Our One Common Country (34 page)

From the distance of North Carolina, the Raleigh
Progress
made short shrift of Richmond's war rallies, which produced great enthusiasm,
putting no one in the army. “When will these farces cease?” Their wellsprings ran dry within days. A “dull, helpless expectation, a blank despondency” soon fell over even the best of Richmond's people, as Edward Pollard appraised them, while the “worst” demanded peace at any price. The “insidious” thought was spreading that the North's brutal war on the South was a military necessity, that Washington sought no more than the Union as it was, that the meeting on the
River Queen
was marked by hearty fellowship, that Lincoln and Seward made liberal propositions. The idea was growing in the Southern mind “that the Yankee was not such a terrible monster after all, that the newspapers had been practicing scarecrows on the people,” that the government had exaggerated the enemy's demands and “painted the terrors of submission” falsely.

Lincoln and his Cabinet knew none of this. A negotiated peace seemed no closer to Gideon Welles than it had before. The ideologues of his party were pushing it away. “There are ultras among us who insist on terms that make peace remote,” resisting every step, demanding that the South be crushed, “violent without much regard to Constitutional or State rights or any other rights indeed, except such as they may themselves define or dictate.”

On Friday, February 10, Lincoln sent his report on the peace conference to Capitol Hill. It consisted by and large of the pertinent correspondence, which he literally cut and pasted into his draft. He omitted Grant's note welcoming the commissioners through the lines after Stanton ordered them stopped, and Eckert's wire to Stanton on their willingness to meet with Lincoln's designee instead of Lincoln himself. He let the rest of it speak for itself, adding only enough scant narrative to string it together, knowing very well that he who explains is losing. Mexico was not mentioned.

When the report was read aloud in the House, every member was in his seat. Noah Brooks was in the press gallery. As the clerk began to read, “no man so much as stirred his hand.” The silence was broken by a murmur of applause when the House heard Lincoln say he would receive any agent proposing to bring peace to our one common country. A louder burst of approval met his three preconditions: Southern disarmament, unqualified reunion, no backward steps on slavery by the executive. A
“ripple of mirth” washed over his instruction to Seward not to assume to consummate anything. The wire that Lincoln had received on January 29 was disclosed, saying peace commissioners were at Grant's lines, two days before he told the House that none were in Washington, or likely to be. If anyone noticed, the record does not say. Grant's wire telling Stanton that the commissioners were ready for reunion was read. In the end, the report declared, they had neither ruled it out nor accepted it. They had seemed to want to postpone the issue.

When the clerk had read the report, he identified its author with a flourish, and the chamber exploded in applause. The Speaker's attempt to quell it was perfunctory. Then Congressman James Brooks, a bespectacled Copperhead from New York, stood up and tried. The president's demand for “absolute submission” was deplorable, and yet he deserved thanks for making
any
effort for peace. When he left for Hampton Roads, the fanatics had opened up “in full howl upon him.” It took courage to face them down. Many thousands of citizens on both sides would welcome peace on any honorable terms. The men of both armies were “panting for it,” as the cheering soldiers showed when the commissioners crossed their lines, but no man in power, North or South, dared boldly to advance it.

The Illinois Republican Elihu B. Washburne, Lincoln's friend and Grant's, asked Brooks if he favored an armistice. Brooks said he did. “I am in favor of appealing from guns and bayonets and artillery to reason, to sense, to Christianity, and to civilization.”

“The gentleman agrees with Jeff Davis and his commissioners upon that subject,” Washburne said.

“Why, certainly I am in favor of an armistice,” Brooks replied. “Someday or other this war must stop.” If the two cheering armies were permitted once again to welcome a peace commission,
they
would end the war if their leaders would not.

Brooks closed with a word on Blair's secret plan, a secret no more, having passed from mouth to ear, in the strictest of confidence, a few too many times. Of “far more importance to us than slavery in the South” was the French flag in Mexico. “Then let us hush this unnatural, fraternal, civil war” until the French invasion was repelled. “Let not Mexico and Central America be enslaved to free a few Negroes here.”

Then Thaddeus Stevens struck. What the gentleman had said was “but perfectly natural and just.” The president had indicted the Rebels, and justice entitled them to an advocate, “one who fully enters into their views and sympathizes with their purposes.” The gentleman was highly qualified, but too hard to please. The Democrats had wanted to send envoys south. On this they had “differed somewhat from the loyal people, I mean the other loyal people of the North and from the gentlemen on this side of the House.” Now it had been learned that the South would insist on independence, as Stevens and his side had expected.

When Brooks pointed out that Lincoln's report did not say that the Rebels had demanded independence, Stevens cited their war rallies, as Campbell and Stephens had known he would. “They met in the African Church. I do not know what to understand by that. They have got very low when they can do that. However, that is a passing remark.” Then he quoted Jeff Davis: “Sooner than we should be united again, I would be willing to yield up everything I have on earth; and if it were possible, I would yield up my life a thousand times rather than succumb.” Then Stevens pointed to his left at Brooks, rhetorically if not physically: “And yet a man calling himself a patriot and an American rises upon this floor and sends forth to the country a denunciation of the President of the United States for not entering into negotiations with men holding these doctrines and entertaining these views. I will apply no epithets to such a man; I do not know that I could use any which would be sufficiently merited.”

Stevens praised Lincoln for trying peace, then warned him indirectly not to try again. A truce would have been an admission that Southern independence was possible. If the president had agreed to one, he should have been impeached.

Sunset Cox took the floor and recalled how the Jacobins had opposed the very idea of a peaceful reunion. Their goal was bloody revenge. One should read between the lines of the peace commissioners' notes included in Lincoln's report. Negotiations should resume. If peace were not achieved, “the fault, I will not say the crime, of failure will lie at the door, if not of the President, of the radicals whose incessant pressure is always at his back.”

If Blair had not briefed Cox, someone else had. Lincoln's “one common country” letter was familiar to him, he said. He wished the House knew
everything
that was said at Hampton Roads. According to Lincoln's report, the commissioners only wished to postpone the reunion question while another course was pursued. “What that other course was, we are only left to conjecture. Perhaps it had reference to a union of our armies for a common object, perhaps in Mexico,” but whatever it was, the commissioners had clearly seen reunion as feasible. A truce would merely suspend the war while reasonable men talked peace.

After five days in Washington, Alec Stephens's nephew John went back to the White House that day for the papers he would need to get home. Lincoln made time to chat again, spoke kindly of his uncle, reminisced about their friendship, shared some impressions of the peace conference. Then he took a sheet of paper and wrote to his old friend:

 

Executive Mansion,

Washington, Feb. 10, 1865

Hon. A. H. Stephens

 

According to our agreement your nephew, Lieut. Stephens, goes to you bearing this note. Please, in return, to select and send to me that officer of the same rank imprisoned at Richmond whose physical condition most urgently requires his release.

 

Respectfully, A. Lincoln

 

Folding the note in half, forgetting to blot the ink, he handed it to his guest and asked him to bring it to his uncle. Then he drew from one of the pigeonholes in his upright desk a postcard-size photograph of himself, signed it, and handed it over too. “Suppose you take this along with you. I don't expect there are many of them down South.”

More grateful than he could say, Lieutenant Stephens went home to Georgia and got himself back in the war.

A new White House guard had been given the midnight shift. As he paced the long corridor through the family quarters, he passed the president's room, adjacent to Mrs. Lincoln's. “I could hear his deep breathing. Sometimes, after a day of unusual anxiety, I have heard him moan in his sleep. It gave me a curious sensation.” With Lincoln “defenseless in his sleep, it made me feel the pity that would have been almost an impertinence when he was awake. I would stand there and listen until a sort of panic stole over me. If he felt the weight of things so heavily, how much worse the situation of the country must be than any of us realized! At last I would walk softly away, feeling as if I had been listening at a keyhole.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

To Serve a People in Spite of Themselves

After Hunter incited the crowd at the African Church, a “considerate friend” approached him and changed his heart and mind. “He told me that he had never listened to me with so little pleasure, and thought me wrong all the while.” Knowing that the war was lost, he should not have urged his people to resist a reasonable peace.

It was a hard thing to hear, and Hunter defended himself at the time, but he knew he had made a mistake. He would regret it the rest of his life, consoling himself with his efforts to correct it. “I did not utterly abandon my duty to the people,” he said, and tried to soften their fall.

Hunter faced the truth. Reunion and abolition were inevitable. An effort should be made “to save as much as possible from the wreck. Upon this Mr. Davis and I differed.” Not long after the war rallies, Hunter paid a call on Davis with two respected colleagues, both of them prewar Unionists, Senator James Orr of South Carolina and Senator William Graham of North Carolina. Sherman was burning his way up through Orr's constituents as they spoke. He would soon be starting on Graham's. Hunter's would be reached in a month or so. However slim their chances, they would try to persuade their leader to endure the unendurable and negotiate a peaceful reunion.

According to Edward Pollard, no one could match Davis for receiving his critics “with such a well-bred grace, with a politeness so studied as to be almost sarcastic, with a manner that so plainly gave the idea that his company talked to a post.” And so, no doubt, he received these senators. In the manner of his considerate friend, Hunter told his president what he did not want to hear. He spoke, as he thought, in confidence. If Davis
believed, as Hunter did, that any chance of success was gone, it would become him to consider something better than waging war until all that was left was defeat. Even if he failed to achieve an honorable, peaceful reunion after further resistance had become pointless, he owed it to himself and “a gallant people” to leave some evidence of having tried.

Acquainted with Davis's pride, Hunter had found a way out for him. Knowing how hard it would be for the president to tell the Senate that the end had come, the Senate might tell
him.
Hunter said he thought he could promise that it would. If Davis would pledge his utmost to get the best terms possible, the Senate would ask him to do so, and take the burden from his shoulders. If necessary, Hunter would introduce the resolutions himself. “We could draw them together,” he said, to be sure that Davis could live with them. The senator was offering to go down in Southern history as the man who had scuttled his country, sparing its president the humiliation and second-guessing.

Davis cast him into the void. It was then, “for the first time, my faith in Mr. Hunter was impaired; and confidence is a plant which will not bear topping.” Hunter had joined the cabal.

Davis asked his visitors to send him a Senate resolution and promised a
prompt reply. He suggested a consultation with Robert Woodward Barnwell, Orr's fellow senator from South Carolina, a wealthy, sixty-three-year-old Harvard man and a trusted Davis ally whose father had served in the Continental Congress. Hunter was intrigued, thinking Barnwell had so much influence that if he and Davis would call for a peaceful reunion, the movement would be irresistible.

Davis summoned his Cabinet as soon as the senators left, and disclosed what he saw as their treachery, which “I would not have permitted to be held confidentially.” Then he went alone to Senator Barnwell, who lived nearby and was ill, and revealed it to him too. As Davis clearly explained, he wanted the resolution to be “so unequivocal that my issue with the cabal should be distinctly understood by the people.”

Then Barnwell behaved unexpectedly. He asked Senator Hunter to come to his home and inquired what he thought were the odds for a palatable peace. “I could not say,” Hunter replied. He quoted Lincoln's declaration that he would not treat with Rebels in arms, but the
pressure for peace was so great that if Richmond proposed another talk, he doubted that Lincoln could say no. At any rate, if an effort to make peace should fail “through the cruelty or vengeance of our enemy, the fact of our having made the attempt would relieve our Government, and particularly the President, from much responsibility that would otherwise attach to us.”

Hunter had the impression that Barnwell disagreed, but the South Carolinian was wavering. He and Hunter, Orr, and Graham went to see Judge Campbell together. Davis was making a legal argument, they said, that the president had no authority to act, that only the states could authorize reunion. A mere abstraction, Campbell said, whatever its merits might be. Some of the states were occupied, some were cut off, and the rest were under pressure. But no one in the room could have thought that Davis would move.

Knowing him as he did, Hunter had tried to save his people with little hope of success. “I scarcely expected to hear more.” But he soon heard it “bruited all over Richmond that I had been thoroughly conquered, had submitted, and was disposed to make peace on any terms, with many other disparaging remarks.” And now he was boxed in. Duty, he thought, prevented him from explaining himself, for his belief that the South was beaten was based on its destitution, “which could not be revealed to the world without doing much mischief.”

So Hunter spoke of peace no more. “If I did not know it before, I was destined to learn how necessary it was to have a great man at the head of a government, to serve a people in spite of themselves.”

In the opinion of General Fitzhugh Lee, the demigod's mortal nephew, no Southern peace commission could have ended the war without winning independence. “Had Mr. Davis agreed with the commissioners that peace should be restored upon any other basis, the soldiers in the field would have marched over him and them to battle.” Only one man could have done it. “But Robert E. Lee was in accord with his civil chief on that question, and was determined to fight and risk the last defiance of fortune.”

Hunter has told us otherwise. Not long after the senator's peace initiative failed, Lee came alone to his boardinghouse under cover of darkness. They were old friends, and they talked through most of the night. Lee told his fellow Virginian that if any chance remained to negotiate a fair reunion in place of a rank surrender, he thought it Hunter's duty to
insist.
He mentioned no duty of his own.

Hunter told Lee about his overture to Davis, and how he had been mocked for it. He would not try again. “It would do no sort of good, for any effort I might make would be misrepresented and laid before the public as soon as it was made, with a view to injure my influence, in which it would probably be successful.” He would share no more confidences with Mr. Davis unless Mr. Davis cleared his name.

Lee insisted that for
him
to seek peace talks in public would be almost the same as surrender. That was so, Hunter said, but if Lee thought the situation desperate, he ought to tell the president. Lee did not reply. He did not tell Hunter that the South had no chance, “but the tone and tenor of his remarks made that impression upon my mind.” He spoke of Hatcher's Run, where his men had repelled the enemy in a furious storm. “The next day, as he rode along the lines in the snow,” he said, “one of the soldiers would thrust forth his bare foot and say, ‘General, I have no shoes.' Another would declare, as he passed, ‘I am hungry; I haven't enough to eat.' These and other circumstances betraying the utmost destitution he repeated with a melancholy air and tone which I shall never forget.”

Not long after Hunter's long night with Lee, the new Secretary of War John Breckinridge came to see him and repeated Lee's advice in so nearly the same words that Hunter wondered if they were working together. Hunter told his old rival Breckinridge about his offer to Davis and what had come of it. He saw no hope for peace, he said, unless the president would cooperate, which he hardly thought Davis would do.

Judge Campbell did his best to save his people too, more persistently than Hunter. He had joined the administration in the first place—a burden, not an honor—to mitigate the evils that infected his new country. “I cannot make you feel how large they were.” The very idea of reunion
was unspeakable in Richmond. It could only be whispered behind locked doors. As a premise for negotiations, even the peace movement's leaders said the states must align themselves as they saw fit. Richmond's peace men denied Unionist sentiments even when they held them, a mortal political sin of which their detractors freely accused them. When Campbell tried to find a responsible leader to face the inevitable and take the responsibility for reunion, he found himself surrounded by duty-shirking men with “a superstitious dread” of negotiation. Though they knew or should have known that reconstruction was inevitable, they responded with a “sort of hesitation, timidity and dread of responsibility” resulting in nothing at all.

First Campbell went to Lee, who repeated, in substance, his late-night speech to Hunter. He would do his military duty, he said, and would not assume to counsel the civil authorities on their responsibility to make peace or war, let alone usurp it.

Then the judge went to Davis, who repeated himself as well. He lacked the Constitutional authority to dissolve the Confederacy and would not assist its suicide. The people had elected him to establish it, not abolish it. He had sworn to preserve, protect, and defend it. He could only submit the issue to the states, which was impractical. Even if he had the power, he could not accept Lincoln's terms without personal dishonor, which was unthinkable. His Secretary of the Navy Stephen Mallory thought he dreaded being charged, as several militants in the Senate stood ready to charge him, with cowardice and treason.

Then Campbell tried the peace movement's leaders in Congress. They said it was Davis's duty to steer the ship of state, not theirs. If the Senate had faced the truth, so Mallory would later say, peace would have come, and countless miseries been prevented, but “its members dreaded the responsibility and were disposed to see Mr. Davis act alone.”

In the end, Campbell said, the captain of the ship stood upright at her helm and watched her hit the shoals. Campbell and Hunter and a few other courageous senators who tried to help him got nowhere. “The idiosyncrasy of one man defeated the design.” Davis and his circle kept the war drum beating, denying their people the truth.

On Saturday, February 11, General Meade wrote his wife about Hatcher's Run. “I see the
Tribune,
with its usual malice, charges the recent movement as a failure, and puts the blame on me.” Her brother Willie's regiment “was in the thickest of the fight and suffered severely,” the general said, “but I believe behaved very well.” Leaving Margaretta to surmise that Willie was in one piece, the general let her know that her status had its rewards. An artist was in camp, “of the name of Simmons, who is sculpturing a life-size head of me, of which he intends casting a medallion in bronze. His work is pronounced excellent, and he promises to present you a copy, so you will have your Meade art gallery increased.”