Our One Common Country (28 page)

The Southerners were skeptical, though not so impolitic as to say so. Whether the Mexican scheme was his own or not, Blair was no amateur. If Lincoln had not sent him, he had let him go for a reason. After nearly four years of carnage, Lincoln must be under almost as much pressure as Davis. The commissioners had expected
some
flexibility in his position, something they could sell in Richmond. Lincoln was giving them nothing.

The president announced categorically that without immediate submission there would be no peace. Plain and simple. He warmed to the subject as he spoke, sensing that the commissioners had misled him. In a rising, high-pitched twang, he rejected any notion that
he
had come here
under false pretenses. (No one had said that he had.) “The restoration of the Union is a
sine qua non
with me. I will listen to no proposal that does not include an immediate restoration of the National Authority.” His letter to Mr. Blair had made that clear. The commissioners were familiar with it. They had used it to cross the lines. He had always been willing to entertain peace, but only on the conditions it recited, “and hence my instructions that no conference was to be held except on that basis.” There was passion in all of this, and no give at all. An aide has let us know that Lincoln could be petulant “when overworked or weary,” and “was always singularly firm in the assertion of his own fixed views or will.” He was singularly firm now.

What came next was a pointed silence. The Southerners could not challenge what the president had said, but how to go on despite his having said it? He demanded what they could not give. It was they who had come under false pretenses. Grant could not help them now.

Stephens wished away what he had just seen and heard—Lincoln's disavowal of Blair's improbable scheme, his demand for immediate submission, the intensity of his convictions. To his colleagues' sheer amazement, Little Alec seemed to think that Lincoln and Seward might step away from victory, admit the simple justice of the Southern cause, and march arm in arm on Napoleon's army. For Hunter, “the extent to which he carried these opinions was strange indeed,” as he now proceeded to prove.

Stephens was so fond of the Mexican fantasy, so sure he was sitting with its authors, that he came to an odd conclusion. Schooled by the crafty Seward, Lincoln might be playing a game, telling the Southerners, sotto voce, that he needed two things to put Blair's plan in motion: an ability to deny its paternity, and an agreement in advance to restore the Union after Mexico was freed. The first was easy to give. The second was the problem. Stephens collected his thoughts and played the Mexican card face up, exuding hope and verbosity.

“But suppose, Mr. President,” he began, “that a line of policy should be suggested which, if adopted, would most
probably
lead to a restoration of the Union without further bloodshed. Would it not be highly advisable to act on it, even without the absolute pledge of ultimate
restoration being required to be first given? May not such a policy be found to exist in the line indicated by the interrogatory propounded? Is there not now such a Continental question in which all the parties engaged in our present war feel a deep similar interest? I allude, of course, to Mexico and what is called the Monroe Doctrine, the principles of which are directly involved in the contest now waging there.” Lincoln was still listening and Stephens was still talking. Richmond was under the impression that the administration in Washington was opposed to a French empire in Mexico, he said, and desired to sustain the Monroe Doctrine. These impressions came from Northern newspapers, the speeches of prominent men of the North, and “other sources.” (Blair had become unmentionable.)

“Yes,” was Lincoln's reply; most of the Northern people
did
feel that way.

Well, then, Stephens said, could not the North and South postpone their present strife and agree to suspend hostilities until the principle was maintained in Mexico? Might not their success in Mexico naturally and “almost inevitably” lead to a peaceful and harmonious solution to their own difficulties? Could any pledge of reunion make a permanent restoration “or reorganization” of the Union more probable, or even
as
probable as that?

But Lincoln was not interested in probabilities. Nor was he interested in invading Mexico, jointly or alone. The politician in him suspected it would be popular, but the commander in chief had had enough of killing. He had launched his career condemning the Mexican War. He would not be responsible for a second. After four years of suffering, the rebellion was all but crushed. Everyone in the room knew it. Now Stephens was suggesting that the South would “almost inevitably” consider some sort of “reorganization” if the North would stop the war, on the edge of winning it, and blithely start another.

Lincoln replied emphatically. The French intervention in Mexico was a second-tier issue for him. The settlement of “the existing difficulties” was of “supreme importance.” He had fully considered a truce. There would be no truce without a satisfactory pledge that the Constitution and laws of the United States would be restored.

Stephens had seen the Mexican scheme as the only way out of the dilemma of one country or two. For him, Lincoln's demand for a pledge of reunion seemed to put an end to the conference, for the commissioners had no authority to give one, even if they had wanted to. Stephens would later say he had not expected such a demand, convinced as he was that the Northerners had hatched the Mexican idea. As a strict precondition to the meeting, Lincoln could not have demanded reunion more clearly, yet Stephens was surprised to hear that he meant it.

Judge Campbell was not. He did not believe in fairy tales. He could see that Blair had misled Davis. “We learned in five minutes that the assurances to Mr. Davis were a delusion and that union was the condition of peace. I had always supposed this to be the case, and had refused all discussions on the subject of negotiations unless that condition was first admitted.” Like Stephens, Campbell had never seen reunion as unacceptable or even undesirable. For years he had thought it inevitable. But great questions remained to be resolved, and the judge had come to Hampton Roads to learn how the victors proposed to resolve them. The South would be punished, but would the rebellious states be restored as free and equal members of the Union, or subdued like vanquished tribes? Slavery was dead, but would the slaves be freed gradually or suddenly, and with compensation for their masters or not? Much of the South had been conquered already, but would its lands be restored to their owners or forfeited to their conquerors? The Confederate leaders would be deposed, but would they also be hanged (not the least of all issues for three of the men in this room)?

Performing the role that his colleagues had assigned him, Campbell probed searchingly into the Northern idea of the
manner
of reunion, accepting Lincoln's premise and his terminology too, with none of Stephens's flummery. “How would the reestablishment of the National Authority take place?” How would reconstruction be accomplished if the Confederate authorities consented? Might the North consider something like the Zollverein, the European economic union that had been drawing the independent German states together since 1818? Free trade and a renewal of good feelings might lead to something more.

It was Seward who replied. With all due respect, he would like to hear more of Mr. Stephens's thoughts about diverting the public mind from the
present quarrel before they turned to Judge Campbell's inquiry. (Before these Rebels were told how unlike the Zollverein the National Authority would be, Seward wanted to hear what they were thinking. Campbell would say not a single careless word. Stephens liked to hear himself talk, as Seward and Lincoln knew. They may have agreed in advance to draw him out.)

Little Alec gladly obliged, filling the air with speech, egged on by Seward's interjections endorsing his “general views,” though he needed no encouragement. If he only kept talking, something might turn up. As Hunter sat and listened, he slowly began to realize that Stephens was attempting to convince Abraham Lincoln and William Seward that secession was the most “conservative” remedy for their differences. “Never was hope more mistaken.”

Stephens said he favored the taking of all of North America by “the States of the two confederacies” in a union of Southern and Northern
power.
In the course of
that
union, with trade and friendly intercourse restored, would not fraternal feelings be restored as well, and a reasonable settlement reached when the blood of “our people” had cooled? A French empire in Mexico offended the Confederate states as much as the United States, and the sovereign right of local self-government was sacred to both—the basis on which their political union should be restored when the heat of the war had dissipated. After bleeding together in Mexico, the states could be expected to reunite. Freely. In the present temper of “both nations,” reunion should be desired by neither, but the law of self-interest would pull them together like the law of gravity, with no further loss of fraternal blood. The people of other North American lands would join the new union as they had the old. An “ocean-bound Federal Republic” would emerge, regulated, of course, by the sovereignty of each state.

For what it might be worth, Campbell suggested that a joint invasion of Mexico, leaving all Southern strongholds in Union hands, would inevitably lead to reunion. Stephens disagreed, the first of several splits in the face of the enemy that would play themselves out in this room. The states would adjust themselves as their interests suited them. Reunion would come if the states were so inclined, but their sovereignty did not permit them to be compelled.

“There is something superficially plausible in what you say,” Seward replied, but it did not work practically. Suppose France or some other nation at war with the other states persuaded Louisiana to join it. Could the rest of the country leave the mouth of the Mississippi in hostile hands at Louisiana's pleasure?

Stephens said Louisiana was unlikely to leave the Union to ally herself with France, but if France treated her better than her sister states, she
ought
to secede. If the other states treated her fairly, she would never think of leaving.

Seward was hearing nothing new—the South had been singing the same old song throughout his long career—but he kept it going for a while. Suppose we did invade Mexico together; how would the South be governed? Who would collect the tariffs? How would they be spent?

Still convinced that the ideas Blair had shared with Davis were balloons sent south by the Lincoln administration, Stephens floated one of them back. If the parties called a truce, whatever troops remained in the South could be withdrawn to designated areas. Civilians could collect the tariffs and execute the laws. No one but the authorities in Richmond and Washington would even have to know. Confederate officials would preside, of course, and the state governments recognized by the Confederacy would be supreme.

Lincoln had heard enough. As Hunter was hearing it, all of this was received with “even less favor than I expected.” Richmond wanted a truce; that much was clear. Lincoln would not give it to them. Stephens was suggesting that he recognize states “in arms against the National Government,” he said, and that Lincoln would never do. He would consider no truce until “the great and vital question of reunion” was accepted. No treaty, convention, stipulation, or agreement could be made with the Confederate states, jointly or separately, on any subject at all, except on the basis of reconstruction.

Judge Campbell saw that Lincoln was declaring his terms, not negotiating them. There was nothing more to say, so Campbell said nothing. Not so Stephens.

“Well, Mr. President,” he said, as commander in chief of the armies of the United States, you might enter into a
military
convention with the
opposing combatants. “Everything could be effected in that way, if both sides were willing.” Lincoln acknowledged that he had that authority, but he was working from a nineteenth century script. There could be no war in Mexico unless Congress declared one, he said; there could be no treaty without the Senate's consent, and, for many reasons, a joint invasion of Mexico made no military sense. He mentioned just one: If a quarrel broke out between the two armies—and they could hardly be sure of each other after four years of war—either could combine with the French to destroy the other. No, Lincoln said, for the third and last time, he would not suspend the war without a prior agreement to restore the National Authority, and surely not to achieve a “collateral objective.”

Before the subject was dropped, Hunter disavowed Alec Stephens's idea that if Mexico were invaded, reunion must follow. The South might remain independent, though closely allied with the United States. In Richmond, there was a diversity of opinion on Mexico. He, for one, differed very much with Mr. Stephens. He would not pick a fight with France on the “pretense” of the Monroe Doctrine. Many Southerners thought the American people had no exclusive rights to this continent, and would not go to war over a mere question of policy, as opposed to one of “honor or right.” Another nineteenth century idea.

Seeing a chance to show that the North was made of sterner stuff, Seward said the government in
Washington
was
united
on this subject. A Napoleonic army on North American soil had feelings running high in the North. The United States might invade Mexico alone. Indeed, there was cause to come to grips with France
or
to settle “the ancient grudge against Great Britain.” Hunter got the message: The Confederacy was dead. The North was looking past it. The North had a war to spare. If the United States of America decided to drive the French out of Mexico—or attack the British Empire—it would need no help from Robert E. Lee.