Our One Common Country (16 page)

As Lincoln and his Cabinet discussed war and peace, the
Don
was gathering steam at the Navy Yard under secret orders. At 11:00 a.m., Blair and his servant Henry rolled up in a closed carriage and came aboard quickly. Fifteen minutes later the
Don
was under way.
A trusted Southern officer would be waiting for Blair on Saturday on the Rebel flag-of-truce boat,
William
Allison.
Barring a particular need, no one else in Richmond was to know that he was coming.

Within hours it was front-page news in both cities. Lizzie wrote Admiral Lee that the leak had been traced to some officers of the
Don.
History does not record their fate. Government sources on both sides had dismissed Blair's first visit as a personal trip. Hardly anyone believed it then; no one could believe it now. Even moderate Republicans were alarmed by the prospect of peace talks, and the Jacobins tore their hair. Lincoln was moved to say that some of his friends in Congress “were afraid to trust me with a dinner,” let alone the Union cause. As hope-filled
rumors took hold in the South, the
Richmond
Sentinel
told its readers what a peaceful return to the North would entail. “All the dark and malignant passions of a vindictive people, drunk with blood and vomiting crime, will be unloosed upon us like bloodhounds upon their prey.”

The
New York
Times
took its own dark view. There was no point in sending agents to “Davis and the Sanhedrim he has called around him.” They would never give in, for “their names will be the curse and scorn of mankind; and they will either hang on gallows, or spend the remainder of their days among the dingy boarding-houses of Leicester Square, or the seedy tenement houses of the Latin quarters, or in some other miserable portion of a European capital.”

On a page filled with advertising, the
Times
ran an item with the arresting headline:
alarming report from richmond
. “Old Mr. Blair” had reportedly been received “by some distinguished rebel ladies there with the most affectionate demonstrations, and it is surmised that this is the secret of his return to the rebel Capital.” Whatever his designs on the ladies might be, “when our bodies are naturally feeble, or debilitated from excess of exertion, or from insidious disease, the lack of strength and vitality, in most cases, may be restored by those means of recuperation which nature and science have placed at our disposal. Of all these advertised restoratives,” the reader should consider Hostetter's Celebrated Stomach Bitters.

As the
Don
headed south, Jefferson Davis's mail gave him reason to try Mr. Hostetter's wares. Congress was on the verge of a vote of no confidence. There was a letter from General Howell Cobb, a former governor of Georgia, Speaker of the House, and Secretary of the Treasury in the old concern, more lately General Sherman's absent host. After sleeping uninvited at Cobb's plantation, Sherman had punished the sin of treason. Instructing his bummers to “spare nothing,” he had watched them warm themselves with bonfires fueled by the governor's fence rails and no doubt by dearer combustibles. The next day they had carried off an “immense quantity” of goods and provisions. Now Cobb told Davis that public sentiment “becomes worse and more disloyal every day.” General Johnston should be restored to his command, for Hood's reputation “is weakening your strength and destroying your powers of usefulness.” Many people
supported state conventions, some because “they believe it will lead to peace,” others “to take control of affairs out of your hands.” Another note from Georgia came from General William Browne, an alumnus of Davis's staff. “Submission is openly advocated and is gaining strength.”

Topping off the day's post, Judge Campbell submitted his resignation as Assistant Secretary of War. Mr. Seddon having resigned as secretary, the president should reshape the War Department. The judge did not add that he disapproved of Davis's appointment of Seddon's successor, John Breckinridge, the savior of Silver Spring, but he told his friend Robert Kean that Breckinridge was “not a man of small
details,
” and Campbell did not want to serve under him. The truth, Kean thought, was that Campbell was “glad of an opportunity to escape from the place.” Davis would not give him one. He rejected his resignation.

Grant was away when Blair passed through City Point on his way back to Richmond. On January 22 the Rebel flag-of-truce boat took him back up the James with five hundred returning prisoners. According to the
Richmond Dispatch,
he lodged this time at the corner of Fourth and Leigh at the home of Lieutenant Colonel William Hatch, the Assistant Commissioner of Exchange under Blair's first host, Colonel Ould. The prisoners were welcomed too, though not so well housed.

Blair dined at the Executive Mansion that night, full of good cheer from Blair House. After Varina left them, Blair handed Lincoln's letter to Davis, who read it through carefully, then read it a second time. When he finally looked up, Blair, pointed out, as if Davis might have missed it, that Lincoln's reference to “our one common country” was a response to Davis's two. Davis said he understood it as such, and said no more about it. The inference that he had accepted reunion as a premise for negotiations was not an unreasonable one for an eager peacemaker to draw, especially in view of Davis's circumstances. Blair drew it.

As for a Mexican invasion as a means to restore our one common country, Blair gave Davis to understand, at the very least, that Lincoln had not rejected it. It was fortunate, he said, that Davis had agreed to negotiate at all, which gave Lincoln confidence in Blair's utility as a go-between.
“Further reflection,” Blair said, had nonetheless altered his views on seeking peace. Mr. Lincoln was embarrassed by the extremists of his party who sought to drive him to harsher measures than he favored. It was not politically feasible to treat with the Confederate government. If anything could be done, it could only be through Grant and Lee, who might make a truce through a military convention, presaging a permanent peace.

Davis said he would willingly entrust a negotiation to Lee. The unsinkable Preston Blair was convinced that the host had accepted the premise of reunion and was willing to work out the details. They would never meet again.

Before he re-boarded the
William
Allison,
Blair reflected and reconsidered yet again and sent a message to Davis. He was sure that Lincoln would not let Grant negotiate with Lee, leaving Davis no recourse but to send civilian envoys or abandon the whole thing.

North Carolina's governor Zebulon Vance, always at odds with Davis over Vance's fundamentalism on states' rights and Davis's faith in a central government, had written to him a year ago. North Carolina's disillusionment with the war could only be dispelled by an effort to negotiate peace. Not that it would go anywhere. A Yankee rejection of fair terms would rally support to the cause and convince the humblest citizens “that the government is tender of their lives and happiness, and would not prolong their sufferings unnecessarily for one moment.”

Davis had let it sink in. Now he would put it in play.

Blair stayed in Richmond and went calling again, testing the political winds in a cold winter rain. A few dissident congressmen whispered reunion. With no more authority than half-remembered bits of presidential conversation, Blair delivered assurances that Lincoln would go along with thirty years of gradualism on the abolition issue and give the South whatever else it wanted, except independence; but the rabid Richmond press was no more enamored of his second visit than his first. “The mystic Blair,” the
Enquirer
said, was “as mystical as before.” The
Whig
was reasonably sure that he had not returned for his toothbrush, but “all this talk about negotiation and peace, while one party is still bent on conquest and
the other on independence, is idle and meaningless.” President Davis was wasting his time.

In a letter to his wife dispatched from City Point, General Meade took heart from the signs of dissent in Rebeldom. “The Richmond papers are very severe on Davis, and there is every indication of discord among them. I hope to heaven this will incline them to peace, and that there may be some truth in the many reports that something is going on!”

In the dark as much as Meade, Davis's vice president Alec Stephens only knew that “Blair is back again. What he is doing I do not know, but presume the President is endeavoring to
negotiate
with him for
negotiation
that same thing which on 17 Nov. seemed to him to be so absurd.” This was unfair. On November 17, Davis had answered some Georgia legislators who had written him about the prospect of a peace convention initiated by the states, independently of Richmond. Mindful of the sacred dogma of state sovereignty, Davis had answered gingerly that separate state action would be objectionable and divisive. The president of the Confederate States of America could hardly say less.

With Blair still in Richmond, Judge Campbell told his friend Robert Kean that he thought the peace men in Congress were about to demand reunion. On the following day, Kean got stark corroboration when Colonel Alfred L. Rives, a thirty-four-year-old godson of Lafayette, came to see him at his boardinghouse. A Washington City engineer before the war, Rives had designed its Cabin John Bridge, the longest, single-span masonry arch on earth. Now he was the Confederacy's Chief of Engineers.

Rives asked Kean if they could speak privately. The parlor was occupied, so Kean led the colonel to his room. When the door was closed, Rives said his father had just had a talk with Davis. Seventy-one years old and a Davis family friend, Congressman William Cabell Rives had been Jackson's minister to France. A pro-Union voice in the antebellum Senate, he was deeply respected now, and Davis had thoroughly shocked him. Everything was in jeopardy, Davis said. “Despondency and distrust” were everywhere. “We are on the eve of an internal revolution.” He would do almost anything to stop it, including sending men to treat with Mr. Lincoln.

Colonel Rives told Kean what Davis had told his father. Lincoln was inviting a negotiation, with reunion as its sole condition. Davis had inferred that the South could come back with its Constitutional rights, including the right to slavery. It was plain to the elder Rives that Davis was in despair—that he had come to believe independence was unattainable, and was willing to accept reunion “to spare the people the effects of subjugation.” To Kean's even greater astonishment, the younger Rives showed him a copy of a letter from General Lee to a Virginia legislator, supporting the enlistment of slaves as soldiers, promising freedom for them and their families. No deeper desperation was imaginable.

Colonel Rives went on. He had come to see Kean to discuss his views on the issue of whom to appoint to a three-man peace commission. Kean must have wondered why his opinion was being solicited. He suggested that one commissioner should come from Virginia or North Carolina, another from a cotton state, the third from across the Mississippi. Perhaps Rives's father would agree to go. If not, General Lee should be asked, or Senator William Graham of North Carolina. They had all been Union men before the war.