Our One Common Country (9 page)

The embryo had its origins in forty-three years of intimacy between Preston Blair and Jefferson Davis. At the age of thirteen, young Jeff had been sent to Preston's alma mater, Transylvania University in Kentucky, where Preston and Eliza Blair, who lived not far away, took a liking to the boy and tucked him into their nest. In 1845, when he came to Washington City as a newly wedded congressman, the Blairs were there to greet him. Eliza introduced Varina to society as Frank introduced Jeff to their fellow Democrats and mentored his career. The two families rented summer cottages together in the mountains at Oakland, Maryland, where Montgomery's daughter had saved Varina's life when she fell into convulsions, or at least Jeff thought she had. Preston's daughter Lizzie's wartime letters to her husband, Admiral Phillips Lee, made discreet, sympathetic allusions to “our Oakland cronies.” In the crisis of 1860, with their men on opposite sides, Lizzie had gone to visit Varina and heard her call to a servant. “That's the Blairs' carriage. Don't let any of them in but Mrs. Lee.”

Now Lizzie lamented for the South. “I cannot for an instant divest myself of feeling that they are my people, my countrymen; mad men as they are, my heart aches for them.” Two months into the war, Mary Chesnut whispered a scandal to her diary. “A Richmond lady told me under her breath that Mrs. Davis had sent a baby's dress to her friend Mrs. Montgomery Blair,” whose thank-you note promised friendship to the grave, though the men might kill each other. Mrs. Chesnut did not know whether to believe it.
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Jeff Davis was no friend of Montgomery's (neither man was flush with friends), but their wives were close. In 1859, when Montgomery all but gave the Davises his Silver Spring house for the summer, Jeff wrote his mother about Montgomery's generosity. “What guarantee he offered for keeping the peace with me I did not learn.” Montgomery's own mother, Preston Blair's wife, thought better of Jeff than Montgomery did. Two years
after
the war, she would call Jefferson Davis one of the greatest men she ever knew. One of the greatest who ever lived.

From its floor-to-ceiling windows, President Lincoln's commodious office on the second floor of the White House overlooked the stable and outbuildings that cluttered its back lawn, the unfinished stub of the Washington Monument, and the enemy state of Virginia, subdued as far as the eye could see. His friend Noah Brooks says the room was “furnished with green stuff, hung around with maps and plans with a bad portrait of Jackson” presiding over the mantle. It comfortably accommodated the table where the president seated his Cabinet; his pigeonhole desk, pushed up against a door; and assorted Victorian furniture, oversized and overstuffed. An American eagle hearth rug lay before the elaborate fireplace.

Crudely rendered or not, Andy Jackson's craggy face glaring down on Abraham Lincoln's must have warmed the scheming heart of Francis Preston Blair. They met beneath Old Hickory's gaze on Thursday, December 22, as Blair had told Greeley they would. By way of introduction to his embryonic plan, the Old Gentleman reminded Lincoln of his friendship with Jefferson Davis. “At the proper time, I might do something towards peace.” Lincoln stopped him before he got started. “Come to me after Savannah falls.” Blair surely grasped the point. When Sherman took Savannah and was ready to march on Richmond, peace and a pledge of amnesty might look better than war and the noose to most of the men who ruled there, and the men who ran the US Congress might see less weakness in it.

That very day, Sherman sent Lincoln a message that took two days to reach him. “I beg to present you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about 25,000 bales of cotton.”

In a captured Savannah mansion, Sherman made his plans to burn his way up through the state that had started it all. He sent a wire to the War Department on December 24. His army was bent on “vengeance upon South Carolina,” he said. “I almost tremble at her fate, but feel that she deserves all that seems in store for her.” With Charleston's rail lines cut, the city was “dead and unimportant.” Sherman would leave the Charlestonians to their misery and keep moving north, the Rebels having shifted half of their available forces to her defense and the other half to Augusta's, leaving Sherman an open path between them.

After dark that Christmas Eve, the unseated Senator Orville Hickman Browning came to Lincoln about getting their friend James Singleton through to Richmond to buy cotton. Browning had invested in the venture. Knowing that Singleton would be seeing influential men in the Rebel capital, Lincoln described to Browning his letter “To Whom It May Concern” in the Niagara Falls fiasco just as Singleton had. Its meaning had been misconstrued, he said. He had never intended to demand abolition as a condition of peace.

“The despondent Christmas of 1864” was a trial for the people of Richmond. Worried parents sang carols with their children and listened for the rumble of cannon borne in on the southern wind. When Varina Davis was told that the Episcopalian orphanage for girls had been promised a festive Christmas and “one pretty prize for the most orderly girl,” she marshaled thin resources. A confectioner pledged “the simpler kinds of candy.” With less than lavish charity, the Davis children contributed eyeless dolls, three-legged horses, “monkeys with all the squeak gone.” To reward the model orphan, one of the household slaves suggested a dollhouse, and built one. Varina and her mother and friends made furniture of pasteboard and twigs.

The Army of Northern Virginia was making do as well. On Lee's orders, the War Department clerks drew lots to determine which half of them would go to the front. Secretary Seddon told one sickly loser to stay.
Another was sent to a medical board to be judged for his fitness to man a trench for a few days. “Great commotion” ensued, said their colleague John Jones, “and it is whispered that General Lee was governed in the matter by the family of the President, fearing a Christmas visit from the negro troops on this side of the river.”

On a bleak Christmas Day, Richmond's finest families sat down to humble dinners and counted vacant chairs. The
Examiner
's Edward Pollard observed how low they had fallen. Socialites “in old finery, in which the fashions of many years were mingled, were satisfied to make a display at Saint Paul's about equal to the holiday wardrobes of the Negroes at the African Church.” On Christmas Day, Judge Campbell's friend and subordinate Robert Kean bemoaned the disasters that had “filled the land with gloom.” Lee's army had no meat; “not a pound remained in Richmond.” The War Department was “totally broken down,” and Congress seemed alarmed. “The truth is we are prostrated in all our energies and resources.” Lee left word for the president that a barrel of precious sweet potatoes, a Christmas gift for the Davises, had been sent to him instead. The error had gone undetected until the general took a few for himself and sent the rest to his hungry men.

On a festive Christmas morning, the people of Washington City woke up to the squeals of their children and the boom of celebratory cannon. The news had arrived that Sherman had emerged from the ruined heart of Georgia and finished his march to the sea. Lincoln sent him a wire. “Many, many thanks for your Christmas gift, the capture of Savannah.” The president confessed he had been “anxious, if not fearful” about the wisdom of Sherman's march through Georgia, supplied by whatever he could rip from her people, out of contact for over a month, and now the general had proved himself right. “But what next? I suppose it will be safer if I leave Gen. Grant and yourself to decide.”

Sherman moved north the next day. His bummers' rape of Georgia had been a mere rehearsal for what they would do to South Carolina. “We marched with thousands of columns of smoke marking the line of each corps,” a division commander said. “The sights, at times, as seen from
elevated grounds, were often terribly sublime,” despite painful thoughts of “the distressed and frightened condition of the old men and women and children left behind” in midwinter. Many years after the war, Sherman would concede that the Georgians in his path “bore their afflictions with some manliness,” but in South Carolina, “the people whined like curs.”

Congressman Samuel S. Cox, also known as Sunset Cox, was a dapper Ohio War Democrat and a scourge of the Lincoln administration. His lush Victorian rhetoric was excessive even for its day. A florid ode on a setting sun had earned him his sardonic nickname. To mix zoological metaphors, Sunset Cox was no Copperhead but had lately become a lame duck. He had lost his seat in November after accusing the Republicans of a “miscegenation plot” to solve the race issue through “interbreeding.” It was too much even for southern Ohio.

Before he left office, Cox hoped to do his country a final service by accomplishing nothing less than ending the Civil War. Sometime during the holidays, having forgotten or forgiven the miscegenation plot, he enlisted a fellow Democrat, Congressman John T. Stuart, to go with him to see Lincoln and urge him to ask Richmond what terms it might accept. Cox did not pick his companion at random. Stuart represented Springfield, Illinois, and had been the president's law partner.