Our One Common Country (21 page)

The roll was called at four, the very hour at which the commissioners had been asked to appear at Grant's lines. No one could be sure that a sufficient lot of Democrats had been pressured, cajoled, or bought. “The most intense anxiety was felt,” said an Illinois Republican, and “so perfect was the silence” that the scratching of a hundred pencils could be heard as the names were called. According to Noah Brooks, “knots of members” huddled around the tally keepers, the Copperheads looking sour. The wavering James English, a Democrat from New Haven, voted aye to a burst of applause, which the Speaker gaveled down. The process was repeated when Democrats from New York cast their votes as Seward and Thurlow Weed had hoped. A Brooklyn Democrat named Moses Odell had lost his seat in November. His aye vote on the amendment and his appointment to head the Manhattan naval office may not have been coincidental.

When the names had all been called, Speaker Colfax declared in a trembling voice that the measure had been approved. The House of Representatives had agreed to banish slavery by a margin of two votes. There was “a pause of utter silence,” then hundreds of congressmen, guests, and spectators leapt to their feet and cheered.

The chamber rocked for minutes. Men applauded and hurrahed, waved their hats and tossed them, threw their arms around each other's necks and wept. To an Indiana Republican, it seemed “I had been born into a new life, and that the world was overflowing with beauty and joy.” When Speaker Colfax could be heard, he asked that his name be called, a pointed break with tradition. He belted out his aye and the chamber rocked again. He gaveled it to order and said he had hoped for more decorum, or so claimed the
Boston Transcript.
If he said it, the record does not reflect it, and he surely did not mean it. The House adjourned at 4:20 as artillery shook Capitol Hill. A hundred thirty miles away, Jefferson Davis's peace commissioners had just passed through the lines.

Two weeks later, Lincoln welcomed Elizabeth Peabody, a sixty-year-old Massachusetts abolitionist, and sat her by the fire in his office. She had been in the gallery when the roll was called. The late Nathaniel
Hawthorne had been her brother-in-law. So had Horace Mann, a pioneer in public education, also now deceased, who had served with the president in Congress. Lincoln's face grew “very sweet” when she spoke of him. “Mr. Mann was very kind to me,” he said, “and it was
something
to me at that time to have him so, for he was a distinguished man in his way and I was nobody.” He said it “with an unconscious dignity, and he looked down with a sweet-musing expression, as if he was remembering some interview that was pleasant.” Mrs. Peabody said she was sure that Mr. Mann was rejoicing with them over the amendment. “You ought to have been in the House that day, Sir!”

Lincoln looked up brightly. “What do you think I was doing that day? I was writing my instructions to Seward! There is a little secret piece of history connected with that.” When the amendment was introduced, Lincoln said, Ashley had the numbers but put off the vote to assemble a bigger majority. “And meantime that Peace Commissioner business came on.” Instead of speeding it through, “I
eased
it along, and concluded to send Seward down.” Ashley's converts would have recanted “had they smelt peace.” Lincoln told Mrs. Peabody he had “left off” writing Seward, “and elaborately wrote that
as far as I knew
there were no Commissioners of Peace in Washington, nor did I think they would come.” For his guest's entertainment, the president repeated himself—“
as far as I knew”
—much to his own amusement.

The Jacobins let the president know they were watching. A friend said Lincoln never met a man he didn't like, with the exception of Charles Sumner, an unsmiling abolitionist who had once been beaten senseless on the Senate floor by a South Carolinian with a cane. His assailant was proud to say he had given the Bostonian “about 30 first rate stripes” in reprisal for a lurid antislavery speech. In their own respective sections, the incident brought glory to the attacker and the attacked. Now Sumner offered a resolution to solicit from the president “any information in his power concerning any recent personal communications with the rebel Jefferson Davis, said to have been under executive sanction.” A colleague inquired delicately whether it might not be better to refer to the mission
of Mr. Blair; but Sumner wished to know who was talking to traitors and why—whether Blair was involved or not—and his cane-shaped scars lent weight to his wishes.

Maryland's Reverdy Johnson recommended gentler language. Sumner would have none of it. Johnson's version referred to “the ‘Confederate authorities,' ” Sumner said. “In my resolution I characterize the head of the rebellion as ‘the rebel Jefferson Davis.' ” Declining to be out-jingoed, Johnson had “not the slightest objection” to calling a Rebel a Rebel. Sumner bristled again when a Wisconsin senator suggested that both versions be printed, letting senators make a choice the next day. “I want the information at once,” Sumner said. “I should like to have the information tomorrow morning.”

A few minutes later, Senator Willard Saulsbury, an overstuffed Democrat from the slave state of Delaware, took the floor in Lincoln's defense. “It is seldom, sir, that I can approve of any act of the President of the United States,” but if harbingers of peace were on their way north and Lincoln was behind it, “I will take occasion here, while approving but little that he has done before, to approve his action in that respect.” Not a single senator seconded him, and if Lincoln had been able to choose a champion, it would not have been Willard Saulsbury. There was no more reptilian Copperhead in the city. His approval of the president was even rarer than he professed, and his Christian love of peace was situational. In 1863, fueled by rage and whiskey, he had spewed on the Senate floor an anti-Lincoln diatribe that reminded John Nicolay of the rant of “a drunken fishwife.” Vice President Hannibal Hamlin had tried to gavel him down. When the sergeant at arms approached him, the gentleman from Delaware pressed a pistol to the officer's head. “Damn you,” he said. “If you touch me I'll shoot you dead.”

On the floor of the US Senate, Willard Saulsbury was the president's only friend on the subject of peace talks with Rebels.

For once, the Richmond press
had something good to say about them
.
“We are not of those that believe that peace talk and peace missions tend to demoralize the army,” the
Enquirer
said that day. They would do the troops a service by defining “the exact degree of degradation to which the enemy would reduce us by reconstruction.” The Southern states were
not about to barter away their independence to the wiles of “Yankee cunning.” Peace at the price of reunion would be “a disgraceful and ruinous failure. . . . Let us have no unmanly shrinking anywhere.”

The commissioners had been waiting in Petersburg surrounded by scars of war. The local paper was called the
Petersburg Express,
and so was a gargantuan mortar brought down by train from Connecticut to batter Southern civilians as well as Southern walls. In 1894, having had thirty years to think about it, the official historian of the 108th New York entertained its paunchy veterans with a poetic bit of drollery about the terror bombing of American women and children. “This mortar threw a projectile of 300 pounds, and as it sailed majestically through the air, with its comet tail of fire, and descended into the city, its explosion produced earthquake tremors, and caused much destruction and alarming fear among the people. It is not surprising that they sought caves and cellars, and were ‘not at home' to these ‘Express' calls.”

Sarah Pryor recalled it well. Her husband was a former US congressman and a prisoner of war in Manhattan. The children were with Sarah when the shells started falling. “There was no place of safety accessible to us,” she said. “The terror and demoralization” were indescribable. Sarah's infant daughter was in her freed black nursemaid's arms in the Pryors' yard when a screaming shell dropped in and buried itself beside them. “The little creature was fascinated by the shells. The first word she ever uttered was an attempt to imitate them.” Being well along in childhood, her siblings understood “it would be cowardly to complain.”

Surrounded by Southern soldiers, Sarah and her children had grown fond of them, “and my boys had grown so rich in their companionship. . . . They were good, wholesome comrades, interested in our books, and in the boys' studies.” Now the Pryors' house was on the battlefield, and Sarah had moved her family to a tent behind the lines. With books evacuated from home, she endowed an officers' lending library. The subscribers brought scraps from their horses' meager fodder to sustain her underfed cow.

As her husband's former colleagues were preparing to vote on abolition, the word was passed through the Southern lines that the peace
commissioners were coming. A Rebel general rode over to Sarah's tent. “I thought you might come out and listen to the cheering. It is echoed by the enemy. There seems to be no doubt of the feeling on both sides.” Sarah was more than interested. Her imprisoned husband, Roger, was a friend of Senator Hunter's, who might help get him freed. She asked for the use of a horse-drawn ambulance and the general obliged. With the white flags flying, the demand for ambulances had abated.

Sarah was driven to the front near the place where the commissioners would cross over. As she and her driver approached, waves of joy broke over them. “The troops of Fort Gregg and Battery 45, just in the rear of my garden, had come out and were cheering vociferously.” They could hear the answering cheers from across the way.

The commissioners and the mayor had come down on the Jerusalem Plank Road, parting throngs of jubilant Rebels. When their carriage pulled up nearby, Sarah walked over to see them, aware of her beating heart. Hunter greeted her kindly and introduced her to Stephens and Campbell. “My errand is to you, dear Mr. Hunter,” she said. “I entreat you, I implore you, to remember your friend General Pryor. He is breaking his heart in prison. Beg his release from Mr. Lincoln.” Hunter promised to try, and so did his companions. As Sarah watched their carriage roll away toward the lines, “a mighty cheer went up from the hundreds of soldiers, Confederate and Union, who were standing on duty and looking on.”