Our One Common Country (8 page)

The president brought forth his message on the state of the Union on December 6, and had it sent to Capitol Hill.
2
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The election had confirmed that the loyal people's purpose was never firmer, it said. Despite much debate over ways and means, not a single congressional
candidate
had proposed to give up the Union. The men and resources required to save it were “unexhausted, and, as we believe, inexhaustible.” The public will to reestablish federal authority in the South was unchanged, “and as we believe, unchangeable. The manner of continuing the effort remains to choose.” It was here on the matter of choice that Lincoln said something new.

“On careful consideration of all the evidence accessible, it seems to me that no attempt at negotiation
with the insurgent leader
could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union, precisely what we will not and cannot give. His declarations to this effect are explicit and oft-repeated. He does not attempt to deceive us. He affords
us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily re-accept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. Between him and us the issue is distinct, simple and inflexible. It is an issue which can only be tried by war, and decided by victory. If we yield, we are beaten; if the Southern people fail him, he is beaten. Either way, it would be victory and defeat following war.” [Emphasis added]

And then came the salient point: “What is true, however, of him who heads the insurgent cause is not necessarily true of those who follow. Although he cannot re-accept the Union, they can.” It was a call to the Southern people to ignore their elected leader. “They can, at any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms, and submitting to the National authority under the Constitution.” If they did, Washington could not keep warring on them even if it wanted to. The loyal people would not allow it. Any issues that remained would be adjusted by lawful means. Some were beyond the executive's power, which the end of the war would diminish. But pardons and remissions of forfeited property were within his control, and the people of the South could expect their liberal use. He had offered pardons a year ago to all but a few Rebel leaders. Even they had been told that they could earn one, and many already had. The door was still open. “But the time may come—probably will come—when public duty shall demand that it be closed” and “more rigorous measures” taken. The rigors were left unnamed.

The president set only one other condition for peace. “I retract nothing heretofore said as to slavery.” He would never revoke the Emancipation Proclamation, nor return to slavery any person freed by its terms, or by any act 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 their 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.”

Lincoln called on the lame-duck House to vote once again on the Constitutional amendment banning slavery, before the new Congress convened. The Republicans had run on an abolition platform. The people had been heard. Prompt, united action abolishing slavery forever would help win the war by erasing the evil that had caused it.

The Radicals loved it. Thaddeus Stevens was thrilled. Jacobin in chief in the House, the grim Pennsylvanian chaired the Ways and Means Committee, feeble at seventy-two, with a miraculous mop of dense brown hair that did his wig-maker no credit,
but sharp of wit and tongue. He would soon attack Andrew Johnson, whom a colleague would defend as a self-made man. “Glad to hear it,” Stevens would say, “for it relieves God Almighty of a heavy responsibility.” Stevens had been skewering Lincoln for years. Now he rushed to his side. The president had “never made much pretension to a polished education,” Stevens said, but no fault could be found in his message “that the war must go on without seeking negotiation,” and be waged until slavery was gone.

The president had said neither of these things. There were reasons why his message had been difficult to compose. It did not invite negotiations but nor did it preclude them, so long as they included reunion and no
backward
steps on abolition. It said not a word about fighting the South to the death, or warring until slavery was gone. In practical effect, the Emancipation Proclamation had only freed the slaves in the conquered parts of the Confederacy, and the Constitutional amendment banning slavery had not yet passed the Congress, let alone been ratified by the states. If peace came now, there was room for negotiation on the timing, particulars, and rewards of moving
forward
with abolition, a priority that Lincoln embraced but had always ranked second to the restoration of the Union.

In the end, Lincoln had invited Southern peacemakers to proceed where “the insurgent leader” would not go.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Wise Men Are Those Who Would End It

A week before Lincoln sent his message to Congress, Horace Greeley resumed his peace initiative in a letter to Preston Blair. “
You
have Mr. Lincoln's ear, as
I
have not, and can exert influence on every side where it is needed. Do urge and inspire him to make peace among our friends any how, and with our foes so soon as may be.”

On the same day, unbeknownst to Greeley, the brilliant Alabamian John A. Campbell, a former justice of the United States Supreme Court, now Assistant Secretary of War in Richmond, sent a letter to a friend, Justice Samuel Nelson of New York, a friend of Seward's as well, a good-hearted man with a judge's scowl. In 1861, Campbell and Nelson had worked with Seward to try to avert the war. Now Campbell would try to stop it, and no one was better qualified to achieve the unachievable.

John Campbell may have been the smartest man in America. He was surely the most diligent. The grandson of a Revolutionary War officer, he enrolled in the future University of Georgia at the tender age of eleven, graduated first in his class in three years, won a place at West Point at fourteen, and resigned to support his family when his father died. After he learned the law at the knee of a former judge, a special act of the legislature was required to admit him to the bar at the unlawful age of eighteen. Georgia was too sleepy to hold him. On his way to legal eminence before he was old enough to vote, he devoted himself to his practice in the thriving port city of Mobile, Alabama. A friend recalled him in his
twenties
as “absorbed in thought, with heavy brow,”
holding “all elegance and imagination in utter contempt, as unworthy of a practical man.”

His New Hampshire–born wife and thoughtful Alabamians were fond of him nonetheless, and comfortable with his quiet mien. They sent him to the legislature at the age of twenty-five. But a political career was not John Campbell's calling. The best that could be said of his most companionable moments was not especially engaging. “At times he is pleasant, and always respectful when it becomes necessary for him to converse.”

He was one of the South's leading lawyers before he was middle-aged. Induced by Jefferson Davis, Franklin Pierce appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1853. He was not yet forty-two. The Senate confirmed him unanimously, with the approval of the
New York Times.
He had argued controversially for the education of slaves and for banning the separation of their families. A year later, sitting as a trial judge in Mobile, he excoriated the illegal African slave trade and the “depraved” public sentiment that condoned it. In his native South, all of this brushed the edge of respectability. That said, he owned house slaves and laborers until 1858 and concurred in the infamous
Dred Scott v. Sandford
decision of 1857—a slave was not made free when taken into free territory. Slavery should be reformed and eliminated gradually, Campbell thought, but the federal government's “enormous pretensions” to take the issue from the states and territories were unconstitutional.

When Alabama seceded, against his stern advice, Campbell stayed on the Court and tried to heal the breach, for which he was pilloried in the South. A man without a country, his heart was with the Union but his state no longer was. When Davis sent envoys to Washington to discuss a peaceful parting, Campbell and Justice Nelson urged Seward to receive them. He wished he could, Seward said, but Lincoln would not permit it, for fear of implying recognition. Nevertheless, the president would relinquish Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, as the Southerners demanded, gaining time to negotiate reunion. Seward asked Campbell to speak with Davis's men and tell them so: “You might stop a civil war.”

Campbell called on one of the Rebel emissaries and vouched for Seward's pledge. His reputation suffered further when Lincoln decided otherwise. Convinced that Seward had betrayed him (an opinion he
would later change), Campbell resigned and went home to Alabama, “to follow the fortunes of my people.”

He met a cold reception. In July of 1861, the South Carolinian Mary Chesnut visited friends in Warrenton, Virginia, not far from Washington City. “We saw across the lawn, but not to speak to them, some of Judge Campbell's family. There they wander disconsolate, just outside the gates of their paradise. A resigned judge of the Supreme Court of the United States! Resigned and for a cause that he is hardly more than half in sympathy with. His is one of the hardest cases.” Later that month, shunned in Mobile and Montgomery as a Yankee collaborator, he moved his family to New Orleans and eventually to Richmond.

He did nothing to support the Confederacy until 1862, when he agreed to serve as Assistant Secretary of War, processing paper, advising the Secretary on minor legal issues, hoping to be useful in finding a peaceful settlement if the opportunity arose. He would later refuse a Cabinet seat. He would do what he could in a subordinate role, he said, but he was not among the men who had ruined his country, and he would take no leading role in their government. The best legal mind of his generation had become little more than a clerk with an overwrought title. The war that had split his country had wrecked his brilliant career.

In December of 1864, now fifty-three years old, Judge Campbell, as everyone called him, had not grown frivolous with age. The letter he wrote to his old friend Justice Nelson was neither impulsive nor unauthorized. Their mutual friend, the Confederate Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, had suggested it. Campbell shared a draft with Robert Kean, his War Department protégé, an articulate young lawyer and a Rebel Army veteran with shining eyes and a full mustache. Kean thought the letter too formal, which cannot have been a surprise. Campbell showed a revision to Hunter, then presented it to his superior, Secretary of War James Seddon, a courtly Virginia aristocrat and a former US congressman who had owned in the 1850s what was now Jefferson Davis's Executive Mansion. To the Blairs' dismay, the Yankees had burned Seddon's rural Virginia home in reprisal for the vandalism at Silver Spring.

Dark-eyed and drawn at the age of forty-nine, with long, salt-and-pepper hair, Sedden wore a skull cap that lent him the look of a Talmudic scholar. Like the mission he had led since 1862, he was reeling toward collapse. A diary-keeping War Department clerk named John B. Jones could see it. “His eyes are shrunken and his features have the hue of a man who has been in his grave a full month. He is an orator and a man of fine education, but in bad health, being much afflicted with neuralgia,” a debilitating disease of the nerves. Davis had the same affliction.

Willing to grasp at straws, Seddon showed Campbell's letter to Justice Nelson to Davis, who let the attempt be made. As peace overtures go, Campbell's began pessimistically. It had more than once occurred to him, he wrote, to approach his old friend to try to end the war. He had feared it would do no good, and expose them both to “misconstruction.” But a door had now been opened to “an intelligent reverend friend” who had just passed the lines of two Northern armies. An unnamed Union general had told this friend that he favored a candid exchange “between citizens of the different sections” (sections, as opposed to countries, must have slipped past Davis's eye) and had offered to try to facilitate a meeting. Campbell's own wish to settle things had not changed since he and Nelson had parted. He continued rather cryptically: “I can say to you now what I expressed then, that the consequences of such a peace I was ready to accept.” In the time appointed by Providence, “all that a good or wise man ought to desire” must result. Campbell offered to see Nelson and other mutual friends “in the U.S.” Justice Benjamin Curtis of Massachusetts had come to mind, along with Senator Ewing of Ohio and Secretary of War Stanton. If Nelson preferred to come to Richmond, Campbell would let him know if it could be arranged. Campbell would bring no authorized proposition. A simple exchange of views was all he had in mind. It might do some good; it could scarcely do harm. He authorized his friend to show the letter to whomever he saw fit, though he did not wish to give it unnecessary publicity.

Campbell had no illusions about its prospects, despite the support of Ulysses S. Grant, the general who had inspired it. While passing him through the lines, Grant had told Campbell's reverend friend, the Episcopal Bishop of Arkansas, that Lincoln would give the South much better
terms than its leaders might think, and Grant would like to talk with General Lee himself.

The Confederate secret signal service sent Campbell's letter to Washington. He never got an answer. “In lieu of this,” he said, “there came Francis P. Blair.”

On December 15, a letter from Horace Greeley flattered Blair once again. “You are an older, and doubtless an abler publicist than I,” closer to “our great ones.” Lincoln should have responded to the peace overtures that some North Carolinians had made in the Rebel Congress, perhaps by offering to buy the freedom of North Carolina's slaves in exchange for her return to the Union. “I believe
you,
if at Raleigh with large powers, could pull North Carolina out of the rebellion in a month.” The Confederacy could not last three months without her.

But Blair had a bolder idea. He was pondering a plan not merely to deplete the Rebels but to end the rebellion. Outright. No one had heard it yet—no one, at least, beyond the house of Blair.

That day and the next, the Rebel Army of Tennessee was all but destroyed near Nashville, recklessly led by John Bell Hood, who fought as his critics said he did, with a lion's heart and a wooden head. It was the war's only battle of annihilation, and it brought the end in sight. With Lee's army pinned and a fragment of Hood's on the run, the South's offensive weapons were gone. The news fell on Richmond like a safe. Congressman Lafayette McMullen of Virginia, a teamster in his youth and a respected former member of the US House, introduced a resolution demanding a peace commission. Reunion was not on the table but was under it.

On December 19, Lincoln kept up the pressure with a call for another 300,000 volunteers. Grant wired Sherman that day: “Jefferson Davis is said to be very sick; in fact, deserters report his death. The people had a rumor that he took poison in a fit of despondency over the military situation. I credit no part of this except that Davis is very sick, and do not suppose his reflections on military matters soothe him any.”

Blair answered Greeley's letter the next day: “To me it seems that the madmen are those who made this war. The wise men are those who
would end it.” In the ranks of the wise Blair included Horace Greeley. He was still under the influence of their meeting in New York, he said, and now felt emboldened to bring the president a plan. “I think I will hint it to Mr. Lincoln on Thursday, so far at least as to test his confidence in me, without which my project must be still born.” Completing the natal analogy, the old man signed off with a wink. “In the meantime, you will keep my suggestions as secret as illicit embryos ought to be and generally are.”