Our One Common Country (27 page)

After wondering for years what the decision makers in Richmond were thinking, Lincoln and Seward were about to sit down with three of them. If Grant had it right, there might be a chance for peace. If not, what good might come of this thing? What could be learned from these men? Lincoln and Seward surely pondered it together before they went to sleep on the
River Queen.

Word was sent to the
Martin
that the president was fatigued from his journey and would see them in the morning on his steamboat, sealed off from the press and interlopers. An hour later, Eckert wired Stanton: “I have the honor to report the arrival of the President at 10:30 p.m., and is now with Mr. Seward on board the
River Queen.
The interview will take place in the morning. The vessels of both parties are anchored half a mile out from dock.”

As the Northern leaders took their rest on the
River Queen
and the Southerners on the
Mary Martin,
the
New York Herald
set the scene. “Peacefully and fraternally these little steamers lay side by side on the placid waters of the river.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There Has Been Nothing We Could Do for Our Country

On Friday, February 3, 1865, a warm sun was shining on a brilliant springlike day as the three distinguished Southerners were welcomed aboard the
River Queen
and shown to the floating drawing room on the vessel's upper deck. The president and Mr. Seward would be joining them soon.

Approached through a pair of French doors, the
River Queen
's saloon had the size, shape, and feel of an elegant bowfront parlor, touched with a nautical tinge. A multipaned skylight admitted the morning sun through the low, coffered ceiling, painted beige to match the woodwork, set off by Corinthian pilasters edged with gilded trim. The compartment was lined with rows of gleaming windows with rose-colored blinds and deep green curtains tied back with tasseled cords over tufted black-leather banquettes. Turned wooden armchairs were arranged with upholstered chairs in a conversational arc on a lush Persian rug that covered the deck completely in ivories, roses, and greens. In the gravity of the moment, the splendor of their surroundings may have been lost on the peace commissioners, who did not have long to admire them before Lincoln and Seward walked into the room and extended their hands to their enemies.

Nathaniel Hawthorne described a similar entrance on a visit to the White House in 1862. “By and by, there was a little stir on the staircase and in the passage-way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor,” dressed in an ancient black suit. Lincoln's hair was uncombed and there was “no describing his lengthy
awkwardness,” but his homeliness was lit by the “homely human sympathies that warmed it.”

Three years of civil war had passed since then, and the president was thirty pounds underweight. As Horace Greeley would soon observe, his sunken face was “seamed with thought and trouble” like a weather-beaten mariner's. All of that said, he was six feet, four inches tall, and the saloon's low ceiling exaggerated his height. Abraham Lincoln commanded the room.

If any introductions were required, Seward could have made them, having worked and socialized with all three Southerners for years, but no more than one was necessary. Lincoln and Stephens had enjoyed a special friendship. As a Supreme Court justice, Campbell had met Lincoln and attended his inauguration. Lincoln and Hunter had served as fellow Whigs in an intimately scaled Congress for two overlapping years, Lincoln in the House, Hunter in the Senate, and had probably met. After parting as friends, it was more than a little awkward to reunite as enemies, but the tension was broken when Stephens greeted Lincoln with the warmth of an old companion and the president responded in kind. Stephens found him talkative and relaxed, in “a splendid humor.” His aide John Hay said Lincoln's eye would brighten when he welcomed old friends to the White House. As he welcomed Alec Stephens to the
River Queen,
the little Georgian looked up at him warmly, grasped his hand with feeling, called him Mr. President in his childlike voice, and took it as a compliment when Lincoln called him Stephens, a familiar, manly form of address that neither recognized his title nor snubbed it, and flattered him with a presidential intimacy in the presence of his peers. It was just the right note. Stephens took the bait and relished it.

Seward brought his charm, remembered Southern friends, and inquired particularly of the health of Mr. Davis. The Southerners were gracious too. If Hunter was true to form, he presented what Mary Chesnut encountered when they met before the war at a state dinner, “a rather tumbled up appearance. His waistcoat wanted pulling down and his hair wanted brushing.” But when seated between Hunter and Alabama's Senator Clement Clay, Mrs. Chesnut found Hunter the better companion. “Mr. Clay had taken me in to dinner, but he seemed quite satisfied that
my other side should take me off his hands,” which Hunter smoothly did “from soup to dessert,” with a publishable critique of English literature. Since then, Mrs. Chesnut said, “I have always looked forward to a talk with the Senator from Virginia with undisguised pleasure.”

Even the stiff Judge Campbell struck a sociable pose when the Northerners took his hand. Campbell was still convinced that Seward had used him in the Sumter crisis, but Seward was still a charmer, and no one was more engaging than Lincoln. Campbell had respected him from afar. Close up, he found himself liking him. “The naturalness was like that of a child,” as the abolitionist Elizabeth Peabody would soon observe, “and had a touch of pathos in it.” He seemed to be “full of feeling,” with “kind, shining eyes.” Campbell saw it too.

Back in Richmond, General Gorgas was thinking that the commissioners “probably reached Washington yesterday and are now pow-wowing. No one expects any results.” Expectations ran stronger up North, where rumors of peace talks had matured into news. According to Noah Brooks, “the perturbation in Washington was something which cannot be readily described.” In House and Senate cloakrooms the Jacobins outbid each other in their prophesies of doom. Lincoln would surrender what the war had been fought to win. The Thirteenth Amendment would be abandoned. The Emancipation Proclamation would be revoked. Freed slaves would be returned. Jeff Davis would be back in the Senate before the month was out. No one would be hanged. The president had followed Seward to Hampton Roads for fear that he would not be sufficiently craven. Moderates urged their colleagues to wait and see. Jacobins shouted them down. There was talk of impeachment. Thaddeus Stevens was bright with rage.

The president, to be sure, was not without his friends. On the floor of the House, Fernando Wood, the despised former mayor of New York, lavished blessings on his head, a fork-tongued kiss of death from the Copperhead king. Some thought it quite deliberate. In the pages of the
Washington Chronicle,
Lincoln's friend John Fourney explained the president's negotiating plans and defended their wisdom, unimpaired by the
slightest knowledge of them. Concessions would be made, the
Chronicle
said, but peace was worth the price. Noah Brooks thought Fourney had taken it on himself “to prepare the public mind for the sacrifice of something vaguely dreadful, and dreadfully vague.” Dread was the result among the Radicals, who knew that Fourney often spoke for Lincoln.

With the president at the peace table, the loyal
New York Times
came abruptly around. “We again advise our readers not to be sanguine in anticipating that peace will be hastened by this conference”—the
Times
had been far from sanguine—but the president should be praised “for making the most of that chance,” an editorial flip-flop of Olympian proportions. Sworn to secrecy by Preston Blair, Horace Greeley could not contain himself. The
Tribune
had “received some inklings” of the conference's agenda, including “the reunion of North and South upon the grand idea of the Monroe Doctrine.” The
New York Herald
praised the president for hosting the event at Hampton Roads, sheltered from the “rising storm of indignation” on Capitol Hill, and denying the rebel envoys “the freedom of Washington,” full of Copperheads and leaks as it was.

In the
River Queen
's
saloon, a free black steward brought in water and cigars as the gentlemen took their seats and began to reminisce. Fragrant smoke filled the air, tinged with the scent of nostalgia. Better times were recalled. Dead characters were exhumed. Amusing anecdotes were told, improving, no doubt, with the telling. There were rumbles of masculine laughter. No one seemed eager to spoil it. The business at hand could wait.

Though the day was warm and the
River Queen
well heated, Stephens stayed bundled in his wrappings well into the conversation. Recalling how small the little Georgian had been as a fellow Young Indian in the club they had formed in the House, Lincoln was amused as Stephens struggled out of his overcoat and revealed his waiflike frame, just as he had to Grant. An agricultural metaphor occurred to the president, which he took the risk of sharing. He had never seen so small an ear emerge from so much husk. Happily for diplomacy, Stephens led the laughter.

To their mutual pleasure, the Confederate vice president and the President of the United States remembered old friends. Lincoln was fond
of stories, and a Georgian lets us know that when Stephens relived old times, his companions would find themselves bantering with “a happy looking schoolboy” with “a wrinkled face and wonderful eyes.” Stephens spoke fondly of Truman Smith, a Young Indian from Connecticut, now older. Lincoln returned the favor with affectionate inquiries about the Georgian Robert Toombs, an outrageously entertaining Indian in 1848, a wounded Rebel general now. Stephens took credit for the making of Zachery Taylor and shared it generously with Lincoln, who recalled the connection vaguely. It began to occur to Judge Campbell that Stephens was gilding their friendship more brightly than Lincoln was, but when the president remembered Tom Flournoy, the Virginian whom Stephens had urged Davis to send in his stead, Little Alec had his moment of unspoken vindication. Adept raconteurs in their own patrician ways, Seward and Hunter shared memories of the old Senate. Campbell no doubt spoke pleasantly when spoken to.

It was Stephens who called the meeting to order. “Well, Mr. President,” he said, “is there no way to put an end to the present troubles and restore the good feelings that existed in those days between the different States and sections of the country?” His words were chosen well. They had a nostalgic air, more than halfway home to our one common country.

Before Lincoln answered, Seward stepped in. It was understood, he said, that the conference would be informal. Implying but not quite saying that it would also be confidential, he observed that no stenographer had been summoned, so that everyone could speak freely. The Southerners concurred. The steward returned from time to time to replenish cigars, bring in refreshments, and straighten up the room, but no aides were present. The conferees were on their own.

Stephens repeated his question: How to end the trouble that plagued “the country” and restore the old feelings?

“There is only one way I know of,” Lincoln said, “and that is for those who are resisting the National Authority and the laws of the United States to stop.”

The laughter had come to an end. Judge Campbell had heard what he had expected. “Any other response would have filled me with amazement,” he would later say. Instead he was filled with resignation.

Stephens was undeterred. Taken as he was with the Mexican scheme, he was confident that Lincoln and Seward had floated it south through Blair and were here to talk it through. In his Lilliputian voice and his windy Victorian style, rarely using a simple word where a convolution would do, Stephens began with some prompting. “Is there no other question,” he asked, “that might divert the attention of both parties, for a time, from the questions involved in their present strife, until the passions on both sides might cool, when they would be in a better temper to come to an amicable and proper adjustment of those points of difference out of which the present lamentable collision of arms has arisen? Is there no continental question which might thus temporarily engage their attention? We have been induced to believe that there is.”

If Stephens expected the Northerners to unveil it, he was promptly disappointed. Lincoln understood the allusion immediately and killed it on the spot with a force that hushed the room. His short declarative sentences hit all the harder on the heels of the little Georgian's verbosity. “I suppose you refer to something Mr. Blair has said.” He wished to make it clear “at the beginning,” with what Campbell perceived as “a great deal of emphasis and force,” that whatever Mr. Blair had said was said on his own account. “Doubtless the old man meant well,” but when he asked to go to Richmond to discuss his ideas with “some influential persons there,” as Lincoln chose to call them, “I told him flatly that I did not want to hear them. If he wished to go, I would not stop him, but he had no authority to speak for me in any way whatever.”