Our One Common Country (33 page)

As lives and limbs were being lost at Hatcher's Run, Davis sent his Congress the peace commissioners' report. An accompanying message of his own supplied the missing vitriol. For a bit of extra flavor, he stirred in flat untruths. The Yankees had insisted that the South must accept their Constitutional amendment banning slavery and the right of the federal Congress to legislate Southern race relations. It was moved in the Senate
that a thousand copies be made. The number was increased to five thousand. The
Richmond
Enquirer
observed that Mr. Lincoln's solicitation of negotiations followed by insults was “quite within the decency of the Yankee” and had opened everyone's eyes. Also on that day, Davis wrote to Stephens's nemesis Benjamin Hill and reported the US Congress's enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, “which disposed of” any question of peace and made a mockery of the ill-fated conference.

Alec Stephens would soon tell Seward that “no one could have been more chagrined and mortified than I was” by the show Davis made of its failure. The day was set aside for war rallies in Richmond. As the
Examiner
's Edward Pollard said, the papers called them “a triumph, a resurrection, a regeneration of the war no longer to be doubted.” Shops were closed. Business was suspended. Three speakers' stands were built in different parts of the city and a procession of distinguished orators, led by a marching band, passed through the streets to fill them. The cheering went on until dusk and started up again after supper.

The papers were saying Alec Stephens was going home to incite his fellow Georgians to continue the war. Grant sent the news to Stanton with a hint of betrayal. The papers had it wrong. Alec Stephens was going home, but not to beat the war drum. Alec Stephens was done. Bloody speeches would be made in Richmond that night, and Davis had asked him to participate, but Stephens could not urge his people to do “what I believed to be impossible, or to inspire in them hopes which I did not believe could ever be realized.”

The keynote speeches were set to begin at seven-thirty at the First African Baptist Church, an old wooden building on College Street, but a multitude had gathered by noon. According to Edward Pollard, the African Church's size endeared it to politicians who had long been in the habit of appropriating it for mass meetings, “as if there was no invasion of sanctity of so lowly a house of God as that where Negroes worshiped.” By five o'clock, two and a half hours early, the white folk of Richmond had taken every foot of its standing room. The balconies were so packed that fears were expressed about their collapse. After the church was filled, a crowd began to grow outside, causing many to regret that the cold and the snow had persuaded the rally's organizers not to stage it in Capital Square.

When a lane had been cleared for the speakers, they were led by Jefferson Davis, sick and gaunt in an old gray suit. His appearance was unannounced, and he found himself buoyed by cheers.
With him came Virginia's eccentric governor, William “Extra Billy” Smith, an old Jacksonian postmaster who had earned extra pay expanding the rural mail service. Extra Billy spoke first, interrupted by thunderous support when he told his aroused constituents that Virginia “would sacrifice everything that remained to her, sooner than surrender.”

Then Davis took the podium, proud and erect as ever. People whose spirits had been dead just days before, who had roundly despised their leader, were stomping their booted feet, shouting and clapping wildly, roiling the African Church. To his own surprise, Edward Pollard was moved by “a smile of strange sweetness” that came to his president's lips, “so feeble, he should have stayed away.” Nearly disabled by the pain in his right arm, by Sherman's devastation of Georgia and South Carolina, by Lee's impending defeat, by the Confederacy's empty coffers, by the catastrophic loss of its outlet to the sea, by every other sign that the Davis administration would be its last, he held the cheering crowd “with his glittering eye,” his “stricken face” tensing as he gathered himself against the pain. Even Pollard admired his courage. When the roar subsided at last, Davis began to speak with a “tuneful flow of words” and delivered the speech of his life. Alec Stephens was there, silent in the crowd. He knew Davis's gifts and had never seen him so “majestic.”

Davis told his people he would be less than a man if he did not yearn to end their suffering. He had chosen his peace commission from “among our best men,” to “heal the breach which severed us,” to secure the independence “which no other power on the face of the earth but the Yankees would think of denying us.” And now Mr. Lincoln had declared his terms. An “extravagance of insolence.” Unconditional surrender. A new Constitution forcing abolition down their throats, breaking their society to fit the Yankee mold. “We are not even allowed to go back to them as we came out, but are required to take just what a conqueror may choose to give the conquered.” To be sure, Davis said, Mr. Lincoln had pledged to be “liberal” in “the confiscation of our property and the hanging of our officers.” The Yankee preacher Henry Ward Beecher had
lately declaimed a sermon with “a long line of rebels on their way to the gallows.” The length of the procession may have softened Mr. Lincoln's heart.

Stephens could not believe what he was hearing. “Brilliant though it was, I looked upon it as not much short of dementation.” The person did not know him, Davis said, who thought he would consent to reunion on
any
terms. He would sooner yield all he had, yield his life a thousand times. In his correspondence with Mr. Lincoln, “that functionary” had spoken of the North and South as one country, but Davis had insisted on two, for “I can have no common country with the Yankee.” The army would stand and fight. Richmond would be defended to the last man and boy. No one who had seen them could think that they would fail, but if the enemy's power “were ten times greater, and ours ten times less than it is, there are still some rights of which they could not dispossess us—the right to maintain our personal honor and the right to fill an honorable grave.” If the South were overcome, happy would be “those who had fallen in the fight. The miserable would be the survivors.”

Listening to his president, the wild response he drew, and his public repudiation of a limited war of maneuver and a negotiated peace, Stephens recalled the Charge of the Light Brigade, British cavalry attacking Russian cannon. Someone had said “it is brilliant; it is grand; but it is not war.” Little Alec was thinking that Davis well knew that the South had nothing left “but the fragments of shattered armies.”

The crowd was hearing otherwise. According to the editorialist Edward Pollard, when their leader scorned the edicts of “his Majesty, Abraham the First,” the African Church's “foul air” was “rent with shouts and huzzahs, and its crazed floor shaken under applause.” If their spirit only spread, Davis said, and he had no doubt that it would, “then indeed would I feel that we are on the very verge of success.” By the summer solstice, the North would sue for peace, and its leaders would know that when they spoke at Hampton Roads “they were speaking with their masters.”

It was then that Stephens knew that the war was truly lost. “Repeated calls were made for the Vice President,” said the
Richmond Dispatch,
“but it was announced that he was not well enough to respond.”

Davis told his people that the South would never surrender with an army as grand as Napoleon's, defending its own homes, every man in its ranks reared with “the habits of command,” the superior of any Yankee.

Some twenty-five miles away on the siege line, a Yankee general made an entry in his journal: “One deserter, 26th Va., a squalid, half-famished wretch.”

At midnight, Grant wired Washington that the Rebels had launched a failed attack, “leaving a part of their dead for us to bury.” General Mott “buries thirty-one of the enemy, and counted twenty-two graves besides, some of which were large enough for five or six bodies each. General Smyth estimates the loss of the enemy in his front at 200.”

The Northerners buried twenty-one of their own.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Thank God We Know It Now

Lincoln's Cabinet reconvened the next day. He seemed to have recovered from their rejection of his peace proposal. When Gideon Welles arrived, the commander in chief was reading aloud from the reflections of Petroleum V. Nasby, a fictional, work-averse Copperhead whose letters to the editor never failed to entertain him. Uncle Gideon observed that the stiff-chinned William Pitt Fessenden, “who came in just after me, evidently thought it hardly a proper subject for the occasion, and the President hastily dropped it.”

On the floor of the House that day, a Democrat proposed that with the Confederacy melting down, half a million dollars could be trimmed from the cost of Washington City's defenses. Thaddeus Stevens disagreed. “I did expect, to be sure—I did hope that the late proceedings would have produced peace. It was very promising for a while—promised on that side of the House, promised elsewhere—but those promises have not been fulfilled, and I understand the war is to be resumed with renewed vigor.”

Even as the congressman spoke, the generals were proving him right.

In South Carolina, a retreating Rebel commander sent a message to Sherman. He would stop burning cotton in the general's path if Sherman would stop burning houses. Sherman replied promptly. “I hope you will burn all cotton and save us trouble. We don't want it, and it has proven a curse to our country. All you don't burn I will.” As for houses, Sherman said, his men only torched the abandoned ones, which did not speak well of their owners.

In the last day of killing at Hatcher's Run, Meade's troops attacked Lee's in a windblown snow and recovered most of the ground they had
lost the day before. Meade told Margaretta that his losses had been modest, and “I hear of but few officers killed or severely wounded.” The general would not have heard of a sergeant of the 60th Ohio who had lost all his limbs to a shell. With one of his last breaths, he spoke of a ring on a severed hand. “He told the boys to take this ring and send it to his wife.” Lee lost over a thousand men at Hatcher's Run, taking ground and giving it back. The North lost more, and kept more coming.

Colonel Charles Francis Adams Jr., a veteran of Antietam and Gettysburg, wrote from Boston that day to his father, the American minister in London, chosen by his old friend Seward. The peace conference had “met with no favor in these parts,” Colonel Adams said. “The old Puritan vindictiveness” was at work. The conference was an indispensable step toward peace, and the man in the street was ready to forgive the Rebels, but the kid glove set were “as ugly and vindictive as possible. They really don't want peace, unless with it comes the hangman.” Seward “needs you in Massachusetts more than in London.”

On the same day, Seward wrote to Adams too, anticipating foreign inquiries about the conference. He opened with a backhanded shot at Blair for pushing Lincoln into war, then pulling him toward peace. Both sides were kind at Hampton Roads, the governor said, but the Southerners made no offers, no “categorical demands,” no “absolute refusals.” They seemed to want to unite in some extrinsic scheme (which Seward left unspecified), with only vague allusions to an ultimate resolution. It amounted to a plea for a truce, which Lincoln considered and rejected. “Nevertheless, it is perhaps of some importance that we have been able to submit our opinions and views directly to prominent insurgents, and to hear them answer in a courteous and not unfriendly manner.” For foreign consumption, Seward said the 13th Amendment would be quickly ratified.

The title of the
New York
Times
editorial spoke for itself:
a peace policy now treason
. Lincoln had been wise to make a run at peace, but the Rebels had declared independence nonnegotiable. Now talk of settlement was disloyal. Having branded the doves with treason, the
Times
took a swipe at the hawks, leaving Lincoln looking reasonable in the middle. The Jacobins could rest easy. “There is no immediate danger of peace.”

In accord with the
Times
on the futility of negotiations, the Richmond press competed in a venom-hurling contest. Henceforth, the
Dispatch
declared, the “dream of a reunited country will vanish even from the lunatic asylums and every eye will see in the face from which the Federal mask has been dropped . . . the undisguised features of the thug and the devil. They will have our property, our lands, our lives will they? Let them come and take them.”

Snow had turned to rain in the slushy streets of Richmond when General Breckinridge took his oath as Secretary of War. Then he met with Judge Campbell to review the Confederacy's means of survival. It was a long meeting and a short list. The judge had held on as Assistant Secretary of War, but had told his subordinate, Robert Kean, that all was lost; he would stay a few weeks and go, whether Mr. Davis liked it or not. With Campbell on his way out, the War Department clerk John Jones could see that a “scramble is going on by the young politicians for the position of Assistant Secretary of War, and Mr. Kean is supposed to be ahead in the race.” As if it were a prize.

Alec Stephens paid a visit to the War Department that day. “He has a ghostly appearance,” Jones thought. He too met at length with Judge Campbell, “with locked doors.”

That day or the next, Lincoln crossed Pennsylvania Avenue and called on Preston Blair. Lizzie knew how depressed her father was. The dreams of an old man had come to nothing more. He would soon tell a New York congressman that the Rebels in Richmond had cheated him.

On Wednesday, February 8, the Bostonian Charles Sumner introduced a resolution in the Senate calling on the president to account for the peace conference, and how such a thing had come to be. The old Puritan vindictiveness was indeed afoot. Sumner would soon spread the word that Seward had plied the Southerners with whiskey, which they “drank thirstily,” and “a couple of bottles of champagne for their dinner.”

Lincoln wired Grant for help. He wanted to include in his report the wire from Grant that had said he wished the President could see the commissioners, their desire for peace and reunion being clear. “I think the
dispatch does you credit, while I do not see that it can embarrass you. May I use it?” Grant replied instantly. “By all means.” He had meant it to be used “as you or the Secretary of War might think proper.”

On a bright and frosty Thursday, February 9, the last of Richmond's war rallies began at high noon in the African Church, a blazing Viking funeral on a crisp Nordic day. John Jones was surprised to hear that Hunter would preside, for “no man living has a greater abhorrence of blood! But perhaps he cannot decline.” Campbell and Stephens did, but Hunter was still angry. The Armory Band played a stirring “La Marseillaise” before his opening address, delivered “under the influence” of his humiliation at Hampton Roads, as the senator later confessed.

Mr. Lincoln had demanded submission, Hunter said, with a “cold insolence” made “monstrous” in the face of two hundred thousand Southern soldiers. He had promised to pardon leniently, but what free people would submit their lives and property to the whim of one man? Washington made treaties “with the meanest Indian tribe” but refused to treat with the Confederacy. Mr. Lincoln had not even promised that the people would have a voice in their government. He would only say he favored it. Such was the inducement held out to them. Over three million slaves “would at once be turned loose as idlers and vagabonds upon our community.” Congress would regulate race relations and be hostile to the South for a generation. The people must resist, and if they were forced to yield, to make their submission dear. “With faith and diligence and courage, we shall assuredly triumph at last.”

Judah Benjamin spoke next, plump, sleek, and smiling. He bowed to Hunter first, behind him in the chair, then disclosed without embarrassment how the administration had used the peace talks and its own confused vice president. No one should be surprised that “our President, whose only defect is that he is too tender-hearted,” had tried to stop the bleeding. Mr. Stephens had been confident that his peace idea was feasible, “which we were not, and what better could we do” than to let him bring it to the enemy? “We knew its failure would be the signal for a grand uprising of the people, which was the only element necessary to
success,” but no one had dreamed that the North would make “such arrogant propositions as were brought from Fortress Monroe. Thank God we know it now.”

The Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates came last, providing comic relief. Just weeks ago, he said, many Southern men had been ready to go back into the Union “if they could carry their heads on their shoulders.” Others might have “run some risks with their heads” if they could bring their stocks and bonds. And then came Blair to Richmond. “Courtesies were extended to him.” Three eminent men were sent to an audience with the Northern king and his prime minister. The streets were full of talk of their grand reception in Washington, when, “lo and behold, it turned out that they were stuck in Hampton Roads . . . and no duck or dinner.” The women of the South “would scorn the wretch who, with sackcloth on his loins and ashes on his forehead, asked mercy from Abraham Lincoln.”

Later that day, Alec Stephens left for Georgia, to settle his affairs and live a quiet life until the federal army took him. He had told Jefferson Davis he would go home and stay there. He would make no public statements, play no part on the public stage, “but quietly abide the issues of fortune, whatever they might be.” They parted, according to Stephens, “in the same friendship which had on all occasions marked our personal intercourse.” Their bitter public intercourse was over. “I therefore left on the 9th of February and reached home the 20th, where I remained in perfect retirement, until I was arrested on the 11th of May.”

The day after Stephens left, Hunter was collecting statistics on the South's ability to wage war when its Congress issued a proclamation of gratitude for the conference at Hampton Roads. “Thanks be to God, who controls and overrules the counsels of men, the haughty insolence of our enemies which they hoped would intimidate and break the spirit of our people is producing the very contrary effect.”