Our One Common Country (14 page)

An understanding should be reached on the Mexican proposal, Davis said. He was willing to appoint commissioners to pursue it, without regard to forms. “There must be some medium of communication.” Mr. Lincoln could rely implicitly on whomever Davis would send. He had recently considered Judge Campbell (a reference to Campbell's overture to Judge Nelson). Blair expressed “unbounded confidence” in Campbell.

Now Davis authorized Blair to go back and tell Mr. Lincoln that he was ready to discuss the plan and knew of no insurmountable obstacle to “a treaty of peace.” We may suppose that Blair could hardly keep still. He spoke of the fame that Davis would win for “relieving the country from all its disasters, restoring its harmony, and extending its dominion to the Isthmus.” He did not bring up the fame that the author of the plan would win.

“What my name might be in history,” Davis said, “I care not, if I can restore the prosperity and happiness of my country. That is the end and aim of my being. For myself, death will end my cares, and that is very easy to be accomplished.”

Later that day, the War Department clerk John Jones saw Blair with his host, Colonel Ould, riding down Main Street in an open carriage. “He looks no older than he did twenty years ago,” Jones thought, and “seemed
struck by the great number of able-bodied men in the streets,” which says more about what was on Jones's mind than Blair's.

Though Blair spoke to few if any men in the Richmond street, he spoke with men of influence who looked at the world very differently than Jeff Davis, and wanted it known up north. Alec Stephens thought everyone in Richmond knew that Blair had met with Davis, but nothing “escaped from the Executive closet, or got to the public in any way.” Blair kept the secret too. He sought out and met with influential men and women but did not disclose his mission. The rumors can be imagined. People spoke of little else. On Friday, the
Dispatch
said Blair had kept or
been
kept out of the public eye, but had met old acquaintances accidentally, with “the utmost cordiality on both sides.” Some chance encounters there may have been, but Blair's meetings with Southern friends were no accident. They opened their homes to him.

Mrs. Stanard's, on the corner of Eighth and Franklin, was the nearest thing to Richmond's salon. A fellow socialite knew its hostess as a “handsome, dark-eyed” widow, “wonderfully persuasive with the other sex, who came when she called and left promptly when she gave some token of a change of mood.” Blair was a family friend. To him, Mrs. Stanard was a good Union woman stranded on hostile ground. When he drew a crowd to her home, she entertained them in a style she could ill afford. Blair breakfasted there with Alec Stephens and other prominent men. “Mr. Blair did not talk much,” the hard-line Virginian James Lyons thought. “He struck me as a man talking to conceal his opinions and draw out the opinions of others. In other words, like a
spy,
as I believed he was.” He had no authority from Mr. Lincoln, Blair said, but knew his sentiments. The South could get better terms now than later. Stephens replied that he too wanted peace and, in Blair's attentive presence, denounced the Davis administration's conduct of the war so enthusiastically that Lyons asked him what
his
war-winning plan might be. Little Alec confided nothing in the presence of the spy.

Emily Mason, a friend of the Blairs and the Davises, implored the old man to let her in on his mission. He told her he was searching for General
Jackson‘s “long-sighted spectacles.” She promised to help him find them if they were anywhere in the South to be found. The
Enquirer
sneered that “Francis P. Blair, Esq., of Lincolndom” had met at the Spottswood Hotel with some members of Congress and the Virginia legislature, who “waited on him” there and “resolved themselves into a Committee of the Whole on the state of the Union.”

Virginia's senator Robert M. T. Hunter was not sneering. He knew that Blair spoke with particular effect to Southern Democrats, “who for so long had been in the habit of taking counsel with him on public affairs.” Blair told them “what seemed to many of us to have much truth.” In view of the North's almost boundless resources, resistance made no sense. Apart from their own huge manpower, the United States “could empty the population of Europe upon the southern coasts,” enticing immigrant soldiers with a promise of confiscated lands. Like others, Hunter said, “my own attention was now more seriously directed to peace than heretofore.”

Judge Campbell's friend Robert Kean took note that the public notoriety of Blair's visit to Davis put pressure on him just when the treasury's “hopeless bankruptcy” was becoming widely known, making Congress “more and more weak in the knees.” Davis would later condemn the “cabal in Congress” who “held secret conversation” with Blair; “how low their spirit had sunk I do not know,” but it made some soldiers angry. Davis was angry too. Blair's secret conversations with the cabal were no secret.

On the day Blair arrived in Richmond, General Grant sent his subordinate, General Lew Wallace, the future author of the novel,
Ben-Hur,
on an odd little mission of his own. Wallace had told Grant that a school friend in Mexico was convinced that Rebel forces in West Texas would “gladly unite with us” to cross the Rio Grande and drive Maximilian from his throne. Independently of Blair, and ignorant of his plan, Wallace told Grant that a joint invasion of Mexico would “stagger the rebellion.” At Wallace's request, Grant sent him down to the southern tip of Texas for a surreptitious chat with the local Confederate commander. Wallace would soon report that the Rebel general endorsed the idea “heartily.”

Davis sent Blair a note on his second day in Richmond, remarking that he might want something in writing about their meeting. Blair came over to get it. Davis had been as careful to document his thoughts as Blair had been, and as careful to omit details. He had written a synopsis of their conversation in his own hand. He showed it to Blair, invited corrections, and accepted them on the spot. The document made it clear that Davis had committed to nothing. Indeed, it said nothing about Mexico at all—for secrecy's sake, Blair thought.

Blair and Davis discussed the ins and outs of a Mexican invasion and a new American empire. Blair made his case more specifically, that the Confederacy could not survive with the Mississippi and the Atlantic seaboard gone. Davis did not reply, but, as Blair perceived it, “his manner indicated assent.” His pen did not. He handed Blair a letter, written and dated the day before, after their first meeting. He addressed it to Blair but intended it for Lincoln, avoiding direct communication between the two heads of state just as Lincoln had done.

 

Richmond, Va., January 12, 1865

 

Sir: I have deemed it proper and probably desirable to give you in this form the substance of remarks made by me, to be repeated by you to President Lincoln, etc. I have no disposition to find obstacles in forms, and am willing, now as heretofore, to enter into negotiations for the restoration of peace; and am ready to send a commission, whenever I have reason to suppose it will be received, or to receive a commission, if the United States Government should choose to send one. That notwithstanding the rejection of our former offers, I would, if you could promise that a commissioner, minister, or other agent would be received, appoint one immediately, and renew the effort to enter into conference, with a view to secure peace to the two countries.

 

As Davis well knew, the last two words were fatal. He had told Blair face-to-face that there was no insurmountable obstacle to peace. Now he
had imposed one, knowing as well as Blair did that Lincoln would scoff at two countries. But the old man's quixotic optimism would not be denied. He left for home the next day with a piece of paper in his hand and jubilation on his face, convincing himself that Lincoln would let two countries become one on the battlefields of Mexico.

On Saturday morning, January 14, Blair left Richmond on the
William Allison,
the Confederate flag-of-truce boat, to meet its federal counterpart at Boulware's Landing and steam back down the James to City Point for a voyage home on the
Don.
Before he boarded the
Allison,
Blair chatted with an old friend, whose twenty-four-year-old daughter stood by, thinking youthful thoughts. “Poor old Mr. Blair,” she would later tell her diary. “I could feel almost kindly toward him. It must be difficult for the old to realize the possibilities of their youth are now but the dreams of the dotard.”

James Singleton arrived in Richmond on the same flag-of-truce boat that took Blair away. All of Richmond knew of his coming, as it had of Preston Blair's. He spent the next few weeks talking money with Richmond's merchants and peace with its leading Rebels, not the least of whom were his brother, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee.

“Men feel peace in their bones,” Horace Greeley's
Tribune
told its readers, “as they say many shrewd men today felt it in their pockets.” More than one member of Congress sold their stocks, for “they dreaded a speedy fall.”

On Sunday, January 15, Davis received a dispatch from the governor of South Carolina. Sherman was moving north, seemingly headed toward Charleston. There was practically no infantry to impede him. “Conceive the worst, and it is that.” The worst was yet to come. On the next day, Davis read a wire from General Braxton Bragg, “mortified” to report the capture of Fort Fisher, the guardian of Wilmington, North Carolina, the Confederacy's last seaport. From Wilmington, as Alec Stephens would later say, the South had been breathing through a quill, shipping cotton to Europe in return for arms and supplies while otherwise choked by “a cordon of armed ships drawn around its neck.” The quill had just been plugged.

On the day the news hit Richmond, Congressman John A. Orr of Davis's home state of Mississippi demanded on the floor of the House “an honest effort of statesmanship to end this carnival of death.” On the same clear day, the Virginia legislature called on Davis to appoint General Lee to head
all
of the Confederate armies, a slap in the face of their beleaguered commander in chief. On the day after that, Davis received a letter from a leading Mississippian. “Unwelcome is the bearer of ill tidings.” What was left of Hood's army was “a mere
mob
without spirit, but that of mutinous anger,” its men “melting away daily.” A letter from Georgia came too. Wealthy families were sending their sons out of the country as they approached draft age, “generally through the blockade, sometimes through the lines.”