Our One Common Country (22 page)

The commissioners passed through the Rebel earthworks where a low plateau fell away. Campbell's warnings had not prepared them for the paucity of Lee's defenses—how thinly his lines were manned, how thin were the boys who manned them. Stepping down from their carriage at the appointed hour of four, they proceeded on foot to no-man's-land, escorted by Colonel Hatch. Stephens got along on the arm of his slave, Ben Travis. A captain named O'Brien bore a white flag before them. A gaggle of federal officers met them halfway, Colonel Harriman among them, keeping his thoughts to himself—that the only peace they wanted was a piece of ten-inch shell. To Harriman, Stephens and Campbell seemed “haggard and careworn,” Hunter “rosy and fat.” Colonel Babcock
represented Grant. “The bearing of these officers was extremely courteous,” said the
Petersburg Express,
their reception “graceful and becoming. They were in excellent good humor and seemed alive to the importance of the occasion.”

Colonel Hatch was given leave to accompany the commissioners to Grant. A request that Mr. Stephens's “servant” be allowed to assist him was granted too. Bellmen in blue took the gentlemen's trunks, leaving Ben Travis free to keep his master ambulatory. The
Express
said they approached the Yankee lines by the Baxter Road. More colorfully, the
Times
said they crossed at Fort Hell. The cheers on both sides raised their chins. As far as one could see, “the breastworks were dark with men,” some surveying the scene with spyglasses. Ladies down from Petersburg, escorted by Southern officers, were in front of the Rebel earthworks, watching from the parapets, riding horseback in the fields. A City Point telegrapher sent Stanton the
Sentinel'
s report of “prolonged and enthusiastic shouting,” which the
Times
denied indignantly, saying “no such thing was heard, or even dreamt of.” The
Times
was doing the dreaming.

A respectful pause interrupted the cheers as the commissioners and their escorts walked slowly across no-man's-land, Alec Stephens setting an invalid's pace. Hunter noticed how they trod on spent ammunition. The Yankees resumed their cheering when the commissioners came back into the Union.

Despite all the brotherly love, Sarah Pryor expected the war to resume once the peacemakers had crossed the lines. “In an instant we were enemies again, and I was hastening out of the range of shot and shell.” Sarah was wise to hasten. The Southern general in local command put an emphasis on his point that peace would be won by “manly exertions.” As soon as the commissioners were out of harm's way, the Rebels opened up with muskets and artillery. The killing continued all day and through the night.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I Was Never So Much Disappointed in My Life

On the military railroad behind the Union lines, an idle locomotive with an empty car had been standing at Meade's Station for hours, giving rumormongers notice that the peacemakers were coming. By the time they arrived at dusk, a crowd of men in blue had gathered there to gawk. They cheered as the train pulled away. On the eight-mile trip to City Point, the commissioners and their escorts mixed small talk with lurching. The tracks were only temporary, and laid with little grading. From a distance, a general said, the trains looked like flies crawling over a washboard. Riders had been known to be seasick.

When the train reached City Point at about seven o'clock, another crowd was waiting, but a certain decorum prevailed at headquarters. There was no report of cheering. Having gotten to know the Southerners, the bitter Colonel Harriman entrusted them to Grant's aide Colonel Babcock and returned to the front. Stephens grasped Harriman's hand and hoped that they would meet again soon “under happier auspices.” Harriman's time with the little Georgian may have softened him.

It was dark when they detrained, as it was a few weeks later when Lincoln arrived by steamer. For a presidential bodyguard, the approach to City Point was enchanting, “with the many-colored lights of the boats in the harbor and the lights of the town straggling up the bluffs of the shore, crowned by the lights from Grant's headquarters at the top. It was a busy camp, and everything was in motion.” More city than camp, it bustled through the night with the comings and goings of troops, politicians,
prisoners of war, and walking wounded. A horse-drawn coffee maker with a steam-powered heating plant helped keep them all awake.

Colonel Babcock brought the Southerners directly to General Grant, accompanied by other officers, including Lieutenant E. W. Clarke. Clarke had encountered the guests of honor in Washington City before the war and was not among their admirers. He wrote that night to Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a Radical Republican. “Poor Stevens [
sic
] looked weaker and sicker than ever,” Clarke said, the morose Senator Hunter “much the same, only browner and not so fat and oily looking.” Judge Campbell was “stiff, starchy, and pokerish as usual.” Hunter smiled just once, acerbically at that, when a colonel making small talk said he would “find the country much changed hereabouts.” “Not I,” the Virginian told its conqueror. “I was never here before.” It occurred to Lieutenant Clarke that “the bone of contention” came along with Alec Stephens “in the shape of a black man carrying a valise.” If the South dropped the bone, well and good, but another four years of war would be better than “a pasteboard peace. And this I believe to be the voice of the Army.”

About to come face-to-face with Grant, the scourge of the Southern nation, the commissioners' pulses must have quickened as they passed the rough-hewn cabins that served as his officers' quarters and approached a fine white house. A self-respecting scourge would have taken it for himself. Grant had assigned it to his chief quartermaster, from which to supply his men. The general's own residence was a cabin like the others, a bit larger than the ones laid out in rows on either side of his, but every bit as plain. Colonel Babcock knocked at its door, which could have been salvaged from a shed. As Stephens heard it, a “very distinct” voice called out to come in. Colonel Hatch and Ben Travis stayed outside.

The door opened directly into Grant's humble office, redolent of cigars, with a bare wood floor, a plain brick hearth, a well-fed fire, a couple of pine tables, some common wooden chairs, and two tiny bedrooms in the back. Grant was the small man in blue, seated at a table, writing by a kerosene lamp. When the general rose to greet them, Stephens “was never so much disappointed in my life,” the impression being instantly favorable. “I was immediately struck with the great simplicity and perfect
naturalness of his manners and the entire absence of everything like affectation, show, or even the usual military air” of a man in his position. There were no flags or aides about him. He wore no polished boots, no gold-braided uniform. He stood in low-cut shoes and a common soldier's jacket with no trappings or insignia but the three gold stars on his shoulder straps, the only man in the army who wore them.

He spoke with a natural fluency, according to Stephens, and “more of brains than tongue, as ready as that was at his command.” The conversation flowed easily, and “I understood now that the report about his being on a big drunk was a canard of the Munchhausen sort,” a fiction of mythic proportions. The general told his guests how sorry he was for the delay in passing his lines. He had been away, he said, and had just gotten back that morning. He had wired their note to Washington. Instructions had been received. He was sorry to have to say they must stay at City Point until a messenger arrived, which could take some time. The river might be icebound for days, and he had no quarters available to make them as comfortable as he wished. He would house them in the staterooms of his steamboat, the best accommodation he had.

He had never met his guests, but “found them all very agreeable gentlemen.” He knew them by reputation, he would later recall, “and through their public services,” a generous note, considering where their services had lately gone. Before the war, he had particularly admired Stephens, a fellow Stephen Douglas Democrat.

A few minutes into their chat, an orderly arrived with a dispatch. The general wrote a quick reply and asked the orderly if he knew how to get it to its destination. When the poor man confessed that he did not, Grant enlightened him patiently and confirmed that he understood. Several other dispatches came and went. The General in Chief of the Army was running the war against the Rebels in their presence. Did anyone think it bizarre?

Not long into their visit, a high-ranking officer knocked and entered, handed the general a document, saluted, and withdrew. Grant begged the enemy's pardon, took a moment to read what had been given him, and scribbled a half-page reply, “very hastily,” Stephens thought. Then he folded it, wrote something on the back, took it to the door, and called for
an orderly to deliver it. Quickly. It was probably the wire that Grant sent to Stanton at 7:30 p.m.:

 

On my arrival here this morning, I received a letter from Messrs. Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell, which I immediately telegraphed the contents to the President and sent at the same time a staff officer to receive the gentlemen and conduct them to my quarters to await the action of the President. The gentlemen have arrived, and since their arrival I have been put in possession of the telegraphic correspondence which had been going on for two days previous [Stanton's order to keep the gentlemen behind their lines and General Ord's obedient reply]. Had I known of this correspondence in time, these gentlemen would not have been received within our lines.

 

Grant's story comes to this: His staff had let him know that morning that three of the highest-ranking men in the Confederacy had appeared at his lines two days ago, seeking leave to proceed to the White House for the purpose of ending the war. Without consulting Washington, or inquiring whether orders had been sought or received, he had waved them through immediately, telling Lincoln after the fact. No one had let him know that the Secretary of War had stopped them in their tracks and ordered them held at the lines until the president decided otherwise. According to an aide, even routine dispatches were brought to Grant instantly, but Stanton's order to keep the Rebel peace ambassadors away—received, understood, and acknowledged on Sunday night—was put in his hands on Tuesday evening, twelve hours after his return, as the objects of the attention of every man in the army sat chatting with him in his cabin.

No one ever asked him to explain himself.

The Southerners had been visiting with him for half an hour or so when Stephens thought it polite to say that if an escort could be provided, they would trespass no more on his time—a sporting gesture indeed, considering how he spent it. Grant denied any trespass but deferred to his guests. “Well, gentlemen, if you wish to go, I will escort you myself.” As Stephens lets us know, Grant rose from his simple chair, “fixed his papers quickly, turned down his kerosene lamp, as I had seen many a village
lawyer do, opened the door,” and followed them outside. Then he turned his key in the lock, put it in his pocket like a shopkeeper closing for the night, “and led the way to the wharf.” The Confederate vice president's slave Ben Travis took Stephens's feeble arm. Though Grant's rustic office had been warm, Stephens had never shed his coat.

On the rugged path to the pier, “General Grant and Judge Campbell went side by side in the lead. The night was dark, Campbell was tall,” and Grant had to struggle to keep pace. Stephens found it poignant. He thought of the scene in
The Aeneid
where Aeneas flees burning Troy with his aged father on his back and his little boy in hand, working hard to keep up. When a sentry demanded, “Who goes there?” the general told him quietly.

Steep wooden stairs ran down the side of the bluff to Grant's luxurious paddle wheeler,
Mary
Martin.
Stephens needed help from his slave. The word had gone forth that the peacemakers were coming, and a craning knot of spectators had gathered in a spot where a lamp lit the way. Stephens would never forget how “someone in the crowd said, quite loud enough for me to hear, ‘Which is Stephens? Which is the Vice President?' ”

“That one, leaning on the arm of the black man.”

“My God! He's dead now, but he don't know it.”

“With this ringing in my ears,” Little Alec says, “I got on the boat as quickly as I could, with the assistance of my faithful servant, Ben Travis.”

Grant had understood that Stephens was “a very small man, but when I saw him in the dusk of the evening I was very much surprised to find so large a man as he seemed to be.” The cloth of his course gray coat “was thicker than anything of the kind I had ever seen, even in Canada. The overcoat extended nearly to his feet, and was so large that it gave him the appearance of being an average-sized man.” When Stephens removed his wrappings, as Grant would later say, “I was struck with the apparent change in size, in the coat and out of it.”

Mary Martin
had been a Hudson River excursion boat, a beauty of her kind, elegant in white, with tasteful gold trim and a rakish cast to her bow. Julia Grant hosted Cabinet members and their wives in her well-appointed dining room and accommodated them in her staterooms. Julia was fond of berthing there herself, a welcome change from the shed.

If the commissioners had not expected the Northern cheers that had swept them across the siege line, or the gracious Northern officers who had taken them to City Point, or the deference that Grant had shown them there, their day was not yet done. They were greeted on the
Mary Martin
with something in the nature of a surprise party. Some fifty Union generals and a smattering of lucky colonels had assembled for a feast in their honor, a liberal interpretation of Lincoln's instructions to Grant to keep them safe and comfortable. History holds no record that the festivities were mentioned to the president, let alone to the Secretary of War.

After a get-acquainted reception in
Mary Martin
's saloon, a well-appointed compartment for entertaining guests, the party moved on to the dining room for what Stephens describes as “a most sumptuous meal of the daintiest viands, consisting of fish, meat, and vegetables of many varieties with an abundance of champagne, hock, sherry, Madeira, as well as other varieties of wine and the best of French brandy, all ending in coffee and cigars.” The guests enjoyed their beverages, but there was no big drunk for the host. Stephens took note that Grant presided at the head of the table, and “I was placed at his left, and I noticed particularly that while others indulged very freely in the good liquors on the board, he took no drop of anything of the sort.”

By the time the board was cleared and the brandy had been poured, the smoke-filled room was a free and easy place, complete with “racy anecdotes” as Stephens would later confess, “many of them bearing upon the mutual acquaintances of the Commissioners and several of the officers at the table.” It is safe to assume that the anecdotes did not grow tamer when the party moved back to the saloon and Grant withdrew for the evening. He took the commissioners aside, promised to return in the morning, and instructed the steward to give them the best staterooms. Stephens had done enough for one day, and retired to his berth with the help of Ben Travis, but sleep would not come for the tired little Georgian. The rosy-cheeked Hunter and even the austere John Campbell, no longer as sober as a judge, kept drinking with their friends until nearly 1:00 a.m., as Stephens gruffly clocked them. “At least they kept up a noise of laughing and talking that prevented me from sleeping until about that hour.”

Like the Rebels on the
Mary Martin,
the Rebels on the siege line were unusually active that night, causing wary federal officers to prepare to repel an attack. While the commissioners and their friends nibbled fish and sipped Madeira, the most vulnerable Northern boys, the sick and walking wounded, were shipped to City Point, temporarily out of harm's way.