Our One Common Country (18 page)

Congressman Arthur S. Colyar of Tennessee was a charter member of the cabal, an antebellum Union man who supported Henry Foote in his renegade mission to Washington. A few weeks before the coming of Preston Blair, Congressman John B. Baldwin of Virginia, a friend of Robert E. Lee's and a veteran of his army, had asked Colyar to take a walk with him in the dark after an evening session. A crisis had come, Baldwin said, and “for the first time in my life I feel that I lack the moral courage to do my duty.” He had seen General Lee, who had given him to understand that “the cause had to fail.” Baldwin knew what had to be done. “A determined stand ought to be made for peace.” But knowing Mr. Davis, he feared that “nothing could be done with him.”

Shortly thereafter, Baldwin engineered the appointment of a fact-finding committee to which he and Colyar were named. Lee was examined in secret. His testimony was chilling. It was only a question of time before he must abandon Richmond, he said. Deprived of his base and supplies, his army could not be sustained. Baldwin asked the general if he had no redemptive ideas. He said that he did not. Unnerved by Lee's confession, Colyar would not stand by and watch. He drew up resolutions calling on Davis to appoint a three-man peace commission to be named
by the House. It was not the first such resolution to be offered, but this one had wind in its sails, and Colyar and his friends had three specific peace commissioners in mind: Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell.

Naming no names, Colyar and a colleague gave Stephens a draft of the resolutions and invited him to edit them, which he gladly did.
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They were offered to the House on January 12, the very day Blair unveiled his Mexican plan to Davis. The earlier drafts had called for negotiations based on state sovereignty, but now a new element had been added—a North-South collaboration to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, a striking coincidence at best. The resolutions were headed for adoption when the Davis men made a bargain with the cabal. The resolutions' sponsors would withdraw them and Davis would appoint on his own the same three peace commissioners they wanted. “This is substantially the truth of history,” so Colyar would later say.

The truth it may be, but Davis never knew it. The president was a fighter, not a deal-maker, as his deal-making allies knew. They had struck their bargain without him, confident that they could persuade him to appoint these peace commissioners with whatever instructions
he
saw fit to give, heading off the greater evil of Congress driving the train.

After Stephens's first talk with Davis, the Cabinet endorsed the peace commission and Campbell's appointment to it, as Stephens had expected, but his other two nominees were unfavorably received. Someone suggested Hunter. Knowing that the war was unwinnable, Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory, an able Floridian and a former US senator, was anxious for peace talks. It was he who proposed Stephens. It would stop his maneuverings in Congress, Mallory said, and a failure to name the Confederacy's leading dove to its peace commission would “excite surprise.” Davis resisted the idea, but took it under advisement.

He conferred that evening with Senator Benjamin Hill, Stephens's fellow Georgian and longtime bête noir. Hard around the eyes, Hill had once been ill-tempered enough to pitch an inkwell at Alabama's senator William Yancey and unlucky enough to hit him. In the face. Hill was young, rich,
and cocky in 1856 when he bested Little Alec in a political debate and started a lifelong feud. They had been deadly enemies, quite literally, since Hill compared Stephens to Judas Iscariot, giving Judas the better grade. When Stephens challenged Hill to a duel, Hill declined and published an explanation. To kill the little fellow would be against the laws of God and Georgia, and “a great annoyance to me afterward.” Stephens was “a perfect ‘Colt's Repeater' in the matter of telling falsehoods,” Hill said, and had called Hill a braggart, having previously equated himself with Moses.

Their hatred for one another was grim. Now Davis asked Hill, a loyal Davis man, what he thought of the choice of Stephens to bargain for the Confederacy's life. Hill liked the idea. He would later say he insisted on it, and had urged it on Davis even before Stephens spoke with the president. Stephens had been close to Lincoln in the old Congress, Hill said (a pale compliment). Sending him to Washington “would at least check his evil-doing in the Senate,” and Davis could not be blamed for a failed peace conference if Stephens led it. Persuaded by Hill's advice, which echoed Secretary Mallory's, Davis assured the senator that he would not yield their country's independence as the price of a chat with Mr. Lincoln, but if a truce could be had, he would take it. With reunion out of the question, Hill was sure that the peace talks would fail and disappoint the people. What better man to lead them than Moses?

Though Hill did not tell Davis, he had made his own deal with Stephens: Georgia's congressional delegation would support Colyar's peace resolutions, and Stephens would persuade Governor Joseph Brown to drop his threats to seek a separate peace. Hill calculated that the resolutions would pass, and produce nothing. When Davis chose Stephens to lead a doomed peace mission, the arrangement could not have been sweeter.

The chief Confederate hawk would appoint three doves as his envoys to the North. A truce just might ensue. Far more likely, nothing would come of it all but a Yankee slap in the face, discrediting Little Alec and his peace movement. And that would be satisfactory too.

Davis's Secretary of State, Judah Benjamin, was an English fishmonger's son and a former US senator. Born in the British West Indies, raised in
Charleston, educated at Yale—from which he had been separated under a cloud of uncertain character—he had taken himself to Louisiana in possession of four dollars and risen to become a leading New Orleans lawyer and a slave-holding sugarcane planter. A “short, stout man,” said the
Times of London
's William Howard Russell, with “a full face, olive-colored, and most decidedly Jewish features, with the brightest large black eyes, one of which is somewhat diverse from the other, and a brisk, lively, agreeable manner, combined with much vivacity of speech and quickness of utterance . . .” A wellborn junior officer mocked his “keg-like form and over-deferential manner, suggestive of a prosperous shopkeeper,” but acknowledged his “elegantly polished speech.” It was said that “the brains of the Confederacy” was a moniker Alec Stephens coveted and Judah Benjamin won. His large cast of enemies rarely missed a chance to allude to his “Hebrew origins,” which had not made his accomplishments easier, despite his conversion to his wife's Catholicism, itself no advantage in Richmond. Judah Benjamin was a talented man, and closer to Jefferson Davis than any other.

It had not always been so. In 1858, the “little man from Louisiana,” as Davis called him then, grew larger after Davis imputed to him in a Senate debate “an attempt to misrepresent a very plain remark.” Without so much as leaving his desk, Benjamin composed an invitation to a duel and asked a colleague to deliver it. To his credit, Davis told Benjamin's second, “I will make this all right at once. I have been wholly wrong.” The next day, he apologized on the Senate floor and admitted that his behavior sometimes inclined to the “dogmatic and dictatorial,” as his best friends told him. Judah Benjamin was grace itself. “I shall be very happy to forget everything that has occurred between us, except the pleasant passage of this morning.”

Now he brought Judge Campbell the news of his appointment as an envoy to Mr. Lincoln, much to the judge's surprise. Benjamin told Campbell who the other members were but gave him no details, and asked him to go to the president's house. When Campbell arrived, Hunter and Stephens were already there. Davis said there was great discontent in the United States with the state of things in Mexico—so much so that Mr.
Blair had brought from Washington a plan for a joint expedition to oust Maximilian from his throne. As the judge took this in, it struck him that no mention was being made of the means to be used, “nor what was to be done with Mexico should we succeed.” To Campbell's increasing amazement, Davis seemed convinced that Lincoln was more concerned about the situation in Mexico than he was about the Civil War, which he was said to be willing to suspend “under some sort of collusive contract.” The Confederacy's demand for independence could somehow be adjusted after things were straightened out in Mexico.

Davis told the judge that he and Mr. Stephens and Mr. Hunter had been chosen to go north to confer with Mr. Lincoln as peace commissioners. Tomorrow morning. They would run down the James by steamer to City Point. Mr. Blair had made it clear that General Grant would be expecting them and would pass them through to Washington City.

Davis gave his envoys little guidance. They were free to accept any “treaty” that did
not
include reunion. He had made it clear to Hill, and no doubt told the commissioners, that while he did not wish them to deceive Mr. Lincoln or be responsible for any false impressions, he was willing to secure an armistice even if they were satisfied that Mr. Lincoln might accept one under the mistaken impression that reunion must follow—a subtle distinction at best. Davis would later say that he gave them some suggestions, but “left much to their discretion,” and advised them, if they could, “to receive rather than make propositions.” Other than that, he left them to negotiate the survival of their country (not to mention their own) on the fly.

As Campbell sized them up, the commissioners' reactions ran from scornful to naive. “I was incredulous, Mr. Hunter did not have faith. Mr. Stephens supposed Blair to be ‘the mentor of the Administration and Republican party' ” with a plan that made perfect sense.

Having authorized them to agree to anything
but
reunion, Davis gave his envoys, “as a passport to Washington City,” the letter from Lincoln to Blair inviting a proposal to bring peace to “our one common country.” As the rarely sarcastic Campbell would soon have occasion to say, they “did not find their passport available” when they presented it to the enemy.

As Stephens had feared, news of their mission was on the street before they were. With secrecy gone, he sent a draft to Davis of a statement to the Associated Press: “It is understood that Judge Campbell, Senator Hunter & Mr. Stephens will at an early day go to Washington to see what can be done in the way of negotiation. It is believed this course has been adopted from what has transpired in the Blair Mission. They go with the approval of the President.” Stephens gave Davis his reasoning. To say that a commission had been appointed “may put Lincoln in some difficulty or embarrassment.” He had been “particular in saying he would accept agents only in an informal way.” On the other hand, an “informal”
interview should not be announced explicitly. The subject should be avoided.

It fell to Judah Benjamin to draft the commissioners' credentials, a letter of authorization to be shown to the federal gatekeepers that could bridge what seemed unbridgeable—Lincoln's offer to make peace for one country and Davis's demand for two. Benjamin found a way. To accompany a copy of Lincoln's “one common country” letter, he drafted a one-sentence note to the commissioners: “In compliance with the letter of Mr. Lincoln, of which the foregoing is a copy, you are hereby requested to proceed to Washington City for conference with him upon the subject to which it relates.” It was neatly done. While purporting to act “in compliance” with Lincoln's letter, Davis would merely be authorizing them to confer on “the subject to which it relates,” neither accepting one country nor demanding two. Everyone's face would be saved.

Benjamin's chief clerk, William Bromwell, made three copies of the secretary's draft and brought them to Davis, who reviewed one closely and glanced at the other two. “Mr. Bromwell,” he said, “there is something wrong here. Mr. Benjamin says in the letter, ‘
on the subject.
' ” No subject was mentioned in Mr. Lincoln's letter. “And again, it will never do to ignore the fact that there are
two
countries instead of but
one common country
. We can't be too particular on that point.” Davis took a pen and ruined Benjamin's work: “In
compliance
conformity
with the letter of Mr. Lincoln, of which the foregoing is a copy, you are
hereby
requested to proceed to Washington City for
an informal
conference with him upon
the
subject to which it relates
,
issues involved in the existing war, and for the purpose of securing peace to the two countries
.” The Confederate States of America did not act “in compliance” with Lincoln's demands; its interests happened to conform with them. The conference would be informal, though Stephens had urged Davis not to say so. One could not be too particular about two countries.