Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (154 page)

Jefferson Davis did something to neutralize the southern propaganda victory by his response to a simultaneous but less publicized peace overture. This one was borne to Richmond by two northerners: James R. Gilmore, a free-lance journalist, and James Jaquess, colonel of an Illinois regiment and a Methodist clergyman who carried a sword in one hand and an olive branch in the other. Although conferring on them no official status, Lincoln permitted them to pass through the lines with the renewed hope that they could smoke out Davis's intransigent peace terms. This time it worked. The Confederate president agreed reluctantly

29
.
CWL
, VII, 451; Clay and Holcombe to Jefferson Davis, July 25, 1864, in Nelson,
Bullets, Ballots, and Rhetoric, 67; New York Tribune
, July 22, 1864.

30
. Clay to Judah P. Benjamin, Aug. 11, 1864, in
O.R.
, Ser. IV, Vol. 3, pp. 585–86; Greeley to Lincoln, Aug. 9, 1864, Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

to meet with the Yankees; he expected no substantive results, but he had his own peace movement to contend with and could not appear to spurn an opportunity for negotiations. Davis and Secretary of State Judah Benjamin talked with Gilmore and Jaquess on July 17. The northerners informally reiterated the same terms Lincoln had stated in his reconstruction proclamation the previous December: reunion, abolition, and amnesty. Davis scorned these terms. "Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals," he declared. "We have committed no crime. . . . At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war. . . . We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE and that, or extermination, we will have. . . . You may 'emancipate' every negro in the Confederacy, but
we will be free
. We will govern ourselves . . . if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames."
³¹

With Lincoln's agreement, Gilmore published a brief report of this meeting in northern newspapers. His account appeared at the same time as the story of Greeley's meeting with rebel agents at Niagara Falls. After all the publicity, no one could doubt that Davis's irreducible condition of peace was disunion while Lincoln's was Union. This served Lincoln's purpose of discrediting copperhead notions of peace
and
reunion through negotiations. As the president later put it in a message to Congress, Davis "does not attempt to deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept 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."
³²

But in the dejected state of northern morale during August, Democratic newspapers were able to slide around the awkward problem of Davis's conditions by pointing to Lincoln's second condition—emancipation—as the real stumbling block to peace. "Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,"

31
. Several versions of Davis's exact words appeared subsequently in print—three of them by Gilmore in the
Boston Transcript
, July 22, 1864, in the
Atlantic Monthly
, 14 (Sept. 1864), 378–83, and in James R. Gilmore,
Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War
(Boston, 1898), 261–73; and one by Judah P. Benjamin in a circular to James M. Mason, "Commissioner to the Continent," Aug. 25, 1864, in
O. R. Navy
, Ser. II, vol. 3, pp. 1190–95. Although these versions varied in wording, they agreed in substance. The quotations here are mainly from the version accepted by Hudson Strode,
Jefferson Davis, Tragic Hero: 1864–1889
(New York, 1964), 76–81. See also Kirkland,
Peacemakers of 1864
, 85–96.

32
.
CWL
, VIII, 151.

according to a typical Democratic editorial. "Is there any man that wants to be shot down for a niger?" asked a Connecticut soldier. "That is what we are fighting for now and nothing else." Even staunch Republicans condemned Lincoln's "blunder" of making emancipation "a fundamental article," for it "has given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief."
³³
Henry J. Raymond, editor of the
New York Times
and chairman of the Republican National Committee, told Lincoln on August 22 that "the tide is setting strongly against us." If the election were held now, party leaders in crucial states believed they would lose. "Two special causes are assigned to this great reaction in public sentiment,—the want of military success, and the impression . . . that we
can
have peace with Union if we would . . . [but that you are] fighting not for Union but for the abolition of slavery."
³⁴

These reports filled Lincoln with dismay. He denied that he was "now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done." Lincoln pointed out to War Democrats that some 130,000 black soldiers and sailors were fighting for the Union: "If they stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept." To abandon emancipation "would ruin the Union cause itself. All recruiting of colored men would instantly cease, and all colored men now 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? . . . Abandon all the posts now possessed by black men, surrender all these advantages to the enemy, & we would be compelled to abandon the war in 3 weeks." Besides, there was the moral question: "There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee [a battle in Florida in which black soldiers fought]. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will."
³⁵

33
.
Columbus Crisis
, Aug. 3, 1864; Henry Thompson to his wife, Aug. 17, 1864, quoted in Randall C. Jimerson, "A People Divided: The Civil War Interpreted by Participants," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1977, p. 131; Strong,
Diary
, 474.

34
. Raymond to Lincoln, Aug. 22, 1864, in
CWL
, VII, 517–18.

35
. These quotations are from the draft of a letter to a Wisconsin War Democrat dated August 17 and from notes taken by one of two Wisconsin Republicans who talked with Lincoln on August 19. A modified version of these notes was published in the
New York Tribune
, Sept. 10, 1864.
CWL
, VII, 499–501, 506–7.

This seemed clear enough. But the pressure to back away from a public commitment to abolition as a condition for negotiations grew almost irresistible. At the same time Lincoln was well aware of a move among some Republicans to call a new convention and nominate another candidate. The motive force of this drive was a belief that Lincoln was a sure loser; but many of its participants were radicals who considered his reconstruction and amnesty policy too
soft
toward rebels. These crosscutting pressures during August made Lincoln's life a hell; no wonder his photographs from this time show an increasing sadness of countenance; no wonder he could never escape that "tired spot" at the center of his being.

Lincoln almost succumbed to demands for the sacrifice of abolition as a stated condition of peace. To a War Democrat on August 17 he drafted a letter which concluded: "If Jefferson Davis . . . wishes to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me." While he pondered whether to send this letter, the Republican National Committee met in New York on August 22. Speaking through Henry Raymond, they urged Lincoln to send a commissioner
"to make distinct proffers of peace of Davis . . . on the sole condition of acknowledging the supremacy of the constitution
,—all the other questions to be settled in a convention of the people of all the States." This would be a public relations gesture, said Raymond, not a real abandonment of emancipation. For "if it should be rejected, (as it would be,) it would plant seeds of disaffection in the south, dispel all the delusions about peace that prevail in the North . . . reconcile public sentiment to the War, the draft, & the tax as inevitable
necessities."
Lincoln authorized Raymond himself to go to Richmond and "propose, on behalf [of] this government, that upon the restoration of the Union and the national authority, the war shall cease at once, all remaining questions to be left for adjustment by peaceful modes."
³⁶

Having gone this far, Lincoln pulled back. On August 25 he met with Raymond and convinced him that "to follow his plan of sending a commission to Richmond would be worse than losing the Presidential contest—it would be ignominiously surrendering it in advance." Whatever the purport of this ambiguous statement, recorded by one of Lincoln's private secretaries, Raymond did not go to Richmond nor did

36
.
CWL
, VII, 501, 518n., 517.

Lincoln send his "let Jefferson Davis try me" letter. His peace terms remained Union
and
emancipation. The president fully anticipated defeat in November on this platform. "I am going to be beaten," he told an army officer, "and unless some great change takes place
badly
beaten." On August 23 he wrote his famous "blind memorandum" and asked cabinet members to endorse it sight unseen: "This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards."
³⁷

Lincoln expected George B. McClellan to be the next president. McClellan was the most popular Democrat and the most powerful symbol of opposition to Lincoln's war policies. The only uncertainty concerned his position on the peace plank to be submitted by Vallandig-ham, chairman of the resolutions subcommittee of the platform committee. Although McClellan had endorsed a copperhead candidate for governor of Pennsylvania the previous year, he was widely known as a War Democrat and in a recent address at West Point he had seemed to sanction the cause of Union through military victory. This caused the Peace Democrats to look elsewhere, though they could apparently find no one except Thomas Seymour of Connecticut, who had lost the gubernatorial election in 1863, or Governor Horatio Seymour of New York—who refused to be a candidate. Nevertheless, the peace faction would command close to half of the delegates and might jeopardize McClellan's chances by bolting the party if the convention nominated him. Behind the scenes, McClellan's principal adviser assured doubters that "the General is for peace, not war. . . . If he is nominated, he would prefer to restore the Union by peaceful means, rather than by war." McClellan himself reportedly told a St. Louis businessman on August 24: "If I am elected, I will recommend an immediate armistice and a call for a convention of all the states and insist upon exhausting all and every means to secure peace without further bloodshed."
³⁸

37
. John G. Nicolay and John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: A History
, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), IX, 221; William Frank Zornow,
Lincoln and the Party Divided
(Norman, Okla., 1954), 112;
CWL
, VII, 514.

38
. Samuel L. M. Barlow to Manton Marble, Aug. 24, 1864, S. L. M. Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; James Harrison to Louis V. Bogy, Aug. 24, 1864,37. Clement C. Clay Papers, National Archives, quoted in Kinchen,
Confederate Operations in Canada
, 93. If McClellan really did say this, it represented a reversal of his position from two weeks earlier, when he rejected advice that he should write a letter suggesting an armistice, and commented: "These fools will ruin the country." McClellan to W. C. Prime, Aug. 10, 1864, McClellan Papers, Library of Congress.

Doubts about McClellan's peace credentials persisted, however, so the party "bridged the crack" between its peace and war factions by nominating the general on a peace platform and giving him as a running mate Congressman George Pendleton of Ohio, a close ally of Val-landigham. Scion of an old Virginia family, Pendleton had opposed the war from the start, had voted against supplies, and expressed sympathy with the South. The platform condemned the government's "arbitrary military arrests" and "suppression of freedom of speech and of the press." It pledged to preserve "the rights of the States unimpaired" (a code phrase for slavery). On these matters all Democrats could agree. More divisive (but adopted almost unanimously) was the plank drafted by Vallandig-ham: "After four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war. . . [we] demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the states, or other peaceable means, to the end that, at the earliest practicable moment, peace may be restored on the basis of the Federal Union."
³⁹