The conqueror will walk at every step over smoldering ashes.
—John Tyler
About 60 of the 131 statesmen dispatched by their states to the Washington Peace Conference trooped into the assembly hall at Willard’s Hotel in Washington, DC. It was noon on a chilly Monday, February 4, 1861. It had snowed late in the night, accumulating more than two inches, with the skies clearing by early afternoon. A hotel concessioner, targeting the peace commissioners, sold cockades, worn on the chest to demonstrate Union or Secession loyalty, “suitable for all political sentiments.”1
A Washington newspaper pleadingly editorialized that morning:
We are sure we echo the consenting prayer of a great majority of our countrymen, who will mark the proceedings with a solicitude second to that which has attached to no similar meeting in our civil history. . . . We cannot doubt that every member will act with a deep and solemn sense of his responsibility in the sight of God and fellow-citizens throughout the whole land.2
Even with such prayers, the cold and snow perhaps added to the gloom in the nation’s capital. Nearly every day since Abraham Lincoln’s election four months earlier brought more reports of the Union’s disintegration. Six Deep South states, starting with South Carolina in December, had already seceded, their congressional delegations having quit the US Congress. On that very day, February 4, their representatives convened in Montgomery, Alabama, as the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States of America. Federal facilities in the Deep South were seized by state authorities, excepting a few US Army installations like Fort Sumter, South Carolina, whose resistance would spark the war.
President James Buchanan dithered over resistance or acquiescence to the secession. In his final annual message to Congress in December, he faulted the unfolding crisis on the “long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery.” He further blamed the “incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century” for its “malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom.” It had left no “sense of security . . . around the family altar,” thanks to “apprehensions of servile insurrections,” with “many a matron throughout the South . . . at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning.”3
The solution was “easy,” Buchanan promised. All the American people must do to “settle the slavery question forever” was to leave the Southern slave states alone to “manage their domestic institutions in their own way.” After all, he reasoned, “as sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them.” He asserted that “the people of the North are not more responsible and have no more right to interfere than with similar institutions in Russia or in Brazil.”4
Easy indeed. Buchanan warned Southern states they had no right to quit the Union, while professing he had no constitutional authority to hold them by force. His secretary of state, Lewis Cass of Michigan, resigned in December to protest Buchanan’s inaction. The secretary of war, John Floyd of Virginia, was fired weeks later for suspiciously relocating US military resources to the South. Deep South members of the cabinet resigned in solidarity with their departing states.
On February 13, the Electoral College results of the presidential election were scheduled for ratification in a joint session of the US Congress. Some wondered if a sufficient congressional quorum would even be present. Others harbored dark fears of possibly violent plots to disrupt the ratification, over which pro-Southern Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky, one of Lincoln’s presidential opponents, would preside.
In January Congress had rejected the “Crittenden Compromise.” It came from aging Kentucky US Senator John Crittenden. Through constitutional amendments and congressional resolutions, it mandated that slavery could spread to new southern states in the West, in sync with the old Missouri Compromise of 1820. And it forbade congressional interference with the intrastate slave trade or any abolition of slavery by Congress, plus guaranteed federal reimbursement to owners of escaped slaves. President-elect Lincoln and his newly empowered Republican Party did not dispute slavery’s legality where it was already existing, but they would not permit its spread, as their 1860 Chicago party platform stipulated.
Amid this brewing crisis, former president John Tyler, nearly age seventy-one, emerged from sixteen years of quiet retirement at his romantically named Sherwood Forest Virginia plantation on the James River, surging suddenly back into public life. On December 14, 1860, before South Carolina’s secession, privately pondering the “lunacy which seems to have seized the North,” he suggested to a Northern friend a “consultation” among border states, six free and six slave, as the “most interested in keeping the peace,” and without whose agreement the “union is gone.”5
A month later, on January 10, Tyler told his son that the “pressure on me for an opinion on the crisis leaves me no alternative.” His public proposal would soon appear in a Richmond newspaper; he thought it would “strengthen our friends in the north.” Published on January 17, and nationally publicized, Tyler’s letter proposed a possible alternative to the “dissolution of that confederacy in the service of which so great a portion of my life has been passed.” Virginia’s legislature having already scheduled a state convention in February to ponder secession, to which he was himself elected, Tyler suggested the legislature also, in a final bid for “quiet and harmony,” invite six free and six border slave states to negotiate preservation of the Union through “adjustment” of the Constitution. Absent such agreement, “peace and concord has become impossible,” and the South should create its own new union, under the same Constitution, inviting all states to join it, “with the old flag flying over one and all.”6
Virginia’s legislature, the oldest elected assembly in the Western Hemisphere, expanded Tyler’s idea. On January 19 it proposed a convention of all states to adjudicate their differences, lest disunion be “inevitable,” and to “avert so dire a calamity” by making a “final effort to restore the Union and the Constitution, in the spirit in which they were established by the Fathers of the Republic.” The Virginians commended the Crittenden Compromise, which protected “slavery of the African race” in the southwestern territories and the right of slave owners to transmit slaves across free territory, as a solution to the “unhappy controversy.”7
Tyler was privately disappointed that the legislature had expanded his idea into an invitation to all states, which he feared would lead to Northern domination and gridlock. Northern and Southern diehards were exasperated and suspicious of Virginia’s plea for reconciliation. A Richmond newspaper hyperbolically denounced the Virginia legislature’s peace convention idea for supposedly suggesting that Virginia “submit to anti-slavery oppression” by the North. But a Cincinnati newspaper denied that Virginia’s appeal “conceals some dark design of the Disunionists,” asserting that it instead showed “perfect good faith.” A Washington newspaper hailed the “ancient commonwealth” for trying to mediate “between the alienated sections of a common country.”8
Hedging its bets, the Virginia legislature also affirmed that if reconciliation failed, Virginia would “unite her destinies with her sister slaveholding states.” Firebrand legislator James Seddon was appointed to the Peace Conference with Tyler and three others who were more moderate. He successfully proposed that Virginia accept no restoration of the Union that didn’t allow to “each section self-protecting power against any invasion of the Federal Union.”9
As his ancient state’s most prominent senior statesman, Tyler was quickly dispatched by the Virginia legislature to President Buchanan, bearing its peace proposal. He was to appeal in the interim for federal restraint toward the seceding states, “avoiding all acts calculated to produce a collision of arms.”10 On January 23, Tyler left for Washington, by way of Richmond. Mrs. Tyler noted he was “very unwell,” heavily medicated with mercury and chalk, but he felt he “must go.” She observed, the “excitement of convention always agrees with him.” Mrs. Tyler expected Southern states to “stay” their secession out of respect to her husband, who was accompanied by their fourteen-year-old son playing the part of his courier with the White House.11
Tyler headed north along the route between Richmond and Washington, where hundreds of thousands from Northern and Southern armies would clash almost continuously for the next four years. From his rickety and likely not well-heated train on that winter afternoon, he could view from his window what would be some of the bloodiest battlefields in American history: Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and Spotsylvania, among others. His warnings about the violent consequences of failure to conciliate the dividing sections, and his Virginia statesman’s knowledge of war and geography, indicate he must have quietly pondered the possibility, even likelihood, that he was traveling through lands soon to be blood drenched and ruined.12
Tyler was committed to the Union, but his love began with his native Virginia, which he foresaw being especially ravaged by war. Four years earlier, he had given a speech commemorating the anniversary of English settlement at Jamestown, with Northern abolitionists probably in mind. He declared: “Political demagogues may revile and abuse, but they cannot detract from the high and lofty fame which belongs to this time-honored commonwealth.”13
TYLER MEETS BUCHANAN
Upon Tyler’s arrival in Washington, he sent a note requesting an immediate meeting with President Buchanan. The president readily invited him to the White House that evening. Tyler and Buchanan had known each other since Buchanan joined him in the US Senate in 1834. Tyler had even supported his earlier failed 1852 attempt for the Democratic presidential nomination. But Tyler had little warmth for Buchanan, once explaining, “he had none for me in my severe trials.” Now explaining his health was “too delicate to make it prudent for me to encounter the night air” of a cold January, Tyler instead visited Buchanan the next morning for ninety minutes.14
Buchanan received his predecessor cordially. Nearly age seventy, just a year younger than Tyler, he was desperate for national conciliation, having served in public office nearly a half century as Pennsylvania state legislator, US congressman, US senator, minister to Russia under Andrew Jackson, minister to Britain under President Franklin Pierce, and US secretary of state under President James Polk. He came from modest means, literally born in a log cabin, with a Scots-Irish immigrant farmer for a father. Buchanan began politically as an antiwar Federalist and later became a Democrat. The last War of 1812 veteran to sit in the White House, and the last US president born in the eighteenth century, he had overcome his war skepticism to serve in the defense of Baltimore against the British in 1814—the battle that would inspire Francis Scott Key’s “Star Spangled Banner.”
In 1834, when Buchanan was a rising politician, he was alarmed by the implications for his career when his sister married a Virginia slave owner. Buchanan purchased two of their slaves for manumission, although Pennsylvania law kept the adult woman bound to Buchanan for seven years and the five-year-old girl until age twenty-eight.15 In 1836 he had warned his fellow US senators, “touch this issue of slavery seriously . . . and the Union is from that moment dissolved.” He explained that Pennsylvanians “are all opposed to slavery in the abstract” but would never violate Southern rights.16
In an 1844 US Senate speech, Buchanan argued that annexing Texas as a slave state would facilitate gradual emancipation by drawing slaves from throughout the South and ultimately funneling them into Mexico, where they could attain “social equality.” He faulted the “mad interference” of abolitionists for interrupting public opinion’s trend toward gradual emancipation.17
Fussy, gossipy, obsessed with detail, sometimes irritable, ever ambitious, and often eager to please, Buchanan reputedly was derided in private by President Jackson as “Miss Nancy.” He was a lifelong bachelor whose First Lady during his presidency was his attractive and coldly proper young niece, the very devoted Harriet Lane, whom he had adopted after her parents’ death, and with whom he maintained a sometimes tense but still solid social partnership.
Seen as sanctimonious, Buchanan was sarcastically called “the Pride of the Christian World” or “Old Gurley,” after his sometime Presbyterian pastor and US Senate Chaplain Phineas Gurley.18 Late in his presidency he reportedly conferred with a New York Presbyterian minister about “regeneration, atonement, repentance, and faith,” after which he indicated he had “much of the experience which you describe.” He promised to formally “unite” with Presbyterianism after retirement, to avoid charges of hypocrisy, lest he seem to profess religion only for political gain.19
Buchanan preferred to be known as “the Old Public Functionary,” signifying his years of public service and multiplicity of offices. Loyal to the Union he had served so long, he was long partial to Southern concerns and, like nearly all his presidential predecessors, never publicly criticized slavery. He had precipitously acclaimed the US Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which was announced right after his inauguration, and which denied any citizen rights even to free blacks, as permanently settling the slavery question.
As the nation crumbled over slavery, Buchanan nonchalantly insisted to all during his final months in office that he slept soundly. But some noticed that his hair had grown pure white. He was a tall, large bellied figure dressed formally in black, his head chronically tossed to one side. Reserved and with few close friends, he was still sociable, had female admirers, deployed warmth and charm when necessary, and could be physically demonstrative. He and his diligent niece tried with some success to cohere Washington socially even as it fractured politically. Their final New Year’s Day reception, open nearly to all, had been mostly a success, even if many Southern notables were noticeably absent. Some attenders wore cockades of competing loyalties, and some defiant women ignored the offered hand of President Buchanan “with an effort at display of lofty disdain.”20
Buchanan’s monthly levee a couple of weeks later was pronounced “elegant” but singularly unique. Most of his fellow Democrats were observed absent, while newly arrived Northern Republicans proliferated, offering him “many words of patriotism and kindness,” which the president naturally, if nervously, appreciated.21 A Georgia newspaper more caustically portrayed Buchanan’s reception as “thinly attended” and including “few congratulations,” as his visitors were mainly his formerly “bitterest opponents.” It warned the president: “Save me from my friends.”22
Buchanan was always a careful party loyalist who had fought his way upward politically from obscurity. But Tyler, on the other hand, was a self-assured, patrician political maverick born into Virginia aristocracy. He was confident he spoke for his commonwealth at the hour of its peril. On the morning of Thursday, January 24, at the White House, his own former residence, he assured Buchanan that Virginians were “almost universally inclined to peace and reconciliation” and urged his sharing with Congress Virginia’s plea for the “status quo.”23
President Buchanan readily agreed to transmit to Congress Virginia’s appeal for a peace summit of the states, which he “hailed with great satisfaction.” But he complained that seceding Southern states had “not treated him properly” by “seizing unprotected arsenals and forts, and thus perpetrating useless acts of bravado, which had quite as well been let alone.” Tyler admitted these acts were meant to “fret and irritate the Northern mind, that he could see in them only the necessary results of popular excitement which, after all, worked no mischief in the end if harmony between the States was once more restored.”24
Tyler met with Buchanan a second time the following day, and Buchanan approvingly reviewed the text of the presidential message to Congress. Tyler personally watched with satisfaction as Virginia’s appeal for peace was presented to the US Senate, where it was received politely but without formal response. New York Republican Senator William Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s secretary of state, approached him to shake hands, with a “timidity he could not disguise,” Mrs. Tyler recalled.25 Buchanan’s message stressed the urgency of ensuring the “slaveholding states adequate guarantees for the security of their rights” and commended to Congress Virginia’s plea for a pledge to avoid force. Trusting that “Virginia’s mediation” under the “Providence of God” would “perpetuate the Union,” he declared with optimistic bravado: “I am one of those who will never despair of the Republic.”26
Tyler sent notes from his customary lodging at Brown’s Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, firmly asking for explanations from Buchanan about a US military supply ship’s rumored dispatch to the South. Buchanan assured him it was “an errand of mercy and relief.” A Richmond newspaper approvingly reported Tyler was “looking well” and “quite determined to see that the rights of Virginia are maintained.” After a week, Tyler left Washington, satisfied his dramatic mission of peace had at least somewhat succeeded, although a Georgia newspaper inferred it was “not entirely successful,” however “kindly” the president may have received him. He would return for the Peace Conference one week later.27
Ominously, Tyler had warned of failure’s bleak consequences in his first public proposal of the Peace Conference:
The conqueror will walk at every step over smoldering ashes and beneath crumbling columns. States once proud and independent will no longer exist and the glory of the Union will have departed forever. Ruin and desolation will everywhere prevail, and the victor’s brow, instead of a wreath of glorious evergreen such as a patriot wears, will be encircled with withered and faded leaves endeared with the blood of the child and its mother and the father and the son. The picture is too horrible and revolting to be dwelt upon.28
Unheeding of Virginia’s appeal, none of the seven seceded states (Texas ratified secession during the convention on February 23) agreed to attend the Peace Conference, nor did three strongly Republican Midwestern free states.29 But fourteen free states and seven slave states sent representatives. Arkansas ignored the invitation, while California and Oregon were too distant to consider in time. New York’s governor responded:
The great mass of the people of this state, and of the entire North, are actuated by an earnest desire that no honorable effort should be left untried to maintain, by peaceful means, the American Union as it has existed for almost a century; and especially to encourage every exertion made toward an adjustment of existing differences by the loyal states.30
Some avid Republicans were reluctant for their states to participate in the Peace Conference, perceiving it would undermine Lincoln’s presidential options. Massachusetts US Senator Charles Sumner was a strong slavery opponent who had been famously thrashed with a cane on the Senate floor by a pro-slavery congressman in 1856, while Senator Crittenden was blocked by a Southern colleague from intervening. Sumner denounced congressmen from his state who were urging participation in the Peace Conference. Congressman Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams and grandson of John Adams, rebuffed the admonishment, prompting a supportive Washington newspaper to say the “son of such fathers cannot do wrong in a moment of gloom like the present.”31
Sharing Sumner’s concern, the strongly Republican, pro-Lincoln states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin refused to send delegates. They were populated by the New England Puritan diaspora, strongly anti-slavery, but not as wedded as the East Coast to trade with the cotton South. Minnesota had voted for Lincoln by almost two to one, and Republicans had fifty-nine out of sixty-three state legislative seats. A St. Paul newspaper editor decreed: “Before this rampant fever of disunion will at all abate, THERE MUST BE BLOOD LETTING!” State legislators resolved: “It is not expedient to compromise when the only basis is for the protection of slavery.”32
A Michigan US senator urged his state to appoint stalwart representatives to “prevent compromise.” The state’s other US senator similarly had urged the dispatch of “stiff-backed men.” But the state legislature declined to acknowledge the Peace Conference, by a far narrower margin than Minnesota. Wisconsin’s governor had intoned, “secession is revolution: revolution is war: War against the government . . . is treason.” The state legislature was two to one Republican, but each house narrowly approved sending delegates to the Peace Conference. However, they could not agree on the terms, so none were sent.33
Most solidly Republican states warily sent representatives to hinder appeasement of the slave states. Even then there were intra-Republican Party objections. Vermont US Senator Solomon Foot snarled to his own state’s delegates that the Peace Conference was “a fraud, a trick, a deception—a device of traitors and conspirators again to cheat the North and gain time to ripen their conspiracy.”34
THE DELEGATES AT WILLARD HALL
Later recalled as the “Old Gentlemen’s Convention,” the nearly unprecedented gathering included scores of elder statesmen, including six former cabinet members, nineteen ex-governors, fourteen former US senators, fifty former US representatives, twelve state supreme court justices, plus of course former president Tyler. Four fifths of them were lawyers. Eleven had served with Lincoln in Congress, including five Southerners.35
A New York newspaper hailed the peace gathering as “one of the most dignified assemblages of men ever gathered together in this country.” A Washington newspaper approvingly observed that representatives were “not chosen by popular election or party favor” but only for “fitness for the high trust.” The states had provided the “sagest of their citizens, if not in every case their oldest,” exemplifying experience, wisdom, dignity, and strength of character.”36
One Washington newspaper offered an overview of some Peace Conference delegates. Illinois sent Judge Stephen Logan, a “strong, warm, personal friend of Mr. Lincoln,” and former governor John Wood, a “strong, anti-compromise Republican.” New York sent James Wadsworth, “a wealthy gentleman from the western part of the state”; former lieutenant governor Addison Gardiner, a Democrat with “high reputation”; the “eminent lawyer” Greene Bronson, a “strong national Democrat”; and merchant William Dodge, an “ultra Lincoln man.” Also from New York came Democrat congressman-elect and financier Erastus Corning; wealthy, newly appointed, pro-Lincoln US Senator William Evarts; Republican lawyer David Field, who was “anxious for public position”; and fellow Republican lawyer William Noyes.
Ohio, the newspaper reported, sent former US senator and governor Salmon Chase, “one of the bright shining lights of the Republican Party” of the “ultra school” and “avowed enemy of slavery.” Along with Chase came Ohio’s own Thomas Ewing, US Treasury secretary (under Presidents Harrison and Tyler) and an “old line Whig” hoping to influence Lincoln toward “whiggery”; and former congressman William Groesbeck.
Pennsylvania dispatched former US Treasury secretary (under President Zachary Taylor) William Meredith; former governor James Pollock; and Congressman David Wilmot, author of the famed proviso attempting to ban slavery in former Mexican territory. New Hampshire sent former congressman Amos Tuck.
New Jersey sent its governor, Charles Olden, a “moral and upright gentleman” of “conservative sentiment”; former US senator and US Navy Commodore Robert Stockton, a War of 1812 veteran and, unmentioned by the newspaper, grandson of a Declaration of Independence signer Richard Stockton. He was accompanied by wealthy former governor Rodman Price; and former governor Peter Vroom.
Rhode Island sent its chief justice, Samuel Ames; former governor William Hoppin; and Alexander Duncan, “one of the wealthiest men in the state.”
Kentucky was represented by former US Treasury secretary (under President Franklin Pierce) James Guthrie, whose retirement was devoted to “railroad enterprises” and “enjoyment of domestic and social intercourse”; former congressman James Clay, son of the legendary late US senator Henry Clay; former governor and US postmaster (under Presidents Harrison and Tyler) Charles Wickliffe; and former vice presidential candidate, Indian fighter, and War of 1812 veteran William Butler.
From Virginia there were George Summers, a “distinguished literateur” and former state legislator; former judge John Brockenbrough, one of Virginia’s “most distinguished jurists”; former US senator and US minister to France (under Presidents Taylor and Pierce) William Rives, who “ranks high as lawyer, minister and statesman.”37
The newspaper later reported on Wednesday, February 6, that “new delegations are arriving daily,” with a “multitude of preliminaries” required before they addressed the “only question upon where there bids fair to be any considerable difference of opinion—the territorial slavery question.” It hoped that by a week from Saturday there would be a “settlement” that was “disposed of with much unanimity.” The delegates continued to arrive at the meeting hall of Willard’s Hotel, which “like a parasitic plant, had gradually surrounded and taken in an old church, which became known as Willard Hall,” as one peace commissioner described.38
Tyler had likely been in this hall before. It had been until very recently the F Street Presbyterian Church, where many Washington luminaries including Presidents John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, and Buchanan had sometimes worshipped. Buchanan had maintained a pew near the pulpit, attending church without an overcoat even in cold weather. He attended typically with his secretary, since his niece and First Lady, Harriet Lane, worshipped at St. John’s Episcopal Church. After the benediction, he hurriedly strode down the aisle as the congregation respectfully stood. Often a congressman’s wife would exclaim to him, “Good sermon, Mr. President!” to which he invariably responded, “Too long, Madam, too long.”39
The congregation was founded in 1807 originally as a Reformed congregation, but became Presbyterian in the 1820s. Rev. Phineas Gurley, who would open an early Peace Conference session with prayer, pastored the church starting in 1854, merging it with another Presbyterian congregation in 1859. He would authorize the building of a new sanctuary a few blocks away that would be New York Avenue Presbyterian, where the president and First Lady Mary Lincoln would worship regularly for four years.
Gurley was a Princeton Seminary graduate and Old School Presbyterian committed to traditional doctrine and mostly avoiding politics. He had agreed to come to Washington to help a church “struggling against the tide of error and ungodliness then prevailing in the nation’s capital.” He condemned profanity, which he sarcastically surmised had become one of the “most important qualifications for office,” while also deriding extreme partisanship by politicians and the press as “iniquitous and shameful in the extreme.” The venerable old F Street Presbyterian Church was sold in 1859 for $12,500 to Willard’s Hotel, which used it for concerts and balls. One report claimed it could seat eight hundred.40
In the 1840s the church had added a Greek Temple–style portico with Doric columns to the new facade of the brick sanctuary. The portico measured sixty by one hundred feet. By 1861, “Willard Hall” was connected to the backside of an expansive and increasingly prominent hotel that filled nearly a city block and fronted on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was one block from the White House and, at the front, within view of the US Capitol, whose uncompleted dome and construction cranes loomed overhead.
Willard Hall’s interior had the high ornamented ceiling of worship space, high paned windows with blinds, chandeliers overhead, a front altar space flanked by pilasters, and two front doors to F Street behind the portico’s columns. The interior also had a side exit into the main body of the hotel. During the Peace Conference the City of Washington posted police at all entrances to bar intruders, and the mayor loaned a full-length portrait of George Washington to add decorum to the hall, about which delegates were “very agreeably surprised.” One newspaper suggested the city also loan its portraits of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay, other icons of national union. The mayor, acknowledging the generous hotel owners’ “highly creditable public spirit,” noted that the hall was sufficiently spacious “yet not affording surplus room enough to permit the body to be incommoded and annoyed by a great mass of spectators, as the halls of Congress unfortunately are.”41
Spectators and reporters were banned from the start, to the chagrin of some Northern representatives. A New York newspaper reported, “citizens are indignant that the meetings should be held in a small hall with closed doors,” making it more of a “dark lantern convention than one to where deliberations the largest publicity should be given.”42
A Vermont newspaper was more approving, saying secret sessions would permit “greater freedom in the expression of opinions” but are “distasteful to the sensation papers and the body of reporters at Washington, and they are tempted to retaliate by disparaging the convention and otherwise exciting ill-will towards it.” It predicted “false and perverted news” about secret events at Willard’s.43
The hotel dated to 1816, formed out of six houses built at Pennsylvania Avenue and Seventeenth Street. Henry Willard, later joined by his brothers, procured the property in 1847, streamlining the structures into a four-story edifice that stretched back to F Street. Their view of the White House was long since blocked by the US Treasury Department’s very imposing new classically columned edifice. Forty-seven years earlier in 1814, according to legend, British officers had watched the incineration of the White House from F Street, at Rhodes Tavern, which still stood across the street from Willard Hall. More than a few old Washingtonians remembered the British destruction of their city’s public buildings and wondered about even more disastrous results if mediation of the current national crisis failed.
The Peace Conference and subsequent war began Washington’s greatest growth spurt to date. And Willard’s Hotel became the city’s chief political and social beehive, teeming with peace commissioners. Not long after the Peace Conference, as civil war ensued, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne stayed at Willard’s. He wrote that the building “may much more justly be called the center of Washington and the Union, than either the Capitol, the White House, or the State Department,” as “everybody may be seen here.” He noted approvingly that in Willard’s highly social milieu “you adopt the universal habit, and call for a mint julep,” or other beverage, as the “conviviality of Washington sets in at an early hour,” and “never terminates at any hour.” He also noticed a “constant atmosphere of cigar smoke,” which formed a “more sympathetic medium, in which men meet more closely and talk more frankly than in any other air.”44
British journalist William Howard Russell stayed at Willard’s only weeks after the Peace Conference, and intriguingly found it a “huge caravanserei” with “every form of speech and every accent under which the English language can be recognized” resounding down long corridors in “tones of expostulation, anger or gratification.” So-called senator-hunters prowled the hallways, aspiring supplicants found “fresh confidence” in the barroom, and ladies of the party in power were objects of “irresistible attraction.”45
A few years later, at the height of the war, New York diarist George Templeton Strong was less beguiled by Willard’s, denouncing it as “absolutely worse than ever; crowded, dirty, and insufferable,” beset by loud, leaking, and vaporous steam pipes, at least in his room. Of Washington and its famed hotel, he proclaimed: “Beelzebub surely reigns there, and Willard’s Hotel is his temple.”46
Lincoln’s private secretary, John Hay, recalled Willard’s and Washington’s hotel atmosphere in general as “littered with a mixture of dirt, scraps of paper, cigar stumps and discarded envelopes, and the whole is embroidered with an irregular arabesque of expectoration.” Yet Hay would regularly dine for years at Willard’s even while living in the White House.47
In early 1861, amid national crisis, the Willard brothers quickly offered Willard Hall to the Peace Conference without charge, including the lighting, patriotically hoping their facilities would be “sanctified by restoring peace to the Union.”48 They were also savvy businessmen. The gathering placed a national spotlight on Willard’s Hotel, where many if not all the delegates would reside. Fifty US congressmen were living at Willard’s as of December 1860, and during the Peace Conference its profits grew to almost $1,200 daily. Lodging and food at Willard’s cost $55 to $60 per week. Peace Commissioner Daniel Barringer, a Unionist US congressman from North Carolina, approvingly wrote his wife of Willard’s great convenience: “The Conference of the Commissioners is held in a large concert hall attached to this building and my room is within ten steps of it under the same roof.”49
Meeting in a former sanctuary like Willard Hall would have seemed familiar to nearly all the Peace Conference delegates. They served as statesmen in an era when often only churches offered sufficiently large and dignified space for important gatherings. Tyler was himself an aristocratic Episcopalian from Tidewater, Virginia, no doubt comfortable in a Greek Revival–style church turned hotel conference room. He was baptized and reared at venerable Westover Episcopal Church in his native Charles City, Virginia, along the James River. The parish dated to 1613, and the sanctuary to 1730. Tyler was baptized there, and a portrait of the old parson who baptized him was said to have hung at Tyler’s Sherwood Forest estate until relocated to Richmond, where it was destroyed by fire at the Civil War’s end. In 1847 then ex-President Tyler was noted as among the “most regular attendants and supporters of the Church” at Westover. Two years later he was elected to the church’s vestry.50
Tyler’s personal faith was largely unarticulated and perhaps rationalistic, similar to Virginia’s Founding-era icons like his father’s college roommate, Thomas Jefferson, as well as James Madison and James Monroe, whom he had known. But he may have become more devout in later years, even during his time at the Peace Conference. As a US senator in the 1830s, Tyler observed that the “variableness in the things of the world [is] designed by the Creator for the happiness of His creatures.” Two decades later, in old age with ailments, he was “convinced that all is wisely ordered by Providence.” Later, after illness, he remarked, “Nothing but the kind providence of our Heavenly Father could have saved me.” He later confided to his Episcopal clergy a “bright faith in the Christian religion.” As president, Tyler purchased a pew at St. John’s Episcopal Church near the White House, which he left for use in perpetuity for future presidents.51
Tyler shared with the Founders a deep commitment to religious liberty and church-state separation. He was a student and disciple of President Madison’s cousin, Episcopal bishop James Madison, who for more than thirty years presided over Tyler’s alma mater, William and Mary College at Williamsburg, Virginia. Tyler thought of him as a “second father” and “strikingly impressive” as teacher and mentor, perhaps more for Madison’s views on republican virtue and American exceptionalism than for theology.52
That patriotic commitment likely informed Tyler’s zeal for the Peace Conference as a last-ditch attempt to salvage the Union. Born in 1790 during George Washington’s presidency, he was literally a son of the Founding generation. His father was thrice Virginia’s governor, and a friend of Monroe and Patrick Henry. He entertained his children at their twelve-hundred-acre estate near Williamsburg with stories of his service in the American Revolution.
Tyler was first elected to the Virginia legislature at age twenty-one. Later serving as governor of and US senator from Virginia, the younger Tyler followed after his father politically until breaking with President Andrew Jackson and most Democrats over Jackson’s threat of force against South Carolina’s attempt to “nullify” US tariff law. He was the Whig vice presidential candidate in 1840, and quickly became the first “accidental” president when William Henry Harrison died from pneumonia in 1841, after only days in office.
Derided famously as “His Accidency” and even “His Fraudulency” by snarling critics, Tyler antagonized his fellow Whigs by opposing their tariff policies and frustrating Henry Clay’s presidential ambitions, while ruining his own chances for re-nomination. As a man without a political party, he pursued nationalist goals, annexing Texas into the Union and settling a Maine border dispute with British Canada.
Several prominent officials of his administration and a New York US congressman were killed in a warship accident on the Potomac River. The USS Princeton’s captain, Robert Stockton, who was not considered at fault for his ship’s disaster, was later peace commissioner of New Jersey. Tyler, a recent widower, comforted and eventually married the deceased congressman’s fainting daughter, Julia Gardiner. She was thirty years younger than he, and a Presbyterian who would convert to Catholicism in her later years after his death. Always precocious, she had moved to Washington after she scandalized proper society in New York by appearing in the stylish advertisement of a clothing store. Tyler called her the “most beautiful woman of her age and the most accomplished.” She was attractive, intelligent, and queenly as First Lady, riding a carriage with many fine horses, receiving visitors in the White House while enthroned on a raised platform, wearing three feathers in her hair, and clad in purple velvet. Ambitious for her husband and herself, she was the first First Lady to dance publicly in the White House, and may have introduced “Hail to the Chief” as the presidential anthem. She was the first First Lady photographed in office, authorized the sale of lithograph prints of herself labeled “The President’s Bride,” tried to manage her media coverage, and hosted huge champagne-soaked White House galas that perturbed some religiously devout critics. After leaving office, she publicly rebutted aristocratic English women who appealed to America’s ladies to work against slavery.53
Tyler fathered seven children with his young, second wife, his last at age seventy in 1860, in quiet retirement and political exile at his Sherwood Forest estate near Williamsburg, Virginia. He brought his considerable virile and robust energies to his sudden political return in 1861, especially at the Peace Conference. Thin and tall, he had been described over the years as “charming,” “bewitching,” “cultivated,” well-read, eloquent, “fine-looking,” and resembling an ancient bust of the Roman statesman Cicero, with high forehead and Roman nose. A visiting Charles Dickens, typically critical, had found him pleasantly “agreeable.” Tyler was also considered vain. Although he pleaded “severe indisposition” and “every possible personal inconvenience” upon his appointment by Virginia, likely he was energized by his return to the national arena.54
Like virtually everybody else, Tyler was privately exasperated after meeting at the White House with Buchanan, who “obviously is to throw all responsibility off his shoulders.”55 The president solicitously visited the ex-president at his suite at Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel, which Tyler shared with his wife, twelve-year-old son, and baby girl, and which often became a sort of court thronged with his admirers. “We are very handsomely accommodated here, private parlors, etc.,” Mrs. Tyler reported with satisfaction. Tyler had been sworn in as president at the Indian Queen in 1841, so perhaps it was a place of reassuring memories. A young Congressman Abraham Lincoln had also lived there in 1847. Brown’s was about eight blocks from Willard’s, closer to the Capitol. Perhaps Tyler wanted some distance between himself and the other delegates, or more proximity to Congress. Like other hotels, Brown’s hosted regular dancing parties, creating a socially rambunctious atmosphere that may have appealed to the still relatively young, very sociable Mrs. Tyler.56
Most other peace commissioners seem to have stayed at Willard’s, including reportedly the whole delegations from Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Some delegates stayed at the National Hotel at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. Three of Virginia’s five delegates, including Tyler, were at Brown’s, across the street from the National, as was the whole Missouri delegation.57 More than two dozen congressmen and several senators lived at the National Hotel, but its reputation had never fully recovered from an 1857 epidemic that sickened thirty people, including then president-elect Buchanan, whose nephew later died from the hotel illness—an intestinal malady attributed to sewer gas. Mary Todd Lincoln told her husband they would not stay there upon their arrival for his inauguration.58
From his perch at Brown’s, Tyler respectfully challenged Buchanan on reports of the US Navy reinforcing Fort Sumter in Charleston, which the South saw as a provocation. More sternly he cited to the president reports that Fort Monroe in Tyler’s own Virginia had swiveled some of its artillery to face inland, “when Virginia is making every possible effort to redeem and save the Union,” only to have cannons “leveled at her bosom.” Buchanan promised to investigate.59
Tyler respectfully intoned to Buchanan his hope that his administration “might close amid the rejoicings of a great people.” A New Hampshire newspaper supposed that, had Tyler been a “man of any wit,” that comment actually would have been a “cruel hit,” as Americans were instead rejoicing over the administration’s end.60
Buchanan was even weaker than the usual lame duck, and with Lincoln’s arrival and inauguration still weeks away, Washington had a power vacuum. It’s possible that Tyler saw his brief window to fill it. He was the only one of four living former presidents to step forward in a major way during this crisis, although Franklin Pierce, fourteen years younger than Tyler, privately said he would also attend the Peace Conference if his health allowed. Former president Millard Fillmore visited Washington during the conference to urge conciliation, but seems to have had little impact.61
A critic scornfully likened Tyler to a “tottering, ashen ruin,” more “cordially despised than any other president.” But friendlier visitors were gratified by his hearty appearance, “even under the weight of so many years.” Several newspapers called him the “same slim, tall-looking, high bred Virginia gentleman,” whose “striking features” evinced a “high degree of mental activity,” and whose “prominent nose” indicated “intellectual superiority.” Others noted his “animal vigor,” his “keen and gentle eyes,” and “well preserved” appearance showing “great age with remarkable grace.”62
Tyler would turn seventy-one in the month following the Peace Conference. His much younger wife, herself going on age forty-one, admired his zealous activity now that he was back in the saddle, saying he was “in a stronger condition to bear up than for many a day, and looks well.” She noted he went to bed “upon a dose of hydrargum,” a sedative, perhaps reflecting his heightened state of anxiety, but heroically performing as “they are all looking to him in the settlement of the vexed question.” Indeed, she observed, “his superiority over everybody else is felt and admitted by all.” And she noted his hotel table was “loaded with correspondence from every quarter.”
Always intensely politically interested, Mrs. Tyler wondered if she were eyewitness to the “last days of the republic,” while denying any interest in Washington’s “gay entertainments” and preferring the “doings of the convention, which has for me the most intense interest.” Presumably channeling her husband, she expected that the South and border states had little hope of saving the Union, thanks to “mischief” by “black Republicans,” or abolitionists, and General Scott’s “absurd and high-handed” gathering of troops in Washington to “overawe” Virginia and Maryland.63
Reverend Gurley returned to his very familiar, former regular place of worship on February 5, to pray before the Peace Conference on its second day. Commissioners had agreed that each day thereafter, a Washington clergy would start their session with prayer. Before Gurley’s invocation the delegates had already quickly and unanimously elected Tyler president of the convention, perhaps aided by the absence of some Northern Republican-dominated delegations who were still traveling. His election must have not surprised him, as he was immediately able to deliver a stirring oration summoning his audience to reconciliation, patriotic fervor, and national unity. Over the course of his career he had always championed national expansion and greatness, minimizing slavery as an issue.64
TYLER AND SLAVERY
Like many highborn Southerners, especially from Virginia and the upper South, Tyler opposed slavery in the abstract. But he believed advocating abolition would be “political suicide,” sometimes wishfully suggesting it would fade away naturally. He was a US congressman during the 1820 crisis over Missouri’s admission as a slave state, when he advocated that slavery’s expansion over wider territory would diffuse the slave population, making eventual emancipation more feasible, as it had been in the Northern states. “You advance the interest and secure the safety of one-half of this extended republic: you ameliorate the condition of the slave, and you add much to his prospects of emancipation, and the total extinction of slavery,” Tyler had suggested. In later years, he insisted that temperate climate “assuredly” would eventually eradicate slavery, starting in the upper South, including Virginia.65
In an 1835 speech as US senator, Tyler condemned abolitionists as “libelers of the South” who defamed slaveholders as “demons in the shape of men.” He accused them of fomenting slave insurrection, warning, “unexpected evil is now upon us; it has invaded our fire sides, and under our roofs is sharpening the dagger of midnight assassination, and exciting cruelty and bloodshed.”66
Unlike most other southerners, Tyler opposed a “gag rule” on antislavery petitions when he was a US senator in the 1830s, fearing that petitions would only encourage abolitionists. And he publicly supported colonization of freed slaves in Africa, while admitting it may be an unattainable “dream.” Apparently offended by slave auctions, he proposed banning the slave trade in Washington, DC, and he supported punishment for cruelty to slaves while opposing a ban on slavery in the nation’s capital outright.67
He was an ex-president during debates over the great Compromise of 1850, when he strongly supported Senators Daniel Webster and Henry Clay in their cobbling together omnibus legislation over slavery to forestall disunion. This irked both Southern and Northern firebrands. Tyler’s strongest condemnation was aimed at abolitionists, who deserved the “deepest curses of the patriot for having put in jeopardy the noblest and fairest fabric of government the world ever saw.”68
Tyler owned “plenty of slaves,” he said—several hundred slaves throughout his life, perhaps about seventy at one time, about a dozen of whom were house servants, three of them living in the main house. A Northern visitor described slaves at Tyler’s Sherwood Forest on the James River as living in a childlike “minority that never terminates” but “uniformly cheerful and happy.” Slaves facilitated Tyler’s aristocratic equipage, which included a splashy carriage with liveried coachmen in white pantaloons, and a dashing blue riverboat, Pocahontas, with blue-and-white-uniformed oarsmen with straw hats and shirt collars decorated by a braided bow and arrow, representing Tyler’s Robin Hood theme, of course. Tyler’s mother-in-law thought this regal showiness in “bad taste,” but her daughter relished it.69
“They are a strange set, are they not?” Mrs. Tyler once exclaimed to her mother, describing their own slaves as “generally kind and happy and don’t want to have anything to do with poor white people.”70 Naturally relieved when fiery abolitionist John Brown’s 1859 attempt to ignite armed slavery revolt from Harpers Ferry, Virginia, (now West Virginia) failed, she celebrated his hanging as the “miserable consequence of his shameful outrage.” In the Tylers’ native Charles County, blacks outnumbered whites by two to one, making the prospect of an uprising terrifying and the idea of emancipation politically outrageous.71
Regarding slaves as the “most important article of Southern property,” then Congressman Tyler had tried to sell a woman slave to finance his new career as US senator in 1827. While president, abolitionist critics alleged Tyler had fathered slave children, which Tyler’s defenders stoutly denied. Abolitionists also condemned the presence of Tyler’s slaves in the White House.72
During the heated 1860 presidential campaign, when Northern and Southern Democrats split, he endorsed Southern Democrat Vice President John Breckinridge. “I fear that the great Republic has seen its last days,” he worried, while stressing that defeating Lincoln and the Republicans was the “great matter.”73 Briefly he pondered his own possible return as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, his wife believing he had “outlived the abuse of his enemies,” but he soon abandoned the idea. He had previously recognized he was the “last of the Virginia presidents,” as the South lost demographically to the North, compelling reliance on sympathetic Northern Democrats like President Buchanan.74
Political controversy entered the Tylers’ Sherwood Forest parlor in 1860 when a local Episcopal clergyman, a Unionist, denounced Virginia’s governor for overreacting to John Brown’s raid the year before to bestir anti-abolitionist sentiment. Another neighbor present exploded by denouncing “clergymen coming from the pulpit to make themselves Sunday evening politicians,” prompting Mrs. Tyler later to commend his “spirit and independence,” with which her husband did not disagree.75
During the 1860 campaign Tyler denounced Northern abolitionists, while he pledged to defend the South, “live or die, survive or perish.” After Lincoln’s election he pronounced the nation had “fallen on evil times,” with “madness” and demagoguery prevailing over statesmanship. He quiescently left to “others younger than myself the settlement of existing disputes,” suggesting that under the current “degeneracy” peaceful separation might be preferable to Union and strife. He predicted that Virginia would never permit her “blacks to be cribbed and confined” within the present limits that Northerners demanded, which would ensure a future race war. Virginia and the South must have “expansion,” if not within the Union, then looking to Latin America or the Caribbean as “ultimate reservations of the African race.”76
In a January 1861 public letter, Tyler explained: “The man who would talk of cultivating the rice and cotton fields and sugar plantations of the South with free white labor, denies to himself the light of experience and observation.” He added: “Asia and Africa have to be resorted to for laborers, while the Caucasian of Europe flees, as from pestilence, the rays of a burning sun, and becomes the cultivator of the cereals, or turns herdsman amid the snows of the North.” Northern demands for no more slave states, he warned, would create a situation amid a growing black population that “cannot be contemplated by any Southern man with any absolute composure.” Of his own Virginia, Tyler declared: “Her destiny good or evil is with the South.”77
But at the Peace Conference, on February 5, 1861, Tyler was far more conciliatory. Lincoln was now elected, and the country’s future in doubt. Modestly professing to have forgotten parliamentary rules, Tyler rejected making “personal considerations” when the “country is in danger,” accepting his duty in the “work of reconciliation and adjustment.” What “our Godlike fathers created, we have to preserve,” Tyler insisted. “They built up through their patriotism monuments that eternalized their names.” His audience had a task no less grand, he said, “quite as full of glory and immortality.” They had to “snatch from ruin a great and glorious confederation, to preserve the government and reinvigorate the Constitution.” If successful, their children’s children would “rise up and call them blessed.”
“I confess myself to be ambitious of sharing in the glory of accomplishing this grand and magnificent result,” Tyler admitted. “To have our names enrolled in the Capitol, to be respected by future generations with grateful applause. This is an honor higher than the mountains, more enduring than monumental alabaster.”
Tyler poetically sounded the roll call of the states represented there in Willard Hall, recalling their glory in America’s War for Independence and in creating a republic seventy years previous. He cited the grandson of a Declaration of Independence signer present in the New Jersey delegation. Admitting the absence of several states, he expressed hope their “hearts are with us in the great work we have to do.”
Their ancestors had probably committed a “blunder” by not requiring a new constitutional convention every fifty years or so, Tyler lamented, as what worked for five million was not now fit for thirty million. But “patriotism” could yet surmount the present difficulties, he hoped, by “triumph over party.” What is party, he pointedly asked at his conclusion, “when compared to the task of rescuing ones country from danger so that one long, loud shout of joy and gladness will resound throughout the land?”78
According to a Richmond newspaper, the “deep and earnest patriotism evinced by the speaker melted the stoutest heart, and as he finished each member seemed to rise simultaneously to his feet, and moved towards the venerable speaker with words of peace and good will.” Tyler was congratulated by “most” of the state delegations.
A delegate from Ohio, that state’s former governor and US senator, told Tyler he was “particularly gratified,” the newspaper pronounced, and that the states “were ready to follow where Virginia led, as she pursued only the path of virtue and honor.” He was Salmon Chase, an antislavery Republican who would soon famously serve as Lincoln’s treasury secretary.79
A Washington newspaper spoke for many in hailing Tyler’s speech as “one of the most affecting and eloquent efforts of the kind ever spoken in the country.” A New York newspaper declared: “The hopes of the Union men are high tonight.”80 A month earlier, Tyler’s son, John Tyler Jr., had reportedly told a crowd in Norfolk, Virginia, with his own vehemence: “Let the Union go to hell.”81 His father was prepared to accept that outcome but still hoped and worked to avoid it.
Meanwhile, days later, Northern Peace Commissioner William Fessenden, a US senator whom Lincoln would describe as “a Radical without the petulant and vicious forgetfulness of many Radicals,” privately predicted the Peace Conference would accomplish nothing. Fessenden himself promised not to “yield one particle of that great idea of human liberty, which lies at the foundation of our institutions, and without which they must inevitably fail.”
On the US Senate floor, Fessenden warned, “If the time ever does come . . . when it will be necessary to use force in order to execute the laws of the United States under the Constitution anywhere and everywhere within what is properly the United States, I am perfectly ready to do it, but I trust we shall have no such necessity.” He added, “I trust we shall be ready to meet all our responsibilities like men.”82
More hopefully, a Vermont newspaper editorialized about the Peace Conference: “Every Christian, every reasonable and patriotic man must hope that, with due regard to essential principles, some plan may be suggested for the peaceful rescue of the nation from the perils evidently arising out [of] a now rampant secessionism.”83
With more determined optimism, a Washington newspaper declared that the peace commissioners would reach compromise by at least a two-thirds vote that majorities of Northern and Southern voters would then “instantly” accept, with Southerners overthrowing Secessionist “revolutionary leaders” who were suppressing self-government. And the newspaper firmly predicted: “The Peace Congress will make such a settlement, and under its happy influence six months will find every seceded state restored to its allegiance to the Union, by the exertions of the Unionists within its own limits only.”84
Guided by cautious realism, a New York newspaper predicted that even with all the “master minds of the country” now gathered, “no voice is loud enough, no patriotism deep and broad enough, no spirit self-sacrificing enough to recall the seceding states back to the fraternal fold of the Union.” Instead, there should be “earnest prayer” for at least “saving the border states.”85
Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had been at war with the “slave power” for thirty years through his Boston-based newspaper the Liberator. He denounced Virginia’s “crafty policy” of summoning a Peace Conference, which was a “snare and mockery.” He warned: “Trojans! Beware the wooden horse!”86
Of Tyler, a Georgia newspaper reported he was “now doing a good service to the country,” having made a “poor President, but he appears to be a capital ex-President.”87 But whether Tyler, as president of the Peace Conference, was in fact such an effective former chief executive would become highly debated over the next several weeks, as both the North and South watched and debated the proceedings at Willard Hall in Washington, DC.