WASHINGTON AND MONTGOMERY

A Solemn Council

FEBRUARY 4

AS LINCOLN PREPARED FOR HIS JOURNEY TO WASHINGTON, HE received encouraging news that reinforced his belief that unionism in the northernmost slave states remained strong. On Monday, February 4, a week before his departure, Virginia held an election to choose delegates for a state convention to consider secession, set to convene on February 13, which was also the day the electoral count would be formally certified in Washington. Of the 152 delegates elected, the great majority—80 percent—favored remaining in the Union, though not without qualification. Lincoln’s secretary of state designee, Seward, received a warning that for such support to continue, Republicans would have to “come forward promptly with liberal concessions.” Seward, however, felt renewed confidence. Virginia’s support was just the beginning, he believed; he expected the so-called border states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—likewise to reject secession. Once they did, the Deep South would surely follow; even the seceded states would seek a return to the fold.

Virginia’s apparent pro-Union leaning provided a much-needed respite from the mounting tension and suspense. In Boston, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., son of the congressman and diarist of the same name, got word of Virginia’s vote on the afternoon of Tuesday, February 5. “I was skating on Jamaica Pond, all by myself,” he wrote in his diary, “when I noticed the throng of skaters flocking together on the further side of the Pond, and almost immediately they began to shout and cheer with all their souls. Some one had come out bringing a paper with fuller and final returns. The tears almost stood in my eyes; and I skated off to be alone, for I realized that the crisis was actually passed.”

A few days later, Tennessee voters delivered an even more striking affirmation of Lincoln’s and Seward’s belief in the latent pro-unionism of the South when in a statewide referendum they voted not to hold a convention at all. Seward was delighted, according to another Adams son, Henry, twenty-three, private secretary to his father. “The ancient Seward is in high spirits and chuckles himself hoarse with stories,” Henry wrote.

Meanwhile, 133 delegates from twenty-one states—fourteen free, seven slave—gathered in Washington for a “Peace Convention” to try to find a way out of the secession crisis. This was set to begin on Monday, February 4, but bad weather hampered the travels of many delegates. When they eventually arrived they found a tense city with soldiers, guns, and cannon everywhere and a palpable fear of invasion by rebel forces, which one delegate proclaimed himself “prepared each morning to see.” Buchanan’s attorney general, Edwin Stanton, harbored the private fear that by Inauguration Day the city would be in Southern hands.

As a display of defiance against unrest, authorities had ordered an American flag flown from the Washington Monument, which at 156 feet was only about 30 percent complete, a stub of blue gneiss granite faced with white marble, surrounded by tumble-down work sheds and scattered pieces of stone. Seward called the flag-raising “more effective than the most eloquent speech,” although skeptics might have been inclined to see the structure below it more as a symbol of failure. Construction of the monument had begun in 1848 with enslaved labor but ceased ten years later, just as America’s sectional crisis neared its peak, and would not resume until 1880. Owing to the use of a different marble upon resumption, the tower’s face would forever after have two tones, inadvertently immortalizing in stone America’s antebellum division.

At length the full quorum of conference delegates managed to reach Washington and convened at the city’s Willard Hotel in its adjacent Willard’s Dancing Hall. The conference offered hope, however wan, at a time when the crisis increasingly seemed to be lurching toward violence. Buchanan urged both Congress and the seceding states to abstain from taking any actions “to produce a collision of arms” while the conference was in session. Knowing souls understood this plea to be a reflection of his own fervent hope to make it through Inauguration Day without a civil war.

The delegates were, to put it kindly, an august group, though Horace Greeley was not inclined to kindness when he dubbed it an “Old Gentlemen’s Convention” whose attendees were “political fossils, who would not have been again disinterred” if not for the crisis at hand. Greeley’s nickname stuck. One elderly delegate died during the conference.

The attendees resolved early on to keep all proceedings secret from the public to avoid the likelihood that conferees would play to the press with overlong speeches and inflammatory remarks. The speeches occurred anyway, day in day out, in a ceaseless grind of words having all the verve of a glacier.

AS THE PEACE CONVENTION doddered on, officials from South Carolina and the other five states that had seceded thus far gathered in Montgomery for a convention of their own, this one to found the Confederate States of America and establish a provisional congress. They designated Montgomery their capital and chose a president for the congress, Howell Cobb, former U.S. secretary of the Treasury.

Montgomery was a curious choice for a capital. With a total population of 8,843 people, half of whom were enslaved, it barely qualified as a city, though judging by the state capitol building it had high hopes of becoming one. A broad unpaved boulevard, Market Street (now Dexter Avenue), ended at a shallow promontory, Goat Hill, that formed the base of the building, a massive white Greek Revival structure built a decade earlier with six three-story columns, a large dome, and a clock. It was here that delegates from the seceded states met, surrounded by elegant interior woodwork and graceful curving stairways crafted by Horace King, a renowned architect, carpenter, and bridge builder who also happened to be Black and formerly enslaved. The building was situated half a mile from the Alabama River, uphill from a wharf where riverboats unloaded delegates and enslaved Blacks alike.

A newspaper called the Montgomery Daily Post and subtitled “An Independent South” provided a sense of the commerce that fueled the city. Here were one-inch ads for such things as caskets, carriages, dental services, whiskey, and women’s “dancing pumps.” The Post was given now and then to attempts at humor. What do you call “The Valet of the Shadow of Death?” Why, “The Undertaker,” of course. Out on the street, visitors to Montgomery might encounter an obvious marker of some retail specialty, such as a giant boot at the boot maker’s shop at the corner of Commerce and Market, or the immense gold tooth at the office of Dr. H. Seger, dentist. At Glackmeyer’s Apothecary on Market, under the eagle sign, you could get a cocaine preparation for your hair, or a French pomade, or an elderflower extract for the complexion, or a particularly tantalizing product called “Dupuy’s Kiss-me-Gently.”

A photograph of Market Street at the time shows two lines of three-story shops and mostly covered sidewalks fronted by drainage ditches receding toward the distant capitol, seemingly afloat in a light haze like some mystical temple from The Arabian Nights. In the foreground are a handful of freight wagons pulled by listless oxen and mules; clusters of men, mostly Black, sit peacefully around the Artesian Basin, a large round cistern on Court Square. William Russell, a correspondent for the Times of London who visited in 1861, found it bleak and desultory. “The streets are very hot, unpleasant, and uninteresting. I have rarely seen a more dull, lifeless place; it looks like a small Russian town in the interior.”

The choice of Montgomery did make a certain sense, however, in that it was the center of the domestic slave trade in Alabama and for much of the Deep South. Scores of enslaved Blacks arrived daily by riverboat and by train, and by overland coffles, to be deposited in slave “depots,” or pens, located throughout the city. On Market alone there were nine businesses engaged in trading, auctioning, or investing in slaves, and at least eight pens where men, women, and children alike were stored before sale. A slave pen on South Decatur Street stood just a block from the capitol. Additional depots and trading houses operated from side streets. The city’s slave auctions were typically held at the Artesian Basin, which made slave shopping about as convenient as possible. The state courthouse stood on an adjacent corner for the filing of slave mortgages, probate agreements, and other instruments; nearby stood a row of banks and insurers that specialized in financing the trade, including the founding office of a firm even then called Lehman Brothers. Advertisements in the Montgomery Daily Post touted enslaved people for sale, made available because of deaths, bankruptcies, and other legal actions. One ad offered a distinctly Southern service. Headlined “Negro Dogs,” it was posted by one W. L. Staggers, who specialized in finding escaped Blacks: “I have a first rate pack of Negro Dogs, with which I will hunt for Negroes at five dollars a day, and ten dollars for each Negro I succeed in securing.”

On February 9, James Chesnut and the other convention delegates gathered inside the capitol building and elected former U.S. senator Jefferson Davis president of the provisional government of the Confederacy. For vice president, they chose Alexander H. Stephens, Georgia’s “Little Ellick.”

Mary Chesnut would join her husband in two weeks.

DAVIS GOT THE NEWS on February 10 at his home, Brierfield Plantation, near Vicksburg, Mississippi. He and Varina were cutting roses at the time. As Davis stood reading the telegram, Varina watched him with concern. Telegrams, still objects of fascination, often brought the worst kind of news. “When reading the telegram,” she wrote, “he looked so grieved that I feared some evil had befallen our family. After a few minutes’ painful silence he told me, as a man might speak of a death sentence.”

Davis initially was uncertain as to whether to accept the appointment. It was an honor, of course, but he was not at all sure that he was the right man for the post. “I have no confidence in my ability to meet its requirement,” he said. He could serve as a general, yes. He was, after all, a West Point graduate (though he graduated twentieth out of thirty-three students in his class) and a celebrated hero of the Mexican War, and had been Secretary of War under Franklin Pierce. But president—especially at this time, with the Confederacy so newly formed—seemed initially to be too great a challenge. He did accept, however. “We are without machinery, without means, and threatened by powerful opposition,” he said, “but I do not despond and will not shrink from the task before me.”

Varina also had her doubts, as she would confess in her later biography of her husband. “He did not know the arts of the politician,” she wrote, “and would not practice them if understood.”

Now, as President-elect Lincoln continued his silence and prepared for his great journey to Washington, President-elect Davis set out from Brierfield to begin an eastward journey of his own, toward Montgomery and his own inauguration, set for February 18.

During the five days of his journey through a rugged and primitive landscape, he made twenty-five speeches in which he proclaimed that the time for Southern independence had come, even if it meant war. “Our separation from the old Union is complete,” he declared. “No compromise; no reconstruction can be now entertained.”