Our One Common Country (17 page)

Then Rives gave away his mission. He wanted to know whether Kean thought Judge Campbell would be willing to negotiate on the basis of reunion. Kean endorsed the judge “as one of the ablest and best negotiators we could have, if it really be necessary to go into that subject.” Kean hoped it would not be. Rives knew it would.

Before the day was out, General Lee issued a public plea for weapons and saddles. General Gorgas told his diary that “Old Blair has returned to this city from Washington and is again gone. What does it all mean? Are we really to make terms with the enemy before we are half beaten? Mr. Singleton has, I believe, gone off. His mission was more I think to see what could be made out of cotton, than one of peace. Would that these birds of evil omen could be kept outside our limits. They do us no good.”

Nor did they do Mr. Singleton good. He returned to Washington City a happy man, bearing contracts for a staggering seven million dollars' worth of cotton, rosin, turpentine, and tobacco. His partner, Senator
Browning, made the glad observation that the loot would “make us rich if we can only get it out.” In due course, Confederate troops burned it, making no one rich.

On January 25, the Rebel flag-of-truce boat appeared at the Union lines with Preston Blair aboard and asked for leave to disgorge him. On his way back north to Eliza, he met with Grant again at City Point, where Rebel gunboats had launched a sneak attack the night before. Had they not run aground, the consequences could have been ugly. The cagy old insider did not miss his chance to tell Grant how his son-in-law, Admiral Lee, had pressed for more ships to protect City Point.

Julia Grant had just arrived to spend the winter with her husband. A former Democrat like Blair, and a longtime resident of St. Louis, she had met the old man, not long ago, at a White House reception. He had walked her in on his arm. They surely chatted now. She loved to be in on a secret, and her husband had been known to indulge her.

Blair docked in Annapolis on the cold afternoon of January 26 and reached Washington City by train, looking weary, Lizzie thought. But he wrote Horace Greeley energetically the next day in a clearer hand than before. “My dear sir: I have only time to say that ‘our plot thickens' & will I think come to a consistency to secure all our objects as well as peace.” He had encountered “a very favorable feeling” among “all who have commanding influence in Richmond,” and was confident that “nothing can defeat an early peace unless technicalities or points of honor be employed by the selfish & unpatriotic in the South” who profit from the war and are “nothing without it & who therefore will exert all their arts to continue it.”

“Great was the excitement” when Blair got home and “it was noised abroad” that peace talks were in the offing, said Lincoln's friend Noah Brooks. The
Times
wished it all away. “The peace bubble that has for ten days past floated so brilliantly before the gaze of men has today come to a sudden collapse. Late last evening Francis P. Blair returned from Richmond, and brought with him precisely what sensible men expected—that
is, just nothing. He brought neither olive branch in his hand, Peace Commissioners under his cloak, nor a treaty in his pocket. His mission, so far as practical results are concerned, is in fact as Mr. Blair expressed himself today, ‘a total failure.' ”

If Mr. Blair said that, he was lying for his country. His hopeful belief that peace was at hand was not among the news that the
Times
saw fit to print.

On Saturday, January 28, Blair returned to the White House and reported to the president. Davis had read his letter twice, he said, acknowledged Lincoln's rejection of “two countries,” and understood that the North would only negotiate for one. Lincoln recorded these things on the back of his copy of his “one common country” letter. Should anything come of it all, the Jacobins could not fault him for agreeing to meet the enemy.

Attesting to his contacts in Richmond, Blair conveyed to the president an assortment of requests for favors from influential Southerners, including Davis himself, who pled for the lives of two Rebel prisoners condemned as spies—falsely, Davis said. Among other pleas, Blair sought leave to send to Mrs. Stanard “a pair of shoes, a box of tea, half a dozen shirts for her son & some coarse cotton to cover the nakedness of her Negro house servant.”

The levelheaded Blair was so enthused about the chance for a peaceful reunion that it must have given Lincoln some encouragement. Noah Brooks did not claim to know what the president was thinking, but “strengthened by one or two conversations with Mr. Lincoln,” he thought he had “no faith whatever” in peace feelers from Dixie.

Gideon Welles thought otherwise. The president, he told his diary, despite “much shrewdness and much good sense, has often strange and incomprehensible whims. Takes sometimes singular and unaccountable freaks. It would hardly surprise me were he to undertake to arrange terms of peace without consulting any one.” Dismissing the public denials, Uncle Gideon had “no doubt that the senior Blair has made his visits in concert with the President.”

Jefferson Davis could not be blamed for thinking so too.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

A Determined Stand Ought to Be Made for Peace

Two months before Abraham Lincoln came into the world in his proverbial log cabin, Robert Mercer Taliaferro Hunter was born into wealth and prominence in Essex County, Virginia, in a house that had a name. When Robert was two, his mother died giving birth to his brother. His father's second wife died in childbirth too, leaving him “twice motherless.” A thoughtful boy he was, said the slave woman who raised him, “lonesome in his ways.”

Educated at the new University of Virginia with Edgar Allan Poe, Robert went on to a rustic school of law and made good in politics despite his quiet mien. Advancing in short order from the legislature to the House of Representatives, he became at thirty-two the youngest Speaker in history, admired for his intellect, liked for his self-effacing style, chosen for his moderation. A portly, long-haired, smooth-shaven man, in the manner of the day, he advanced to the Senate in 1847 as Lincoln entered the House. When his friends grew beards and muttonchops, Hunter made no change, indifferent to fashion, indifferently groomed, “neither addicted nor adapted” to light conversation or “gossiping intercourse,” a loving daughter said. The Mississippi firebrand Henry Foote, unforgiving of his fellow men, called his colleague from Virginia “tardy and sluggish in his movements,” crafty and full of grand ambitions but lacking the boldness to achieve them. An admirer called him modest almost to diffidence, with a lifestyle as simple as any plain Virginia farmer's, a term that bears defining. In 1860, the senator owned more than three thousand
acres, a flour mill, and about a hundred slaves, though an ever-growing family, bad investments, and a preference for politics over business caused financial strain.

No Virginian since the founding fathers had been more influential. A protégé of Calhoun's, Hunter, along with Jefferson Davis and the bombastic Robert Toombs of Georgia, made up what was known in the old Senate as the Southern Triumvirate. Looking down from the gallery, a spectator saw them huddled in a tableau vivant of temperaments, Toombs leaning forward aggressively, Davis imperiously erect, Hunter listening quietly with his cheek in his hand.

In 1860, Hunter made a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination with respectable Northern support. He condemned the Know Nothings' religious bigotry with no little courage and defended the right to own people. After Lincoln's election, he proposed a bizarre scheme to redesign the Union in an ill-considered effort to save it, including two presidents, one Northern, one Southern, with rotating portfolios. Wounded by the ridicule, he swung his support to secession and resigned from the Senate before Virginia left the Union, but his heart was not in it. He spoke of reconstruction when the Confederacy was barely born, damaging himself in the South while the North was condemning him for treason.

When excited Confederate officials crowded around a telegraph, cheering the news from Bull Run, Hunter only listened. Even friends read his caution as timidity. Davis thought it diminished him, but condescended “to take him as God made him, esteeming him for his good qualities, despite his defects,” and made him Secretary of State in 1861 after Toombs left the job to fight Yankees instead of Davis. It lasted seven months. Knowing the president as he did, Hunter told a friend he would
be
Secretary of State, not Mr. Davis's clerk. The last straw fell when he commented on a military matter at a Cabinet meeting. “Mr. Hunter, you are Secretary of State,” Davis said, “and when information is wished of that department it will be time for you to speak.” Hunter resigned the next day and became once again a senator from Virginia, on the edge of Davis's world, no part of his inner circle but generally supportive.

Hunter's mood, rarely sunny, deteriorated with the war. His eldest boy came home from college with tuberculosis a month after the fighting
began and died at the age of twenty-two. Hunter later said his ambition died with his son. In 1863, a Union general sent gunboats up the Rappahannock specifically to burn his mill and take his horses and cattle. Now “ruin stared him in the face.” Though the Senate made him its president pro tempore, he faded into the wallpaper, until talk of peace emerged in the winter of 1865, cautiously backed by Hunter, who found himselfnudging toward the cabal.

With Blair gone from Richmond, Rebel deserters reported “great exposure and suffering” on the Petersburg siege line. Dozens of shivering Southerners went over to the enemy every night, enticed by Yankee pickets hawking hot food and safety. Some Virginians simply walked home. In their frigid capital city, firewood was selling at five dollars a stick. Desperate women and children burgled their neighbors' coal bins.

On Friday, January 27, an exceptionally bitter day, the corpulent Senator Hunter hastened to the War Department almost at a run, expelling clouds of vapor. It was not the cold that animated him. Davis had dispatched him to ask his vice president to come to the Executive Mansion on special, important business. Hunter found Stephens and told him what the business was, then hurried to the War Department to share it with his friend Judge Campbell.

Davis was at home with the recurring nerve disease that crippled his right arm with pain and cannot have improved his mood. Stephens had been in Richmond for a month and a half, but had not spoken to Davis since 1863. His malignant speeches and letters had built no bridges between them. Now Davis thanked him for coming and told him he would speak in strict confidence about a matter he had discussed with no one but Mr. Hunter. Not even his Cabinet knew. He had asked them to assemble at 4:00 p.m., and wished to have the benefit of Mr. Stephens's judgment before they met. Having neither sought nor respected Mr. Stephens's judgment for years, his unexplained interest in collecting it now must have struck his vice president as odd.

Then Davis let Stephens in on what everyone wanted to know—why Blair had come to Richmond. Even Stephens may have been speechless
as Davis recounted the old man's message: that the South could either be subjugated for a generation, or have a victory parade in Mexico City and a new Southern empire. Mr. Blair had said that the Radicals in Mr. Lincoln's party were pressing him hard for a punitive postwar policy, including “the most extreme measures” against the rebellion's leaders (Davis and Stephens being leaders one and two). Davis showed Stephens the letters that had passed between him and Mr. Lincoln. They were only a “cover,” he said, for the “undisclosed object” of a joint invasion of Mexico in a reconciling brotherhood of arms.

Far from laughing it off, Davis told Stephens that the ejection of the French from Mexico could lead to reunion. Stephens understood him to be posing “a grave question for mature consideration.” Davis wanted to know what Stephens thought. Stephens asked him if he believed that Mr. Blair really spoke for the Lincoln administration. Mr. Blair had denied it, Davis said, but with confidence that Mr. Lincoln would back him. Davis said he was sure that Mr. Lincoln understood what Mr. Blair proposed, despite Mr. Blair's disclaimers.

Stephens endorsed it on the spot. If nothing else, it would open a channel to Mr. Lincoln. Perhaps a truce could be had while the
North
invaded Mexico, “without committing us to an active participation.” The chance to regroup would be precious. Whether reunion would result was uncertain. If it did, the seceded states would be returning voluntarily, securing the self-determination for which they had been struggling. It occurred to Stephens immediately that the Jacobins would quash any favorable terms for the South if they knew that peace talks were coming, while a public negotiation that failed would dishearten the Southern people. He stressed the need for “the utmost discretion and the most perfect secrecy” if a meeting were to accomplish anything. Davis said Mr. Blair had been “very particular in stating the same thing.”

“Well then,” Stephens said, “Mr. President, looking to the question in all its bearings, in my judgment, you and Mr. Lincoln yourselves are the persons who should hold the conference.” They could meet near City Point without anyone knowing but Grant and Lee. Davis said no. Decisively. The Confederacy should send at least three commissioners, not its
president.
5
*
Davis wanted to know whom Stephens would recommend. Stephens thought it over. Secrecy was vital, he said again. Able, discreet men were needed, men whose absence would not be noticed. Judge Campbell was circumspection itself, and respected North and South. General Henry Benning (a former Georgia Supreme Court justice who commanded a brigade near City Point) could slip away unmissed. The able Virginian Thomas Flournoy was visiting Richmond and would leave in a day or two. His departure would cause no comment. He and Mr. Lincoln had been friends in the old Congress.

For the first time in a long time, Davis agreed with his vice president, on the mission and its missionaries. Stephens considered it done, “for I did not think the Cabinet would object to what Mr. Davis so cordially approved.” The ice had been broken between them, and they chatted until the Cabinet began to arrive for their meeting. The vice president was not invited.

Saturday, January 28, dealt the suffering people of Richmond another cold blow, but the War Department clerk John Jones thought Blair's visitation had warmed them. “Can't find a thermometer in the city,” he wrote, but there were “many smiling faces in the streets, betokening a profound desire for peace.” Early that morning, Jones saw Senator Hunter almost running down the street for a second day in a row, unaccustomed as he was to exertion. He was headed for the stone-built edifice at the foot of Capitol Square, the old US Customs House, the Confederacy's executive office building. Jones guessed the senator was eager for news about Breckinridge, the new Secretary of War, a rival in the old Senate, but Hunter was the one bearing news. Davis had asked him to summon Mr. Stephens again.

Stephens was not surprised when Davis let him know that the Cabinet had agreed to send envoys to Mr. Lincoln, but was taken aback when
he was told that he would lead them. Judge Campbell had been appointed, as Stephens had proposed, but General Benning and Mr. Flournoy had been dropped. Stephens and Mr. Hunter would go instead.

Stephens protested as forcefully as his childlike squeak allowed. He presided over the Senate, he said, and Mr. Hunter presided in his absence. They had never gone missing together. Explanations would be demanded. The Senate's very rules would have to be changed. Two more visible men could not have been named to a secret peace commission “if anything was expected to be accomplished by it.” Davis said his Cabinet had made up their minds. Stephens thought again. If he refused to join the mission, Davis and his circle would blame him for its failure, and a crippled negotiation was better than none. Little Alec gave up the fight.

Neither man knew it, but the fight had been fixed, and their friends had fixed it.