Our One Common Country (42 page)

On May 4, General Gorgas made an entry in his Richmond diary. “The calamity which has fallen upon us in the total destruction of our government is of a character so overwhelming that I am as yet unable to
comprehend it. I am as one walking in a dream, and expecting to awake. I cannot see its consequences, nor shape my own course, but am just moving along until I can see my way at some future day. It is marvelous that a people that a month ago had money, armies, and the attributes of a nation should today be no more, and that we live, breathe, move, talk as before—will it be so when the soul leaves the body behind it?”

Epilogue

 

The Southerners after the War

 

JEFFERSON DAVIS

On May 10, 1865, the 4th Michigan Cavalry captured Davis and his party near Irwinville, Georgia. He tried to escape. His own escorting cavalry were absent, scouting nearby, but federal troopers fired on each other in confusion. Two more men lost their lives to Jefferson Davis's refusal to surrender.

He was charged with treason and imprisoned at Fort Monroe in a cell overlooking Hampton Roads. His jailers tacked a huge American flag to the wall. He fought them physically when they shackled him. Preston Blair asked President Johnson to ease his treatment. Thaddeus Stevens offered his legal services, which Davis declined, not for lack of confidence in the Jacobin congressman's abilities, but because he proposed to argue that the Confederacy was a conquered principality, and captured princes are not hanged for treason. “That would have been an excellent argument for me,” Davis said, “but not for my people.”

After two years in jail, he was freed on a bond that Horace Greeley helped raise. The charges were later dropped. True to his word, he refused to seek a pardon or swear allegiance to the United States, and never regained his citizenship. “He had not changed his beliefs in the least degree,” Varina said, and “could not honestly express the contrition he did not feel.” He accepted the presidency of the Carolina Life Insurance Company,
traveled in Europe, wrote a bitter, carping memoir and
A Short History of the Confederate States of America.

When Alec Stephens's book on the war assigned the failure of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference to him, Davis called Hunter “my hope for truth and justice.” After Hunter's account appeared, Davis dismissed it as lies, senility, and “sophomorian twaddle,” and condemned its “injustice to the heroic mothers” of the South, who would not have flinched at sacrificing their sixteen-year-old sons. Hunter replied that Davis knew little about mothers.

Years after the fact, Davis still smarted over Lincoln's reception of his envoys on a riverboat instead of at the White House. He faulted the commissioners for it. He had instructed them to “proceed to Washington City,” and this they had failed to do.

Reviled in the South during his presidency, he was glorified in defeat. He spoke at many Confederate memorial ceremonies, not including the dedication of a statue of Lee in 1883. He canceled his appearance when he learned that General Johnston would chair the event. “I could not with due self-respect appear before a meeting over which he was to preside.”

In 1878, an Episcopal minister wrote to Davis from Virginia, still struggling with the outcome of the war: “I know that we were right,” he said, “and I know that God permitted our overthrow, but I do not know how to reconcile these facts.” Davis had heard it many times before. God's favor required not only that a cause be righteous, he replied, but also that it be righteously defended. “Had we succeeded, how well and wisely we would have used our power was made questionable by various manifestations in the last twelve months of the war. . . . Perhaps the furnace to which we have been subjected was necessary for our purification. Has it not been shown by the result that we were more right than even our own people knew? And the world may now learn how faithless, dishonest, and barbarous our enemies were.”

The Jefferson Davis Highway still connects Washington to Virginia, one of many such monuments to his name. He died at the age of eighty-one, in 1889. “In the greatest effort of his life,” Varina said, he failed from the predominance of some of his “noble qualities . . . his courage, integrity, and devotion to duty. . . . His family who survive him were engulfed in the common disaster and utter ruin, but are proud of his record, and hopefully await the verdict of posterity.”

 

VARINA DAVIS

Educated in Philadelphia, Varina Davis was fond of saying that her grandfather had been Governor of New Jersey and her mother a Virginian, which made her a proud “half breed.” Left widowed with scant resources, she declined a house politely when the city of Richmond offered her
one, and moved with a daughter to Manhattan. She composed a graceful memoir of her life with Jefferson Davis, submitted charming essays to Joseph Pulitzer's
New York World,
and made a good living with her pen. In an article published in the
World
in the first year of the twentieth century, she called Ulysses S. Grant a humanitarian and “a great man” and declared that God “in his wisdom” had decreed the survival of the Union. After meeting her by chance at a Hudson Valley resort, she befriended Julia Grant “with the sympathy of one who has suffered in a like way.”

A sought-after figure in the city's social life, she enjoyed a daily carriage ride through Central Park and died in 1906 in a room overlooking it, but chose to be buried in Richmond, where her tombstone reads, “At Peace.”

 

JOHN CAMPBELL

Three weeks after Lincoln's assassination, Grant had Campbell arrested on suspicion of abetting it. An officer's letter to Davis implicitly offering to kill Lincoln had been found in the Confederate archives. Davis had sent it to Judah Benjamin, who forwarded it to Campbell, who sent it “for attention” to the adjutant general, who reviewed all officers' letters. The judge was arrested at home in the night and taken out in irons in the presence of his terrified wife. No one told him why. He was cleared of the assassination but accused of leading General Weitzel into “the grave misconduct” of recalling the Virginia legislature. Lincoln, it was said, had intended no more than to gather individuals to help restore order.

Campbell wrote to Attorney General Speed from his prison cell in Georgia. General Weitzel was with him on the
Malvern,
he said, and heard the president speak. “It never entered into my imagination to conceive that he used the word ‘legislature' to express a convention of individuals.” The notion was in fact absurd, and his friends Justice Curtis and Justice Nelson persuaded President Johnson to release him. “I have retained a strong regard for him,” Curtis wrote, “founded on his purity and strength of character, his intellectual power, his great attainments, and his humane and genial nature. . . . ”

After Campbell was freed, he wrote in gratitude to Curtis, making no attempt to glorify his attempts to stop the war. “I do not pretend to have done more than to accept conditions that were inexorable,” he said; and
as for the war's results, “I concur in the policy of abolishing negro slavery throughout the United States. I regard the revolution as the most radical and momentous that has ever occurred in any country.”

The judge moved his family to New Orleans, where he built a successful law practice and returned to the Supreme Court to argue several cases. In 1878, he ran into Jefferson Davis on a New Orleans street. Davis wrote home to Varina about it. Judge Campbell had “hesitated as if about to speak,” Davis said. “I looked over his head and passed on. I want no controversy with any one, but, hating treachery, must repel a traitor.”

Campbell died in 1889 at the age of seventy-seven. No highways are named for him.

 

ROBERT M. T. HUNTER

Unlike Alec Stephens, Hunter had not charmed Grant, who ordered him arrested with other “particularly obnoxious political leaders in the State.” General Halleck objected: “Hunter is said to be at his home advising all who visit him to support the Union cause.” Lincoln had recommended against disturbing him. “I would prefer not to arrest him unless specifically ordered to do so.” Grant saw the wisdom of Halleck's view, and acquiesced in Hunter's liberty, but Hunter was soon arrested and imprisoned with Campbell nonetheless, at Fort Pulaski in Georgia, and charged with treason.

Campbell told Hunter that Lincoln had expressed admiration for him on the
Malvern,
and respect for his influence in the South, and had thought aloud to Campbell that he might have hammered out with Hunter “some proposition which would bring the warring sections together,” had they been able to reconvene. “Whether this is the case or not, I do not know,” Hunter later said, “but I have always regretted that circumstances prevented our meeting at that time.”

In July 1865, Hunter wrote to a daughter from his cell (another teenage daughter had recently died of consumption): “Mr. Seward wrote to me that he would soon call the attention of the President to my case. . . . Your mother says very little of the farm and nothing of the mill. . . . Perhaps there was nothing pleasant to say, but still I would like to hear.” Two days earlier, his youngest son had drowned at the age of fifteen, swimming with other boys.

A month later, Seward took Mrs. Hunter to see the president, who ordered her husband's release. He devoted himself to farming and his studies, barely making a living. A friend said, “Mr. Hunter regarded it as his duty to accept the union in good faith” and wished to help restore it. “It was deeply unfortunate that this sentiment was not at once recognized and acted on by the dominant party, instead of adopting, as they did, the policy of hate, military rule, and disenfranchisement.”

In 1870, James M. Mason, a grandson of the founding father George Mason, wrote to Davis, teasing Hunter in absentia for his somnolent retirement. “He is buried at his plantation on the lower Rappahannock, entirely out of the world and difficult to disinter,” but he might be dug up for a reunion with Davis. No record survives that Davis showed any interest.

The legislature made him Treasurer of Virginia in 1874. He was defeated for reelection in 1880. In the following year his mill burned down, his youngest daughter died, and the rebuilt mill burned down again. He was seventy-two years old. Grover Cleveland made him Collector of the Port of Tappahannock, Virginia, in 1885. It gave him a bare living. He died two years later, at the age of seventy-eight. Friends solicited contributions to move his remains to Richmond and build a monument at his tomb. For lack of public interest, they failed to raise the money.

Over half a century later, in 1942, the United States Navy launched the liberty ship USS
Robert M. T. Hunter,
which served in World War II and Vietnam.

 

ALEC STEPHENS

At a family reunion in Georgia soon after the tragedy at Ford's Theatre, John Stephens showed his uncle the letter that Lincoln had written, returning his nephew to him. “I almost wept over the letter when I saw it,” Alec said. On May 11, 1865, federal troops came for him at Liberty Hall. His last conversation with Davis took place on a steamer taking prisoners to Hilton Head. Stephens found Davis “far from cordial.” They shared some empty pleasantries.

Stephens was jailed in Boston Harbor, not knowing if his life would be spared. Purporting to express “the universal opinion of the army,”
General Custer had just called for “the extermination” of all senior Rebel leaders. Little Alec's old friend Lincoln had promised mercy. Now his old friend was dead. Stephens kept a prison diary. “My whole consciousness, since I heard of President Lincoln's assassination, seems nothing but a horrid dream.” Frightened but well treated, he received kindly visitors from Boston, flowers from his jailor's daughter, courage from General Richard Ewell, a one-legged prisoner hobbling on crutches who said he was waiting to see if he would hang before he bought a prosthesis, in which case he did not care to go to the expense. On the first day of summer, Stephens recalled from behind bars Jefferson Davis's prediction at the African Church that Lincoln and Seward would know by the summer solstice that when they spoke at Hampton Roads they were speaking to their masters. Now, Stephens wrote, “I am, with him and thousands of others, a victim of the wreck.”

Released after five months, with help from Grant and Seward, Stephens led a reconciliation movement and was sent back to Congress in 1872. According to a newspaperman, not much had changed. “An immense cloak, a high hat, and peering somewhere out of the middle a thin, pale, sad face. How anything so small and sick and sorrowful could get here all the way from Georgia is a wonder. If he were laid out in his coffin, he needn't look any different, only then the fires would have gone out in the burning eyes.” He served five postwar terms and spoke at the same podium with Congressman James Garfield, a Union war hero and a future martyred president, at the presentation in the Capitol of a painting of Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation with his Cabinet about him, Seward in the most prominent place, Montgomery Blair behind him, Uncle Gideon looking stern in his bad white wig. The painting hangs there still.

Most of Stephens's former slaves stayed on as tenant farmers. His law-breaking decision to teach them to read and write was rewarded in their letters. A daughter of Harry, his freed plantation foreman, wrote him soon after he returned to Congress. “My Dear Master Alex,” she began. “My dear friend. I am ashame of my self for not writing to you before now. I was waiting to get over my crying spell. The reason I did not write to you it was not because I had forgot you, it was because it made
me feel so sad to think that you was so far from home. . . . I wish you was hear. . . . With much love I remain your friend, Dora Stephens.”

An elderly former slave wrote a letter to him in 1878, recounting the infirmities of several of her peers: “Dear old Master. I am well at this time and hope this letter may fine you the same. . . . I want to see you mighty bad if I never see you no more I hope to meet you in heaven where sickness and trials are done away with. . . . I will close by saying God bless is my pray. Your truly friend, Jane Colborne.”

Stephens was elected governor of Georgia in 1882. “The one criticism recorded of his administration,” an early biographer said, was his “excessive use of the pardoning power.” He died in office in 1883 at the age of seventy-one. After one final illness.

 

JOHN L. STEPHENS