The Civil War: A Narrative: Volume 3: Red River to Appomattox (92 page)

Although he neither mentioned the fact nor showed the strain it cost him, he had not been able to receive them earlier this Sunday because of the lengthy cabinet meeting that had resulted in the dismissal telegram Joe Johnston was reading now, on the outskirts of Atlanta. “His face was emaciated, and much wrinkled,” Gilmore observed from across the table, “but his features were good, especially his eyes, though
one of them bore a scar, apparently made by some sharp instrument. He wore a suit of grayish brown, evidently of foreign manufacture.… His manners were simple, easy and quite fascinating, and he threw an indescribable charm into his voice.”

Jaquess opened the interview by saying that he had sought it in the hope that Davis, wanting peace as much as he did, might suggest some way to stop the fighting. “In a very simple way,” the Mississippian replied. “Withdraw your armies from our territory, and peace will come of itself.” When the colonel remarked that Lincoln’s recent Proclamation of Amnesty perhaps afforded a basis for proceeding, Davis cut him short. “Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals. We have commited no crime.” Gilmore suggested that both sides lay down their arms, then let the issue be decided by a popular referendum. But Davis, thinking no doubt of the North’s more than twenty millions and the South’s less than ten, was having no part of that either. “That the
majority
shall decide it, you mean. We seceded to rid ourselves of the rule of the majority, and this would subject us to it again.” It seemed to Gilmore that the dispute narrowed down to “Union or Disunion,” and the Confederate President agreed, though he added that he preferred the terms “Independence or Subjugation.” Despairing of semantics and the profitless exchange of opposite views that had brought on the war in the first place, the New Yorker made an appeal on personal grounds. “Can you, Mr Davis, as a Christian man, leave untried any means that may lead to peace?” Davis shook his head. “No, I cannot,” he replied. “I desire peace as much as you do; I deplore bloodshed as much as you do.” He spoke with fervor, but seemed to choose his words with care. “I tried in all my power to avert this war. I saw it coming, and for twelve years I worked night and day to prevent it, but I could not. And now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight his battle,
unless you acknowledge our right to self-government.…
We are fighting for Independence — and that, or extermination, we will have.”

Additional matters were discussed or mentioned, including the military situation, which Davis saw as favorable to the South, and slavery, which he maintained was never “an essential element” in the contest, “only a means of bringing other conflicting elements to an earlier culmination.” But always the talk came back to that one prerequisite. Whether it was called Self-Government or Disunion, all future discussion between the two parties would have to proceed from that beginning if there was to be any hope of ending the carnage they both deplored. The Confederate leader made this clear as he rose to see his visitors to the door, shook their hands, and spoke his final words. “Say to Mr Lincoln, from me, that I shall at any time be pleased to receive proposals for peace on the basis of our Independence. It will be useless to approach me with any other.”

Whatever sadness he felt on hearing this evidence that the war was unlikely to end through negotiation, Lincoln perceived that the closing message, along with much that preceded it, would serve quite well to further his other purpose, which was to demonstrate his adversary’s intransigence in the face of an earnest search for peace. He asked Gilmore, who had stopped by Washington on his return journey from Richmond, what he proposed to do with the transcript he had made of the interview. “Put a beginning and an end to it, Sir, on my way home,” the New Yorker said, “and hand it to the
Tribune.”
Lincoln demurred. He had had enough of Horace Greeley for a while. “Can’t you get it into the
Atlantic Monthly?
It would have less of a partisan look there.” Gilmore was sure he could; but first, by way of counteracting what Lincoln called “Greeley’s Niagara business,” it was decided to release a shorter version in the Boston
Evening Transcript
the following week, while the full
Atlantic
text was being set in type and proofed for review by Lincoln. “Don’t let it appear till I return the proof,” he cautioned. “Some day all this will come out, but just now we must use discretion.” The
Transcript
piece appeared July 22, followed a month later by the one in the
Atlantic
, from which the President had deleted a few hundred words mainly having to do with terms he had found acceptable off the record. Both received much attention, especially the longer version. Indeed, so widely was it reprinted, at home and abroad, that another distinguished contributor — Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose son had lately cursed Lincoln off the parapet at Fort Stevens — soon told Gilmore that it had attracted more readers than any magazine article ever written.

Meantime (as always) Lincoln had kept busy with other problems, military as well as political. Often they overlapped, as in the case of facing up to the need for replacing the troops whose fall or discharge left gaps in the ranks of the two main armies: especially Meade’s, which had a lower reënlistment quotient and had been further reduced, moreover, by detachments northward to shield Washington from attack by Early, still hovering nearby. On Sunday, July 17, while Jaquess and Gilmore talked in Richmond with Jefferson Davis — who had just put a message on the wire to Atlanta that presaged a step-up in the fighting there — Lincoln telegraphed Grant: “In your dispatch of yesterday to General Sherman I find the following, to wit: ‘I shall make a desperate effort to get a position here which will hold the enemy without the necessity of so many men.’ Pressed as we are by lapse of time, I am glad to hear you say this; and yet I do hope you may find a way that the effort shall not be desperate in the sense of a great loss of life.” He sent this by way of preparation for a proclamation, issued next day, calling for 500,000 volunteers and ordering a draft to take place immediately after September 5 for any unfilled quotas.

This must surely be the last before November, he was saying,
although there were already those who believed, despite the recent removal of the $300 exemption clause, that the results would not suffice even for the present. “We are not now receiving one half as many [troops] as we are discharging,” Halleck complained to Grant the following day. “Volunteering has virtually ceased, and I do not anticipate much from the President’s new call, which has the disadvantage of again postponing the draft for fifty days. Unless our government and people will come square up to the adoption of an efficient and thorough draft, we cannot supply the waste of our army.”

Coming square up was easily said, but it left out factors that could not be ignored, including the reaction to this latest call for volunteers, which was seen as a velvet glove encasing the iron hand of a new draft. “Only half a million more! Oh that is nothing,” one angry Wisconsin editor fumed, and followed through by saying: “Continue this Administration in power and we can all go to war, Canada, or to hell before 1868.”

Now that the year moved into the dog days, with the fall elections looming just beyond, there was need for caution, if not in the military, then certainly in the political arena. Yet even caution might not serve, so portentous were the signs that a defeat was in the making. Frémont was something of a joke as an opponent, though not as a siphon for drawing off the Radical votes that would be needed if Lincoln was to prevail against the Democrats, who were scheduled to convene in Chicago in late August to adopt a platform and select a candidate for November. The platform would be strong for peace, and the candidate, it was believed, would be George McClellan: a formidable combination, one that might well snare both the anti-war and the soldier vote, not to mention the votes of the disaffected, likely to go to almost any rival of the present national leader. Indeed, the prospect so thoroughly alarmed a number of members of the Republican hierarchy that a secret call went out for a convention to meet in Cincinnati in September “to consider the state of the nation and to concentrate the Union strength on some one candidate who commands the confidence of the country, even by a new nomination if necessary.”

For the present this was circulated privately, with the intention of bringing it out in the open when the time was ripe. In point of fact, however, the time seemed ripe enough already, to judge by the immediate response. Dissatisfaction with Lincoln had grown by now to include even close friends: Orville Browning, for example, who confessed he had long suspected that his fellow Illinoisan could not measure up to the task required. “I thought he might get through, as many a boy has got through college, without disgrace; but I fear he is a failure.” Others agreeing were the eminent lawyer David Dudley Field, whose brother Lincoln had recently appointed to the Supreme Court, and
Schuyler Colfax, Speaker of the House. Chase expressed interest in the supersession, of course, and Ben Butler lent encouragement from down on Bermuda Hundred. Henry Davis was vehemently for it, but Wade and Sumner remained aloof for the time being, the former because he preferred to wait till after the Democratic convention, the latter because he thought it would make less trouble for the party if they gave Lincoln a chance to withdraw voluntarily. Many prominent editors favored the maneuver, including Parke Godwin of the New York
Evening Post
and Whitelaw Reid of the
Cincinnati Gazette
. But the most vociferous of them all was Horace Greeley, whose expression was cherubic but whose spirit had lately been strained beyond forbearance. “Mr Lincoln is already beaten,” he declared. “He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from overthrow.”

Lincoln knew little or nothing yet of this plan by his friends and associates for a midstream swap, but he saw as clearly as they did that the drift was toward defeat and was likely to remain so unless some way could be found, between now and November, to turn the tide. A military victory would help, even one on a fairly modest scale — the more modest the better, in fact, so far as bloodshed was concerned — just so it encouraged the belief that things were looking up for one or another of the armies. But that was mainly up to Grant, locked in a stalemate below Richmond, and Sherman, apparently no better off in front of Atlanta. The other possibility was politics, Lincoln’s field, and he was prepared to do all he could in that direction. His native Kentucky would be the first state to hold an election since his nomination; August 1 was the balloting date, and though only some county offices and an appellate judgeship were at stake, the contest was certain to be regarded as a bellwether for the rest, which were to follow in September. Consequently, he took off the gloves for this one. Declaring martial law, he suspended the writ of habeas corpus on July 5, continued the suspension through election day, and gave a free rein to Stephen Burbridge, who, having recently disposed of John Morgan at Cynthiana, proposed to move in a similar aggressive manner against all foes of the Administration throughout his Department of Kentucky. As a result, prominent Democrats were arrested wholesale for “disloyalty,” and the name of their candidate for the judgeship was ordered stricken from the ballot on the same vague charge, obliging the survivors to make a last-minute substitute nomination for the post. Lincoln awaited the outcome with much interest, only to find on August 1 that all his pains had gone for nothing. The Democratic candidates swept the state.

There would be other contests; Maine, for instance, was coming up next, to be followed by Vermont. Although the snub just given him in his native state did not augur well for the result, he had no
intention of doing anything less than his best to win in all of them, with the help of whatever devices he thought might help and despite the clamor of his critics, left and right, in his own party or the other. “The pilots on our western rivers steer from point to point, as they call it,” he told a caller one of these days, “setting the course of the boat no farther than they can see. And that is all I propose to do in the great problems that are before us.” One such point now was Atlanta; or anyhow it seemed to him it might be. Events that followed hard on the rebel change of commanders there had brought the fighting to a pitch of intensity, throughout the last two weeks in July, that matched the savagery of the struggle here in the East before it subsided into stalemate. The same thing might happen there — for that seemed to be the pattern: alternate fury and exhaustion — but Lincoln kept peering in that direction, seeking a point to steer by in his effort to land the boat in his charge before it split and sank.

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