Our One Common Country (26 page)

Intrigued as he was by the Mexican idea, Stephens would bring it to Lincoln reluctantly, with only a “slight hope of doing some good.” He was sure that Davis was merely using it to derail the peace resolutions in Congress. Like Hunter and Campbell, he hoped for no more than a truce, a “cooling of hot blood,” a stepping stone at best to a conference of all the states, where peace could be made “upon some satisfactory basis.” Once Americans stopped killing one another they would never start again. As for slavery, its profits were “but the dust in the balance” when weighed against its social and moral consequences. He would give it up for a better alternative with no regrets. So long as state sovereignty was respected, the issue was whether slavery or some other system better served both races—the “inferior” as well as the “superior.”

Before the
Mary Martin
paddled off to Hampton Roads, Campbell left a letter with Colonel Hatch to take to Davis, informing him that the commissioners would meet Lincoln and Seward at Fort Monroe, enclosing their correspondence with Eckert and Grant. The judge gave their maneuverings a dubious, self-congratulatory spin: “We suppose that thus far we are entirely free from any compromise and that we have sufficiently defined our expectations and purposes, to those who may be apprehended to meet us, so that there will be no mistake.”

Davis had no hope that anything good would come from Hampton Roads after Campbell let him know that Seward would be there. He told Stephens's nemesis Benjamin Hill that “Mr. Lincoln is an honest, well-meaning man,” despite his misguided views, “but Seward is wily and treacherous.” Unlike Jefferson Davis.

On Thursday morning, February 2, at about nine-thirty, Lincoln left the White House in the company of Charles Forbes, his twenty-eight-year-old valet, born and raised in Ireland with all of the charm of his tribe. The president called him Charlie. He was one of Tad's favorites. Lincoln's friend Noah Brooks was not especially fond of the “corps of attachés of Hibernian descent” whom the president had gathered around him, with the specific exception of Charlie, an “intelligent servant” according to Edward Neill, the 1st Minnesota Infantry's chaplain, assigned temporarily as one of Lincoln's live-in secretaries.

Neill had befriended Charlie too. He was going upstairs to his room that morning while Charlie was coming down with a carpetbag in his hand. Neill asked him where he was going. Looking back up to be sure they were alone, Charlie whispered, “Fortress Monroe,” and hurried on. When Neill reached the upper hall, “I met the President with his overcoat, and going to my room, looked out of the window, and saw him quietly walking around the curved pavement which leads to Pennsylvania Avenue, while Forbes was following, at a distance of two or three hundred feet.” Neill crossed the hall to John Nicolay's room. Nicolay knew nothing about it.

Montgomery Blair had left Lincoln a note asking to see him. Lincoln left a note of his own: “Mr. Blair will hereafter know that I ought not to stop now.”

Charlie, the president, and his carpetbag, making up his entourage, were driven to the Washington City depot and left for Annapolis in a one-car train that the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad supplied at a moment's notice. A B&O agent escorted them. Apart from Seward, no Cabinet member knew that Lincoln had gone until he was on his way. Only Seward was pleased. Gideon Welles had grave misgivings when he heard about it. “The President and Mr. Seward have gone to Hampton Roads to have an interview with the Rebel commissioners, Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell. None of the [rest of the] Cabinet were advised of this move, and without exception, I think, it struck them unfavorably that the Chief Magistrate should have gone on such a mission.”

Davis's friends at the
Richmond Sentinel
made little of it. “The less we say or think about the probable success of the deputation to Washington the better. Let us go on with our work as though no such mission was on foot, lest we make of it a snare and a peril.”

A more festive mission was under way that day as General John Pegram marched his division ceremoniously past Robert E. Lee. Just turned thirty-three, Pegram was a Petersburg native and a product of West Point. His charisma moved men and his looks melted women. He had married Hetty Cary two weeks before, with the loan of a horse and carriage from two of their wedding guests, President and Mrs. Davis. No one enjoyed a Virginia lineage more luminous than Hetty Cary's. Descended from Jeffersons, Randolphs, and Pocahontas, she had famously waved a Rebel battle flag at scowling blue regiments as they marched through her native Baltimore. Now the newlyweds had been loaned a honeymoon cottage near Petersburg.

Pegram's young friend Colonel Henry Kyd Douglas had never seen so beautiful a woman as the general's auburn-haired bride. The review of the division was dedicated to her. With Lee at her side, Hetty sat her horse “like the Maid of France.” As she rode off the field past a group of
common soldiers, she brushed a gawking North Carolinian and nearly knocked him down. When she pulled up immediately and turned to the man to apologize, he snatched his hat from his head. “Never mind, Miss,” he said. “You might have rid all over me. Indeed you might!”

It occurred to Seward belatedly to verify Grant's report that the commissioners had accepted Lincoln's terms. Eckert may have prompted him. He wired the general that afternoon from Fort Monroe: “You state ‘The Gentlemen here have accepted the proposed terms and will start for Fort Monroe at 9:30 A.M.' Please telegraph me the form & words of their acceptance as soon as possible.” With the gentlemen irretrievably on their way to Hampton Roads, Grant replied immediately: He had given their acceptance to “a Staff Officer to be delivered to you. I retained no copy of it.”

A mutton-chopped army captain met Lincoln's private train at Annapolis. Then the captain, Charlie Forbes, and the B&O Railway man walked the president half a mile to the Naval Academy pier, where the USS
Thomas Collyer,
the fastest ship on Chesapeake Bay, was steamed up and ready. As Lincoln and Charlie went aboard, the Academy hospital band played patriotic airs. The
Collyer
pushed off immediately, nudged past the ice in the harbor, and broke into open water for the fastest run to Hampton Roads on record, just under eight hours.

In the shadow of Fort Monroe, the enormous stone-built edifice that had guarded Hampton Roads since 1834, the
River Queen
was waiting, resplendent with flags and pennants. When the
Mary Martin
approached the scene before five o'clock, hours ahead of Lincoln and the
Collyer,
the
New York Herald
'
s man was watching: “General Grant's flagboat,
M. Martin,
has just arrived, bringing the rebel peace commissioners. The
River Queen,
with Secretary Seward on board, is anchored a short distance from the wharf, and as I write the
M. Martin
is just coming alongside of her.” As the
Mary Martin
's captain eased her up to the
River Queen,
sailors stepping lively threw lines from one to the other and drew the two steamboats together. The tugboats
Silas O. Pierce
and
George J. Loane
shuttled
smartly between the
River
Queen
and the shore, bearing messengers, fuel, and supplies.

Denied the freedom of movement they had enjoyed at City Point, the Rebel dignitaries were not invited to disembark. Their escort Colonel Babcock crossed over to the
River Queen
and handed Major Eckert the letter Alec Stephens had written to him the night before, in which, according to Grant, they had “accepted the proposed terms.” The look on Eckert's face when he read its closing line can be imagined: “We think it better to add, that in accepting your passport we are not to be understood as committing ourselves to anything . . .”

Resisting the temptation to go over to the
Martin
and take his old friends by the hand, Seward stayed put on the
River Queen
and sent a wire to Stanton: “Richmond party here. President Lincoln not arrived. I do not recognize them until he comes.” Recognition duly withheld, the Secretary of State sent over to the Southerners a welcoming gift—three bottles of good whiskey.

Lincoln arrived on the
Collyer
at about ten-thirty and transferred to the
River Queen,
where Seward and
Eckert handed him the commissioners' letters and told him they were on the
Mary Martin
and Seward had not yet seen them. The president would soon tell Congress, careful of every word, how he came to be in this place. “I ascertained that Major Eckert had literally complied with his instructions, and I saw, for the first time, the answer of the Richmond gentlemen to him, which, in his dispatch to me of the 1st, he characterizes as ‘not satisfactory.' ” Fresh from the
Mary
Martin,
Colonel Babcock showed the president the commissioners' midnight note to Eckert, another equivocation that Lincoln had not seen. With the gentlemen from Richmond literally tied to his ship of state, he could hardly cut them loose even if he had wanted to, which he surely did not. Grant had given him shelter.