Our One Common Country (15 page)

Sherman and his vengeful army marched north out of Georgia into South Carolina that morning. On the day after that, the Rebel War Department clerk John Jones made an entry in his diary: “It is published in the papers that Mrs. Davis threw her arms around Mr. Blair and embraced him. This, too, is injurious to the President.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

We Are on the Eve of an Internal Revolution

As Blair made his way up Chesapeake Bay, reportedly in “a remarkably good humor,” Sunset Cox asked the House of Representatives in Washington to resolve that “now, in this hour of victory, which is the hour of magnanimity,” President Lincoln was duty-bound to send a peace commission south, or receive one from Jefferson Davis. Elihu B. Washburne, Lincoln's friend and Grant's patron, disagreed. Davis and his Congress had “again and again peremptorily and insultingly refused to entertain any overtures for peace.” Washburne thought it disgraceful to beg them to receive one now. Cox replied that this was the Republican Horace Greeley's proposition. It was laid on the table and died.

Blair's daughter, Lizzie, wrote joyfully to Phil that night. Her aged traveler had come home, “very tired and silent,” but pleased to have been “most cordially received by our old friends.” He was perfectly well but overwhelmed with excitement and fatigue. He had given his happy daughter just a “glimpse” of what was said in Dixie, and a message from Jefferson Davis. He would remember her in his prayers, “even when dying.” With her father safely home, Lizzie confessed to “no small sense of joy to know that he is in his own bed and sleeping with Mother by his side, happier than I have known her to be for some time past.”

Before he came to bed, the old man crossed the street and reported to Abraham Lincoln. To his pleasure, he would later tell a friend, Seward was
not there. They “did not draw well together,” and he doubted that the Secretary of State would support negotiations conducted over his head. After stopping Blair cold a few days ago when he started to say what he meant to tell the Rebels, Lincoln was eager to hear what the Rebels had told
him.
Blair handed him Davis's letter and the memorandum he had read to his friend—“Suggestions to Jefferson Davis,” he had titled it. Lincoln read the letter and scrawled a disclaimer on the Suggestions. “This paper first seen by me on this 16th day of January 1865. . . . I having had no intimation as to what Mr. Blair would say or do while beyond our military lines.” After he read it, Lincoln asked if Davis intended to send a copy to Napoleon III. It was not a good start. Blair said he had left Davis nothing to send.

Lincoln surely wanted Napoleon out of Mexico but had no intention of evicting him, least of all in league with Jeff Davis. “There has been war enough,” he would soon tell a French marquis. “I know what the American people want, but, thank God, I count for something, and during my second term there will be no more fighting.” Blair had opened a door, but “peace to the two countries” and a war against a third did not tempt Lincoln through it. What the president said to Blair about the Mexican plan is unknown, but given what Blair said and did thereafter, Lincoln must have told him he would consider it, or at least implied that he would, if only to humor the old man.

Blair's report on his meeting with Davis told Lincoln not much new, but his chats with Davis's enemies were intriguing. Davis would later surmise that the defeatists who had “gathered themselves unto him” had exposed the cabal to Blair, who in turn had revealed it to Lincoln, giving the enemy aid and comfort. Davis had it right. The old Jacksonian told Lincoln that nearly everyone he had spoken to was convinced that the cause was hopeless, and eager to find a way out. Lincoln surely thanked him and duly consulted Seward.

Arrangements were made that night to send Blair back to Richmond immediately.

The “glorious news of the capture of Fort Fisher” arrived the next morning, to the joy of Gideon Welles. The Cabinet was assembled, aglow with
the Rebels' loss of their access to the sea. By omission, Uncle Gideon's diary suggests that Blair's mission went unmentioned.

The
New York Times
was jubilant about Fort Fisher but no keener on peace talks than the Richmond press. “Unless the most explicit assurances in the highest quarters are utterly unreliable,” said the
Times
(which often spoke for Seward), neither Mr. Blair nor Mr. Singleton had gone to Richmond to negotiate with the Rebels. That Mr. Blair had grand ideas was likely, but he had gone on private business, with “no shadow of authority, direct or indirect, to say one syllable on behalf of the Government concerning terms of peace.” In fear, perhaps, that its president might go wobbly, the
Times
thought it wise to add that the people had just rejected the party seeking peace through negotiation, the “opposite plan” of the Lincoln administration, which “seeks peace and freedom
through war
more resolutely and more exclusively than before.”

As the
Times
was proclaiming that Blair's trip to Richmond had nothing to do with the president, Blair was preparing to return at his behest. On the following morning, Lincoln handed him a letter. He addressed it to Blair, as Davis had done in reverse, “with the view that it should be shown to Mr. Davis.” In response to the insurgent leader's invitation to bring peace to two countries, Lincoln poked a stick in his eye.

 

Sir: Your having shown me Mr. Davis's letter to you of the 12th instant, you may say to him that I have constantly been, am now, and shall continue ready to receive any agent whom he, or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country. Yours, etc., A. Lincoln

 

With no other legitimate title, “Mr. Davis” was only one “influential person” resisting the national authority. There were many of them in Richmond. If Mr. Davis would not send an agent to bring peace to our one common country (“informally” was penciled in as an afterthought, underscoring Davis's illegitimacy), some other influential person might. Lincoln was inciting a Gray Revolution, expecting if not instructing Preston Blair to make his letter known to the cabal that kept Davis awake at night.

Blair caught Greeley up on things. He would have written sooner, he said, but until he had been to Richmond he could not weigh his chances. “And now I have to content myself & you with the saying of the old sage that ‘all that is known is that nothing is known.' Still I can say to you my faith is strong that we shall have a happy deliverance, and that soon.” There was goodwill for it on both sides, but “formidable obstructions” too, which “selfish bad men will abuse to thwart peace.” (The miscreants' names and sections were left unspoken.) “I think your envoy has done much good,” but his work must be secret, and “if your head full of sagacity should penetrate it or should grasp it, I beg you not to divulge even your conjectures. I have
great hopes,
and would not hesitate to indicate something of their foundation to you but that I have pledged to be tongue tied.”

On the following day, as the Confederacy fought for its life, its Secretary of War left his post. The Virginia congressional delegation had demanded that Davis replace his entire Cabinet or face a vote of no confidence. Their fellow Virginian James Seddon, sickly, insulted, overwhelmed, took advantage of the chance to resign.

The congressional petition to make Lee general in chief kicked sand in Davis's face, though he had no choice but to endorse it. Lee's subordination to his president never wavered, despite his low opinion of Davis's military instincts, but the president's thin skin was pierced. When an ally who had voted for the petition called at the Executive Mansion, Varina confronted him hotly. “So you too, Mr. Henry, have turned against my husband?” The senator protested that the people required it, and the president should take comfort in knowing he did not deserve it. “I think I am the person to advise Mr. Davis,” Varina said, “and if I were he, I would die or be hung before I would submit to the humiliation that Congress intended him.”

Mr. Davis neither died nor was hanged, but the consequences for the Confederacy were worse. For the rest of its short life, its president and its Congress waged war against each other, to the conspicuous disadvantage of their war against the United States and any chance to negotiate a palatable end to the contest.

On Friday morning, January 20, just back from Savannah, Lincoln's Secretary of War told the Cabinet that, despite Sherman's lenient occupation and reports of the city's pacification, there were few loyal men there. The women were “frenzied, senseless partisans,” Stanton said. Gideon Welles suspected that “the Rebels are not yet prepared to return to duty and become good citizens. They have not, it would seem, been humbled enough, but must be reduced to further submission.” When would they come to their senses? If the fall of Savannah and Wilmington had not made them see reason, neither, perhaps, would the loss of Charleston and Richmond. “They may submit to what they cannot help, but their enmity will remain. A few weeks will enlighten us.”

The Richmond press fed Welles's fears. The
Whig
told its readers that no one in Georgia had any idea of abandoning the struggle “but a pack of sneaks in Savannah.” Their submission was surely encouraged by Sherman's surprising leniency and a committee of wealthy Philadelphians, who contributed to their relief.