Bitter Waters

What some people called the White House was a stately shade of gray. It had stood since 1818 at the corner of Twelfth and Clay, built for a Richmond merchant in the straight-front neoclassical style. Though Lincoln's White House dwarfed it, it was three stories high, with elegantly furnished rooms over forty feet square. The Davises' little boys liked to kiss “the pretty ladies” in the parlor, the goddesses of youth and the hunt carved in the marble mantle.

On Blair's first morning in Richmond, a bright and frosty day, the Davises greeted him fondly at their door. Varina threw her arms around him. “Oh you rascal. I am overjoyed to see you.” He had known her since her youth, and it struck him that she had never looked better. Stout, he thought, but fairer and more gregarious than ever.
Life at the top had been kind to her. The same could not be said for her husband. In the fresh eyes of Preston Blair, Jefferson Davis was so “emaciated and altered as not to be recognized.” Preston surely fussed over the children and brought them a gift or two. Refreshments were served, happy memories recalled, until the men were left alone.

Varina knew her husband “noticed every shade of expression” on the face of every man. Suspicious in all things, he would have seen no duplicity in Francis Preston Blair. The old man said he had told Mr. Lincoln about their friendship and his hope to do something in the direction of peace, but the president had let him go to Richmond not wanting to hear what he would say there. He had come with no credentials, no instructions. His views were entirely his own. He repeated it several times. He had no other power than to build communications between men disadvantaged by
having none, he said, no way of knowing what the other side was thinking, nothing to help them end their quarrel. His private status entitled him to no reply. Davis bore great responsibilities and could speak or not, as he chose. Blair's denials notwithstanding, his host was convinced that the old man spoke for Lincoln. Davis's Secretary of State Judah Benjamin would soon suggest that had Blair denied it once, he should have been taken at his word. Having done so repeatedly, he was not to be believed.

Blair asked Davis if he had made any commitments to a European power that would bar an agreement with the United States. Davis said no. Emphatically. Had it been otherwise, Blair replied, he would not have had another word to say. As it was, he produced what he called a rough draft of his thoughts and proposed to read it aloud, adding with a grin that it was more like an editorial than a diplomatic paper. He could not change his ways, he said. A shoemaker sticks to his last. He had become an old man, and what he would read might be nothing but an old man's dreams. He depended on Davis's good sense to tell him whether they could be realized. He knew that his host would speak candidly, expecting candor in return. “I love my whole country,” he said, “but my affections attach me to the South.” Every drop of his blood and his children's blood was Southern. He wanted to see this war end. The South could not win it; slavery could not be saved, but Southern honor could be.

Davis assured his mentor that he knew him to be honest. The personal attachment was mutual, he said. He owed a great deal to the Blair family for kindnesses done to his. He would never forget them. That said, Blair's private role did differ from his, and he would let him present his proposal without interruption.

Blair started reading his shoemaker's editorial. Its opening was inauspicious. “The Amnesty Proclamation of President Lincoln” (more repugnant to Davis than a death sentence) would surely be enlarged to forgive every Southern man who swore allegiance to the federal government and abandoned slavery, the “cause of all our woes.” Slavery was doomed, and “all the world condemns it.” From the Southern point of view, the document rolled downhill from there: All but a few seceded states had already been subdued, it said. They had started the war for slavery. They were now prepared to abandon it as the price of foreign protection.

The room had acquired a chill, and the old man stopped in midstream. What had seemed so convincing when he had read it to the Blairs in Blair House had a different ring when he read it to Davis in Davis's house, perhaps at the point where the Southern states' cry for independence was said to have degenerated into “an appeal for succor to European potentates, to whom they offer, in return, homage as dependencies!” Blair would later say he decided to skip the parts that bore rather hard on the South. Turning the page theatrically, he drew a rare laugh from his friend. “I will pass this over,” he said. “It smacks too much of the editorial.”

And then he came to the point—the common need to end the Napoleonic threat in Mexico, a threat to “make the Latin race supreme in the Southern section of the North American continent.” He surely read in comfort the effusive words that followed: “Jefferson Davis is the fortunate man who now holds the commanding position to encounter this formidable scheme of conquest, and whose fiat can at the same time deliver his country from the bloody agony now covering it in mourning. He can drive Maximilian from his American throne, and baffle the designs of Napoleon to subject our Southern people to the ‘Latin race.' ” President Lincoln had made this possible when he issued his amnesty proclamation “and the message which looks to an armistice.” (Davis must have wondered which message this was. Lincoln's had looked to no armistice but surrender.) Secret preliminaries would let Davis march “a veteran army of invincibles” into Mexico where the democrat Juarez would rally his men to Davis's. And if more troops were needed, would not the Northern army enlist in an enterprise so vital to “our whole Republic”? If Davis added Mexico to a restored American Union, “rounding off our possession” to the Isthmus of Panama, he would finish the work of Jefferson and add new states to the South, “if indeed such sectional distinctions could be recognized after the peculiar institution which created them had ceased to exist.”

It took several minutes for Blair to read the rest. Then he put his paper down and looked at his old friend. “There is my problem, Mr. Davis. Do you think it possible to be solved?”

Davis paused for a moment. “I think so,” he said, and started Blair's heart racing. But how would such a plan be implemented?

The old man replied that every Northern political party supported the Monroe Doctrine and wished to apply it in Mexico. A secret treaty might be made. Then he told Davis the rest, too much to write down even in a document that he had no intention of relinquishing, insisting yet again that Lincoln knew nothing about it. He did not mention Grant.

Lee would abandon Richmond and retreat southwest, “to more defensible positions.” Grant would follow in hot pursuit, but not so hot as to catch him, until he had driven him into Mexico, where Lee would provoke the French. With one American army attacked by a foreign foe, the other would leap to its side. Together they would decimate Napoleon's legions, embrace once again on the old familiar battlefields, reenact the triumphal march into Mexico City. After fighting in Mexico twice in twenty years, “our people” could not be made to leave. Once they joined hands to win a second Mexican War, no elaborate political devices would be needed to forge a reunion. It would follow as night the day.

Davis seemed intrigued, and shared what Lee had lately told him—that 25,000 men could conquer Mexico. Ever jealous of his stature, he said he would have liked the plan better if Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward had brought it to him in person. The implication was plain: He was sure it had come from them. As he typically did when negotiations were mentioned, he recalled the peace envoys he had sent to Washington in 1861, Mr. Stephens's mission to Fort Monroe in 1863, the message he had sent through Colonel Jacques in 1864. Mr. Lincoln had rebuffed them all. He could not see how the first step might be taken unless Mr. Lincoln changed course.

Blair said he thought Mr. Lincoln would send or receive a peace commission, remembering to add later that he could give no assurances; he could only return to Washington, explain his plan to Mr. Lincoln, who had yet to hear a word of it, and see what he would say. Mr. Lincoln did not sympathize with the extremists in his party who wanted to devastate the South, but they had great power in this Congress, and would have more in the next. Even the Cabinet was divided. Blair said he believed in state sovereignty. He hoped that the war would end and the Union be restored in such a way that Southern pride, power, and honor would suffer no shock and Southern territory would be extended.

Then he made it plain, as respectfully as the circumstances allowed, that if the war went on, Southern territory would cease to exist. Davis did not deny it, and came rather close to admitting it, recalling the war for independence that “our colonial fathers” fought. Had they lost that glorious war (a tacit admission that the South might lose its own), Britain would have borne the expense of holding in subjugation a people who deserved to be free, instead of enjoying the commerce between two countries that now enhanced her wealth.

Blair pursued the subjugation theme. If the Union stayed divided, both sides must keep standing armies, which always led to monarchy. As Davis was hearing it, Blair was implying for a second time some Confederate entanglement with a European crown. Davis denied it again, hotly this time. He was absolutely free, he said, and would “die a free man in all respects.” Democracy was born and bred in him. He would not permit the French or any other foreigners to dominate the Confederacy. Napoleon was trying to flank it, but would not be allowed to do so. Left in control of Mexico, the French would attack Virginia for its coal, iron, and timber, to build a navy on Chesapeake Bay. The great difficulty of bringing “the sections” together, Davis said, had nothing to do with “Eu-rope,” as he pronounced it. The “insurmountable obstacle to restoring fraternal relations” was the scar of the “fiendish cruelty” that the Northern armies had inflicted on the invaded states.

Blair conceded the need to build “a new channel for the bitter waters,” a stronger bond than memories. A common effort to enforce the Monroe Doctrine would provide it.

If Davis acted according to habit, he nodded unconsciously as he spoke. Reconciliation must depend on time and events, he said, which he hoped would restore good feelings, but nothing could be better than to see the arms of “our countrymen” united against a foreign power that threatened the principle of self-government, which “both sections” treasured. The potentates of Eu-rope must be pleased to see “our people” destroying each other, hoping to see our form of government die, vindicating their monarchical principles, weakening us as prey.

Blair was encouraged to hear it, he said. If “our country” were encouraged too, as he thought it would be, happy unity would soon resume.

“You should know with what reluctance I was drawn out of the Union,” Davis said. He had tried until the last to avoid it. He had followed “the old flag” with more devotion than anything else on earth. On the field at Bull Run, he had glimpsed it hanging loose on its staff and thought it was his own. When the wind unfurled the flag of the United States, he had seen it with a sigh as an enemy banner. Since then he had thought it was put away for good. But a foreign war might change things. If “the people” came together in Mexico to bear common sacrifices, face common dangers, gather shared renown in defense of shared principles, new memories would take the place of the ones the war had made. In time, they might restore the old feelings. If France were driven from Mexico, that country might be connected with this. No one could foresee how things would shape themselves. “It is for us to deal with the problems before us, and leave to posterity questions which they might solve, though we cannot.”

Blair said Davis mistook the war's effects on the minds of the people. He had just spent four hours on the lines and had seen the kind feelings of the pickets who were sent there to kill each other. His Northern and Southern escorts had shared a drink and goodwill. “It is only the politicians,” he said—forgetting, perhaps, that he sat with one—“and those who profit or hope to profit by the disasters of war who indulge in acrimony.”

What Blair said was “very just, in the main,” the politician replied. It was mostly the people at home who brooded over the war and indulged themselves in bitterness, not the men who led and fought it. On slavery Davis said nothing. The inequality of Blair's responsibility and his own, he thought, made the subject inappropriate. As for the Mexican idea, everything depended on “a well founded confidence.”

Then Davis turned the subject to the men who led the North. He looked at his guest with what Blair perceived as a “very significant expression.”

“Mr. Blair,” he said, “what do you think of Mr. Seward?”

The old man knew what Davis thought; it was something they had in common. “Mr. Seward is a very pleasant companion,” he said. “But I have no doubt that where his ambition is concerned his selfish feelings prevail over all principle. I have no doubt he would betray any man, no
matter what his obligations to him, if he stood in the way of his selfish and ambitious schemes. But this matter, if entered upon at all, must be with Mr. Lincoln himself,” a military matter, led by the commander in chief. “Mr. Lincoln is capable of great personal sacrifices, of sacrificing the strongest feelings of his heart, of sacrificing a friend, when he thinks it necessary for the good of the country.” (He was thinking, no doubt, of a friend named Montgomery Blair.) But if he “plights his faith to any man, he will maintain his word inviolably.”

Davis was glad to hear it. He said he did not know Mr. Lincoln, but Blair's endorsement was good enough for him. In Mr. Seward he had no confidence, and he knew of no Southern man who did. (A few days later, he would tell a Southern man that Mr. Seward was wily and treacherous, forgetting what he had told a Confederate general: For the kindnesses that Mr. Seward had shown his family, he had promised himself “never to say aught against him.”)