by Shelby Foote
Eckert saw them that evening. One look at their instructions quickly convinced him the main condition was unmet. At 9.30 he wired Washington, “I notified them that they could not proceed.”
That seemed to be that; another peace effort no sooner launched than sunk. Lincoln inclined to that view next morning, February 2, when he received a somewhat puzzled telegram Seward had sent last night from Fort Monroe: “Richmond party not here.” Eckert’s followed, explaining the holdup. Lincoln was about to recall them both, ending the mission, when Stanton came in with a message just off the wire from Grant, a long and earnest plea that negotiations go forward despite Eckert’s disapproval. In it, the general seemed to have come under the influence of the contagion that infected his soldiers, two days ago, while they watched the rebel carriage approach their lines. He had had a letter from and a brief talk with two of the Confederates, following Eckert’s refusal to let them proceed, and he had been favorably impressed. “I will state confidentially, but not officially to become a matter of record,” he wired Stanton, “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 fear now their going back without any expression from anyone in authority will have a bad influence.” He himself did not feel free to treat with them, of course; “I am sorry however that Mr Lincoln cannot have an interview with the two named in this dispatch, if not all three now within our lines. Their letter to me was all the President’s instructions contemplated to secure their safe conduct if they had used the same language to Major Eckert.”
For Lincoln, this put a different face on the matter. He got off two wires at once. One was to Seward, instructing him to remain where he was. The other was to Grant. “Say to the gentlemen I will meet them personally at Fortress Monroe as soon as I can get there.”
He left within the hour, not even taking time to notify his secretary or any remaining member of his cabinet, and by nightfall was with Seward aboard the steamer River Queen, riding at anchor under the guns of Fort Monroe. The rebel commissioners were on a nearby vessel, also anchored in Hampton Roads; Seward had not seen them yet, and Lincoln sent word that he would receive them next morning in the Queen’s saloon. His instructions to the Secretary of State had been brief and to the point, listing three “indispensable” conditions for peace. One was “restoration of the national authority throughout all the states”; another was that there be no “receding” on the slavery question; while the third provided for “no cessation of hostilities short of the end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.” Lincoln considered himself bound by these terms as well, and had no intention of yielding on any of them, whatever else he might agree to.
The Confederates were punctual, coming aboard shortly after breakfast Friday morning, February 3. Handshakes and an exchange of amenities, as between old friends, preceded any serious discussion. “Governor, how is the Capitol? Is it finished?” Hunter asked. Seward described the new dome and the big brass door, much to the interest of the visitors, all three of whom had spent a good part of their lives in Washington, Campbell as a High Court justice, Hunter as a senator, and Stephens as a nine-term congressman. Lincoln was particularly drawn to the last of these, having admired him when they served together in the House at the time of the Mexican War, which they both opposed. “A little, slim, pale-faced, consumptive man,” he called him then, writing home that his fellow Whig had “just concluded the very best speech of an hour’s length I ever heard.” Stephens, though still pale-faced, seemed to have put on a great deal of weight in the past few years; that is until he took off a voluminous floor-length overcoat fashioned from blanket-thick cloth, a long wool muffler, and several shawls wound round and round his waist and chest against the cold. Then it was clear that he had not added an ounce of flesh to his ninety-four pounds of skin and bones. “Never have I seen so small a nubbin come out of so much husk,” Lincoln said with a smile as they shook hands.
That too helped to break the ice, and when the five took seats in the saloon, conversing still of minor things, the Union President and Confederate Vice President spoke of their days as colleagues, sixteen years ago. There had been a welcome harmony between the states and sections then, Stephens remarked, and followed with a question that went to the heart of the matter up for discussion: “Mr President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble?” Lincoln responded in kind, echoing the closing words of his recent message to Congress. “There is but one way,” he said, “and that is for those who are resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance.” Although this was plain enough, so far as it went, Stephens wanted to take it further. “But is there no other question,” he persisted, “that might divert the attention of both parties for a time?” Lincoln saw that the Georgian was referring to the Mexico scheme, about which he himself had known nothing until Blair’s return from Richmond, and declared that it had been proposed without the least authority from him. “The restoration of the Union is a sine qua non with me,” he said; anything that was to follow had to follow that. Stephens took this to mean that a Confederate pledge for reunion must precede such action, and maintained that it was unneeded. “A settlement of the Mexican question in this way would necessarily lead to a peaceful settlement of our own.” But that was not what Lincoln had meant — as he now made clear. He would make no agreement of any kind, he said, until the question of reunion was disposed of once and for all. That had to come first, if only because he could never agree to bargain with men in arms against the government in his care. Hunter, who had preceded Benjamin as Secretary of State and prided himself on a wide knowledge of international precedents, remarked at this point that Charles I of England had dealt with his domestic foes in just that way. Lincoln looked askance at the Virginian, then replied: “Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr Seward, for he is posted in such things. My only distinct recollection of the matter is that Charles lost his head.”
Hunter subsided, at least for a time, and the talk moved on to other concerns. Campbell, ever the jurist, wanted to know what the northern authorities had in mind to do, when and if the Union was restored, about southern representation in Congress, the two Virginias, and wartime confiscation of property, including slaves. Lincoln and Seward, between them, dealt with the problems one by one. Congress of course would rule on its own as to who would be admitted to a seat in either house. West Virginia was and would remain a separate state. As for compensation, both considered it likely that Congress would be lenient in its handling of property claims once the war fever cooled down, and Lincoln added that he would employ Executive clemency where he could, though he had no intention of revoking the Emancipation Proclamation, which was still to be tested in the courts. At this point Seward broke the news of the Thirteenth Amendment, approved while the commissioners were entering Grant’s lines three days ago, and Lincoln remarked that he still favored some form of compensation by the government for the resultant loss in slaves — provided, of course, that Congress would go along, upon ratification, and vote the money for payment to former owners; which seemed unlikely, considering the present reported mood and makeup of that body.
All this came as a considerable shock to the three rebel listeners, but the shock was mild compared to what followed when Hunter, having recovered a measure of his aplomb, expressed their reaction in a question designed to demonstrate just how brutally intransigent such terms were. “Mr President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is that not about what your words imply?” There was a pause while they waited for Lincoln’s answer, and presently he gave it. “Yes,” he said. “You have stated the proposition better than I did. That is about the size of it.”
That remained about the size of it throughout the four-hour exchange in the River Quee
n saloon. He was unyielding, and though he told a couple of tension-easing stories — causing Hunter to observe with a wry smile, “Well, Mr Lincoln, we have about concluded that we shall not be hanged as long as you are President: if we behave ourselves” — the most he offered was a promise to use Executive clemency when the time came, so far at least as Congress would allow it. The Confederates, bound as they were by their own leader’s “two countries” stipulation, could offer quite literally nothing at all, and so the conference wound down to a close.
Amid the flurry of parting handshakes, Lincoln said earnestly: “Well, Stephens, there has been nothing we could do for our country. Is there anything I can do for you personally?” Little Aleck, once more immured within his bulky overcoat and wrappers, shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. But then he had a thought. “Unless you can send me my nephew who has been for twenty months a prisoner on Johnson’s Island.” Lincoln brightened at the chance. “I’ll be glad to do it. Let me have his name.” He wrote the name in a notebook, and that was how it came about that Lieutenant John A. Stephens, captured at Vicksburg in mid-’63, was removed from his Lake Erie island prison camp and brought to Washington the following week for a meeting with the President at the White House. Lincoln gave him a pass through the Union lines and a photograph of himself as well, saying of the latter: “You had better take that along. It is considered quite a curiosity down your way, I believe.”
Young Stephens and the photograph were about all the South got out of the shipboard conference in Hampton Roads, except for an appended gift from the Secretary of State. Reaching their own steamer the commissioners looked back and saw a rowboat coming after them, its only occupant a Negro oarsman. He brought them a basket of champagne and a note with Seward’s compliments. As they waved their handkerchiefs in acknowledgment and thanks, they saw the genial New Yorker standing on the deck of the Queen, a bosun’s trumpet held to his mouth. “Keep the champagne,” they heard him call to them across the water, “but return the Negro.”
Stephens, Hunter, and Campbell spent another night tied up to the wharf at City Point, and then next day recrossed the Petersburg lines, their mission ended. “Today they returned to Richmond,” Meade wrote his wife that evening, “but what was the result of their visit no one knows. At the present moment, 8 p.m., the artillery on our lines is in full blast, clearly proving that at this moment there is no peace.”
* * *
A basket of wine, supplemented in time by a homesick Georgia lieutenant bearing a photograph of Lincoln, seemed a small return for the four-day effort by the three commissioners, who came back in something resembling a state of shock from having learned that negotiations were to follow, not precede, capitulation. Davis, however, was far from disappointed at the outcome. His double-barreled purpose — to discredit the submissionists and unite the country behind him by having them elicit the northern leader’s terms for peace — had been fulfilled even beyond a prediction made in the local Enquirer while the conference was in progress down the James. “We think it likely to do much good,” the editor wrote, “for our people to understand in an authoritative manner from men like Vice President Stephens, Senator Hunter, and Judge Campbell the exact degree of degradation to which the enemy would reduce us by reconstruction. We believe that the so-called mission of these gentlemen will teach our people that the terms of the enemy are nothing less than unconditional surrender.” Now that this had been borne out, Davis used much the same words in a note attached to a formal report of the proceedings, submitted to Congress on the Monday after the Saturday the three envoys reappeared in Richmond: “The enemy refused to enter into negotiations with the Confederate States, or with any of them separately, or to give to our people any other terms or guaranties than those which the conqueror may grant, or to permit us to have [peace] on any other basis than our unconditional submission to their rule.”
Wasting no time, he struck while the propaganda iron was hot. Amid the rush of indignation at the news from Hampton Roads, Virginia’s redoubtable Extra Billy called a meeting at Metropolitan Hall that same evening, February 6, to afford the public a chance to adopt resolutions condemning the treatment its representatives had received three days ago, on board the River Queen, at the hands of the northern leader and his chief lieutenant. Robert Hunter was one of the speakers. “If anything was wanted to stir the blood,” he informed the close-packed gathering, “it was furnished when we were told that the United States could not consent to entertain any proposition coming from us as a people. Lincoln might have offered something.… No treaty, no stipulation, no agreement, either with the Confederate States jointly or with them separately: what was this but unconditional submission to the mercy of the conquerors?”
The crowd rumbled its resentment, subsiding only to be aroused by other exhortations, then presently stirred with a different kind of excitement as a slim figure in worn gray homespun entered from Franklin Street, paused in the doorway, and started down the aisle. It was Davis. Governor Smith greeted the unexpected visitor warmly and escorted him to the platform, where he stood beside the lectern and looked out over the cheering throng. “A smile of strange sweetness came to his lips,” one witness later wrote, “as if the welcome assured him that, decried as he was by the newspapers and pursued by the clamor of politicians, he had still a place in the hearts of his countrymen.”
When the applause died down at last he launched into an hour-long oration which all who heard it agreed was the finest he ever delivered. Even Pollard of the Examiner, his bitterest critic south of the Potomac, noting “the shifting lights on the feeble, stricken face,” declared afterwards that he had never “been so much moved by the power of words spoken for the same space of time.” Others had a similar reaction, but no one outside the hall would ever know; Davis spoke from no text, not even notes, and the absence of a shorthand reporter caused this “appeal of surpassing eloquence” to be lost to all beyond range of his voice that night. Hearing and watching him, Pollard experienced “a strange pity, a strange doubt, that this ‘old man eloquent’ was the weak and unfit President” he had spent the past three years attacking. “Mr Davis frequently paused in his delivery; his broken health admonished him that he was attempting too much; but frequent cries of ‘Go on’ impelled him to speak at a length which he had not at first proposed.… He spoke with an even, tuneful flow of words, spare of gestures; his dilated form and a voice the lowest notes of which were distinctly audible, and which anon rose as a sound of a trumpet, were yet sufficient to convey the strongest emotions and to lift the hearts of his hearers to the level of his grand discourse.”
Apparently the speech was in part a repetition of those he had made last fall, en route through Georgia and the Carolinas, in an attempt to whip up the flagging spirits of a people distressed by the loss of Atlanta. Now, as then, he praised the common soldier, decried the profiteer, and expressed the conviction that if half the absent troops would return to the ranks no force on earth could defeat the armies of the South. In any case, with or without these shirkers, he predicted that if the people would stand firm, the Confederacy would “compel the Yankees, in less than twelve months, to petition us for peace on our own terms.” The darker the hour, the greater the honor for having survived it — and, above all, the deeper the discouragement of the enemy for his failure to bring a disadvantaged nation to its knees. As it was, he had nothing but scorn for those who spoke of surrender: especially now that Lincoln had unmasked himself at Hampton Roads, revealing the true nature of his plans for the postwar subjugation of all who had opposed him and his Jacobin cohorts in the North. The alternative to continued resistance was unthinkable. Not only did he prefer death “sooner than we should ever be united again” with such a foe; “What shall we say of the disgrace beneath which we should be buried if we surrender with an army in the field more numerous than that with which Napoleon achieved the glory of France — an army standing among its homesteads?” All this he said, and more, in response to enthusiasti
c urgings from the crowd, before he reached the ringing peroration. “Let us then unite our hands and hearts; lock our shields together, and we may well believe that before another summer solstice falls upon us, it will be the enemy who will be asking us for conferences and occasions in which to make known our demands.”
There followed a series of patriotic rallies featuring speakers who took their cue from this lead-off address by the President in Metropolitan Hall. Three days later, at the African Church — requisitioned for the occasion because of its vast capacity — Hunter once more described how Lincoln had “turned from propositions of peace with cold insolence,” and told his indignant listeners: “I will not attempt to draw a picture of subjugation. It would require a pencil dipped in blood.” Benjamin, the next man up, came forward with his accustomed smile. “Hope beams in every countenance,” he said. “We know in our hearts that this people must conquer its freedom or die.” He brought up the touchy subject of arming the slaves, calling on Virginia to set the example by furnishing 20,000 black recruits within the next twenty days, and was pleased to find that the subject was not so touchy after all. The outsized crowd approved with scarcely a murmur of dissent. Davis spoke too, though briefly, again predicting a Confederate victory by the end of summer, then left the rostrum to other dignitaries who continued the daylong oratory into the evening. Judge Campbell, unstrung by his recent visit beyond the enemy lines, was not among them; nor was Stephens, who — though he was present, as Campbell was not —was too disheartened to join the chorus of affirmation. Like all the rest, he was swept along by the President’s address, which he praised for its “loftiness of sentiment and rare form of expression,” as well as for the “magnetic influence in its delivery.”