Never Call Retreat (63 page)

For a climax, the Federals captured Fort Fisher. This fort, at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, protected Wilmington, North Carolina, the last haven for blockade runners, and General Lee had written that he could not subsist his army if Fort Fisher fell. The Federals had tried to take the place in December with a fleet under Rear Admiral Porter and an army under Ben Butler, but the venture failed wretchedly when Butler, having landed his troops, concluded that the fort was too strong to be taken, re-embarked his men, and sailed back to Hampton Roads. . . . Butler had pressed his luck too far, at last. The presidential election was over, he no longer had to be handled with tongs, and after Porter told Grant that the fort could be taken any time a real soldier was sent down to take it, Butler was relieved of his command and sent home so that his singular blend of arrogance and military incompetence could no longer hamper the war effort. On January 12 a new expedition came down —Porter's fleet again, and an 8000-man army under General A. H. Terry—and now things went differently. The fleet bombarded the fort for two days, Terry got his men ashore and made ready to assault, on January 15 the fort's land face was carried by storm, and that night Fort Fisher was surrendered. The Anaconda coil dreamed of so long ago by old Winfield Scott was complete now, and the four-year blockade had become airtight, save for minor leakage caused by the corrupting Yankee lust for cotton. The Confederacy was finally isolated.
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Matters stood so while the House of Representatives debated the 13th Amendment, and the argument that this act was needed in order to bring the war to a close began to look very thin. The war was being won anyway, at an accelerating rate as all men could see, and the Congress was really debating a consequence of victory rather than a probable cause of it. To kill slavery now was to prepare to step out of the war and enter the future, and although passage of the amendment would not exactly define that future it unquestionably would make a new definition inevitable: would mean, in short, that the future would be totally unlike the past. Essentially, the question before the House and the nation was simply: Having won this victory, what are you going to do with it?

Montgomery Blair tried in vain to get Barlow to line up Democrats in support of the amendment. He spoke from the same platform he had been using a year earlier—give up slavery in order to save the master race—and he pleaded that to speed the amendment to passage "would obviously be to reconstruct parties on the Negro question, as contra-distinguished from the slave question." If this could be done, the radicals could be beaten forever: "It is not slavery or independence which the South is fighting for. They are fighting against 'Negro equality'—I speak of the fighting men, not the Snobbery. If the northern Democracy could now be rallied to the support of the President and ignore the slavery question, we can soon bring back the South."

Less subtle—if indeed Blair's argument had any especial subtlety—was the argument made on the floor of the House by the New York Democrat Fernando Wood. He had been mayor of New York in 1861 and when one after another the Southern states announced that they were leaving the Union he proposed that New York City should somehow detach itself and maintain a happy and profitable neutrality; which led Mr. Lincoln to remark that he had never before heard of the front porch trying to set up in business for itself. Now former Mayor Wood had a timeless word of warning that would echo down the years from his own particular tower of darkness: "We may amend the constitution; we may by superior military force overrun and conquer the South; we may lay waste their lands and destroy their property; we may free their slaves. But there is one thing we cannot do: we cannot violate with impunity or alter the laws of God. The Almighty has fixed the distinction of the races; the Almighty has made the black man inferior, and sir, by no legislation, no partisan success, by no revolution, by no military power, can you wipe out this distinction. You may make the black man free, but when you have done that what have you done?"
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The search for an answer might take many generations, but the vote itself could not be delayed. On the afternoon of January 31, before a crowded House and packed galleries, the hours of argument came to a close, and in a tense quiet the voice of Speaker Schuyler Colfax put the question: "Shall the Joint Resolution pass?" The clerk called the roll; it was found that ten Democrats had joined the Republicans in support of the amendment, and that eight other Democrats (who presumably would have opposed the measure) had found it convenient to be absent; and in short the amendment passed the House, by 119 votes to 56. As the total was announced there was a moment of dazed silence, then a wild explosion of cheers "the like of which" (said a slightly partisan reporter) "probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before." In all of the jubilation hardly anyone recalled that only four years had passed since the Congress passed, and Abraham Lincoln accepted, a proposed amendment specifying that the Constitution could never, in all time, be changed in such a way as to permit interference with the institution of slavery.
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3. Too Late

GENERAL SHERMAN intended to start north from Savannah by the middle of January, but heavy rains delayed him. They came down day after cold gray day, unbroken, so that the Savannah River finally went over its banks and became three miles wide where General Slocum had put a pontoon bridge. The bridge tugged at its moorings in mid-stream isolation, and it had to be spliced at each end with long trestle works before any soldiers could walk on it. Beyond, the South Carolina low country turned into an immense swamp and the Confederate authorities considered it impossible for the Yankees to make a campaign now. This seemed reasonable: as a sample of the problems, the Salkehatchie River at Buford's Bridge was so swollen that it offered fifteen separate channels, all of which must be bridged before an army could get across. Sherman had put some units in motion early in January, but he confessed that in the end "the real march began on the first of February."
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Then his 60,000 veterans went tramping and splashing up into South Carolina to begin the climactic campaign of the war, heading north and expressing a desire to get even with the state that had started all of this trouble.

Two days later, Abraham Lincoln and Secretary Seward sat down in the cabin of a steamboat at Hampton Roads to discuss terms of peace with three representatives of the Confederate government.

This conference was taking place for a number of reasons. For one, the hour after all was getting late; for another, old Francis P. Blair was a great busybody; for still another, possibly most important of all, General U. S. Grant felt that if the Confederates really wanted to talk peace somebody at the highest level ought to come down and listen.

Peace feelers had been put out many times in the past year. None had brought any results, because each side used them chiefly to show that its opponent was so unyielding that negotiations would be pointless. This, as it happened, was about the case. Mr. Lincoln would talk peace only if reunion and emancipation were accepted, and Mr. Davis would talk peace only if Confederate independence were accepted, and no one had ever been able to think of a bridge that would cross that kind of gap.

No one, that is, except the elder Blair, who had his family's ability to believe that a Blair could do anything. Bearing a pass from President Lincoln, Blair went to Richmond at the end of 1864 and early in January he had two long chats with President Davis, whom he had known in the old days. It seemed that he had come all this way to propose that North and South should stop fighting each other and join hands to drive the French out of Mexico; Blair felt that this would restore the Monroe Doctrine and create a fraternal feeling under which reunion might take place. Mr. Davis was not drawn by this gambit, but he reflected that what Blair said was much less important than the fact that he had been allowed to come to Richmond to say it; he would not be here if the Lincoln administration did not have some sort of desire to talk peace. So Mr. Davis named Vice-President Stephens, Assistant Secretary of War Campbell, and Senator R. M. T. Hunter commissioners to discuss peace terms, and at the end of January these three crossed the lines under flag of truce and presented themselves at the headquarters of General Grant.

It seemed unlikely that they would get any farther. Their written instructions told them to seek peace between "the two countries," and Mr. Lincoln would negotiate on no such basis. But Grant knew how bad the Confederacy's military situation was, and he sensed that this move meant business. (After all, Mr. Davis had appointed moderates, not bitter-enders, and this could hardly be accidental.) Grant talked with Senator Hunter and with Vice-President Stephens (whom Grant, as an old Douglas Democrat, had long admired from afar) and he became convinced that they were ready to accept reunion. So the general sent a rather diffident telegraph to Washington, saying that these men were sincere, that it would be too bad to dismiss them without a hearing, and that while he himself did not know what to recommend he did wish Mr. Lincoln would at least talk with them.

. . . Once before Mr. Lincoln had received political advice from a general who faced Lee's army along the James River. In the summer of 1862 McClellan, fresh from the disaster of the Seven Days, wrote a long letter explaining that only by following a thoroughly conservative course with respect to slavery could the North hope to win the war; Mr. Lincoln thanked him, pocketed the letter, and went his way as if the letter had never been written. Now there was this advice from Grant, the tone of it slightly different, received by a President who had just seen the 13th Amendment through the Congress; and it got an immediate response. Back to Grant came a telegram from the President: SAY TO THE GENTLEMEN THAT I WILL MEET THEM PERSONALLY AT FORTRESS MONROE AS SOON AS I CAN GET THERE. And the next morning the Confederate commissioners had their talk with the President of the United States.
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Unfortunately, when the commissioners talked they did not say much, possibly because they were in a state of shock. They had been expecting from this meeting much more than they had the remotest chance to get, and when this was made clear to them they were outraged. They seem to have anticipated the sort of give-and-take negotiations that come when two parties talk from positions of relatively equal strength—a concession here met by a concession there, each side receding bit by bit from its announced position until at last there is a suitable compromise halfway between extremes—and the first thing they learned was that this was not that kind of meeting. The parties here were not talking from positions of equal strength: one of them was talking from the edge of extinction, and it had almost no bargaining strength at all. The conference had been called a trifle too late.

Indignantly, Senator Hunter wrote that the Northern President "distinctly affirmed that he would not treat except on the basis of reunion and the abolition of slavery," and after the war the Senator voiced his protest: "Neither Lincoln nor Seward showed any wise or considerate regard for the whole country, or any desire to make the war as little disastrous to the whole country as possible. If they entertained any such desires they made no exhibition. Their whole object seemed to be to force a reunion and an abolition of slavery. If this could be done they seemed to feel little care for the distress and suffering of the beaten party." Vice-President Stephens picked up Blair's idea and proposed an armistice so that the French could be expelled from Mexico, but Mr. Lincoln made it clear there would be no armistice under any circumstances, and Stephens noted that "the only basis on which he would entertain a proposition for a settlement was the recognition and re-establishment of the National authority throughout the land."
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Senator Hunter's indignation was natural but illogical. The whole object of the war, as far as the Northern government was concerned, was indeed precisely what the Senator said it was—to force a reunion and the abolition of slavery— and by this time it was as certain as anything could be that this object would speedily be won no matter what anybody said at Hampton Roads. To suppose that the President would abandon his objective just when he was finally winning it was to take a long flight from reality. The result was tragic, because the commissioners tried so hard to get the President to yield points on which he was bound to be unyielding that they neglected to bring up subsidiary points on which he was prepared to be flexible. That they might conceivably have won concessions that would make the time of defeat "as little disastrous to the whole country as possible" seems not to have occurred to them, except for the suggestion that an armistice and a joint war against the French might somehow lead to reconstruction, as Justice Campbell remarked, or at least to a harmonious and intimate alliance between two independent nations, as Senator Hunter proposed. In the end the conference ended with no agreement on anything, and Senator Hunter offered a gloomy summary: as far as he could see there could be no treaty between the Confederacy and the United States, and "there was nothing left for them but unconditional submission."
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So the conference closed, and the commissioners went back to Richmond. Mr. Lincoln stopped off to visit General Grant, and gave him an account which Grant summarized in these words: "He spoke of his having met the commissioners, and said he had told them that there would be no use in entering into any negotiations unless they would recognize, first; that the Union as a whole must be forever preserved, and second; that slavery must be abolished. If they were willing to concede these two points, then he was ready to enter into negotiations and was almost willing to hand them a blank sheet of paper with his signature attached for them to fill in the terms on which they were willing to live with us in the Union and be one people." In more guarded terms, the President told the Congress that the Confederate commissioners did not say that, "in any event, or on any condition, they
ever
would consent to reunion, and they equally omitted to declare that they
never
would so consent. They seemed to desire a postponement of that question and the adoption of some other course first, which, as some of them seemed to argue, might, or might not, lead to reunion, but which course we thought would amount to an indefinite postponement." Secretary Seward told Mrs. Seward that "the condition of the South is pitiable, but it is not yet fully realized there."
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