Our One Common Country (35 page)

In response to the peace that Lincoln and Seward offered, General Lee called for “new resolution” in a message to the Southern people. His soldiers, he said, required no exhortation. “The choice between war and abject submission is before them. To such a proposal brave men, with arms in their hands, can have but one answer. They cannot barter manhood for peace, nor the right of self-government for life or property.” Fresh from his night with Hunter, Lee assured his people that “our resources, wisely and vigorously employed, are ample, and with a brave army, sustained by a determined and united people, success, with God's assistance, cannot be doubtful.”

He did not inspire Sarah Pryor. “I am afraid we were too faint from want of food to be as courageous as our noble commander expected.”

Judge Campbell had started taking lives out of harm's way. His clerk John Jones could make no sense of it. He was “furloughing, detailing, and discharging men from the army,” Jones wrote that day, “and yet he thinks the country is pretty nearly exhausted of its fighting population! His successor is not yet appointed; the sooner the better, perhaps.”
Three days later, Jones lamented that Davis was “immovable in his determination not to yield to the demand for new men in the government, and the country seems to have lost confidence in the old. God help us, or we are lost!”

On Saturday, February 18, Judge Campbell had a private talk with Jones's superior, Robert Kean. What did Kean think of the state of things?

“We will all be fugitives” by the end of March, Kean said.

“What then?”

“The second stage of the war, as some call it,” Kean replied. “The boldest will be bushwhackers. The struggle will be outside the laws of war.”

“Do you think that is work for a patriot?”

“The enemy in your Conference have left us nothing else. I don't think a patriot could consent to carrying on the war a day after the struggle has become hopeless, provided any door for terms is open.”

Campbell concurred in Kean's view of patriotism, but it was not the North that had closed the door. Lincoln and Seward had seemed disappointed on the
River Queen,
he said. They had plainly expected an offer. The speeches at the African Church could only have hardened them. Their people had been disappointed, too, “until the speeches made here went North.” Campbell recalled how Davis had pressed the commissioners to misquote Lincoln and Seward. The judge seemed proud of their refusal but very much dissatisfied about the peace conference. “It
ought not
to have been dropped when it was.” The commissioners should have returned with a proposal for reunion. Kean reminded him how Lincoln had spoken of oak trees and necks when Campbell discussed the difference between conquest and negotiation. “He said this was true, and shook his head and spoke in a low tone of despair.”

The judge confessed his forebodings to a clerk named Wattles too. “We are now arrived at the last days of the Confederacy.” A second peace commissioner was in the same place. Jones told his diary that “Mr. Hunter seems more depressed today than I have ever seen him. He walks with his head down, looking neither to the right nor the left.”

Sickness had slowed Alec Stephens on his journey back to Georgia, but he got home to Liberty Hall toward the end of February. His enemy Benjamin Hill soon wrote to Davis, attacking his fellow Georgian for refusing to enflame the people after “his failure” at Hampton Roads. “He has been a weight for two years and seems determined to remain one.” Some time ago, Stephens had said in a published letter that the South had the means to win and only lacked the brains. Now Hill was glad that Stephens had been sent to talk peace with Lincoln. “His failure has at least
silenced
his
pernicious tongue about ‘
brains'
and has made active patriots of many of his heretofore deluded followers.”

Instead of inciting his neighbors, Stephens assembled his slaves. “I told them they were now free, at which I was perfectly contented and satisfied; that I might and probably should be taken away from them soon and perhaps hung; that I wished them, if they saw fit, to remain there and finish the crop,” and take half the harvest. If he survived, he said, and the authorities allowed, he would come back and divide the plantation into farms that they could tend and live on if they wished, paying rent from the fruits of their labors. Then he went home to Liberty Hall and sat down with Harry, his black plantation manager, who had put his private earnings in Stephens's care. They amounted to $662. In exchange for that sum, Stephens sold Harry all of his horses and mules, “to which he was attached.” They were worth more. Then he taught him how to manage in the event of his master's arrest.

Little Alec told friends at dinner that Davis sent envoys to Lincoln because Stephens and his followers pressured him. Lincoln's terms were not “utterly bad,” but Davis denounced them and the peace process died. Stephens had gone home to avoid a public rift. The great trouble with Davis was not that Lincoln had insulted the South but that Lincoln had insulted Davis, who could not abide the thought that his office was ignored, that the Confederacy and its president would never be more than “a name and a dream.” When Lincoln had said that he would not recognize the Confederacy and would make no treaty with its government, Davis had heard that there would be no recognition of
him,
no treaty with
Jefferson Davis.
His military blunders had shattered his plans to dictate peace “from the head of Lee's legions at the gates of Washington City.” Now the South could get no more than Lincoln's overture at Hampton Roads: payment for its slaves and its rights restored in the Union. It was not much, but it was the best one could hope for with the Confederacy on its deathbed.

Stephens told a fellow Georgian that he knew Lincoln well in Congress, a fair and reasonable man who usually voted with him. If the commissioners had returned, he would have accepted a truce (undeclared, to save Northern pride), a joint invasion of Mexico, and secret arrangements
to slip cotton to Europe through the blockade for the common account of the North and South. Blair had told Davis that all of this was possible. Though Lincoln dared not write it down, for fear of Northern opinion, Stephens knew Blair, whose word was “voucher enough” for him. But now it was too late.

Poor, deluded Stephens.

Friends urged him to say publicly that Davis had sabotaged peace, but Stephens chose not to “divide our people.” Instead, “I stayed at home, not wishing by absence to seem to be avoiding arrest, which from the time I left Richmond, I considered my ultimate fate.” He would not get out of the way of Northern troops, he said, but neither was he disposed to get
in
their way. In the meantime, it pained him to see Davis and his circle use the failure at Hampton Roads to incite a still more hopeless war.
Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,
he thought. Whom God would destroy, He first renders demented.

On February 22, Senator William A. Graham of North Carolina wrote a friend that Davis was telling people that he “never intended to commit himself officially against negotiations on the basis of reunion—that his speech at the African Church was but the expression of his individual opinion. What do you think of the distinction, or of the specimen it affords of the wisdom with which the world is governed?”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

It Is the Province of Statesmanship to Consider of These Things

On February 23, a Rebel officer sent a wire to Richmond from the siege line. Was it meant to be sardonic? “I have nothing to report this morning of unusual interest. Sixteen of Gracie's, nine of Wallace's, and ten of Wise's brigade deserted to the enemy.” On February 24, a resolution declaring the unalterable determination of the Southern people never to unite with the North again was adopted by their Congress. Unanimously. It was not good enough for Judah Benjamin. Two days later, he denounced as cowards and traitors “these Representatives and Senators who are still hankering after peace.”

Senator Graham fit the bill. Five of his sons were fighting for the South, and a niece was Stonewall Jackson's widow, but for Benjamin and Davis, the silver-haired North Carolinian, an antebellum Unionist, had gone over to the cabal. Having accompanied Hunter and Orr on their fruitless mission to Davis, he asked Judge Campbell whether Lincoln would negotiate, and what would be the legal consequences, apart from abolition and reunion, if the South were defeated in battle? On February 24, Campbell replied in a letter, which he urged Graham to share with his “brother Senators.”

Lincoln would not treat with the Confederacy, Campbell said, but only with individuals, to whom he would “declare” his terms, which ought to be no worse than the ones he endorsed at Hampton Roads. Congress might have to approve some of them, but the commander in chief had broad authority, and the statutes that directed him to seize Southern
property allowed him to make exceptions. In the judge's legal opinion, the president could intercede in confiscations prospectively
and
retrospectively. With reunion as a premise, negotiations could proceed on the status of West Virginia, paying the Confederacy's debts, disbanding its armies, readmitting its states “into fellowship” with the North, addressing the slavery issue and other “internal affairs.” True Northern statesmen should prefer negotiation to conquest. As for their Southern counterparts, the terms that Lincoln had floated on the
River Queen
should have been taken, if none better could be had. The Confederacy was in disarray. There was no communication across the Mississippi. Hood's defeat at Nashville had opened the west to the enemy. The war had been reduced to the defense of Richmond. Grant had Lee pinned. Sherman was storming north. Another federal army was on its way. The South could neither support the troops it had, nor recruit new ones. There were three times as many Southern men in Northern prisons as there were in Lee's army.

The facts were plain, the conclusions unavoidable. Graham shared Campbell's letter with his colleagues, along with the judge's summary of the conference at Hampton Roads.

A few days later, expanding his dolorous litany, Campbell submitted a report to the Secretary of War, premised on the necessity “that accurate views of our situation be taken. It is not the part of statesmanship to close our eyes upon them.” The Treasury was four or five hundred million dollars in debt, “paralyzed by want of credit.” Its authority to issue paper money had expired on December 31. The Secretary of the Treasury had been selling gold ever since. When the gold was gone, the Treasury would cease to exist. Campbell would soon observe that there was no treasure with which to fill it, “or even to veil its nudity.” Paper money was trading at sixty to one against gold and silver.

The condition of the army was scarcely less dire. The supply of foreign weapons was barred by the blockade. All of the South's munitions factories were vulnerable or gone. So many deserters were at large, an estimated 100,000, that the crime had lost its stigma, and “the criminals are everywhere shielded by their families, and by the sympathies of many communities.” Lee had just reported 1,200 new desertions. The conscription pool was exhausted. North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia had withdrawn from it. An effort to draft 20,000 slaves as teamsters and laborers had driven as many black men to the enemy's ranks as had reinforced the South's. If everything went well, the army could not be sustained. These “embarrassments” had so much accumulated that the problem of sustaining Lee was beyond solution. Permitting himself an understatement, Campbell allowed that the morale of the Army of Northern Virginia was “somewhat impaired.” Elsewhere things were worse. Hood's decimated troops, now back under General Johnston, could “scarcely be recognized as an army.” Tasked with resisting Sherman, only a fraction of General William J. Hardee's command was fit to fight. (His son would soon be killed at Bentonville, North Carolina, in the last, losing effort to stop Sherman. He was sixteen years old.)

The political situation was no better. Georgia was in a state of insurrection. North Carolina did not support the war as Virginia did. The less said about the entire length of the Mississippi, the better. When Richmond was evacuated, as it surely would be, Virginia must be abandoned. “The war will cease to be a national one from that time.” The Southern people's hopes, affections, and treasure had long been devoted to Virginia. “When this exchequer becomes exhausted, I fear that we shall be bankrupt, and that the public spirit in the South and Southwestern States will fail.”

The judge concluded eloquently. “It is the province of statesmanship to consider of these things. The South may succumb, but it is not necessary that she be destroyed. I do not regard reconstruction as involving destruction, unless our people should forget the incidents of their heroic struggle and become debased and degraded. It is the duty of their statesmen and patriots to guard them in the future with even more care and tenderness than they have done in the past. There is anarchy in the opinions of men here, and few are willing to give counsel, and still fewer are willing to incur the responsibility of taking or advising action. In these circumstances I have surveyed the whole ground, I believe calmly and dispassionately.” Campbell did not ask that his views be accepted, “but that a candid inquiry be made with a view to action.” He proposed that General Lee's opinion be solicited (a canny suggestion), and that the president submit the subject to the Senate or the whole Congress and invite
them
to act.

Campbell presented his report with a memorandum on the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, a reminder of a direction in which to go. Then Lee submitted a report of his own, complying with Secretary Breckinridge's request to all department heads. The consequences of Grant's superior resources, it said, had already been “postponed longer than we had reason to anticipate.” The other reports were as grim.

Campbell was convinced that Lincoln and Seward had disclosed enough at Hampton Roads to warrant an expectation that terms could be had “which would avoid some of the evils of conquest and subjugation,” and so he told Graham and anyone else who would listen. A few days later, Graham told him that Davis would send no more peace commissions.

Campbell spoke of what befalls a party that “knows not when it is beaten.” Then he wrote to a friend, the former US senator and Alabama governor, Benjamin Fitzpatrick. Richmond would soon be evacuated, Campbell said. Lee's army would be no more. The cause was lost. The governor should be prepared to lead Alabama back to the Union.

With steel-blue eyes and a full brown beard, the South Carolinian James Longstreet was Lee's right arm. His own right arm was in a sling, a souvenir of the Battle of the Wilderness. He was one of Lee's best generals. He was one of Grant's best friends.

They had bonded at West Point over twenty years earlier. Some would even call them family. Fresh from the Academy, they were serving with the elite 4th Infantry at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, when Longstreet rode out to see his uncle Fred Dent and his cousin Julia Dent and brought Grant with him. When Grant married Julia, Longstreet was one of three fellow officers who stood up for him, future Rebels all. Since 1861, he and Grant had been in contact only in battle. The conference at Hampton Roads had come and gone since Grant told the Bishop of Arkansas that he would like to be a peacemaker and have a talk with Lee. He had not abandoned his vocation since the failure on the
River Queen.

Grant's confidant General Edward Ord, who had been in command at City Point when the peace commissioners arrived, was another friend of Longstreet's. On February 20, Ord sent Longstreet a note, purporting
to be concerned about commerce between pickets (a pastime as old as the war), and proposing to discuss it. Longstreet was sure that his friend had something else in mind. When they met the next day on neutral ground, Ord asked to see Longstreet alone. It may have taken two minutes for Longstreet to suggest how to stop the fraternization and Ord to accept it. Then they turned to other things.

Longstreet had been called Old Pete since his youth, an allusion to St. Peter's rocklike character, and Longstreet says Ord brought up the conference at Hampton Roads. Northern politicians were afraid to talk peace, Ord said. The only way to start was through the officers. On Ord's side of the lines they thought “the war had gone on long enough; that we should come together as former comrades and friends and talk a little.” In response, Longstreet made it clear that he and Lee knew the war was lost. It would be a “great crime” to prolong it. “Mr. Davis was the great obstacle to peace. . . .” Then Ord suggested a truce—that “General Grant and General Lee should meet and have a talk.”

Ord had more to say. Longstreet's wife and Mrs. Grant were friends. Mrs. Longstreet should visit Mrs. Grant at City Point with an escort of Southern officers. Mrs. Grant would return the call in Richmond, accompanied by Northern officers. While Grant and Lee were talking, their officers and ladies would be talking too, “until terms honorable to both sides could be found.” Longstreet said he would report the idea to Lee and the civil authorities. Then he wired his wife at Lynchburg and asked her to come to Richmond.

Horace Porter, another member of Grant's inner circle, understood the idea. The officers' chivalry would arouse goodwill, and “everywhere lead to demonstrations in favor of peace between the two sections of the country.” But according to Porter it was Longstreet's idea, too visionary to be taken seriously, though drowning men catch at straws. Perhaps they do, but the notion that Longstreet proposed it is challenged by a witness in a position to know, apart from Old Pete himself.

Julia Grant stepped out of her bedroom and into her husband's office one afternoon and found Ord there with him. “See here, Mrs. Grant,” her husband said. “What do you think of this?” (He knew very well what she would think of it.) General Ord had brought a suggestion that peace
might be had “through you.” Ord explained that he had gone to see Pete Longstreet—that pickets were trading newspapers for tobacco, running races together, and generally “on good terms”—and he thought it ought to stop. And then he had said to Longstreet, “Why do you fellows hold out any longer? You know you cannot succeed. Why prolong this unholy struggle?” To the best of Julia's memory, many years later, Ord
said it was
he
who had proposed the exchange of female visits. The idea delighted Julia, but she was sure it was not her husband's. She was eager to see Louise Longstreet and help make peace, but her husband only smiled and said no. The whole thing was unseemly. “It is simply absurd. The men have fought the war and the men will finish it.”

Grant's protests notwithstanding, it is all but inconceivable that Ord made an overture to the enemy for peace talks between Grant and Lee without Grant's knowledge, let alone a proposal that Grant's wife should receive Longstreet's and a bevy of Rebel officers at his headquarters. It would not have been the first time Ord protected Grant's flank.

Longstreet and Lee were called to Richmond to discuss Ord's overture. They met at night at the Executive Mansion with Davis and Breckinridge. They talked it through for hours and agreed that another meeting should be arranged. Longstreet urged Lee to ask to see Grant on “some irrelevant matter,” and “once they were together they could talk as they pleased.” Breckinridge was keen on the part assigned to the ladies.

On February 27, Grant sent Ord a message: He wanted to see Longstreet himself, but Ord should revisit him first. “[G]o tell him that you will try to arrange for an interview. . . .” Ord replied that night. A meeting had been set with Longstreet to discuss an exchange of civilian prisoners, and “had I not better have some definite proposition. . . .” Grant responded immediately: Since the meeting's “ostensible” purpose was a prisoner exchange, Ord should negotiate one. When Ord met again with Longstreet, Old Pete let him know that he and Lee were anxious for peace, but “nothing could be done with J. Davis.” Ord said Lee should write Grant and propose a meeting, so that “old friends of the military service could get together and seek out ways to stop the flow of blood.”