Our One Common Country (25 page)

As the telegrapher sent Grant's wire, Eckert was on his way to Hampton Roads on the overnight steamer
Lady Long,
leaving Grant in possession of the field. It was past ten-thirty when the general circled back to the
Mary Martin.
Campbell had gone to bed, nursing a lingering ailment, but Stephens and Hunter were up. Stephens took note of Grant's “heavy brow,” and the three of them talked past midnight.

The
New York Times
correspondent was hovering by the wharf, wondering what the Southerners were up to. “It was expected that early this morning they would take their departure down the river, but up to this time of writing, midnight of the 1st, the
Mary Martin
is still at her station. This has, of course, given rise to all sorts of speculations; many wondering whether these gentlemen have, after all, come here in any authoritative capacity to act; and whether their visit is not going to terminate here.”

Not if Grant could help it. He was working with Stephens and Hunter in the
Martin
's saloon. How to get past Eckert? How to get around one country, or two? How to get Lincoln to the table, where anything might
happen? After midnight they had a plan and a letter. Stephens served as scrivener:

 

February 2, 1865

Maj. THOMAS T. ECKERT,

Aide-de-Camp

 

MAJOR: In reply to your verbal statement that your instructions did not allow you to alter the conditions upon which a passport could be given to us, we say that we are willing to proceed to Fort Monroe, and there to have an informal conference, with any person or persons that President Lincoln may appoint, on the basis of his letter to Francis P. Blair of the 18th of January ultimo [1865], or upon any other terms or conditions that he may hereafter propose, not inconsistent with the essential principles of self-government and popular rights, upon which our institutions are founded.

It is our earnest wish to ascertain, after a free interchange of ideas and information, upon what principles and terms, if any, a just and honorable peace can be established without the further effusion of blood, and to contribute our utmost efforts to accomplish such a result.

We think it better to add, that in accepting your passport we are not to be understood as committing ourselves to anything, but to carry to this informal conference the views and feelings above expressed.

 

Very respectfully, yours, etc.

Alexander H. Stephens, J. A. Campbell, R. M. T. Hunter

 

Grant seemed delighted with the letter and said it should satisfy Major Eckert. Then he purported to take it to Eckert, who was on his way to Fort Monroe. After a suitable interval, Grant returned with what looked to Stephens like “an anxious disquietude upon his face.” He delivered the bad news first, with a straight face. Major Eckert was still not satisfied. But the good news outweighed the bad. Grant had decided on his own responsibility to send the commissioners to Fort Monroe, where Mr. Seward might agree to see them. He asked them to be ready
in the morning. There was no need to pack. They would go on the
Mary Martin.

Grant bid them good-night, taking their letter with him. Then he summoned Colonel Babcock, handed the letter to him, and told him not to wire it to Fort Monroe, but to take the commissioners there in the morning and hand their letter to Eckert, too late for the major to prevent them from arriving literally and figuratively on common ground with Seward.

On Thursday, February 2, Preston Blair's daughter teased her husband. “The world is all agog about the peace commissioners,” Lizzie wrote. “There is an odd game going on which would excite you not a little if I dared write it, but as I cannot, I will only say that Father thinks you would enjoy it.”

That day, Rhode Island and Michigan became the second and third states whose legislatures ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, beating Maryland to the punch.

At 9:00 a.m., the
Lady Long
arrived at Hampton Roads and delivered Major Eckert to Fort Monroe. He presented himself to Seward, handed over his correspondence with the commissioners, and declared that he had turned them away. As Eckert and Seward prepared to return to Washington, a message was on its way to Seward from Grant, who had wired it at 9:00 a.m., knowing it would take time to be transcribed and delivered: “The gentlemen here have accepted the proposed terms and will start for Fort Monroe at 9:30 a.m.” The wire said no more, and the gentlemen's late-night note to Eckert was not included, leaving no way to question whether they
had
accepted Lincoln's terms, and no time to stop them before they left.

At 10:20 a.m., unaware that they were coming, Eckert wired Stanton the news he had tried to transmit from City Point—that he had sent them back to Richmond. They were on their way to Hampton Roads as the telegrapher tapped it out.

After breakfast, the president had walked over to the War Department and read Eckert's message that the commissioners' response was not satisfactory. He was about to recall Seward when he read Grant's wire to Stanton of the night before, as Grant had known he would—the one about how sorry Grant was that the president would not see them, for “their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and union.” It moved him.

The Southerners had been standing with their aide Colonel Hatch on the
Mary
Martin
as her boiler made steam for the run to Fort Monroe when the General in Chief of the Army came pounding down the stairway almost at a run. He was “beaming with joy” as Stephens caught sight of him, waving a ribbon of telegraph paper, shouting to his coconspirators. “Gentlemen! It's all right! I've got the authority!” In his hand was a wire from the president. Almost out of breath, Grant read it aloud on the paddle wheeler's deck. “Say to the gentlemen I will meet them personally at Fortress Monroe as soon as I can get there. A. Lincoln.” The president had wired Seward as well. “Induced by a dispatch of General Grant, I join you at Fort Monroe so soon as I can come.”

Lacking Grant's gift for brevity, Stephens would later say that the general congratulated them “with evident indications of high gratification.” Then Hunter pushed his luck. “Well, General. How about Colonel Hatch, our secretary. Will he be permitted to go or not?” Grant reflected for a moment. Lincoln had agreed to meet “the gentlemen,” the general said, by which he clearly meant the commissioners. Grant would take no more liberties with his orders. “We've had a great deal of trouble already.” He turned to Colonel Hatch with the ease of a brother soldier. “We'll send these gentlemen down to Fortress Monroe to make peace while you and I go up to Varina to see about the exchange of prisoners.” Varina, Mrs. Davis's coincidental namesake, was the place south of Richmond where prisoners were often traded. As Assistant Commissioner of Exchange, Hatch would soon learn that Grant wanted him out of a job. The general was willing to exchange
all
prisoners, officer for officer, man for man, until one side exhausted its supply.

Then Hunter asked to bring another uninvited guest. “How about Mr. Stephens's body servant?” Mr. Stephens was “just out of a bed of
illness and cannot travel without him.” The general turned to Stephens. “Is he white or colored?”

“He is colored.”

“Is he slave or free?”

“He is a slave.”

“Are you not afraid he will run away [and] make his escape from you?”

“Not at all. I have no apprehensions of the sort.”

“Well, then,” the general said, “I take the responsibility.”

As the
Mary Martin
pulled away for Hampton Roads with a parting blast of her steam whistle, the commissioners' mood had shifted from despair to excitement. When they had fallen into bed the night before, their mission had been half-dead. Now something might be done, but hope was a burdensome gift. “We were no diplomatists,” as Hunter would later say. In the space of less than twenty-four hours, they had been asked to end the war and had set off to try, with almost no direction from their delusional president. In their scant time alone, they had barely absorbed their task. “We had formed no particular scheme of negotiation, no definite line of policy . . .” Apart from their shared ambition to secure a truce—to give the South room to breathe and both sides time to regain their senses—they had not even reconciled their own divergent thinking.

For Hunter, the Mexican scheme was nonsense, but if Blair had it right that the North would fight on regardless of cost, the South had no chance, and neither did two countries. Hunter thought that “any limitation of the range of discussion was unwise and inexpedient,” but the senator agreed with Davis that reunion was too high a price for peace. He was going to Hampton Roads to learn what the enemy was thinking and to try to get a truce. Given Davis's mandate to reject reunion, he “never supposed that we were authorized to treat for peace . . . and if we had been, none of the Confederate commissioners, in my opinion, would at that time have accepted peace on the condition of reunion. I certainly would not.”

He was wrong about Campbell and Stephens.

Judge Campbell's mind was clear. The Mexican scheme was a pipe dream, the demand for two countries absurd. The war was lost, slavery
was dead, reunion was inevitable. The questions were when and how. The South could be conquered and crushed or rejoin the Union with honor, though shorn of many prewar advantages. Hoping only for the latter, Campbell wished to hear Lincoln's proposals for reconstruction, “and the rights that would be secured to the Southern states in the event that one should take place.” He put his hopes for peace not in Lincoln and Davis but in Grant and Lee. The Northern and Southern people would accept terms from them that they would take from no one else. Once the fighting stopped, “old habits of communion and profitable trade” would return, and a rekindling of good feeling and self-interest could produce a peaceful reunion that politicians could not achieve.

Hunter and Campbell shook their heads over Stephens's eccentricity. To Hunter, Stephens seemed “possessed” with the thought that the North might agree that the states should realign as they wished. On the way to Hampton Roads, Stephens told Campbell he had given up on the Confederacy. Its internal divisions and Davis's destructive policies were wounds that would not heal. In the end, another union might form, but not necessarily the old one, though Stephens did not oppose its reconstruction. He never had. The alignments that the states might choose were not the essential thing. What mattered was their sovereignty, and “Constitutional Liberties.” Whatever civil unions they might join or put asunder were secondary. A marriage for love would vindicate all that Stephens held dear. A shotgun wedding would not.