WASHINGTON

The Old Gentlemen Pay a Call

FEBRUARY 23–24

ON FEBRUARY 23, THE DAY OF LINCOLN’S ARRIVAL IN WASHINGTON, the president-elect invited the delegates of the Washington Peace Convention—all of them—to a reception at nine P.M. in his room at the Willard, parlor suite number 6. He was particularly interested in meeting one of them, William Cabell Rives of Virginia, sixty-seven years old, a former U.S. congressman and senator who had studied law under Thomas Jefferson at Monticello. Though Rives owned nearly one hundred slaves, he was a devout unionist. What Lincoln did not know was that he was quite short, a trait relevant only because of the encounter soon to occur.

Rives had not intended to do much speaking at the Peace Convention, but as it grew deadlocked, with each side increasingly convinced of its own virtue, he felt he could no longer just sit and watch. At one point he leapt to his feet and launched into a ninety-minute wholly extemporaneous plea for North and South to find a way to reunite. “I condemn the secession of States,” he said. “I detest it. But the great fact is still before us. Seven states have gone out from among us.” Coercion to bring them back would solve nothing, he warned. “You may spend millions of treasure, you may shed oceans of blood, but you cannot conquer any five or seven States of this Union.” He urged both sides to recognize that unless they made immediate concessions, Virginia, whose secession convention was still underway, and fellow border states also would secede, but he addressed the Republican members in particular. “War is impending,” he said. “Do you wish to govern a country convulsed by civil war? The country is divided. Do you wish to govern a fraction of the country?”

He had personal experience with the horrors of civil war, he told his audience, an allusion to the time he spent as America’s minister to France. “I have seen the pavements of Paris covered, and her gutters running with fraternal blood: God forbid that I should see this horrid picture repeated in my own country.”

ONE HUNDRED OR SO delegates showed up at parlor suite number 6. Despite the crush, they had no problem spotting Lincoln, who towered over them all, an aspect of the president-elect that they undoubtedly had read about but now were able to appreciate in person. Far from the hell-raising John Brown surrogate they may have expected, Lincoln moved among them with a cordial grace, escorted from delegate to delegate by Salmon Chase, a former governor of Ohio who helped found the Republican Party. He was also a conferee and would soon become Lincoln’s treasury secretary, though this had not yet been made final.

“They saw a tall, powerful man whose grand face overlooked them all; whose voice was kindly, who greeted every one with dignity and a courteous propriety of expression which surprised his friends,” wrote Vermont delegate Lucius E. Chittenden, the official keeper of Peace Convention records. Now and then a delegate would ask Lincoln a pointed question tinged with “a slight contemptuous disrespect,” Chittenden recalled. “Then his stature seemed to grow loftier, and there was a ring to his voice and flash from his eyes which discouraged a repetition of the experiment.”

Upon being introduced to Rives, Lincoln told him, “You are a smaller man than I supposed.”

He meant no offense; he often deployed his own great height as a device to warm initial meetings with strangers, as he had done repeatedly during his train journey to Washington. Lincoln now quickly qualified his remark: “I mean in person: every one is acquainted with the greatness of your intellect. It is, indeed, pleasant to meet one who has so honorably represented his country in Congress and abroad.”

The ever-courtly Rives took this for the compliment it was and replied in kind, telling Lincoln, “I feel myself to be a small man in your presence.” After asserting his own dedication to saving the Union, Rives observed that “the clouds that hang over it are very dark. I have no longer the courage of my younger days. I can do little—you can do much. Everything now depends on you.”

An uncomfortable pause followed as Lincoln considered a response.

“I cannot agree to that,” he said at last. “My course is as plain as a turnpike road. It is marked out by the Constitution. I am in no doubt which way to go. Suppose now we all stop discussing and try the experiment of obedience to the Constitution and the laws. Don’t you think it would work?”

Rives came away from this encounter feeling that Lincoln, though “good-natured and well-intentioned,” did not grasp the true gravity of the crisis, as he wrote in a letter to his son the next day. “He seems to think of nothing but jokes and stories.”

A few days later the Peace Convention approved a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution to be submitted to Congress for a vote. All seven of its clauses dealt with slavery, including one nicknamed the “Never-Never” clause, which would bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery as it existed in any state or territory in the country. The seven clauses underscored the fact that for all of the South’s efforts to blame the crisis on Northern tyranny in imposing tariffs, collecting revenue, and ordaining “internal improvements,” the crux of the crisis was in fact slavery. This was obvious to all at the time, if not to members of a certain school of twentieth-century historiography who sought to cast the conflict in the bloodless terms of states’ rights. As famed historian Samuel Eliot Morison observed, “I wish that some of our evasive historians, our mufflers of great passionate issues, who are trying to persuade the American public that Negro slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War, would read the debates in this Peace Convention.”

RIVES, EXHAUSTED, PREPARED TO return to Virginia but received another message from Lincoln, this one requesting that he and several other key Southern delegates return to the Willard for a second meeting, this also at nine P.M.

Lincoln, too, seemed tired; he sat in a chair with his feet up on a spindle, elbows on his bent knees, his hands at the sides of his face. The conversation quickly grew testy, though Lincoln began it with remarks aimed at putting the delegates at ease, repeating his vow to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and protect slavery in states where it already existed. One of his guests, ominously named Charles Slaughter Morehead, a former governor of Kentucky, entreated Lincoln to remove all federal troops from Fort Sumter lest violence break out and a “fratricidal war” result. At this, Rives stood and warned that if Lincoln resorted to coercion, his own home state of Virginia, despite its border status, would not hesitate to secede. “Old as I am,” Rives said, “and dearly as I love this Union, in that event I go, with all my heart and soul.”

Lincoln rose and walked up to Rives, according to Morehead’s recollection. “Mr. Rives!” Lincoln said. “Mr. Rives! If Virginia will stay in, I will withdraw the troops from Fort Sumter.”

Rives disclaimed holding the power to direct Virginia’s course but told Lincoln, “If you do that it will be one of the wisest things you have ever done. Do that, and give us guarantees, and I can promise you that whatever influence I possess shall be exerted to promote the Union and restore it to what it was.”

But Lincoln offered no guarantees. Stung by the aggressive character of the conversation that night, Lincoln closed the meeting with a jab that bore an uncharacteristic degree of hurt. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I have been wondering very much whether, if Mr. Douglas or Mr. Bell had been elected President you would have dared to talk to him as freely as you have to me.”

THE SENATE RECEIVED THE amendment proposed by the Peace Convention and promptly voted it into oblivion, 28 to 7. It never went to the House. But a vestige survived in the form of a parallel constitutional amendment proposed in the House by Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio and in the Senate by William Seward that guaranteed that Congress would not interfere with slavery where it currently existed.

This vestigial stub fared better. The House approved it by a vote of 133 to 65; the Senate did likewise, 24 to 12. Lincoln later forwarded the proposed amendment, the original thirteenth, to all state governors, including those in the Confederacy, for ratification by their legislatures. He neither endorsed it nor denounced it. As he saw it, the amendment merely made explicit—“express and irrevocable”—a principle already embodied in the Constitution and one he himself had espoused many times.

Only a few states would ultimately ratify the amendment before events made it irrelevant. Known to future centuries as the Shadow or Ghost Amendment, it remained an active congressionally approved but unratified amendment into the twenty-first century, theoretically still open to a final vote by the states.