The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (153 page)

That remained about the size of it throughout the four-hour exchange in the
River Queen
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 enthusiastic 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.”

Even so, looking back on it later, he pronounced it “little short of demention.” Asked by Davis after the meeting what his plans were, he replied that he intended “to go home and remain there.” He would “neither make any speech, nor even make known to the public in any way of the general condition of affairs, but quietly abide the issue of fortune.” Discredited, outmaneuvered, he threw in the sponge at last. He left Richmond next day, returning to Liberty Hall, his home near Crawfordville — a deserter, like some hundred thousand others — and there remained, in what he termed “perfect retirement,” for the balance of the war.

Such defection was rather the exception through this time, even among the Vice President’s fellow Georgians who lately had been exposed to the wrath or whim of Sherman’s bummers. Howell Cobb, whose plantation had been gutted on specific orders from the red-haired destroyer himself, spoke fervently in Macon that same week, calling on the people to unite behind their government, which he said could never be conquered if they held firm. “Put me in my grave,” he cried, “but never put on me the garments of a Submissionist!” Benjamin Hill followed Stephens back to their native state, but for a different purpose. Addressing crowds in Columbus, Forsyth, and La Grange, he declared that the Confederacy still had half a million men of military age, together with plenty of food and munitions; all it lacked was the will to win. “If we are conquered, subjugated, disgraced, ruined,” the senator asserted with a figurative sidelong glance at Joe Brown in Milledgeville and Little Aleck in nearby Liberty Hall, “it will be the work of those enemies among us [who] will accomplish that work by destroying the faith of our people in their government.” Robert Toombs, the fieriest Georgian of them all, emerged from his Achilles sulk to assume the guise of Nestor in reaction to the news from Hampton Roads. All that was needed was resolution, a recovery of the verve that had prevailed in the days when he himself was in the field, he told a wrought-up audience in Augusta. “We have resources enough to whip
forty
Yankee nations,” he thundered, “if we could call back the spirit of our departed heroes.” Similarly, in North Carolina, even so confirmed an obstructionist as Zeb Vance came over when he learned of Lincoln’s “terms” for acceptance of the South’s surrender. In response, the governor issued a mid-February proclamation calling for all Tarheels to “assemble in primary meetings in every county in the State, and let the whole world, and especially our enemies, see how a free people can meet a proposition for their absolute submission.… Great God! Is there a man in all this honorable, high spirited, and noble Commonwealth so steeped in every
conceivable meanness, so blackened with all the guilt of treason, or so damned with all the leprosy of cowardice as to say: Yes, we will submit to this’ … whilst there yet remains half a million men amongst us able to resist? … Should we willfully throw down an organized government, disband our still powerful armies, and invite all these fearful consequences upon our country, we would live to have our children curse our gray hairs for fastening our dishonor upon them.”

Editors formerly critical of practically everything Davis did or stood for, especially during the twenty months since Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg, now swung abruptly to full support of his administration, as if in admission of their share in reducing public morale to so low a point that Lincoln felt he could afford to spurn all overtures for peace except on terms amounting to unconditional surrender. Formerly gloomy, they turned hopeful, claiming to find much that was encouraging in the current military situation. “Nil Desperandum,” writing in the
Enquirer
, pointed out that less of the Confederacy was actually occupied by the enemy now than there had been two years ago; Sherman had marched through it, true enough, but had not garrisoned or held what he traversed, except for Savannah, where he had been obliged to stop and catch his breath. What was more, he had not really whipped anyone en route, according to the Georgia humorist Charles H. Smith, who signed himself Bill Arp: “Didn’t the rebellyun klose rite up behind him, like shettin a pair of waful irons?” Pollard of the
Examiner
agreed. “His campaign comes to nought if he cannot reach Grant; nothing left of it but the brilliant zig-zag of a raid, vanishing as heat lightning in the skies.”