Our One Common Country (29 page)

Hunter summoned his dignity. The commissioners had no instructions to negotiate on the subject of Mexico, he said. “Nor am I, for one, prepared to do so.”

As the senator spoke, one of Sherman's divisions was breaking through a critical Rebel blocking position, leaving South Carolina all but helpless to resist him.

Blair's Mexican fantasy having played itself out, Judge Campbell turned back to reality. “Supposing, Mr. President, that the Union were reconstructed with the Confederate States' assent—how would the reconstruction be accomplished?” Lincoln answered the question as simply as Campbell had asked it. “By disbanding their troops and permitting the national authorities to resume their functions.”

As if that were not stark enough, Seward turned his friends to the elephant in the room. Not a word had yet been said about slavery. Its size and its smell were daunting. Now the governor led it out and put it on the table. A contemporary said he spoke unpretentiously on the Senate floor, “as though he were engaged in conversation, and the effect was always great.” In an armchair with friends and cigars, the effect was greater still. The president could not express himself more plainly than he did in his message to Congress, Seward said, which clearly showed the way “by which peace can be secured to the people.” The New Yorker did not speak of the Southern people or the Northern people. Peace would be secured to “the people.” He then recited from memory the substance of the message's salient points, an effective bit of theater:

 

In presenting the abandonment of armed resistance to the National Authority on the part of the insurgents as the only indispensable condition to ending the war on the part of the Government, I retract nothing heretofore said as to slavery. I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that “while I remain in my present position, I shall not attempt to retract or modify the Emancipation Proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of the Proclamation, or any Acts of Congress.” If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to reenslave such persons, another, and not I, must be the instrument to perform it. In stating a single condition of peace, I mean simply to say that the war will cease on the part of the Government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it.

 

The consequences were simple, the governor said. There was no swagger in his tone, no arrogance on his face, but what he said was plain: Federal officials will preside over the post offices, the custom houses, the land offices, and the courts. The federal government will appoint them. “The laws will be submitted to.”

Campbell replied like a former Supreme Court justice. He did not challenge what Seward had said, but the consequences of the separation and the war must be lawfully adjusted before a “harmonious restoration of the former relations” could be achieved, supposing that the South endorsed one. Both sides had seized and sold Southern property, leaving titles to be settled, compensation to be negotiated. Disbanding the Confederate Army and disposing of its supplies would be no small task. All of this would take time. The judge did not say so, but time was what the commissioners wanted to buy.

Seward was not selling any. Certainly, there were legal issues to be resolved, but that was what the courts were for. The war must end first. Congress would no doubt be liberal about confiscated property “after the passions excited by the war have been composed.”

The issue of property having been raised, Stephens looked the elephant in the eye. In effect, the Emancipation Proclamation had only freed the slaves in the
occupied
South, he said. If the war ended now, how would it affect the
entire
Negro population? Would it emancipate them all, or only the slaves that the Northern army freed?

Ironically enough, it was here, on the issue of slavery—the issue of the century, the damnable issue that had started it all—where the Northerners had room to maneuver. Their demand for reunion and disarmament had been made. The chest-thumping phase was over. Now Lincoln and Seward tried to coax the Southerners home with kinder, gentler inducements, none of them inconsiderable: their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

Two of Lincoln's three conditions for peace had already been declared. The Rebels must lay down their arms and the Union must be restored. Unequivocally. But there were cards to be played in the
River Queen
's
saloon on the third condition: The
president
would take no
backward
steps on slavery. Lincoln gave Stephens his first nuanced answer.
His public statements on slavery were impossible to reverse, he said, even if he wanted to. So long as he remained in his present position (he never referred to himself as president),
he
would not change the Emancipation Proclamation “in the slightest particular.” The issue was what it meant, a point on which reasonable minds could differ and did. Some said it was a purely military measure that would end with the war, others that it operated only in places under Union occupation, still others that it was effective everywhere in the rebellious states. These were legal issues, to be dealt with in the courts. How they would be decided he did not pretend to know. He supposed the answer would come when someone took a slave from one place to another and the question was raised in a lawsuit.

There was no mistaking his meaning. In the
Dred Scott
case, Judge Campbell had helped decide, as a matter of
federal
law, that slaves were
not
made free when taken into free territory. It was still the law of the land. The South could not preserve its independence on the battlefield, but Lincoln was suggesting that it might preserve slavery in the courtroom, if only for a while. Even if slavery died, a palatable substitute might take its place. General Meade had told the commissioners that a system could be devised that would not be “so obnoxious as slavery.” Many Northerners shared his vision of an American brand of serfdom. Lincoln himself had spoken of a transitional “apprenticeship” system.

Lincoln did not stop there. In his own opinion, he said, the Emancipation Proclamation was an exercise of his presidential war-making powers, and could only be effective as such. If the war ended now, it would only have freed the slaves in the areas under Union control. Of course that was only his opinion. The courts might see it otherwise. Then Seward laid a stick next to Lincoln's carrot. “
Up to this time
” the Emancipation Proclamation had freed only about two hundred thousand of the South's three million slaves. If the war went on, they would all be freed by force.

They were saying in Washington City that Jeff Davis had come through the lines and was closeted with Lincoln at City Point—or was it Fort Monroe? An unnamed Cabinet member would neither confirm nor deny it, which was reasonable enough, since no Cabinet member but Seward
knew anything. Stanton had only a false inkling, Grant's message of the day before that the Southerners had accepted Lincoln's terms. The
New York Herald
said Stanton told a former congressman that “an early and amicable termination of the war” was probable, “and a feverish anticipation of the result of the pending negotiations exists among all classes.”

Not among all classes. Though the price of gold had dropped, in fear of a chance for peace, the market was “but little affected,” said the
New York Commercial Advertiser.
“There is such utter incredulity as to the possibility of peace coming out of the negotiations that stocks are actually strengthening . . .” It was widely assumed on Wall Street that nothing would come of it all but a keener commitment to the killing, to be followed by “a strong upward bound in prices.”

On the floor of the US Senate, the old Democrat Reverdy Johnson observed that “a singular state of things is existing at the very moment I am speaking.” Senators should reflect on it. Suppose the commissioners said, “We know the whole thing has been wrong; we see the horrors which have resulted from it . . . we have committed the error of our lives,” and only ask a pardon. Why should we not welcome it? It was clear when they crossed the lines that despite the arts “of the traitor and the demagogue,” the people's affections for each other and common love of country had not changed. “The rebel soldiers cheered, and so did ours, seeing that they should no longer do all they could to murder each other; but that the time was approaching when they could embrace each other as brethren and as American citizens.”

In a musical Galway brogue, the Irish-born senator John Conness, a Republican from California, asked the senator from Maryland how he knew what the troops were cheering. Perhaps the Rebels thought their independence was at hand, while “our Army cheered because they believed the Commissioners were going to acknowledge the power of the Union and the supremacy of our flag.”

Senator Jacob Collamer, a taciturn Vermont Republican, had a shorter explanation. “Perhaps they were cheering at the idea that they would be able to go home in peace.”

In the
River Queen
's saloon, when the time seemed right to disclose the morning's surprise, Seward did it casually. “It might be proper to say” that the House had just endorsed a Constitutional amendment for the
immediate
abolition of slavery
throughout
the United States, which would moot the debate on the Emancipation Proclamation. Illinois, Rhode Island, and Michigan had already ratified it. Then he handed Judge Campbell the words that would render
Dred Scott
a nullity. It took just a moment to read them:

 

Be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States in Congress assembled: That the following article be proposed to the Legislatures of the several States, as an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, when ratified by three-fourths of said Legislatures, shall be valid to all intents and purposes, as a part of said Constitution, namely:

 

ARTICLE XIII

 

SECTION 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

 

SECTION 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

 

Judge Campbell asked the governor what significance he attached to it. Were he not William Seward, his reply would have been astonishing. “Not a great deal,” he said. The amendment had passed under the revolutionary passions of war, which always recede in peace. Maryland had just banned slavery within her own borders. Her abolitionists had proposed to end it in fifty years, well into the twentieth century. A more extreme faction countered with seven. The radicals demanded abolition now, and got it. Extremists always predominate in a revolution. If the South abandoned
the war, the measures the war engendered would probably be abandoned too. There were thirty-six states in the Union (the undivided Union), any ten of which could block the Thirteenth Amendment. Seward stopped short of insulting the Southern intelligence. It was needless to say that eleven of them were Confederate, or that Delaware and Kentucky had never left the Union and never abolished slavery.