Our One Common Country (6 page)

The dashing John Breckinridge had a good sense of humor, good political skills, and a good Kentucky family. Eliza Blair was his cousin. She had nursed his dying father. In 1850, the Blairs had welcomed Breckinridge to Silver Spring as a newly elected congressman. With no little help from them, he had risen in his thirties to become James Buchanan's vice president, the youngest in American history. As the Southern Democrats' presidential nominee in 1860 at the age of thirty-nine, Breckinridge took Maryland and Delaware from Lincoln, as well as the Deep South. He loved Silver Spring and the Blairs. He was crushed by what his men had done to them.

When Lizzie got home a few days later, shaken servants told her what had happened. She wrote her husband, Phil, that the house had been the scene of “a perfect saturnalia.” One drunken Rebel had danced in her father's red velvet wrapper, another in the butler's uniform, a third in a lady's riding habit. The vandals had drained a barrel of bourbon, cleaned out the larder, absconded with the poultry. “All the kitchen utensils have gone to Dixie.” Oddly, the horses and crops were untouched. Gone were the mules, a pony, a donkey with its cart, all of Preston's clothes, and “the presents of a lifetime,” as the Old Gentleman would later say. The lawn was strewn with rags left behind in poor exchange. Books and papers were torn and scattered. The pommels had been cut from the ladies' saddles for the sheer enjoyment of the thing. The maids' humble finery was in tatters. A servant named Olivia had fled in terror, permanently, she said. Lizzie hoped Olivia's husband, Harry, would not choose to follow her. Preston had just sold Lizzie and Phil a lot adjoining Blair House for a thousand dollars, declining to take the money unless he needed it someday. He took it now.

A note had been left on the library mantel: A Confederate officer, “for himself & all his comrades,” apologized for the pilfering, though federal officers had permitted “darker crimes” in the South. Another note was leaning on a photograph of Emma Mason, a Virginian who had married General Frank Wheaton, the Rhode Islander whose troops had repelled Early's raid. “A confederate officer has remained here until after eleven to prevent pillage & burning of the house because of his love of Mrs. Wheaton who found in this home good & true friends.”

A neighbor informed the Old Gentleman that Rebel officers who dined at her table told her Breckinridge had saved Silver Spring. He had called it his place of refuge, and “made more fuss about things there than if they had belonged to Jeff Davis.”

Jubal Early had barely left Silver Spring when a procession of blue-ribbon committees and blue-blooded Republicans descended on Lincoln and urged him to yield the presidency to a better man. Horace Greeley was one of the instigators. Lincoln told his Cabinet that “Greeley is an old shoe,” valuable in his day but lately grown “so rotten that nothing can be done with him. He is not truthful; the stitches all tear out.”

In the summer of 1862, a series of enemy victories had nearly broken the president's spirit. “I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.” In the summer of 1864, it was his friends who were driving him to despair, less than four months before the election, with the fate of the Union in the balance.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Only Way to Make Spaniels Civil Is to Whip Them

In August of 1864, Seward's alter ego, Thurlow Weed, pronounced Lincoln's political death sentence. The people were “wild for peace,” he told Seward, and their leader would not give it to them. His reelection was “an impossibility.” Lincoln thought Weed was right.

On August 17, the president composed an answer to a letter from a Wisconsin editor who supported the war on secession but not a war on slavery. To abandon abolition, Lincoln wrote, would ruin the Union cause. “All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men in our service would instantly desert us. And rightfully too. Why should they give their lives for us, with full notice of our purpose to betray them?” Besides, the Rebels refused to abandon their cause on
any
conditions. If Davis would accept reunion, “saying nothing about slavery, let him try me.” If Lincoln was considering such an overture, he could not bring himself to say so. He drafted the letter twice and filed it away unsent.

On August 22, the
New York
Times
's publisher Henry Raymond told the president that his friends in every state said the tide was setting against him. He had no stauncher friend than his home state congressman Elihu B. Washburne, who told him the stunning truth. If the election were held today, Lincoln would lose Illinois.

Attributing the disaster to the military stalemate—with Grant bogged down at Petersburg and Sherman unable to punch his way through to Atlanta—and a public misimpression that reunion could be had were it not for abolition, Raymond urged the president to offer the Rebels peace
on the sole condition of accepting the Constitution, every other issue to be solved at a convention. If they agreed, the war would be over, the Union restored, and Lincoln reelected. If they refused, as they surely would do, the people of the North would salute the flag and return their commander in chief to his post. The next day, Lincoln drafted instructions to Raymond to go down to Richmond and inquire of Jefferson Davis whether he would like to accept reunion, all other issues to be adjusted peacefully. His aide John Hay would later say that he was stating the proposition to make Raymond “a witness of its absurdity.” Perhaps so. Perhaps not.

If Lincoln had been wavering, he called Raymond and the rest of the Republican National Committee to the White House and stopped. They were panicky. Lincoln steadied them. Sending envoys to Richmond to yield on slavery would be worse than losing the election, he said. It would give it up cravenly in advance. The Radicals would abandon him. The platform on which he had been nominated would be scrapped. His promises to the blacks would be broken. At about the same time, he told two White House guests that he would never let Negro troops be reenslaved as the price of reunion. If he did, “I should deserve to be damned in time and eternity. Come what will, I will keep my faith with friend and foe.”

More than worth fighting for, abolition was worth losing for. The election would run its course. If the Rebels came to the table while Lincoln was president, peace with honor would be considered. Peace with slavery would not.

Everything changed on September 2 when Sherman took Atlanta, two days after the Democrats nominated McClellan on a peace platform. “All Yankeedoodledom is clapping hands and flinging up caps as though there were no longer a ‘live rebel' in all America,” a Northern paper raved. Sherman was said to have kicked in the South's back door with Grant hunkered down on its porch.

In a brilliant war of maneuver at the head of the Army of Tennessee, the badly outnumbered General Joseph E. Johnston had been making Sherman pay for every step toward Atlanta. At loggerheads with Johnston since West Point, Davis had replaced him in July with John Bell
Hood, an old friend of Sherman's whose useless left arm and missing right leg were badges of reckless bravery. Hood wasted lives in suicidal charges, then destroyed ammunition and supplies, abandoned Atlanta, and withdrew his broken army, shedding deserters along the way. Davis shrugged it off. His people knew better. Mary Chesnut was the wife of a former US senator from South Carolina. “No hope,” she told her diary, “we will try to have no fear.”

On September 20, Davis left Richmond on a whistle-stop tour in an effort to rally his people. His rhetoric was delusional and stunningly indiscreet. The
Philadelphia Inquirer
called it “so damaging to the Rebel cause that attempts are being made to raise doubts as to its authenticity.”

He spoke in Macon, Georgia, on September 23, openly appealing to deserters to return. “To the women, no appeal is necessary. They are like the Spartan mothers of old. I know of one who had lost all her sons, except one of eight years. She wrote me that she wanted me to reserve a place for him in the ranks.” On September 26, he proceeded from self-parody to self-destruction, revealing Hood's plans to recapture Tennessee, giving Sherman time to thwart them. Three days later, Davis replied to the First Tennessee Infantry's serenade in Palmetto, Georgia, with the mind-­boggling admission that “there are on the books of the war department at Richmond the names of a quarter of a million deserters, yet you, my brave soldiers, captains all, have remained true and steadfast.” When he visited Hood the next day, a chipper officer urged his men to give the president three cheers and a Rebel yell. “Give us Johnston,” they shouted. “Give us back our leader!”

Davis addressed the Alabama legislature on September 29. He would have preferred a military role, he said. He had made some mistakes in the role thrust upon him. His earnestness made him rigid when he thought he was right. But if half of Hood's deserters returned, they would drive Sherman back to his masters in a month. The more he thought about the war, the more confident he became. Victory was “the surest element of strength to a peace party.”

Then he met with General Richard Taylor, President Zachary Taylor's son, a Skull and Bones man at Yale. Hood's army was in great spirits, Davis said. Taylor advised him that a leader should beware of being told
what he wanted to hear. Hood was incapable of reaching Tennessee, Taylor said. He could only hope to survive the winter. A letter from a captain of the 38th Alabama arrived at the Executive Mansion in Davis's absence. Hood's men had “a fixed, ineradicable distrust” of him, the captain said. Their morale could not be lower. Davis's home state senator James Phelan wrote two days later. Mississippi was awash with deserters, some in armed bodies, intimidating politicians, defying arrest. The “infernal Hydra of Reconstruction is again stirring its envenomed head in our State.”

At the Columbus, Georgia, depot, Davis belittled critics who cried for peace and kept their distance from the front. He assured an Augusta crowd that the South was stronger than when the war began. He would welcome negotiation, but there was no alternative to independence. An invincible ally gave him confidence. “I believe that a just God looks upon our cause as holy, and that of the enemy as iniquitous.” When he spoke in Columbia, South Carolina, schoolchildren were let out for the occasion. The South would prevail, he told them, and “every man who does not live to see his country free will see a freeman's grave.” Some were misinformed that “we are not stronger today than when we began this struggle.” Others were willing to reconstruct the Union. He was glad they were scorned in South Carolina. He had sought an honorable peace, but every overture had been met with insolence. Did anyone imagine that the Yankees could be conquered in retreat, “or do you not all know that the only way to make spaniels civil is to whip them?” He brought good cheer from Hood's army, he said, which had grown since Atlanta had fallen. Sherman would be limping back north in a month. It was only natural that Hood's retreat had produced some despondency, “but as I approached the region occupied by our troops, the hope increased, until at last I found in the army the
acme
of confidence itself.”

Poorly fed, clothed, and led, the South Carolinians cheered.

On November 7, the day before the Yankee election, Davis told his Congress that independence was not negotiable. No one was surprised. Then he spoke the unspeakable. If the South must accept subjugation or make soldiers of its slaves, he saw “no reason to doubt what should then be
our decision.” Shock waves rolled out from the capital. The South had declared its independence to preserve its slaves. Now Davis would free its slaves to preserve its independence. The war of secession that had ruined his country and killed six hundred thousand of her sons had become an end in itself.

The once-handsome city of Richmond was rusty and unkempt. In the winter months to come, the coldest in recent memory, the city would be rife with beggars, many of them women and children. To the shame of a young Rebel officer, the poorer classes would be “scantily clad in every kind of makeshift garment.” Hungry men and women lacking overcoats, subsisting on bacon and peas, would talk of peace “with their teeth chattering.” Rats, mice, and pigeons would disappear from the streets.

One hundred twenty-five miles to the north in Washington City, Seward wrote his wife: The Rebels were exhausted and did not know it. Lincoln's reelection would make them conscious of it.