Our One Common Country (31 page)

An awkward pause ensued. The Southerners may have felt their collars tighten. Then Hunter summoned the nerve to look Lincoln in the eye. “What you are saying, Mr. President, is that we of the South have committed treason, that we have forfeited our rights, and that we are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that what your words imply?”

If the gentleman from Virginia was expecting reassurance, he was disappointed. “Yes,” Lincoln said. “You have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it.”

There was, to say the least, another uncomfortable pause. Then Hunter broke the tension. In an odd sort of way, Lincoln's anger had cooled his own. “Well, Mr. President,” he said, “we suppose that would necessarily be your view of our case, but we have about concluded that we will not be hanged as long as you are President—so long as we behave ourselves.” Lincoln took it as the compliment Hunter intended. His face surely gave him away. A few days later, a friend saw it clearly when he repeated what the Virginian had said. Stephens took the chance to soften him further when someone mentioned an Illinois congressman who had gone to the Mexican War. Little Alec recalled two congressmen from that state who had differed on how to pronounce it. One said “Illi-noy,” the other, “Illi-noise,” and John Quincy Adams had been asked to adjudicate.
Considering the state's politicians, the crusty former president said, it ought to be called “All Noise.” Lincoln enjoyed the story, as Stephens knew he would.

Now Lincoln turned to a more agreeable topic than oak trees and necks: compensation for the slaves in return for their freedom, a salve for Southern pride, an analgesic for surrender. With the war caused by slavery still raging, almost within earshot, the president told his enemies that the people of the North were as responsible for slavery as the people of the South. The North had “abetted it,” he said, “traded in it, and defended it, until slavery became a vast, public question and invited war.” Northern shippers brought the slaves from Africa and sold them to Southern planters. He did not add, though he knew it to be so, that Northern investors, manufacturers, and merchants had profited from slave-picked cotton and tobacco ever since, and the people of the North consumed them. He would take back nothing he had done to advance abolition as far as it had gone, but if the war ended now, with a
voluntary
emancipation, he for one “would rejoice to be taxed on my own little property” to help slave owners bear the cost, and he believed that feeling was widely shared in the North. More than merely saying that the victors should pay the vanquished to abandon the sin of slavery, the commander in chief of the triumphant Union armies was sharing the weight of the sin. Future presidents would help the people of defeated nations whose evildoing had led to war. None would share blame for the evil.

The Southerners may have been glad to hear Lincoln's confession, but they gave him no absolution. They seem to have sat in silence. Of course, Lincoln said, only Congress makes laws and appropriations. He could provide no assurances, no stipulations; he could only express his views and his understanding of those of others. But he believed that a fair compensation of $400 million could be had. He was willing to recommend it to Congress. “You would be astonished were I to give you the names of Senators and Representatives who have told me this could be done” if the war ended now, with no more expense, with a voluntary abolition of slavery. Horace Greeley supported it too.

“These observations were incidentally made,” Campbell would later say, “and did not seem to have any reference to the general subject. They were not intended apparently as the ground of any proposition.”

Seward took them seriously enough. What happened next was a display in the presence of the Davis administration of a fundamental rift in Lincoln's. What the president had told these Rebels was so startling that his Secretary of State bolted from his chair and paced the colorful carpet as he disavowed it, a habit in moments of intensity. “The United States has already paid on that account,” he said, having spent so much on the war and suffered such losses.

Lincoln stayed calmly seated. “Ah, Mr. Seward,” he said. “You may talk so about slavery if you will, but if it was wrong in the South to hold slaves, it was wrong in the North to carry on the slave trade, and it would be wrong to hold onto the money that the North procured by selling slaves to the South, without compensation, if the North took the slaves back again.”

The governor threw up his hands, figuratively if not literally. The Northern people were weary, he said (another frank confession). They wanted peace and harmony. He believed they
would
pay a price for the slaves “equal to the cost of continuing the war.” He was not so indelicate as to speak of the cost of winning it.
7
*

As Stephens would later recall, rather than generating more discussion, the compensation overture produced a silent pause, “as if all felt that the interview should close.” In the end, as Judah Benjamin had foretold, it had all broken down over Lincoln's demand for reunion and Davis's refusal to consider it.

Judge Campbell picked up an impression that Lincoln and Seward had sincerely hoped an agreement could be made, and were disappointed that the commissioners offered none—no terms of their own, or even a pledge to return with any. The Mexican fantasy aside, they brought nothing to the table but a vague idea that a truce and renewal of trade would shoot tendrils across the border and eventually draw the “two countries” into some sort of voluntary reorganization. It was far from good enough.

The meeting had lasted about four hours when Stephens brought it to a close. It seemed that their mission would be entirely fruitless, he said, unless something could be done by way of a prisoner exchange. Lincoln said he favored one, and invited the Southerners to raise it with Grant when they passed through City Point on their way back to Richmond.

“Well, Stephens,” Lincoln said, “there has been nothing we could do for our country. Is there anything I can do for you personally?”

“Nothing,” Stephens said. And then he thought of something. “Unless you can send me my nephew, who has been twenty months a prisoner on Johnson's Island,” a famously uncongenial prison camp for Southern officers on Lake Erie.

“I shall be glad to do it,” Lincoln said, “if you will send back one of our young lieutenants. Let me have his name.” When Stephens happily obliged, the president wrote it down and asked considerate questions about Lieutenant John A. Stephens and his family.

Little Alec was reluctant to leave without a final effort to salvage something of broader consequence than his nephew's liberation. Perhaps, he thought, Lincoln had felt constrained by the publicity the conference had generated, and might revisit the Mexican idea after things had settled down. “I wish, Mr. President, that you would reconsider the subject of an armistice on the basis which has been suggested. Great questions, as well as vast interests, are involved in it. If, upon doing so, you shall change your mind, you can make it known through the military.”

As Stephens heard him, Lincoln answered “with a peculiar manner very characteristic of him” before they wished each other farewell. “Well, Stephens, I have thought it through maturely. I will reconsider it, but I do not think my mind will change, but I will reconsider.” Lincoln's sympathy for the suffering Southern people had been plain to Judge Campbell, who was moved and encouraged by it. He would take it back to Richmond and build on it.

In their own brotherly parting, Hunter put a wistful question to Seward. The Capitol's magnificent dome had been under construction when he had left it four years ago. “Governor,” he asked, “how is the Capitol? Is it finished?” Seward said it was, and described its grandeur with feeling.

And now the reluctant enemies “took their formal and friendly leave of each other,” as Alec Stephens called it. Lincoln and Seward withdrew together first, but not before Seward took his old friend by the hand. “God bless you, Hunter,” he said.

Major Eckert wired Stanton at three o'clock. The conference was over. The presidential party was preparing to return. “We shall leave here on steamer
River Queen
at 4:30 p.m.” Eckert wired Grant at the same time: “The President directs me to say that Mr. Stephens had some conversation with him on the subject of prisoners, and that he referred the matter to you, and desires that you confer with Mr. Stephens on the subject. The interview has concluded and both parties preparing to return.” The major did not enlighten the general on the results.

At about dusk, the
River Queen
parted gently from the
Mary Martin
and turned toward Chesapeake Bay for the run back to Annapolis. The faster
Thomas Collyer
followed and soon overtook the
River Queen,
bearing two of Grant's generals.

Judge Campbell would soon report, as a thing to be commended, that the conference had been conducted “with gravity and without levity,” but Seward could not resist a touch of levity in the end. As the
River Queen
pulled away, a black man in a rowboat approached the
Mary Martin
with a basket of champagne and a note with the governor's compliments. The Southerners waved their handkerchiefs at Seward, who stood on the deck of the
River Queen
waving back, shouting at them through a boatswain's trumpet.

“Keep the champagne! Return the Negro!”

Part III

A Suffering and Distracted Country

Photograph of Abraham Lincoln taken on Sunday, February 5, 1865, two days after the Hampton Roads Peace Conference

Meserve-Kunhardt Collection, Library of Congress

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It Is More Dangerous to Make Peace Than to Make War

The
River Queen
docked at the Naval Academy pier early on Saturday morning, awash in a sea of rumors. Lincoln and Seward rebuffed a crowd of newspapermen, leaving hope to feed on gossip. On the
River Queen
herself, the crew had spread the word that a thirty-day truce was in place. No one knew for sure. Everyone wished to know—some more than others.

The B&O Railroad supplied a private car to take the president and his party to Washington City. As Major Eckert later told it, an acquaintance approached him on the platform and handed him an envelope. If he shared what he knew, there was something for his trouble inside. He took it with a noncommittal word, asked his benefactor to wait, and joined Lincoln on the train. When the envelope was opened, the major and the president beheld a certified check for $100,000, made out to Thomas Eckert—fifty years' pay for a major. Who had done this? Lincoln asked. Eckert did not feel at liberty to say, but the president might watch and see for himself. When Eckert disembarked and returned the check, Lincoln recognized its donor, a well-known player from a western state. Lincoln took Eckert's advice and let it go. No good could come of exposing it.

When the presidential train chugged into Washington City, the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, as the press had begun to call it, was widely understood to have ended the war, until Seward summoned the Associated Press to his State Department office, adorned with books and engravings and not much else. The peace talks had failed, he said. All
rumors to the contrary were false. The stock market rose in New York and Lincoln's stock rose in the capital. With conquest in their grasp, the Jacobins were relieved that the president had not made peace. Some Democrats thought better of him for trying.

As soon as he was free of Lincoln and Seward, Eckert reported to Stanton and threw his hands up high. “Mr. Secretary, you are heads and shoulders above them all!”

The war had resumed in Virginia, where the
Times
reported a twelve-mile race near Petersburg on that lovely, false spring day. A company of “colored cavalry” had chased a dozen guerrillas tricked out in captured blue. All but two escaped, but their leader was dropped from his horse with an ounce of lead in his stomach. A sergeant rode up to the writhing man, one Johnny Roach by name, who shot at him and missed. When a bullet in the leg failed to take the fight out of him, the sergeant clubbed him to death with his carbine, saving the authorities the trouble of hanging him.

On the siege line that day, a Georgian named William Sharp took a bullet in the knee and lost his leg to a saw. The officer leading his company, a lieutenant named Levy, was hit too. It took him a day to die.

On the floor of the US House, Thaddeus Stevens assured his fellow Jacobins that peace was not at hand. As Sunset Cox had promised, many Democrats threw in with Lincoln and victory, the Rebels having rejected peace and reunion. Thaddeus Stevens and Fernando Wood were in the same tent, and so was Horace Greeley, but an Illinois Republican wanted more. Lincoln and Seward had barely gotten back when Congressman Ebon C. Ingersoll declared that no enduring peace could be made “which shall ever recognize the traitorous leaders of this rebellion as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal rights, privileges, and immunities with the loyal people thereof under the Constitution of the United States.”

Seward wrote home to his wife in Auburn. “I wish I were able to give you an account of our conference at Hampton Roads but it is mail day today and I can only write so much as shall show that I do not forget to write to you altogether.” He did let her know that the state of the South was “pitiable, but it is not yet fully realized there.”

The president summoned his Cabinet for a short noon briefing. He and Seward described their encounter with the Rebel leaders. It was more than merely civil, they said. Something might yet come of it. They had surely talked it through on the long trip home. Gideon Welles had a sense that it was likely to tend to peace, which Lincoln said he thought he could negotiate better than any agent. Lincoln and Seward said the commissioners had named no terms that could bring the South back, but had not ruled it out. They had made no demands for liberty or death, Jefferson Davis style. Peace had been left dangling on a tantalizing hook. Uncle Gideon could see that Lincoln and Seward hoped to find a way to grasp it. “I have not brought back peace in a lump,” the president told James Singleton, “but I am glad I went down, and hope for good results.”

Alec Stephens's hopes had been vindicated. Lincoln had not given up on peace. No halfway step would do, and surely no foreign invasion, but the very idea of negotiation—giving something to the South in
exchange
for reunion instead of simply demanding it, saving thousands of young lives, all of them American, promoting the national healing that was Lincoln's dearest wish—had already been put into play. In the meantime, the pressure would be kept up. At a quarter past noon, Stanton sent a wire to Grant: “The President desires me to repeat that nothing transpiring with the three gentlemen from Richmond is to cause any change, hindrance, or delay of your military plans or operations.” Grant assured Stanton he had nothing to fear: “The appearance of Mr. Stephens and party within our lines has had no influence on military movements whatever.”

Later that day, a dozen Southern officers were huddled by a stove with the wind whipping off Lake Erie when a soldier in blue appeared at the bunkhouse door and called out “John A. Stephens!” When a wary Georgian replied, he was told to report to the commanding officer. He would have been handsome had he not been undernourished. Captured in the fall of Port Hudson, Louisiana, in 1863, Stephens knew the ropes. Nothing good could come of this.

His anxiety turned to amazement when the commandant handed him a telegram addressed to the officer in command of the Johnson's
Island prison camp: “Washington, D.C., February 4, 1865. Parole Lieutenant John A. Stephens, prisoner of war, to report to me here in person, and send him to me. It is in pursuance of an arrangement I made yesterday with his uncle, Hon. A. H. Stephens. Acknowledge receipt. A. Lincoln.”

Alec Stephens had been a second father to John, whose natural father had a wife and six children, a failed law practice, and a weakness for whiskey. His older half brother Alec gave him lectures and loans. Neither did long-term good. In 1854, John came to live with his Uncle Alec, who enrolled him in the local academy and paid for it. When the boy's father died, Alec moved his widow and her other five children across the state, bought them a house near his, and cared for them as his own. Now he had smiled on John again. In a state of disbelief, the lieutenant gathered his meager possessions and said his ambivalent good-byes. He was led to a sleigh, wrapped in a buffalo robe, and pulled across Lake Erie by a pair of army mules to a train bound for Washington City. A celebratory jingle of bells dispelled the numbing cold.

The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher wrote to Lincoln that night from his parsonage in Brooklyn. He had read the late editions, and their meeting at the White House had eased his reverend mind. “Even your unexpected visit to Fort Monroe did not stagger me.
It has been much criticized.
The
pride of the nation
is liable to be hurt. Anything that looks like the humiliation of our Government would be bitterly felt,” though “going
to
the rebels is an act of condescension which
will stop the mouths of Northern enemies.
” The country's leading Christian signed off with a warning that “it is more dangerous
to make peace than to make war.
An address to the army, or to the nation, declaring
that peace can come only by arms,
if in your judgment the fact is so, would end these feverish uncertainties & give the spring campaign renewed vigor.”

The commissioners had reached City Point on Friday night, several hours after the peace conference, and spent their last evening on the
Mary
Martin
commiserating with Grant. When they told him that Lincoln had encouraged a prisoner exchange, the general repeated what he had told their aide Colonel Hatch. He would approve a universal exchange immediately, with a few individual exceptions, of which General Roger A. Pryor was one. Hunter would later tell Sarah Pryor that the commissioners had remembered her husband but could not secure his freedom. He was too big a fish to catch and release.

The commissioners left City Point on a Saturday-morning train. Heading up their honor guard, Grant's staff officer Horace Porter chatted with Stephens on the jolting ride back to the front. The little Georgian “was greatly disappointed at the failure of the conference,” Porter thought, but “prudent enough not to talk much about it.” The artillery duel that had started on Tuesday as the commissioners crossed the lines had gone on killing sporadically as they reminisced with Lincoln and Seward on the
River Queen.
It was still in progress now, greeting them on their return as it had on their arrival, mocking them with death.

A lieutenant from Alabama returned to the trenches that day after an absence of some duration, disturbed to find “an intense feeling of insubordination among our men . . . this feeling I fear pervades the whole army. . . . The men speak openly of the ‘muskets having the power' and of their determination not to submit to military authority much longer.” Later that week, more than two hundred men would desert one brigade in a single night.