XIV

PEACE

We don’t have much to talk of now, but Peace!

—Corporal George H. Mellish
to his father,
near Petersburg, Virginia,
January 30, 1865

By quitting when they did, Southerners were able to believe that they had fought as long as they could, which was true by strictly conventional standards. Defeat was thus honorable. But they saved more than honor; they saved the basic elements—with the exception of slavery itself—of the Southern social, that is to say racial, order. The social order could not possibly have survived the guerilla warfare which a continued resistance movement would have required.

—John Shy

CITY POINT was not only the command post for the prosecution of the war but also the center of efforts by soldier-statesmen to bring the war to an end by negotiation. Ordinary soldiers had already established patches of peace. In the months of stalemate at Petersburg, men had taunted each other across the lines for so long that the obscenities bred familiarity and yielded to conversation. Rebs and Yanks washed clothes together in the streams, and the kidding that went along with the laundering led first to good-natured horseplay and then to organized foot races and wrestling matches. Without waiting for William James to declare athletics the moral equivalent of war, the soldiers converted it into a field day. But then they had to go back to killing one another; the slower-witted statesmen and generals in charge of these games never simply let men leave when they have had enough of the party.

In January 1865, General E. O. C. Ord was one of the general officers with ideas similar to those of the privates. On the seventh, Grant assigned him to replace General Benjamin F. Butler as commander of the Army of the James. Butler had bungled an attack on Fort Fisher, which protected Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major supply port for the Confederacy, and with the national election now over, Grant could at last get rid of that outspoken politician. In contrast, Ord proved himself to be the most relaxing of Grant’s commanders in the east; the two men enjoyed each other’s company, Ord had graduated from West Point the spring before Grant entered. He was a Marylander and, according to romantic legend, the illegitimate grandson of King George IV. Neither vengeful toward the Confederacy nor particularly obsessed with the trappings of victory, he was, both in January 1865 and during Reconstruction, what later political observers would call “soft” on the South.

Another border-state man with similar views was the seventy-four-year-old politician Francis Preston Blair, from Kentucky. After Sherman reached the sea, Lincoln was so confident that the Confederacy could not be sustained as a separate nation that he felt ready to make overtures to Jefferson Davis in the hope of stimulating a negotiated surrender. Blair—whose son Francis was one of Sherman’s generals—was the man for the job. A powerful editor in the cause of Jacksonian Democracy, Blair had been close to Andrew Jackson. He was by this time a Republican, and still very much a politician. He had long been a friend of Davis’s and proposed now to talk to the Confederate president about ending the war. Blair loved being on the scene of politics and could not resist a chance to play with Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis in the last act of the Civil War. Jubal Early’s men, when they threatened the capture of Washington in July 1864, had broken into Blair’s country place at Silver Spring, Maryland, and Blair turned the pillage to his advantage; his “cover” as he went to converse with Davis was that he wanted to retrieve some personal papers that had been taken in the looting. Lincoln authorized a pass through the lines for Blair, and he set out for City Point. In time, safe passage was assured by the Confederates, and Blair crossed Grant’s and Lee’s lines. On January 12, 1865, Blair and Davis sat down in Richmond to talk.¹

Blair’s scheme for achieving a North-South reconciliation was bizarre, but only marginally more so than Seward’s idea in 1861 of fostering a foreign war in order to stave off civil war. Both were less insane than the slaughter at Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. The idea was for Confederate and Union soldiers to stop fighting one another and, with Generals Grant and Lee riding side by side, to march into Mexico to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and drive out Maximilian and the French. What was more, Blair (with confused echoes, from his childhood, of Aaron Burr’s scheme) suggested that Jefferson Davis replace Maximilian and become the dictator in Mexico. Davis, who must have recognized this aspect of the proposal as Blair’s rather than Lincoln’s, listened; what mattered was not the Mexican chimera but the fact that Blair had found a talking point, and Davis responded to his true purpose. It was agreed that Blair would go back to Lincoln and learn whether the president would receive peace commissioners from Richmond. When he reached City Point on his way back to Washington, Blair carried a letter from Davis indicating willingness to have representatives “enter into [a] conference with a view to secure peace to the two countries.” Blair was not a restrained talker, and he must have taken advantage of the chance to enlist his host in the cause of his exciting diplomacy; from the time of their long conversation at City Point, Grant missed no opportunity to help bring about peace negotiations.²

Lincoln discussed Davis’s message with his closest advisers in Washington, and Grant was in the city when the reply was under consideration. It seems unlikely that he was kept completely in the dark about a conference bearing so critically on his military plans. Just the fact that passage across the lines would have to be arranged for those who were to do the negotiating argues that Grant must have been told of Lincoln’s decision. The president, balking at Davis’s reference to “two countries” but ready to talk, sent Blair back to Richmond with a letter indicating his willingness to receive a representative from Davis “with the view to securing peace to the people of our one common country.” Davis, over strenuous objections from some committed Confederates, agreed to a meeting and sent three commissioners, none of them a die-hard and all of them men who had distinguished themselves in both governments: John A. Campbell, assistant secretary of war for the Confederate States of America, had been, as associate justice of the Supreme Court, the highest-ranking member of the United States government to join in the secession; Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice-president, had sat in the United States House of Representatives as a congressman from Georgia; Robert M. T. Hunter, once a United States senator, had also served as a senator from Virginia in the Confederate States of America and had for a time been the Confederacy’s secretary of state.³

Arriving at Petersburg, the three commissioners sent a message requesting permission to cross the Union lines. When it was clear that the officer to whom they were brought did not know of their coming, they asked for Grant and were not buoyed by the reply that he “was on a big drunk.” Both Grant and Meade were, in fact, away—Grant with Schofield, planning an attack on Wilmington, and Meade in Philadelphia; Ord, in command in their absence but obviously not alerted to the Confederates’ arrival, forwarded to the War Department a telegram from the officer who met the commissioners, which said they had come “in accordance with an understanding claimed to exist with Lt. Gen. Grant….” Stanton replied that “this Department” had no knowledge of any agreement made by Grant for anyone to come across, and ordered the men held at the front lines. The next day he instructed that the Confederate delegation be told only that a messenger would shortly arrive with further word. Grant returned to City Point on the morning of January 31 and, on his own initiative, gave the three commissioners safe-conduct across the lines and invited them to his headquarters. Grant’s immediate cooperation suggests that, as the Confederates claimed, he knew they were coming. In his invitation to the three he added encouragingly, “Your letter to me has been telegraphed to Washington for instructions. I have no doubt but that before you arrive at my Headquarters an answer will be received directing me to comply with your request.” What they sought was safe passage to Washington, to confer with Lincoln. Grant assured the three that should his optimistic prediction prove wrong, they would be given safe-conduct back to their own lines.⁴

When the commissioners passed across the Union lines, General Meade observed, “soldiers on both sides yelled loudly, ‘Peace! peace!’” The cry, he thought, was not in mockery of three appeasers, but came from the heart; similarly, the Richmond Sentinel reported that hopes for peace were widely held. Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell were met with no pomp, but were escorted directly to City Point, where Orville E. Babcock, of Grant’s staff, told them he would present them to the general. It was evening; they were taken to a very unprepossessing cabin with no guard posted in front of it. Stephens recalled it all: “Upon Colonel Babcock’s rapping at the door, the response, ‘Come in,’ was given in a tone of voice, and with a cadence that I can never forget.” They entered to find Grant sitting alone at a table, writing by the light of a kerosene lamp.⁵

The conversation was free and immediately to the point—the making of peace. This inevitably meant that political matters of the greatest moment were under consideration, and Grant cheerfully violated the principle that soldiers should not discuss politics. After a brief, comfortable talk, Grant escorted the three men to a floating hotel—a transferred Hudson River excursion boat, the Mary Martin—where they were pleasantly accommodated. Stephens was certain that Grant was “very anxious for the proposed conference to take place.” Meanwhile, Lincoln, also anxious to make the conference succeed, sent Secretary of State Seward to Hampton Roads, Virginia, to prepare to meet with the commissioners.⁶

The “detention” of the commissioners that Stanton had ordered proved civilized indeed. Referring to it in his Memoirs, Grant said, “They remained several days as guests on board the boat. I saw them quite frequently, though I have no recollection of having had any conversation whatever with them on the subject of their mission.” Twenty years afterward, Grant was still trying to demonstrate that he had not exceeded his authority; in point of fact, he had. Both Grant and Meade paid lip service to the concept that generals should be nonpolitical, but the minute they had the chance to enter peacemaking conversations with the distinguished commissioners from the Confederacy, they plunged straight into politics. The talk of the three rebels and Grant and Meade was cordial. Indeed, the initial meeting unconsciously underscored one of the ironic absurdities of the war and, in a sense, foreshadowed the denouement of Reconstruction that followed. Meade wrote his wife that Senator Hunter gave him a letter from Henry A. Wise (the Virginia governor who had hanged John Brown) and “Judge Campbell asked after” her family; the wives of General Meade, U.S.A., and General Wise, C.S.A., were sisters. These enemies were not enemies.⁷

When Grant left the room, Meade “talked very freely with them. I told them very plainly what I thought was the basis on which the people of the North would be glad to have peace, namely, the complete restoration of the Union and such a settlement of the slavery question as should be final, removing it forever as a subject of strife.” Stephens urged an armistice, so that matters could be discussed. Meade said that “was entirely out of the question.” The Southerners would first have to accede to the two conditions he had put forth. Undaunted by two hundred years of anguish and four years of battle, Stephens said he did not see “the slavery question as so formidable a difficulty.” The Georgian was less interested in slavery than in an alteration of the Constitution that would protect states’ rights.⁸

Hunter, the Virginian, returned to the matter of slavery; according to Meade, he asked “what we [in the Union] proposed to do with the slaves after freeing them, as it was well known that they would not work unless compelled.” Meade, agreeing that this posed a problem, said it was “grave” but not “insurmountable” and suggested that since the people whose interests the commissioners represented “must have labor, and the negroes must have support; between the two necessities…some system could be devised accommodating both interests, which would not be so obnoxious as slavery.” He was suggesting a system ensuring a subordinate status for the laborers as a substitute for slavery. Flatteringly, they then said, Meade reported, that it was “a pity this matter could not be left to the generals on each side, and taken out of the hands of politicians.” Meade agreed, and urged Grant to cooperate fully. While not optimistic, he told his wife that he hoped “Mr. Lincoln will receive them and listen to all they have to say.”⁹

Stephens recalled that they all talked quite openly about how the war might be brought to a close, and Grant stated later that “no guard was placed on them” and they were “permitted to leave the boat when they felt like it, and did so, coming up on the bank and visiting me at my headquarters.” Howard C. Westwood, in his analysis of the peace conference, considers Grant to have been responsible for its being held, and both Stephens and Campbell indicated that Grant took an important political initiative, both in his own conversations and in seeing to it that no one prevented them from stating their case at the very highest level of government. Grant had had no previous acquaintance with the three men, but found none of them difficult to talk with. He particularly liked Stephens, claiming that he had admired him before the war. Stephens, wizened and strange-looking in a great stiff gray overcoat—he seemed to shrink as soon as it was shed—was a compelling man despite his small size. He was also the one most taken with Blair’s Mexican scheme.¹⁰

The two little men, Grant and Stephens, sat down together. While five miles away, outside Petersburg, two armies wrestled to no resolution, the vice-president of the Confederate States of America and the commanding general of the Army of the United States of America talked easily but with urgency about how to get Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis to discuss peace. All was cordial, and when the other two men joined Grant and his wife for a large dinner, Julia found she also liked the commissioners, and tried to transact some family business. Could they arrange the release from a Confederate jail of her brother John?—“a thorough rebel if there ever was one,” she claimed almost proudly. He was not a prisoner of war, she explained, but had gone to Louisiana and been jailed there. The commissioners turned the matter back to her, asking why she had not gotten her husband to arrange his release by exchanging a Confederate soldier for him. She replied that she had asked him to do just that, but Ulysses—who had similarly refused to set up an exchange for his Confederate cousin Richard M. Hewitt, then in a Union prison—had told her that it would “not hurt John to have a good, wholesome lesson.” (As a result, Julia noted in her Memoirs, “dear brother did not get back until the general exchange of prisoners…at the close of the war.”) Inadvertently, perhaps, Julia Grant had given the Confederate negotiators a glimpse of the toughness that the general’s geniality had disguised.¹¹

Hunter reported being told by one of Grant’s officers that “Mrs. Grant had expressed her opinion openly that her husband ought to send us on,” and observed that the commissioners were “impressed…favorably by her frankness and good feelings.” However, not everyone was as cordial. Lincoln’s messenger, Major Thomas T. Eckert, the chief telegraph officer at the War Department (chosen by Stanton because he was an efficient bureaucrat) arrived with orders that the commissioners were to be sent back unless they accepted the stipulation of “one common country.” It looked as if the men would be returned, and “the impatience of the bystanders [in City Point] to bring the parties together grew rapidly.” Eckert, a stalwart away-from-the-front-lines patriot, saw himself as preventing appeasement and proved an inflexible barrier to negotiation. He was persuaded that Stanton was afraid “Lincoln’s great kindness of heart and his desire to end the war might lead him to make some admission which the astute Southerners could willfully misconstrue,” and he was equally worried about Grant. On arrival, he officiously told the lieutenant general that he was not to involve himself, since the mission of communicating with the commissioners had been entrusted solely to him, Eckert. The excuse for keeping Grant away was that if things were bungled, the blame would fall on Eckert, an underling, and not on the commanding general. Grant recognized that this was a pretext and was “vexed” when Eckert insisted on going alone to see the commissioners.¹²

At that meeting on February 1, 1865, Stephens turned on all his considerable Southern charm. He had known Eckert’s cousin before the war, when they were members of the same Congress, and had helped Eckert get safe passage out of Atlanta in June 1861 (another Yankee, caught there then, had been hanged). Stephens was determined to win Lincoln’s envoy to the idea that their passage to Washington must be arranged, but Eckert would not budge. Having presented the president’s message, he left to await formal acceptance of the “one common country” stipulation. Their reply at 6:00 P.M. he found “not satisfactory.” The commissioners were in a quandary. Grant, Blair, and Meade had all encouraged them to think Lincoln wanted a peace conference. But now, an underling sent to make arrangements for the meeting was insisting on a legalistic point as a condition for the conference. They were unwilling to break their own instructions and accept the “one common country” provision, but they were also determined to have their conversation with Lincoln.¹³

Luckily, Grant was equally determined that the talks take place. He went himself to the Mary Martin and resumed his amicable conversations with the commissioners, during which Hunter spoke frankly to him: “We do not seem to get on very rapidly with Major Eckert. We are anxious to get to Washington and Mr. Lincoln has promised to see us there.” Grant’s own sense of things agreed with theirs, and he encouraged the commissioners to appeal past Lincoln’s emissary; as he prepared to leave the boat about 8:00 P.M. he carried a brief message, addressed formally to him, saying, “We desire to go to Washington City to confer informally with the President personally….” Neatly, the Confederates did not say “President of the United States”; Grant hoped the one country / two country dilemma had been got round. As for the subjects to be discussed, the commissioners referred simply to “matters mentioned” in Lincoln’s letter to Blair, and they maintained the position of having made no concessions by adding that they would discuss such matters with Lincoln “without any personal compromise” on any topic in the letter.¹⁴

Major Eckert, hearing that Grant was aboard the Mary Martin, joined him there. Grant had told the commissioners that the message “would or ought to be satisfactory to Major Eckert,” but he was wrong; the stubborn telegrapher told Grant that the letter did not meet Lincoln’s requirements, and calling the lieutenant general out of the room, but not so far away that the Confederates were unaware of what was being said, reproved him for involving himself in diplomacy. Their conversation was smoldering—Eckert recalled, “Grant was angry with me for years afterward”—but Grant could not flatly override Lincoln’s emissary. In fact, the general obeyed the major, and the commissioners were told by Eckert that their request to proceed was disallowed. Eckert did defer to Grant on one crucial matter, however; as he finished his last conversation with the three Confederates he told them that if they “concluded to accept the terms” they should “inform General Grant.” Eckert then left the Mary Martin and at 10:00 P.M. sent a telegram directly to Lincoln stating that the commissioners had been told, at nine-thirty, that the president’s conditions had not been met. The purport of Eckert’s message, which quoted the note the Commissioners had addressed to Grant, was that the conference should not be held. But Eckert did hedge on just one point; with no obvious relevance to anything else in his telegram, he added that he did not think it much mattered whether any possible meeting was in Washington: “Fort Monroe would be acceptable.” This was the door through which Grant moved to bring about the peace conference.¹⁵

At ten-thirty that same evening, February 1, Grant with scrupulous attention to protocol sent a telegram not to Lincoln, but to the secretary of war:

Hon. Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War:

Now that the interview between Major Eckert, under his written instructions, and Mr. Stephens and party has ended, I will state confidentially, but not officially to become a matter of record, that I am convinced upon conversation with Messrs. Stephens and Hunter that their intentions are good and their desire sincere to restore peace and union. I have not felt myself at liberty to express even views of my own or to account for my reticency. This has placed me in an awkward position, which I could have avoided by not seeing them in the first instance. I fear now their going back without any expression from anyone in authority will have a bad influence. At the same time, I recognize the difficulties in the way of receiving these informal commissioners at this time, and do not know what to recommend. I am sorry, however, that Mr. Lincoln can not have an interview with the two named in this dispatch, if not all three now within our lines. Their letter to me was all that the President’s instructions contemplated to secure their safe conduct if they had used the same language to Major Eckert.

U. S. Grant, Lieutenant-General.¹⁶

Then, after the fact, Grant set out to get a document to substantiate the bold initiative he had taken. He returned to the Mary Martin and told the Confederates (with what Stephens recalled as “an anxious disquietude upon his face”) that “Major Eckert was not satisfied,” but that he, Grant, had “determined” to send them not to Washington but “to Fortress Monroe the next day on his own responsibility.” He told them that Seward was already there, and counseled them to be willing to speak to Lincoln’s deputy rather than only to the president. He may well have also said that he had hinted that Lincoln should go to Fortress Monroe to be with Seward for the meeting with the Confederates. In any case, he told them to be ready in the morning to leave for Hampton Roads and Fortress Monroe.¹⁷

When he left the commissioners he carried a letter from them (presumably written after midnight, since it was dated February 2, 1865); this was carefully addressed not to him, but to Eckert. In it, they again sought to avoid the one country / two country dilemma by merely referring to Lincoln’s letter to Blair and stating, “It is our earnest wish to ascertain, after, a free interchange of ideas and information, upon what principles and terms, if any, a just and honorable peace can be established without the further effusion of blood, and to contribute our utmost effort to accomplish such a result.” Further, they told Eckert, should they be granted and accept his “passport,” they were “not to be understood to be committing [themselves] to anything.” Stephens and his fellows were protecting themselves from being charged in Richmond with having yielded the concept of Confederate sovereignty, but they also stated that they were “willing to proceed to Fortress Monroe and there to have an informal conference with any person or persons that President Lincoln may appoint….” Grant did not let Eckert have a look at the most important letter ever addressed to him until the next afternoon. By the time Orville Babcock delivered it, at Fortress Monroe, it was too late for Eckert to decide that this letter, too, was unsatisfactory.¹⁸

The previous evening, at about the same hour that Grant sent his telegram, Eckert, as he left for the coast expecting to join Seward at Hampton Roads and return with him to Washington, also tried to send Stanton a telegram. It was an exceedingly obscure message designed to reconcile the language in the various communications of the commissioners. The telegram would have neither helped nor hindered the cause of the peace conference, but no matter; when Major Eckert tried to send it, the telegraph line mysteriously was out of order. Service had been restored by the following morning. Steam was up on the Mary Martin, and the commissioners were anxiously awaiting their departure, when Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, “coming in almost a run down hill,” got about twenty or thirty paces from the dock and with “countenance beaming” shouted to the rebels, “Gentlemen, it’s all right, I’ve got the authority.” He was waving a telegram, and coming up on deck, he read from it to them: “Say to the gentlemen I will meet them personally at Fortress-Monroe as soon as I can get there.” At the White House, during the night, Lincoln had been prepared to act on Eckert’s negative report, but at dawn, Stanton had brought him Grant’s personal message urging that the conference take place. “This dispatch of General Grant changed my purpose,” Lincoln later told Congress. He elected to set aside his own legalistic insistence on the “one common country” stipulation and go himself to meet with the Confederate delegation. Instead of recalling Seward, Lincoln wired, “Induced by a despatch of Gen. Grant, I join you at Fort-Monroe as soon as I can come.” Campbell took the same view of Grant’s centrality in the matter; he was sure that it was Grant who persuaded the president to make a trip his cabinet disapproved of. Welles and Stanton, in particular, knew how opposed Radicals in Congress could be to anything that would look like appeasement. In this respect the shift from Washington to Hampton Roads proved important on two counts: First, those opposed to having any conversation with the enemy would be mollified by the fact that the meeting took place in a neutral setting aboard ship rather than in the White House; second, Lincoln had more latitude away from Washington. In the capital he would have been exposed to nervous pressures from congressmen, reporters, and cabinet members like Stanton.¹⁹

When Lincoln’s telegram—the one that Grant and the commissioners so cordially celebrated—arrived at City Point, Grant was of course greatly relieved that his initiative had been sanctioned by the president. He was delighted that the conference would be held, and he knew, too, just how powerful his word had become. But much as he may have wanted to, Grant did not go to the conference. He and one of the commissioners’ aides remained at City Point to discuss prisoner exchanges and the three Confederate commissioners, who knew from their earlier talks with Grant that he took a hard line on this subject, saw in his willingness to talk about it still another optimistic sign as with Orville Babcock as escort, they set out for Hampton Roads and the peace conference on the River Queen.²⁰

By the accounts of all five participants, it was a civil, even cordial meeting. After exchanging pleasantries with Lincoln about Whig politics back in 1848, Stephens asked if good relations could be restored by the acceptance of the Confederacy’s independence. The reply was no. Stephens then explained that they had been commissioned by Jefferson Davis to propose a joint attack on Mexico, but were not authorized to talk of the reabsorption of the Confederate States into the Union. It is likely that Lincoln saw the Mexican mission as a euphemistic expression of Southern desperation. (Hunter, in fact, was openly scornful of the silly scheme.) What Lincoln failed to see was how great the pressure on Davis to make peace was; the gentlemanly commissioners did not succeed in making the president of the United States aware of how hungry the starving people of the South were. Campbell, the most realistic of the three, tried to give a hint of the South’s weakness, but Lincoln did not fully perceive the strength of the North’s position. All of the commissioners were surprised—one senses their great disappointment—that Lincoln did not demand a peace agreement, a surrender. Such a show of strength might, in turn, have strengthened their hand with Davis when they sought to persuade him that immediate negotiations would be more fruitful than later ones.²¹

During the discussion, the Confederates were told that the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, which had already been approved by the Senate, had now cleared the House and was being sent to the states for ratification. The Confederates knew that both Seward and Chase had been at the House lobbying for passage (twice previously denied the measure) on the grounds that such a statement on slavery would strengthen the position of Lincoln and Seward in any peace negotiations with the Confederacy. It would persuade the Southerners that there was no turning back on the abolition of slavery. Now, however, on the River Queen, Seward toyed with a startling idea. Lincoln stated his position that he would countenance no re-enslavement of people freed under the Emancipation Proclamation, but he listened as the secretary of state suggested that if “the Southern States will return to the Union,…with their own strength and the aid of the connections they will form with other States, this amendment will be defeated.” In other words, if the Southern states were to come back into the Union—to take part in the political process—they could hold off the final end of slavery. An amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of the states, so the eleven Confederate states acting together would be able to block approval. It is doubtful whether Seward truly believed the clock could be turned back with respect to the ending of slavery, but he may have wanted the rebels to see that they still had considerable bargaining power and that if slavery could not be salvaged, then some other system of involuntary labor, such as an “apprenticeship” system, might replace it. Thus the loss of a labor supply, and indeed the chaos which, it was feared, would follow when the slaves were quickly freed would be avoided. So, of course, would total emancipation.²²

Lincoln, at this point, had a different suggestion to make to his old Whig friend Stephens: “If I were in Georgia…I would go home and get the Governor…to call the Legislature together, and get them to recall all the State troops from the war…and ratify this Constitutional Amendment prospectively, so as to take effect—say in five years…. Slavery is doomed….” The five white Americans then discussed slavery and some “substitute status” for the slaves. When Hunter insisted that the black people, once freed, would no longer be cared for, Lincoln replied with his famous story of the hungry hogs which the farmer had provided for by planting a field of potatoes; when they’re hungry enough, said the farmer, they can root. But what, someone asked him, would happen when the ground froze solid? “Let ’em root,” the farmer answered stolidly. It was an odd simile for the Great Emancipator to choose, but Lincoln, like Hunter, was not sure the abolitionists had provided for the winter.²³

Lincoln then introduced one of his favorite ideas, that of compensated emancipation, and Seward got up and paced about the cabin. Undaunted, Lincoln added to his secretary of state’s discomfort by saying that Northerners were as culpable as Southern slaveholders and should be willing to share the costs of freedom. Lincoln then reiterated his support of the Emancipation Proclamation and said he would not permit any people freed by it to be re-enslaved. However, when Stephens questioned him he agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure and conceded that those who had not been freed by the time peace was established might still be slaves in the eyes of the law. Thus, all five men kept returning to the discomfiting question of what the status would be of four million black people in the South when peace came.

No one seemed aware of the sixth man in the room. It was only to set the scene in his fine account of the conference that Stephens wrote, “During the interview, no person entered the saloon…except a colored servant” who brought in “water, cigars and other refreshments.”²⁴

If they could agree in their insensitive misgivings about the future in freedom of black Americans, the statesmen could come to no agreement on the basic question of sovereignty. Lincoln insisted on the unconditional resumption of federal authority over the whole South, while the commissioners did not have license from Davis even to discuss alterations in the United States Constitution that would have redefined federal authority in ways which might be favorable to the Confederates. The conference ended without agreement, and the commissioners started back toward Richmond.

At City Point, Stephens again saw Grant, who “regretted very much that nothing had been accomplished by the Conference.” Julia Grant was equally disappointed. In her Memoirs, she recalled with vivid detail a conversation she did not have with Abraham Lincoln, during which she became so frustrated that she upbraided the president of the United States. As she remembered it, she opened the door to the living section of her husband’s headquarters the morning after the conference and, seeing Lincoln, could not wait to summon the general before asking the president if there was going to be peace. “Well no,” was his reply, as he tried to brush her off. “No!” she blurted out. “Why, Mr. President, are you not going to make terms with them? They are our own people, you know.” Taking her seriously now, Lincoln said, “Yes, I do not forget that,” and he reached into his pocket and read to her the terms he had offered the commissioners. Then he looked straight at her and she said, “Did they not accept those?” Her account continued: “He smiled wearily and said, ‘no.’ Whereupon I wrathfully exclaimed: ‘Why, what do they want? That paper is most liberal.’ He smiled and said: ‘I thought when you understood the matter you would agree with us.’”²⁵

There is no doubt that Julia Grant would have relished having such a conversation to report, but if she and Abraham Lincoln ever had such an exchange, it was not on the morning after the meeting with the peace commissioners; the president had left for Annapolis and the train for Washington at four the previous afternoon, immediately after the conference ended. In her memory, she may have confused the conversation with one she could conceivably have had with Lincoln when he visited City Point later in the winter; of the fact that her imaginings reflected her sentiments, there can be no doubt. She had pressed her husband hard to see to it that a peace conference was held.

Critics of the peace conference claim it lengthened the war by strengthening the will of Confederates who saw Lincoln, not Davis, as the obdurate force. Why then had Grant, whose job was to win the war, worked so hard to bring the conference about? The answer is that he truly thought the enemy, or at least the saner enemy leaders, ready to stop the fighting, and he believed the peace conference had a chance of succeeding; he believed Lincoln and the three Confederates would find a way to say that enough was enough. If they had done so, Grant would have completed his job in a nonmartial manner. Grant’s eagerness to bring the politicians to the table was not, however, entirely born of confidence. By January 1865 Thomas had halted the last threat of a major Confederate offensive and the Confederate armies were locked into place around Richmond, but all was not over. Sherman had yet to complete his circle north through the Carolinas, and he was paced by the still-dangerous Johnston. And even that was not Grant’s greatest worry. Rationally, he knew his position was much stronger than Lee’s, yet he feared the war would slip out of his grasp. “One of the most anxious periods of my experience during the rebellion was the last few weeks before Petersburg.… I was afraid, every morning, that I would awake from my sleep to hear that Lee had gone…and the war [had been] prolonged another year.” Lee was shrewd, and his small army might prove adroit; Grant feared that the Confederates might slip off not so much to thwart Sherman as to “escape”—to move into the hills and fight as guerrillas. If they did, Grant would lose his personal hold on the war and its destiny. By functioning as a diplomat, working to bring to the bargaining table men from both sides who feared chaos, he remained in command of his war.²⁶

Not all observers were totally discouraged by the lack of success at the peace conference. Charles Francis Adams, Jr., about to become the colonel of a black regiment in General Ord’s command, saw the meeting as “an indispensable first step which had to be taken.” Adams, whose troops had not won his affection, wanted a moderate peace—that is, a peace considerate of the feelings of white gentlemen in the South. (In contrast, his men were inconsiderate of the Massachusetts gentleman; Adams blamed this on the fact that he was a stern disciplinarian: “I no longer wonder slave drivers were cruel. I no longer have any bowels of mercy….”) Adams told his father he was glad Lincoln had met with the commissioners: “As for dignity, I do not look to President Lincoln for that. I do look to him for honesty and shrewdness and I see no evidence that in this matter he has been wanting in these respects.”²⁷

In March, after hearing Lincoln’s second inaugural speech, with its talk of malice toward none, young Adams wrote his father, in England, “[The] rail-splitting lawyer is one of the wonders of the day.” He saw the speech as setting a tone of peace but observed that “since Hampton Roads, there had been no presidential effort comparable to the conference on the River Queen.” Others, however, were actively trying to get the two sides to talk again. John A. Campbell, his splendid legal mind searching every corner of the issue for a way to redefine it, tried repeatedly to persuade his government to reopen negotiations; on a less intellectual level, Mrs. General Grant had a similar goal. Perhaps people on both sides who knew how to talk to one another could be brought together to discuss how best to bring an end to the war.²⁸

Ulysses had a way of teasing Julia. He would talk to her playfully about something serious and then, abruptly, turn away from the subject when she took it seriously. One day she came out of their bedroom and found Grant and Ord talking. Her husband told her that Ord had been across the lines under a flag of truce and had had a conversation with a mutual friend, the Confederate general James Longstreet. Many years later, Julia recalled her husband’s asking her what she would think of “an interchange of social visits between you and Mrs. Longstreet and others when the subject of peace may be discussed, and you ladies may become the mediums of peace.” In reply, she at once exclaimed, using the diction of breathless femininity, “Oh! How enchanting, how thrilling! Oh, Ulys. I may go, may I not?” Grant, Julia reported in her account of the conversation,

only smiled at my enthusiasm and said: “No, I think not.” I then approached him, saying, “Yes, I must. Do say yes. I so wish to go. Do let me go.” But he still said: “No, that would never do.” Besides, he did not feel sure that he could trust me; with the desire I always had shown for having a voice in great affairs, he was afraid I might urge some policy that the President would not sanction. I replied to this: “Oh, nonsense. Do not talk so, but let me go. I should be so enchanted to have a voice in this great matter. I must go. I will. Do say I may go.” But General Grant grew very earnest now and said: “No, you must not. It is simply absurd. The men have fought this war and the men will finish it.”

I urged no more, knowing this was final, and I was silent, indignant, and disappointed.²⁹

No more negotiations were attempted; after the peace conference that brought no peace, there were eight more weeks of siege at Petersburg. Grant was not moving, but Sherman was—coming north from Savannah through the Carolinas. The war was being won, even as the terms for ending it still eluded the captains of the Union cause. Sherman’s advance evoked a “Te Deum of the nation,” recalled Gideon Welles, who nastily added that the “hosannas to Sherman roused Grant to the necessity of doing something lest there should be another and greater hero who would eclipse him.” Had Grant sat still and simply kept Lee’s men engaged at Petersburg, Sherman might have walked in from the southwest, taken Richmond, and indeed become the hero of the hour. Grant foresaw the possibility; when Sherman wrote that he would decline a rumored promotion—one that would raise him to Grant’s singular place—if it were offered, Grant in his reply was not only gracious about this prospect but even offered to bow out: “No one would be more pleased…at your advancement than I, and if you should be placed in my position and I subordinate it would not change our personal relations in the least.”³⁰

Grant chose to let that possibility remain hypothetical and began to put heavy pressure on the Confederates outside Richmond; he did indeed want to play an active role in his own victory, but Welles was wrong to suggest that Grant was pigheadedly trying to shove past Sherman. During February, Grant could see the coming “dissolution” of the Confederate cause on all fronts. He noted that the number of Confederate deserters was increasing despite official Richmond attempts to make the “insult” to the Confederate commissioners at the peace conference a rallying cry for renewed fighting. In a letter to Elihu Washburne, he wrote generously, “A few days more of success with Sherman will put us where we can crow loud.” There already hung, in the rotunda of the Capitol, in Washington, a painting of Grant standing with gloved hand on a cannon. He was already in his place as the war’s great military hero, and he wanted to have at his elbow, when the war finally ended, its only greater hero—Abraham Lincoln. On March 20 he wrote Lincoln, “Can you not visit City Point for a day or two? I would like very much to see you and I think the rest would do you good.” If Lincoln came, the two men could be together at the war’s close, and there would be less risk of Grant’s being left out of whatever was going to happen once the war was over.³¹

To the delight of Ulysses and Julia, Lincoln accepted the invitation at once. On March 24, 1865, Abraham and Mary Lincoln and their son Tad reached City Point on board the River Queen. The visit proved to be an incongruous mixture of frivolous social skirmishing and the most serious of talk. The men who did the talking were the president of the United States, his two senior generals, Grant and Sherman (who came north by sea), and Admiral David Dixon Porter. The women, frustrated in their impotent rage at a war they could neither affect nor avoid, scarcely knew what to do. City Point, with its tents and cabins, was a strange world which Mary Lincoln’s husband enjoyed, but in which she had no place. Had there been no other women around, she might have reigned on foreign ground. Instead, she was confronted with generals’ wives who had made City Point theirs, and was out of sorts as she arrived.

Robert Lincoln was already at City Point. His father had asked Grant if his son, who had just graduated from Harvard, might not have a chance to see a bit of the war, and Robert was serving on Grant’s staff. He brought the word to the Grants’ cabin at City Point that his parents and brother had arrived on the River Queen, which stood off the point in the James River. The Grants went at once to call on the Lincolns, and as the men went off together, Julia Grant, feeling ill at ease, was left alone in small quarters with Mary Lincoln. Mrs. Lincoln had gotten up to greet her, and now Julia, as unobtrusively as possible, sat down on the small sofa on which Mrs. Lincoln had been sitting. Only when she looked up and saw the disapproval on Mrs. Lincoln’s face did she realize, too late, that she should not have seated herself while the president’s wife was standing. She started up with an apology, but was beckoned back with belated graciousness by Mrs. Lincoln, who sat down on the sofa as well. The two women were jammed together in discomfort and silence. After an eternal second or two, Julia rose and “quietly took a chair near her.”³²

The next day things went no better. Mrs. Lincoln, accompained by Julia, was driven to a review of troops in an ambulance that moved slowly and uncomfortably through the mud. The general’s wife tried to bring a cheerful note to the tedious trip, but her supply of tact was drawn on heavily. When Mrs. Lincoln grew exasperated with their progress, Julia persuaded her not to get out in the calf-deep mud, but she was totally unable to appease the first lady’s wrath when General Ord’s wife rode blithely past them on horseback. Mary Lincoln made the day totally miserable, and the memory lingered.³³

When Grant and Sherman returned the next day from a conference with Lincoln, in which business of the first importance had been discussed, Julia’s first question was whether they had remembered to pay their respects to Mrs. Lincoln. They had not, and Julia scolded them—“Well, you are a pretty pair!” The following day, remembering her chastising words as they went aboard the River Queen, they carefully asked for Mrs. Lincoln. The president went to her stateroom but soon returned and asked that she be excused since she was not well.³⁴

Julia was tiring of this imperiousness. When, on a social occasion, the topic was, What should be done with Jefferson Davis, if he is captured? Mary Lincoln baited Julia Grant: “Suppose we ask Mrs. Grant. Let her answer this important question.” Julia, with good political savvy, caught Lincoln’s eye and said she would trust Davis “to the mercy of our always just and most gracious President.” Julia had won that round in the eyes of the men but had lost forever so far as the president’s wife was concerned. Mary Lincoln hated every woman who played up to her husband, and hated herself for caring. It was particularly galling to be jealous of a dowdy little person like the general’s wife. From this moment on at City Point, Mary Lincoln snubbed Julia Grant—refusing, for example, to allow her to go with her party to visit Petersburg after the city finally yielded to the siege. And even in Mary Lincoln’s forlorn, unbalanced years after the assassination, Julia never forgave this treatment.³⁵

While the women, deprived of any activity save flirtation, yielded to bitchiness, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, and Porter met for long conversations. The topic was what John A. Campbell had called Reconstruction—that is, they were considering what the relationship of the Southern states to the national government should be when the Union was rebuilt. “Change” was not the key word in the conversations; Reconstruction did not, for those four, involve basic revision of the racial order, enforced by the introduction of a concept of national citizenship. Slavery was dead, but the superiority of white men over black men was not. We have only Sherman’s and Porter’s accounts of the conference—written when both sought to justify Sherman’s later claim that everything he did in making terms with Johnston in April was in accordance with what was said by the four men on the River Queen in late March. G. P. A. Healy painted a wonderful picture of the four victors in the stateroom of the boat, but it is a cartoon without a caption. Guessing what was on Abraham Lincoln’s mind in the weeks before the death that prevented him from putting any of his thoughts into action has been one of the nation’s favorite speculative games ever since the assassination.³⁶

We cannot know, but nothing anyone said—certainly, nothing the president himself said—after the talks on the River Queen suggests that the commander in chief and his highest military lieutenants wanted anything more than the end of the war and the establishment of a stable civil order. They seem scarcely to have been cognizant of the fact that this order would have no defined place within it for the four million people who would be slaves no more. Porter thought “Mr. Lincoln came down to City Point with the most liberal views toward the rebels. He felt confident that we would be successful, and was willing that the enemy should capitulate on the most favorable terms.” Porter was convinced that Lincoln “wanted peace on almost any terms.” Conferring with the admiral and the two generals, Lincoln was separated from those in his capital who were desperately anxious lest he give away the victory. Lincoln joked about stern, demanding Stanton; it was a relief to leave behind even for a few days that dogged man and his constant reminders that radicals in Congress, such as Senator Sumner, had in mind dramatic changes in the social order of the South that would give the freedmen power at the expense of the white men who presently directed civil life there.³⁷

G. P. A. Healy, The Peacemakers. Sherman, Grant, Lincoln, and Porter. WHITE HOUSE COLLECTION

While the Lincolns were at City Point, Petersburg fell. Lincoln and Grant went into the town that so long, so stubbornly, so valiantly, had resisted Grant’s armies. On Market Street, they went up to the pillared house of an old Whig friend of the president’s, and Lincoln asked a young gentleman at the door if they could come in. Appalled, the man went back inside and said to his father, “You are not going to let that man come into the house!” “I think it would not do to try to stop a man from coming in who has fifty thousand men at his back,” was the reply as he joined Lincoln and Grant on the porch. The callers laughed, and their host, enlarging on his hospitality, invited them into the parlor. As C. C. Carpenter remembered it a quarter of a century later, Grant demurred: “Thank you, sir, but I am smoking.” While they stood on the porch, Grant was handed a telegram. He read it, “took the cigar from his mouth, and with the utmost coolness” read it aloud. Richmond too had been occupied.³⁸

The army that finally reached the city on April 3, 1865, found that the Confederate government had left for Danville, Virginia. Lee had informed Davis that he could no longer protect the capital and withdrew his army from the defense lines in front of Richmond. A Union officer, Edward H. Ripley, wrote that when his men went over the Confederate defense works they “rushed wildly in every direction,” mounting the great iron cylinders “until a howling maniac in blue sat astride every one of the thickly planted guns in reach.” The move into Richmond itself became a race, with cavalry units rushing past infantry and competing cavalry—all trying to be first into the city. One infantry unit broke into a run, only to encounter a swamp. Ripley remembered how he had urged his men on through earlier long and agonizing marches by saying, “Close up, boys. Close up.” Now the same cry seemed to drive them with an almost sexual energy. As he rode back along the ranks of his advancing infantrymen, he found himself looking down, he said, “into flashing eyes and quivering faces of the men as they glanced up at me in the mute freemasonry of a common joy and glory.”³⁹

Some of the Union soldiers were black. For them, the fall of Richmond had a special significance. The stories of their entrance into the city have the hollowness of twice-told tales that have been invested with symbolic grandeur, and yet one cannot wholly discount all the accounts of the emotional welcome they got from the black Virginians who came into the streets to greet the day of deliverance. Ripley remembered the freed slaves of the city on their knees, calling out, “‘Glory to God! Glory to God!’…while floods of tears poured down their wild faces.” Some stories of that day became legends, among them the tale of the black Union soldier who entered one house to liberate his wife, still a slave, only to be bayoneted by the white rebel soldier guarding the white inhabitants. Ripley approved of this action, claiming the Union soldier had been bent not merely on rescue but also on mocking his wife’s master and forcing the cook to prepare a meal for him and his wife. Ripley thought it wise when General Godfrey Weitzel ordered his black troops to camp outside the city. In town, “none of the better class of whites were to be seen; blinds on houses were shut.”⁴⁰

Saluting the fall of Richmond, Herman Melville wrote, “God is in Heaven, and Grant in the Town,” but he was wrong. The general did not enter the enemy’s capital—the victorious captain at the head of his troops. He stayed away from Richmond. “Say to the President,” Grant wrote in a note to Colonel Theodore S. Bowers, “that an officer and escort will attend but as to myself I start toward the Danville road with the army. I want to cut off as much of Lee’s army as possible.” Julia did go to Richmond, and was sorry afterward. In perhaps the finest passage in her Memoirs, she recorded that there was in the “fallen city” no glory. “When we arrived at the landing, we took a carriage and directed the coachman to drive through the principal streets and past the public buildings. I only saw that the city was deserted; not a single inhabitant visible. Only now and then we would meet one or two carriages with visitors from the North, coming like ourselves to see this sad city, and occasionally an old colored servant would pass alone, looking on us as intruders, as we all felt we were.”⁴¹

Another intruder was Abraham Lincoln, who came into Jefferson Davis’s capital and made peace with the highest-ranking member of the Confederate government remaining in Richmond, John A. Campbell. In 1861 Campbell had been one of the last men to try to negotiate a compromise to avoid secession and war. Now he pointed out to Lincoln the distress of the people of Richmond. There had been a great fire and a worse devastation of spirit as the government and army left. “I represented the conditions to him and requested that no requisitions on the inhabitants be made of restraint of any sort save to police and preservation of order; not to exact oaths, interfere with the churches, etc. He assented to this,” Campbell claimed. He portrayed Lincoln as wanting his wayward children to come home. If the people of the South would acknowledge the “national authority” he would let them go on about their business with no restraints. Lincoln was apparently ready to jettison Francis Harrison Pierpont’s feeble Unionist government in Virginia if the Confederate government “up yonder” in the statehouse would declare, as Lincoln put it to Campbell, that it was ready to change landlords and come back into the Union.⁴²

Campbell was delighted with his agreement with Lincoln. It preserved the essentials of the Southern order. Slavery was not mentioned, but the continuance of a government that had so long enforced the racial arrangements of the South boded well for their maintenance. This was a compromise in which Campbell gave nothing and gained much. It was in the tradition of the great American compromises in which white men made agreements at the expense of black men. Pursuing his promising diplomacy, Campbell the next day called on Lincoln, on the gunboat Malvern, on the James. Lincoln gave him a document reiterating the need to recognize the national authority and ambiguously saying that “on the slavery question” he would not go back “from the position in the late annual message to Congress and in preceding documents.” Using his executive power, he banned further confiscation of property, but he added that this “remission of confiscation has no reference to supposed property in slaves.” He ordered General Weitzel, in command of the occupied city, to call the legislature into session. Then, called back to Washington, he left Grant alone to finish the war.⁴³