Lincoln (112 page)

The President probably did not intend to refer to members of Congress, but certainly their views underwent a remarkable transformation. Many who had hitherto strongly opposed Lincoln now muted their criticisms. When Henry Winter Davis, always implacable in his hatred of Lincoln and his administration, proposed to condemn the President for failing to adopt a more belligerent policy toward the French in Mexico, the President found an unlikely defender in Thaddeus Stevens, hitherto one of Lincoln’s most vocal critics. Other Radicals chimed in to praise “an Executive who is doing his utmost in a patriotic spirit to preserve unimpaired all the institutions of our country” and to condemn those who, like Davis, wished to “impugn his integrity in any respect whatsoever.” It did seem, as the
National Intelligencer
observed, that the country was entering on a new Era of Good Feeling.

In the spirit of conciliation Lincoln reached out for the support of Democrats as well as Republicans. His annual message contained an earnest plea to his political opponents to support the proposed constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the United States. In the previous session of Congress the measure had failed to secure the required two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives, because all but four of the Democratic members voted against it. At Lincoln’s urging, the National Union Convention had made the amendment a central plank in the platform on which he and a heavy Republican majority in the next Congress were elected. He now asked the lame-duck session of the Thirty-eighth Congress to reconsider the amendment. “Without questioning the wisdom or patriotism of those who stood in opposition,” the President urged the Democrats to rethink their position. “Of course,” he admitted, “the abstract question is not changed; but an intervening election shows, almost certainly, that the next Congress
will pass the measure if this does not.” Since adoption was simply a matter of time, he asked, “may we not agree that the sooner the better?” Arguing that “some deference shall be paid to the will of the majority, simply because it is the will of the majority,” he appealed for support of the amendment now.

Not content with rhetorical exhortation, Lincoln used his personal authority and considerable charm to influence Democratic and border-state congressmen whose votes were in doubt. Not since 1862, when he tried hard to persuade border-state congressmen to support his gradual emancipation plan, had the President been so deeply involved in the legislative process. He worked closely with James M. Ashley of Ohio, the principal sponsor of the amendment in the House, to identify members who might be persuaded to support the amendment and invited them to the Executive Mansion. For instance, he had a long talk with Representative James S. Rollins of Missouri, who had voted against the amendment in June, and entreated him as an old Whig and follower of “that great statesman, Henry Clay,” to join him now in supporting the measure. When Rollins said that he was ready to vote for the amendment, Lincoln pressed him to use his influence with the other congressmen from his state. “The passage of this amendment will clinch the whole subject,” the President assured him; “it will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close.”

If Lincoln used other means of persuading congressmen to vote for the Thirteenth Amendment, his actions were not recorded. Conclusions about the President’s role rested on gossip and later recollections like those of Thaddeus Stevens, who remarked, “The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.” Lincoln was told that he might win some support from New Jersey Democrats if he could persuade Charles Sumner to drop a bill to regulate the Camden & Amboy Railroad, but he declined to intervene, not on grounds of principle but because, he said, “I can do nothing with Mr. Sumner in these matters.” One New Jersey Democrat, well known as a lobbyist for the Camden & Amboy, who had voted against the amendment in July, did abstain in the final vote, but it cannot be proved that Lincoln influenced his change.

Whatever the President’s role, in the final balloting more than two-thirds of the House members voted for the Thirteenth Amendment and submitted it to the states for ratification. Celebrating, the House adjourned after inadvertently sending the resolution to the President, who happily signed it on February 1. He was untroubled when senators pointed out that, according to a Supreme Court decision of 1798, presidential approval was not required for constitutional amendments. He was convinced that, with or without his signature, the Thirteenth Amendment would root out “the original disturbing cause” of the rebellion and would fully settle all questions about the legal validity of the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally the country had “a King’s cure for all the evils.”

One important bit of assistance Lincoln gave to the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment he was not prepared to make public at the time. During the last days of debate in the House of Representatives, rumors spread that Confederate commissioners were on their way to Washington to negotiate a settlement, that peace was at hand. Fearing defections among the reluctant supporters of the measure, Ashley anxiously asked the President whether there was any truth in the reports. Choosing his words with care, Lincoln replied: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.” His note calmed the Democrats, who, as he said later, “would have gone off in a tangent at the last moment had they smelt Peace.”

In fact, at that very moment a Confederate peace commission, consisting of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, John A. Campbell, the Confederate assistant secretary of war, and Robert M. T. Hunter, the prominent Virginia Confederate senator, was crossing into Union lines—but at City Point, not Washington.

Behind their visit lay some careful planning on Lincoln’s part. Earlier he had strongly opposed any negotiation with the Confederates, refusing to meet with Stephens in 1863 and as recently as July insisting on terms he knew the Confederate emissaries at Niagara Falls could not accept. Talk of peace, he then thought, would lower army morale; worse, it might lead to an armistice that, in effect, gave the Confederacy its independence. But now things had changed. The overwhelming victories of Sherman and Thomas in the West, coupled with the unremitting devastation that Grant and Sheridan were wreaking in Virginia, had weakened the Southern will to fight, and there were strong indications that the Confederacy might be coming to pieces. Grant believed that half of Lee’s army would desert if there was an armistice. The governors of Georgia and North Carolina were openly talking of making a separate peace; the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Confederate House of Representatives debated a resolution creating a peace commission; Representative Henry S. Foote demanded a “cessation of hostilities and restoration of peace” and declared that only Jefferson Davis stood in the way of ending the war.

Lincoln’s annual message to Congress in December 1864 sought to take advantage of this disarray among the Confederates. After what he had learned through the Jaquess-Gilmore mission, he was confident “that no attempt at negotiation with the insurgent leader”—whenever possible he avoided Jefferson Davis’s name and never referred to him as President of the Confederate States—“could result in any good. He would accept nothing short of severance of the Union—precisely what we will not and cannot give.” But, the President continued: “What is true ... of him who heads the insurgent cause, is not necessarily true of those who follow. Although he cannot reaccept the Union, they can.” To encourage these second-level Confederate leaders, the President promised generous terms: “They can, at
any moment, have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution.” But the generous program of amnesty and pardon, which he had offered in December 1863 and which was still “open to all,” would not remain so indefinitely. “The time may come—probably will come,” he said, “when ... more rigorous measures ... shall be adopted.”

Several intermediaries attempted to follow the lead the President offered. James R. Gilmore wanted to try another peace mission, this time to North Carolina, where he was sure he could persuade Governor Zebulon B. Vance to bring the state back into the Union, but Lincoln did not think this approach expedient. The plan of a former Illinois legislator evoked a more favorable response from the White House. Backed by Browning, James W. Singleton, a leading Peace Democrat, secured Lincoln’s permission to go to Richmond in order to sound Confederate opinion on ending the war. Singleton spent two pleasant weeks in the Confederate capital and had interviews with Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and others. He returned to tell the President that Southerners were eager for peace on generous terms but that they were unwilling to give up slavery except for “a fair compensation coupled with other liberal terms of reconstruction secured by Constitutional Amendments.” Lincoln listened, but his faith in Singleton, always slight, dwindled when it became clear that he was less interested in peace than in buying up huge quantities of Southern cotton and tobacco.

The most conspicuous effort at peacemaking was that of Francis P. Blair, Sr., who reached Richmond on January 11. He had wanted to go earlier, but Lincoln had refused permission, saying, “Come to me when Savannah falls.” When the President did allow the elder statesman to cross the lines, he declined to talk with him about his project or to offer any instructions; Blair was on his own. In a long interview with Jefferson Davis, who had been a close friend of his family before the war, Blair argued that slavery was no longer “an insurmountible [sic] obstruction to pacification,” since the recent decision to enroll blacks in the Confederate army necessarily entailed giving them freedom. The reunion of the North and South was now inevitable. Only the machinations of European monarchs could prevent it, and the activities of France’s puppet ruler of Mexico, Maximilian, showed how real was this danger. Davis could remove this threat by agreeing to an armistice with the Union and removing his armies to Texas, where—as dictator, if necessary—he could lead the fight to drive out the French invaders. Doubtless many Northern soldiers would volunteer to join his forces, and Blair offered the services of his son, General Frank Blair.

According to the elder Blair, Davis rose to the bait. He doubted—or perhaps it was Blair who doubted—the good faith of Seward in any negotiations, but he was willing to accept Blair’s assurance that if Lincoln “plights his faith to any man ..., he will maintain his word inviolably.” He gave Blair a letter to take to Washington, promising to appoint a commission that
would enter into negotiations “with a view to secure peace to the two countries.”

This was not at all what Lincoln had in mind. He wanted to undermine the authority of the Confederate government and to fragment the Confederate state, not to negotiate with its leader as an equal. Promptly he sent Blair back to Richmond with the message that he would be willing to receive a Confederate commission that looked toward “securing peace to the people of our one common country.”

That should have been that. But on both sides of the battle lines sentiment for peace was now too strong to be derailed. Under pressure, Davis named three leading advocates of negotiation—Stephens, Campbell, and Hunter—as commissioners authorized not merely to secure peace between the two countries but to discuss “the issues involved in the existing war.” Lincoln and Stanton were ready to refuse to receive the commissioners because they would not concede, even for purposes of discussion, that the Confederacy was a separate nation. At this point Grant, who was increasingly eager to finish off the war and who was not attuned to the niceties of diplomatic negotiations, intervened. He persuaded the commissioners to delete from their instructions the reference to two separate countries and wired to Washington that he hoped Lincoln could meet with them.

Agreeing with Grant that to send the three Confederates back to Richmond “without any expression from any one in authority” would be impolitic, Lincoln forthwith joined Seward at Fort Monroe for a conference from which he expected little. On the morning of February 3, Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell came aboard the President’s steamer, the
River Queen,
at Hampton Roads for an interview of several hours. Lincoln had not seen Stephens for sixteen years, when they were both Whig members of the House of Representatives, and he greeted the Confederate Vice President with a smile and a handshake. Watching the ninety-pound Stephens take off his thick gray woolen overcoat, his long wool muffler, and several shawls, he laughed, “Never have I seen so small a nubbin come out of so much husk.”

The five men agreed that the discussion was to be informal, that no papers or documents would be read, and that no notes would be taken. Stephens opened by asking, “Well, Mr. President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble, and bringing about a restoration of the general good feeling and harmony... between the different States and Sections of the country?” Thus at the outset he avoided making an issue of whether there was now one country or two.

Lincoln replied “that there was but one way that he knew of, and that was, for those who were resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance.”

The Confederates then began to explore the path that Blair had apparently opened. Stephens asked whether, in order to give time for passions to cool, there was “no Continental question” that could temporarily engage
the attention of both sides to the present conflict? In short, just as Blair had suggested, could there not be an armistice, during which Southern and Northern armies could join in driving the French out of Mexico? Lincoln replied bluntly that he had not authorized Blair’s mission and that he could not consider any proposition of an armistice that was not based “upon a pledge first given, for the ultimate restoration of the Union.”

Since Stephens was obviously unwilling to give up the possibility of a Mexican adventure, Seward suggested that he develop what he called a “philosophical basis” for that scheme, and the Confederate Vice President did so at considerable length, discoursing on the importance of maintaining the Monroe Doctrine. Seward raised objections to his arguments, and Hunter made it clear that he differed with Stephens and thought the Southern people “would be found unwilling to kindle a new war with the French on any such pretence.” All three men realized that the discussion was pointless since, as Stephens said, “Lincoln had virtually closed all further conference on that subject.”