Thus ended the great American Civil War, which must upon the whole be considered the noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.
—Winston Churchill
On March 4 president-elect Abraham Lincoln rode in an open carriage with outgoing President James Buchanan down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the US Capitol. The street was lined by crowds—and by troops, including sharpshooters and artillery, on orders of General Winfield Scott, anxious to ensure a peaceful inauguration. Aged General John Wool, a peace delegate from New York, stood sentinel at a battery of artillery. It was a typically brisk, windy March day in Washington, DC. The incoming and the outgoing presidents chatted amicably. Buchanan looked old and tired yet relieved. Reputedly he said to Lincoln: “My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland, you are a happy man indeed.” Lincoln replied pleasantly but without unctuous flattery: “Mr. President, I cannot say that I shall enter it with much pleasure, but I assure you that I shall do what I can to maintain the high standards set by my illustrious predecessors who have occupied it.” General Scott, in his own carriage, rode on streets parallel to the presidential entourage, examining security precautions. The day of official events proceeded like clockwork, doubtless to Scott’s satisfaction.1
Buchanan had always been a gracious host, and he presided over his administration’s closing days with dignity, hosting farewell receptions and meals for friends and officials. He must have been gravely disappointed by the Peace Congress’s rejection by its own creator, his predecessor and longtime associate John Tyler, and the dead-end it met in Congress. In his final hours of power and the following day, he continued to receive reports from besieged Fort Sumter, which he forwarded to Lincoln. He left Washington the next day, never to return. He was received by friendly crowds in Baltimore, and at home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he found a sort of peace at his bucolic estate outside town. He worried about his legacy. After the war began, he started receiving threats based on his perceived pro-Southern policies. The local Masonic order posted guards for his protection. Buchanan chafed at the especially Republican attacks on his record, but supported the war effort, which he claimed should be “sustained at all hazards.” He called Lincoln an “honest and patriotic man.” When Confederate forces came near his home during the Gettysburg campaign of 1863, he refused to leave, although he sent his niece Harriet Lane to Philadelphia, explaining: “I have schooled my mind to meet the inevitable evils of life with Christian fortitude.” In 1865, he was finally received into the Presbyterian church “on his experimental evidence of piety” at age seventy-four. He died in 1868 at his beloved home, having published an apologia for his policies of 1861. But he was still not vindicated.2
Harriet Lane, Buchanan’s devoted niece, married at age thirty-six while her uncle still lived. After his death she endured the tragedy of losing both her children and her husband. As a wealthy widow she often spent time in Washington, DC, endowing the National Gallery of Art with her paintings, endowing a pediatric facility at Johns Hopkins University, and endowing the soon-to-be-built National Cathedral and a boy’s school to become St. Alban’s. The cathedral dean and the Episcopal bishop of Washington conducted her funeral in 1903.
A lifelong Episcopalian like Lane, John Tyler had even less time to worry about his legacy than did her uncle. His and his family’s devotion to the new Confederacy was complete. On March 5 his oldest granddaughter had helped raise the new Confederate flag over the Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama.3 Just five days after the firing on Fort Sumter, he voted with the majority at the Virginia Convention for secession on April 17, which Virginia’s voters ratified in May. He had told the convention after their vote that there had never been a more “just and holy effort for the maintenance of liberty and independence,” but he may not “survive to witness the consummation of the work begun that day.” His expectation was correct. Before the vote, he had written his wife, Julia: “These are dark times, dearest, and I think only of you and our little ones. But I trust in that same Providence that protected our fathers. These rascals who hold power leave us no alternative. I shall vote secession, and prefer to encounter any hazard to degrading Virginia.” He admonished her to live as “frugally as possible” as “trying times are before us.”4 Tyler also realized the “battle at Charleston” had “aroused the whole North,” and “they will break upon the South with an immense force.”5
After Virginia’s secession, a mob in Philadelphia threatened Tyler’s son, an outspoken Secessionist who had condemned the Peace Conference as a plan to “demoralize the people of the southern section.” He was forced to flee to Richmond, where he worked for the Confederacy. “I am truly sorry he went so far astray from his line of duty,” commented former president Buchanan when hearing the news of the younger Tyler, who had helped him gain his presidential nomination. The sentiment must have applied doubly to the father.6 After the war, Buchanan sent the impoverished son $1,000, which the son declined.7
In June 1861 the older Tyler was elected to the Provisional Confederate Congress, now meeting in Richmond. In July he toasted the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run. On July 4 at historic Jamestown, Virginia, where English-speaking America first began, near his estate, he bemusedly told Confederate soldiers he was still young enough to fight. When his mother-in-law suggested Julia Tyler’s return to New York for safety, he assured her that their home on the James River “will be far safer than Staten Island.”8 In November, he was elected to the newly formed Confederate US House of Representatives, for which he would take office in January 1862. But instead he suddenly took ill and died while staying at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, where he had famously denounced the Peace Congress ten months earlier. Fellow Peace Delegate William Rives was among the last to visit, and Tyler’s wife was present, having come to him due to a fearful premonition. “Perhaps it is best,” were his last words. Tyler lay in state in the Virginia Capitol, his body draped by the Confederate stars and bars. His funeral took place across the street at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where the bishop presided. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was in attendance.9
Tyler’s friend, former Virginia governor Henry Wise, had visited Tyler during his final hours. He pronounced that Tyler was a “firm believer in the atonement of the Son of God, and in the efficacy of His blood to wash away every stain of moral sin.” He had been “by faith and by heirship a member of the Episcopal Church of Christ, and never doubted Divine Revelation.”10
During the war Tyler’s beloved Sherwood Forest was spoiled but not destroyed by occupying federal troops. Initially the estate had federal guards in 1862, thanks to appeals from Julia’s mother in New York through fellow New Yorker and Peace Delegate General John Wool. When a slave escaped with some of Julia’s clothing, Julia complained to the local federal commander that such an escapade if unpunished might “produce a restless feeling among the rest of my negroes who are in fact blessed in being situated above every want with very moderate effort on their own part.”11
After gaining a pass in late 1862, Julia took six of her seven children to her mother in New York. She returned home with two of them in 1863, finding the “negroes are well disposed and in order.”12 Numerous Tylers served the Confederacy, and one of John Tyler’s grandsons by his first wife died in combat. Julia raged against her pro-Union New York brother while also being “utterly ashamed” of her native state. She complained of the federal blockade against the South, which was part of General Scott’s “Anaconda” plan to squeeze the rebellion: “Even our river boat would be fired at and taken, if that impudent war steamer, lying off Newport News could get the chance.”13 She was referring to the Pocahontas, their bright blue “royal barge” with matching blue satin cushions whose slave oarsmen wore matching uniforms with bows and arrows stitched in their collars, designed by Julia herself. The Tylers during happy years of peace had plied the river under its canopy, visiting neighbors at venerable plantations that once had housed peers of the Founding Fathers. Their beautiful boat disappeared during the war.14 Early in the war the Tylers also lost their vacation home farther down the river near federal fortress Monroe, prompting Julia to complain: “Was there ever such a savage wicked war?”15
Julia spent part of 1863 in Richmond, getting close to the first Confederate couple Jefferson and Varina Davis, the latter of whom noted Julia “positively did not look one day over twenty” and was “so fresh, agreeable, graceful, and exquisitely dressed.”16 She escaped again to see her mother in late 1863, this time more daringly on a blockade runner, also shipping several bales of cotton for a nice profit. During her absence in 1864, federal forces composed of black troops raided Sherwood Forest, capturing her plantation manager, a relative. Julia pleaded to President Lincoln: “By the memory of my husband, and what you must be assured would have been his course in your place, had your wife appealed to him, remove these causes of anxious suspense.”17
Sherwood Forest was turned over by federal forces to several slaves. The main house, shorn of its valuables, temporarily became a school for whites and blacks. Meanwhile, hours after Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, several men broke into Julia’s Staten Island family home demanding her “rebel” flag. The incident made the newspapers. With Jefferson Davis imprisoned after the Confederate collapse, his destitute wife, Varina, wrote her friend Julia for help: “I sometimes wonder if God does not mean to wake me from a terrific dream of desolation and penury.” Julia sent her clothing.
Julia met First Lady Julia Grant at the White House in 1872, having moved to Georgetown in the District of Columbia the year before. Julia Tyler’s portrait as First Lady was displayed in the White House. She socialized with Republicans, scandalizing her son, and looked for spiritual solace after the death of her daughter. After experimenting with spiritualism, she found comfort in Roman Catholicism, whose schools for her children had impressed her. A bishop presided over her induction into the church. She insisted on re-baptism even after being discouraged by the church against it, since the church recognized her Episcopal baptism. For her, Catholicism was the “best and truest religion,” and the “other sects” like “ships at sea without anchor or rudder, though until one comes to understand this one is not to blame for continuing with them.”18
She gained a federal pension as former First Lady in 1881, already having a small pension as the widow of a War of 1812 veteran. Mostly she resided comfortably in Richmond, across the street from a Catholic church where she devoutly practiced her faith. In 1888 she died after a stroke while at the Exchange Hotel, where her husband had died twenty-six years before.
Thanks to a significant inheritance from her New York mother, Julia’s final years were relatively comfortable, certainly compared to many Southern luminaries impoverished by the war. But she no longer lived royally with scores of slaves, a blue carriage with liveried coachmen, or a river barge with uniformed oarsmen. The universe her husband had sought to preserve had been governed by a planter aristocracy who espoused Republican principles laced with classical rhetoric and depending on a permanent caste of enslaved blacks; it was no more. Always a defiant apologist for her husband and the Southern cause, Julia Tyler still grudgingly reconciled to the new order as she lived in New York and Washington, dined with former adversaries, and abandoned the illusion that the slaves at Sherwood Forest had been content in their servitude. Almost all of them had fled during the war.
The Tylers embodied the old order whose last political hurrah was the Washington Peace Conference. The leading participants summoned all the wisdom they could from long lives, often dating to the eighteenth century. They often cited the patriotic sentiments of the Founding Fathers, whom some of them had personally known. Many of them could personally recall the disasters of the War of 1812, in which some of them had fought, particularly the burning of Washington itself by the invading British. For decades many of them had helped orchestrate the great compromises that at least delayed division and civil war. But their creativity had run dry, and the old stratagems no longer worked. The Founders had assumed or at least hoped, as Lincoln emphasized, that slavery would eventually end. So, too, at least initially, had the subsequent generation, including John Tyler.
But as these sons of the Founders aged, this vision faded. They instead realized that the South’s wealth and racial stratification deeply depended on slavery. They saw no plausible alternatives. Nor did they fully understand the political revolution of the 1850s that resulted in the creation and triumph of the Republican Party and Lincoln. Their primary response was to fear and resist it.
This fading old generation had hoped the Peace Conference could broker the grand accommodations of the past. But the new generation, which included many Republican delegates from the North, largely thought like Indiana governor Oliver Morton, who explained to Lincoln why his state sent delegates: “It was not that I expected any positive good to come of it, but to prevent positive evil.”19 After its culmination, Lincoln’s secretaries later judged the Peace Congress proposals to be “as worthless as Dead Sea fruit.”20 But Kentucky Senator John Crittenden perceptively judged that the Peace Congress, by investing the upper South’s hopes in a potential accommodation, had crucially delayed secession for states like Virginia and helped prevent secession by border states like his own. The Peace Conference also arguably allowed a cooling period that facilitated the peaceful count of the electoral vote in Congress and Lincoln’s inauguration.
The debates of the Peace Congress focused nearly exclusively on slavery, and their rhetoric encapsulates the national division that led to civil war. Lincoln’s meetings with the full Peace Congress, and later with select delegates urging his active conciliation, illustrate the political iron of the new president that persuaded the old generation that the accommodationist era of James Buchanan was decisively over.
Unintentionally, the clergy who prayed each day at the Peace Conference better represented the future than did the old men before whom they delivered their invocations. They were nearly all steadfastly pro-Union and anti-slavery, and would remain so throughout the war. America’s great denominations had divided over slavery, but the clergy of Washington, DC—reputedly a divided city and even Southern city—had emphatically chosen for the new order.
The debates at the Peace Congress also confirmed the unbridgeable chasm between the North and South that was politically insoluble. The South, for its protection from the new Republican anti-slavery ascendancy, demanded permanent, ironclad, irrevocable constitutional protections for slavery. Such protections the Founding Fathers had never given; the Constitution was almost completely silent about slavery. The South believed that their domestic order, even their very lives, required a national agreement to end all debate over slavery, putting the most incendiary of all controversies to bed forever. A newly Republican north could not agree without repudiating the Founders’ hopes, as they understood them, that slavery was ultimately incongruous with American democracy.
Winston Churchill would call the “great American Civil War” the “noblest and least avoidable of all the great mass conflicts of which till then there was record.” The Peace Congress seems to prove him right.21