Our One Common Country (20 page)

Grant had heard this kind of thing before. In 1862, when the general was in command in Tennessee, Stanton and his man Henry Halleck, then General in Chief of the Army, had cautioned him to keep his military plans from the president. Lincoln was so kind, they said, “so averse to refusing anything asked of him, that some friend would be sure to get from him all he knew.” Grant took their advice and improved on it. “I did
not communicate my plans to the President,” he later recalled, “nor did I to the Secretary of War or to General Halleck.”

He was about to expand his range in the art of evading Stanton.

On Monday, January 30, Jefferson Davis's mouthpiece spoke. The president had sent able men to see Mr. Lincoln, the
Richmond Sentinel
said. In their efforts to win peace, “no means will be left untried,” but if “three eminent citizens” failed, one good thing
would
happen: It would no longer be possible for “factions or the timid” to persuade the Southern people that peace could be had by any other means than “stout hearts and strong hands.”

The
Examiner
took a harder view, shamed by the very thought of the South's submission to federalism but not by human bondage as an ornament of its civilization. The enemy would demand two things—abolition and submission to federal power—“and these include everything.” The defeated states would be provinces of a Northern empire, “and a distinctive element of our Southern civilization” would be lost. “The enemy knows the weakness of our President.” It was weak to let Mr. Blair come and go in the service of “schemes and projects unworthy of a gallant people.” It had turned their thoughts to peace when they ought to be bracing for war.

The
Examiner
was not alone. On the floor of the US Senate, the Jacobin Benjamin Wade attacked Preston Blair and Jefferson Davis like an edged weapon. “We have heard of our emissary going down there to beg for peace at the footstool of those scoundrels. . . . Is there nothing that will degrade a man? May he not steep himself in crime so deep that it is damnation and contamination to communicate with him? . . . I was here when Jeff Davis and company walked up to your desk, sir, and raised their hands to God, and swore to maintain the Constitution of the United States, and I was here when that oath was forgotten and they raised their accursed arm against this Republic. . . . Is perjury no disgrace? . . . It seems it did not affect Mr. Blair in the least.”

Maryland's moderate Unionist Reverdy Johnson defended his constituent. “How came he to go there?” Johnson asked, implying that he had gone with Lincoln's blessing.

“God only knows,” Wade replied. “I would like to know. Yea, sir, I intend to know . . .”

“He went in a Government vessel the last time.”

“Yes, I understand he went in a Government vessel.” He had no more right to be on that vessel on a mission to this devil Davis than on the road “to the lower regions in a vehicle furnished by the Government.” (Wade had senators laughing now.) “Sir, it is dishonor, it is futile to beg of Davis and company for compromise or peace. I know these men. They are high-spirited men, as the devil, I suppose, is high-spirited. After he went into rebellion I suppose he would not go back into heaven if they offered to reconstruct with him. His pride would forbid it.” (More laughter.) Why did our president allow communication with this rebellious devil Davis? “I do not know that he does, and I hope to God he has not sanctioned any such thing, and that he never will sanction it.” Break up “this nest of vipers at Richmond,” and the people of the South will “flock back to the old standard with joy . . . but you must first break up these devils; you must not disgrace our nation by treating with them; for it would be disgrace, dishonor, contamination in the eyes of our own people and in the eyes of the civilized world.”

On the siege line that Monday morning, three devils awaited their due. General Willcox sent a wire to his superior, General Parke. “I fully share what I know must be your regret at the delay concerning the commissioners. If the rebel government is seeking capital, this delay will be a point in their favor.” If Grant, as they claimed, had authorized their passage, would it not be well to admit them through the lines and hold them on our side until the word came to pass them on? Parke replied promptly. No one was going anywhere until Washington said so.

Bearing his flag of truce, the charming Colonel Hatch appeared again in front of Fort Morton and its fourteen Northern cannon and again returned to the Rebel lines. No pass had come through. Less than seven months earlier, Colonel Sam Harriman, one of Hatch's interlocutors, had lost 145 of the 37th Wisconsin's 250 men and boys in a single day. Now he wrote home to his adjutant general. “I have but little faith in peace
commissions. A piece of ten-inch shell is all the peace they can appreciate or that will help them any.”

The Secretary of War sent a wire to the front at 10:30 a.m. Major Eckert was coming from Washington, it said, though the major was not named: “By direction of the President,” Stanton said, General Ord was to tell the commissioners “that a messenger will be dispatched to them at or near where they now are, without unnecessary delay.” The message was unspecified. Far from dropping his guard, Ord wired Parke that “the rebels may attempt something on our rear or flank.” Have your men alert and “plenty of ammunition handy.”

While Ord kept his powder dry, an anxious Alec Stephens wrote a note to General Grant, which Hunter and Campbell approved and Hatch delivered to the siege line.

 

Sir: We desire to pass your lines under safe conduct and to proceed to Washington to hold a conference with President Lincoln upon the subject of the existing war [Judah Benjamin's evasion restored], and with a view of ascertaining upon what terms it may be terminated, in pursuance of the course indicated by him in his letter to Mr. F. P. Blair of January 18, 1865, of which we presume
you
have a copy; and if not, we wish to see
you
in person, and to confer with
you
upon the subject. [Emphasis added]

 

They signed themselves “Very Respectfully.” Very cleverly too. The course that Lincoln had indicated in his letter to Mr. F. P. Blair was peace for “our one common country.” The commissioners kept to themselves their orders to insist on two. Their request to see Grant if Lincoln would not see them was rooted in Blair's assurance that the general endorsed their mission, and their belief that Grant and Lee could end the war if Lincoln and Davis could not.

Traders dumped gold on Wall Street that day. The threat of peace had reached New York. Gideon Welles recorded the mood in Washington. “Great talk and many rumors from all quarters of peace.”

Jefferson Davis's wild-eyed nemesis, the resigned Rebel congressman Henry Foote, wrote to his old friend Seward that day from a Union Army command post on the Virginia side of the Potomac, to which he had made his way after a Confederate judge had ordered him freed from his Fredericksburg jail cell, completing his escape from rebellion. Mr. Davis was the only bar to peace and reunion, he wrote. Most Southerners and many of their leaders would return to “the flag of our fathers” and endorse a ban on slavery, effective in 1900, if the North gave them amnesty and restored their Constitutional rights. Seward replied coolly, soliciting any further information that “the prisoner may think it proper to impart,” and giving him a choice between repatriation to the Confederacy and a one-way trip to Liverpool. Foote chose the latter.

While Foote flailed away ineffectually, General Lee was staying abreast of Richmond's authorized peace mission. In a letter to Davis that day, he speculated that the enemy was delaying the commissioners' passage to keep them from seeing troop movements.

As Colonel Hatch and the commissioners retired for the night, unsure if their mission had failed, General Grant was on his way back to City Point on an overnight steamer.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

You Will Not Assume to Definitely Consummate Anything

Grant admired Lincoln. His affection for the Secretary of War was limited. “Mr. Lincoln gained influence over men by making them feel that it was a pleasure to serve him,” Grant said. Mr. Stanton “cared nothing for the feelings of others. In fact, it seemed to be pleasanter to him to disappoint than to gratify. He felt no hesitation in assuming the functions of the executive, or in acting without advising him.” Two could play at that game.

Civilian supremacy over the military had been drilled into Grant since his plebe year at West Point. So had honesty in all things. An aide said the general always thought himself obliged to defer to Stanton, his civilian superior, whose Assistant Secretary of War, Charles Dana, said the general was incapable of chicanery. The general said otherwise. Long after peace had come, he repeatedly recalled in public, without a hint of contrition, how he had evaded the Secretary of War, defied him, even deceived him when it served.

As General Jubal Early had shown in July in his visit to Silver Spring at the head of a Rebel division, his troops in the Shenandoah Valley were a short march from Washington. Stanton insisted on keeping strong forces between Early and Pennsylvania Avenue, forgoing opportunities to attack him from the south. As Grant would blithely recall, “I determined to put a stop to this.” Stanton objected when Grant chose the hyperaggressive General Phillip Sheridan, then defending Washington on the Monocacy River, to attack General Early. Unmoved by the secretary's wishes, Grant
wired General Halleck, Stanton's obedient servant, and said that Sheridan must “put himself south of the enemy and follow him to the death. Wherever the enemy goes let our troops go also.”

When Lincoln saw Grant's telegram he wired him directly. “This, I think, is exactly right, as to how our forces should move. But please look over the dispatches you may have received from here, even since you made that order, and discover, if you can, that there is any idea in the head of any one here of ‘putting our army
south
of the enemy,' or of ‘following him to the
death'
in any direction. I repeat to you, it will neither be done nor attempted unless you watch it every day, and hour, and force it.”

Needing no clearer license to ignore Stanton, Grant saw it and raised it to a deception. “I replied to this that I would start in two hours for Washington, and soon got off, going directly to the Monocacy without stopping at Washington on my way.” There was more. “I knew it was impossible for me to get orders through Washington to Sheridan to make a move, because they would be stopped there.” He executed his plan without troubling Stanton with it. Sheridan attacked Early and routed him.

When Grant approved Sherman's march to the sea, cut off from the War Department, “the authorities” vetoed it. “Out of deference to the Government,” Grant would later say, “I telegraphed Sherman and stopped him twenty-four hours, and then considering that that was deference enough to the Government, I telegraphed him to go ahead again.”

As part of their running battle, Stanton instructed Grant's telegraphers to send him every word the general transmitted, and forbade any orders to be sent until he approved them. “He never disturbed himself, either, in examining my orders until it was entirely convenient for him,” Grant said. “I remonstrated against this in writing, and the Secretary apologetically restored me to my rightful position of General-in-Chief of the Army. But he soon lapsed again and took control much as before.” Two could play at that game, too.

No one was tougher in a fight than Grant, but the general was as soft as Lincoln on peace and reconciliation. He dismissed the Secretary of War's assessment that the president's kindness required supervision. “Mr. Lincoln was not timid, and he was willing to trust his generals in making and executing their plans. The Secretary was very timid. . . . He could
see our weakness, but he could not see that the enemy was in danger. The enemy would not have been in danger if Mr. Stanton had been in the field.”

Mr. Stanton was not in the field when Messrs. Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell presented themselves at Grant's siege line, seeking leave to come to the peace table.

On Tuesday, the last day of January 1865, the commissioners, still in Petersburg, woke up to a warming trend. By Michigan standards, General Willcox thought the weather had turned fine. The Virginian John Jones found it “bright and frosty.” Early that morning, Grant returned to City Point and found it hot with peace fever. Despite “the admirably private and noiseless manner in which everything is conducted here,” the
New York
Times
correspondent said, the distracting news was out that peace envoys were coming, though “no one seemed to know exactly when or how.” Every train pulling in from the front, every steamboat down the James, was said to bring Rebels bearing armistice papers. The end of the war was in the air, and Grant was determined to keep it aloft, the Secretary of War notwithstanding.

Resuming his command at the center of the bubble, the general was informed that three Rebel dignitaries had presented themselves at his lines two days before, and had sent him a note seeking leave to proceed to Washington for the purpose of ending the war. It was put in his hands immediately. Davis had told the commissioners that Grant would be expecting them. He waved them through on the spot with an eloquent exclamation point:

 

Gentlemen!

 

Your communication of yesterday requesting an interview with myself, and a safe conduct to Washington and return, has been received. I will instruct the commanding officers of the forces near Petersburg to receive you, notifying you at what part of the line and the time when and where conveyance will be ready for you. Your letter to me has been
telegraphed to Washington for instructions. I have no doubt that before you arrive at my Head Quarters, an answer will be received, directing me to comply with your request. Should a different reply be received, I promise you a safe and immediate return within your own lines.

 

To deliver his note of welcome and bring his guests to City Point, Grant dispatched his twenty-nine-year-old aide, Lieutenant Colonel Orville Babcock, a battle-tested veteran and a genial favorite of Mrs. Grant's. Babcock left for the siege line on the next train.

Only after all of this was done did the general enlighten Washington, enclosing the commissioners' note. He began writing a message to the Secretary of War, then crossed out Stanton's name and addressed himself to Lincoln: “I have sent directions to receive these gentlemen, and expect to have them at my quarters this evening awaiting your instructions.” Lincoln replied that afternoon, well aware that Stanton had stopped the gentlemen cold a day and a half before. “A messenger is coming to you on the business contained in your dispatch. Detain the gentlemen in comfortable quarters until he arrives, and then act upon the message he brings as far as applicable, it having been made up to pass through General Ord's hands, and when the gentlemen were supposed to be beyond our lines.” The president did not inquire why Stanton's order to keep them there had been ignored.

Lincoln was encouraged when he read their note to Grant, suggesting as it did that they were ready to bring peace to our one common country. He decided to meet them halfway, far from Capitol Hill, in the person of his Secretary of State, so long as they assured Tom Eckert that they accepted his conditions. He took up a pen and sent Seward to Hampton Roads.

 

You will proceed to Fortress Monroe, there to meet and informally confer with Messrs. Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell on the basis of my letter to F. P. Blair, Esq., of January 18, 1865, a copy of which you have. You will make known to them that three things are indispensable, to wit: 1st. The restoration of the national authority throughout all the states. 2d. No receding,
by the Executive of the United States
[emphasis added], on the slavery question from the position assumed thereon in the late annual message to Congress and in preceding documents. 3d. No cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the Government.

You will inform them that all propositions of theirs, not inconsistent with the above, will be considered and passed upon in a spirit of sincere liberality. You will hear all they may choose to say, and report it to me. You will not assume to definitely consummate anything.

 

Weeks later, when the president's instructions were read to the House of Representatives, members who knew Seward would chuckle over the last sentence.

As Lincoln was sending Seward south, his aide John Nicolay was a guest on the floor of the House, on the verge of its vote on the Constitutional amendment banning slavery. The outcome was considered a coin toss, despite the president's pledge to his vote collectors on Capitol Hill: “Whatever promise you make to those men, I will perform it.” Sunset Cox woke up that day expecting to vote aye. He had promised to support the amendment, for “high officials” had told him that all hope for negotiation was gone, and the South was about to free its slaves to make soldiers of them. Now there would be war until the Confederacy was dead, and a Constitutional ban on slavery could not impede reunion. But when Cox strolled into the chamber at half past noon, he was told that Southern peace envoys were about to cross Grant's lines. Some said they already had.

Congressman James M. Ashley was the amendment's floor manager, a smooth-shaven abolitionist from Toledo who had comforted John Brown's wife on the day he hanged. Now Ashley was beset by Democrats like Cox who had pledged to vote aye, thinking peace talks were dead. Knowing no more than they did, Ashley confronted Nicolay. With innocent sincerity, Lincoln's aide said he knew of no peace commission. It was not good enough for Cox, who told Ashley that his vote depended on the president's confirmation.

The president was writing his instructions to Seward when a messenger arrived with a note from Ashley: “The report is in circulation in the House that Peace Commissioners are on their way or are in the city, and is being used against us. If it is true, I fear we shall lose the bill. Please authorize me to contradict it, if not true.” Honest Abe wrote his answer on Ashley's note and had it sent back up the hill: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it. A. Lincoln.” Then he finished sending Seward to meet them at Hampton Roads.

At half past one, Lincoln's note was handed to Ashley, who displayed it to Cox. Spotting the equivocation, Cox made inquiries to “other than official sources,” who assured him that a peace commission from Richmond was indeed at Grant's lines. “In some inscrutable way,” Cox had found, “there were men in Congress who were better advised as to their presence than Mr. Ashley or the President.” Sunset Cox would vote no.

As the roll call neared, the chamber was jammed, literally from floor to rafters. Noah Brooks counted five Supreme Court justices, several Cabinet members, “Senators by the dozen,” Montgomery Blair, “hosts of other prominent persons.” Every seat was filled. All the standing room was taken. Anxious abolitionists fretted in the galleries. Some blacks had been admitted for the first time ever. The press gallery above and behind the Speaker “was invaded by a mob of well dressed women.” The newspapermen surrendered their seats and took notes standing up.

Even now there were speeches to be made, explanations to be given. One by one, anxious Democrats took the floor and committed themselves to abolition, comforted by Lincoln's assurance that no doves were flying north. A Pennsylvanian had voted no in June. Now he had the clerk read his statement, ignorant of Cox's sources or unconvinced of their veracity: “I have been in favor of exhausting all means of conciliation to restore the Union as our fathers made it. The result of all the peace missions, and especially that of Mr. Blair, has satisfied me that nothing short of the recognition of their independence will satisfy the southern confederacy. It must therefore be destroyed. I cast my vote against the cornerstone of the southern confederacy [Alec Stephens's infelicitous phrase], and declare eternal war against the enemies of my country.”