Our One Common Country (23 page)

The Tuesday-night revelers awoke on Wednesday morning to an elegant breakfast and a lovely day. Content with lesser pleasures, the combatants on the front were grateful for the break in the cold. It was warm and pleasant even at Fort Hell. Walking down to the
Mary Martin,
the
New York Times
City Point correspondent got a look at Grant's guests, their dignity intact on the morning after. “I caught a glimpse of the lions this morning, on board the
Martin,
” he told his readers. “One was a very thin, spare man, who was pointed out as Alexander H. Stephens, pacing the after-deck, thoughtfully, in company with a stout, burley figure, said to be Hunter of Virginia.”

The newspaperman was not the only curious Yankee to stroll past
Mary Martin.
In any ordinary week, so many famous men came to visit Grant that his camp had grown used to them, but the eagerness to see the “new-comers from rebellion was quite remarkable,” and the objects of all this interest had been left to roam free. No guard was put on them, no limits imposed on their movements, no pledge extracted that they would not abuse their privileges. “They were permitted to leave the boat when they felt like it,” as Grant would later recall. The general had a reason to let the lions off the leash. The embarrassment of riches that the North had laid at his feet was good for them to see, their welcoming feast included. Captured at Spotsylvania in May, Private Louis Leon of the Charlotte Grays, a sharpshooter by trade, had absorbed what the commissioners were absorbing. “Look at our army,” he had written, “and you will see them in rags and barefooted. But among the Yankees I see nothing but an abundance of everything.” The gap had widened since then.

Hunter had a way with understatement. “It was interesting to us to know whether the other party was aware of our real situation.” Spies and deserters and the broad notoriety of the South's destitution made
it “impossible to suppose that the enemy were not sufficiently aware of our condition to make their knowledge in that particular an important element in the negotiation,” but no one at City Point said so. When the commissioners passed through their own thin lines and emerged in a cornucopia, Hunter thought he knew why they had been left so long to wait. The Lincoln administration had little interest in a Rebel peace commission, and wanted them to know it. The North could take whatever peace it chose.

Grant called on the commissioners late that morning, giving them time, perhaps, to sleep off their consultations with his generals. He took them back to his cabin and introduced them to his wife and children, the youngsters no doubt thrilled to meet Rebels in the flesh. Julia Grant had been raised by slaves on a Missouri plantation and professed to believe they were as pleased about the arrangement as she was. When her family spoke of Yankees it was not a term of endearment. Now she gushed Southern charm, blessed the commissioners' mission, and asked to be remembered by name to several Rebel officers.

Grant took his guests to his stables and showed off his favorite mounts. To Stephens, an animal named Lexington appeared to be his favorite; Cincinnati may have been introduced; Jeff Davis probably not. The general had arranged to take the commissioners on a carriage ride, but Stephens begged off for the cold. Though the day was clear and pleasant, his colleagues demurred in deference to the vice president.

Not all of their talk with Grant was of horses and friends. According to Stephens, they spoke freely on several subjects, though “not much” on the peace mission, but Grant made it clear he was anxious for its success. Stephens inferred that the general was fully apprised of Blair's invasion of Mexico. One of Grant's subordinates watched the commissioners try to draw him out on peace, on two occasions, but Grant would not be drawn. The Southerners spoke of negotiations between
“the two governments,” while the general would acknowledge only one. Hunter later said the commissioners suggested what amounted to a coup—that Grant and Lee could settle things more easily than Lincoln and themselves.
“The attempt was in vain,” to Hunter's regret. “Lee had too much principle probably to have yielded to such a suggestion” (it seems not to have occurred to Hunter that he was unprincipled enough to suggest it) “and if Grant would have suffered no principle to restrain him . . . he had not the ability to weigh truly his responsibility or to understand his opportunities.” Regrettably, Hunter thought, Grant was no Julius Caesar.

More than twenty years later, Grant claimed no recollection of any conversation with the commissioners on the subject of their mission. “It was something I had nothing to do with. . . . As long as they remained there, however, our relations were pleasant and I found them all very agreeable gentlemen.” Discretion surely tempered what he told them, but Grant found their mission as agreeable as their company. He would have a great deal to do with it.

The slender, balding, trim-bearded General Meade made a courtesy call on the peace commissioners. A contemporary described Meade, who had beaten Lee at Gettysburg and saved the war for the North, as “the tall figure, with the nervous, emphatic articulation and action, and face as of antique parchment.” Some thought highly of him, but Stanton's Assistant Secretary of War Charles Dana was no friend. “I think he had not a friend in the whole army. No man, no matter what his business or his service, approached him without being insulted in one way or another, and his own staff officers did not dare to speak to him unless first spoken to, for fear of either sneers or curses.”

When he called on the Southerners, there were no sneers or cursing. They talked very freely, Meade told his wife, Margaretta. “Judge Campbell asked after your family, and Mr. Hunter spoke of Mr. Wise, and said he had brought two letters with him, one of which I herewith enclose.” As governor of Virginia, Henry A. Wise had hanged John Brown. Now he commanded the brigade that the commissioners had just passed through, followed by shot and shell, sent aloft pursuant to his orders. Margaretta knew him well. He was married to her sister.

Meade told the Southerners he had nearly been arrested in Chicago when the war began, for predicting it would end like the Kilkenny
catfight, an old Irish yarn involving cats who bit and chewed each other until only their tails remained. “And who now will say that such an opinion was absurd?” They spoke about slavery and Richmond's desire for a truce, which Meade said would never happen. After they had chatted a while, the Southerners sidled up to the same proposition they had tried on Grant. They thought it was a pity that the matter of war and peace could not be taken from the politicians and given to the generals. Meade refused the bait as Grant had done, but not without a hint of reluctance. Things would be settled more quickly that way, he said, but “I fear there is no chance for this.”

Meade told his wife that the whole thing boded “not much chance of peace. I fear we will split on the questions of an armistice and State rights. Still, I hope Mr. Lincoln will receive them and listen to all they have to say, for if it can be shown that their terms are impracticable, the country will be united for the further prosecution of the war. At the same time, the selection of three most conservative of Southern men indicates most clearly to my mind an anxiety on the part of Mr. Davis to settle matters if possible.” He cautioned Margaretta that “it would not do to let it be known I had been talking with them, or what I said.”

Other Northern officers came calling. Hunter found them “courteous in their comments on their enemies,” complimentary toward Southern military prowess, “mindful of old acquaintanceship and old ties.” Many were eager for peace, and Stephens impressed them in particular. His “complexion was sallow,” a general said, “and his skin seemed shriveled upon his bones. He possessed intellect enough, however, for the whole Commission.” Another Yankee officer shared his impressions of Little Alec with a friend: “The Lord seems to have robbed that man's body of nearly all its flesh and blood to make brains of them.”

One federal officer let the Southerners know that Mrs. Grant thought the general should send them on to Washington—that something good would come of a meeting with Mr. Lincoln—but if Mr. Seward intervened, he would break it all up with “his wily tactics.” Like her husband, Mrs. Grant was fond of peace talks and Blairs—plain-speaking Southerners with strong Missouri ties and deep Southern roots, much like herself, decidedly unlike Seward.

Candidly enough, Stephens told an officer that after bringing disaster upon them, the men who had started the rebellion could not tell their people, “We have drawn you into this war, and now that you have poured out your blood and treasure until want and woe sit by every fireside of the South, you must abandon it.” Hundreds of thousands of graves would be dishonored if the South won nothing “but desolation and distress. You should not ask, you cannot think, we must abandon all and turn back to our old allegiance” with nothing but sorrow to show for it. If the North would only treat the South as a nation, a deal could be struck that would unite them in practice if not in form. Stephens made it clear that another campaign would inflict “fearful losses” on both sides. Though the North would win in the end, it would be far better for both to make an agreeable peace. “We are but one people,” Stephens said, “and should have but one common interest.”

Like the troops at City Point, the citizens of Washington City were not overawed by celebrities, but the
Times
called them “much excited” by word that Rebel peacemakers were coming. Rumors were rife that they had already arrived. “One of them originated with a porter of a hotel, who said he was perfectly familiar with their faces.” The visitors he had spotted were tourists returning from Baltimore. The Washington correspondent for a Cincinnati paper said “the impression is hourly growing stronger here” that the peace talks would succeed. Horace Greeley's
Tribune
was not so optimistic. Powerful men in Congress and the administration were “impatient of the whole olive branch business.”

Having placed a bet on olive branches, sending Seward to Fort Monroe, Lincoln hedged it with arrows. He sent a wire to Grant that morning: “Let nothing which is transpiring change, hinder, or delay your military movements or plans.” Grant replied forthwith: “Your dispatch received. There will be no armistice in consequence of the presence of Mr. Stephens and others within our lines. The troops are kept in readiness to move at the shortest notice, if occasion should justify it.”

The president's messenger, Major Eckert, was on his way to City Point, and Lincoln had put him in Seward's charge: “Call at Fortress Monroe,
and put yourself under direction of Mr. S, whom you will find there.” Mr. S had left that morning in his traveling coat and muffler from his office at the State Department on the eastern edge of the White House lawn, accompanied by R. S. Chew, his elegant clerk. They took a train to Annapolis to steam down Chesapeake Bay to Hampton Roads. Governor Augustus Bradford welcomed them at Maryland's statehouse. Seward urged him to assemble the legislature to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Bradford was ahead of him. The State Senate would vote that very day, the General Assembly on Friday. The result was not in doubt. One of four loyal slave states, Maryland had just adopted its own ban on slavery.