Our One Common Country: 
Abraham Lincoln and
the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

James B. Conroy

Lyons Press, 2014 390 pp. $27.95
        

Review by Gordon Berg

      On Jan. 29, 1865, Captain Thomas Parker of Pennsylvania walked out into no-man's land along the Petersburg, siege lines.  There, he met Lieutenant Colonel William Hatch of Kentucky.  Both men were unarmed and under flags of truce.  Hatch informed the dumbfounded Parker that three emissaries had just arrived from Richmond and wished to meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss terms for ending the war.  Four days later, Lincoln, traveling alone, slipped into a carriage in front of the White House, bound for a fast steamer destined for Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  Only Secretary of State William Seward knew the purpose of Lincoln's clandestine sojourn.  Thus began one of the most star-crossed secret missions of the Civil War, an audacious tale James B. Conroy tells with energy and eloquence.

        Conroy, a lawyer and former DC publicist and speechwriter, gives lie to the shibboleth that a thoroughly researched, abundantly footnoted, monograph can only be written in parched, overly academic jargon, by denizens of collegiate ivory towers.  Our One Common Country swings out at a quick step pace with a narrative strategy that manages to incorporate a myriad of detail and analysis into a universe of uncommon suspense.   It resonates with illustrative anecdotes, pithy turns-of-phrase, occasional hints of irony, and bon mons enough to fill a gossip column.  It's a Civil War story that experts and novices will find riveting and revelatory. 

        Rumors of a negotiated peace had been in the air at least since the summer of 1864 when influential Northern publisher Horace Greeley advised Lincoln to meet with Confederate agents on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.  The President declined.  Re-elected in November 1864 and with the tide of battle turning in favor of the Union on every front, Lincoln was finally ready to do something no sitting President had ever done before or since: engage with the enemy in peace talks in the midst of a shooting war.  That makes the meeting aboard the steamer River Queen on Feb. 3, 1865, a unique event in American history; an event that has, until now, escaped an in-depth investigation.

        Conroy sets up his drama by giving readers incisive character portraits of the drama's leading players.  His description of Greeley is as priceless as it is accurate: eccentric, fickle, and powerful all at the same time.  Conroy conveys the essence of Ulysses S. Grant in two clear, concise, unpretentious paragraphs, a fitting tribute to the man himself.   Conroy lets Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' own Shakespearian rhetoric eloquently invoke his startling image:  "Weak and sickly I was sent into the world with a constitution barely able to sustain the vital functions…But all these are slight when compared with the pangs of an offended and wounded spirit."  Conroy needs only seven choice words to bring Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens to life: "Richard III in a Prince Albert suit."

        The Hampton Roads conference was spawned in the quixotic imagination of the Francis Preston Blair Sr., the senior Democratic senator from Maryland with influential friends throughout the North and South.  With Lincoln's permission, the old man traveled to Richmond with a fantastic proposal the wily politician had concocted but Lincoln had never backed. Nevertheless, Confederate government officials were interested, although President Jefferson Davis set conditions that insured its failure.  So the peace conference process, possibly the worst kept secret of the war, staggered forward.  Conroy describes it with melodrama worthy of a Stephen Spielberg film noir.

        The three Confederate peace commissioners, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, Senator Robert M. Hunter, and Vice President Alexander Stephens, expected to be received by General Grant and escorted to Washington.  But Lincoln, a wily politician himself, had a different agenda.  Congress was ready to consider the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and even a whiff of a negotiated peace might induce wavering Democrats to vote against it in hopes of ending the war without abolishing the "peculiar institution".  While Congress debated, Lincoln connived to keep the peace emissaries far from The Capital.  While they waited aboard the steamer Mary Martin, unaware of the machinations their visit had spawned, the Southern commissioners were treated like visiting royalty, replete with good food, cigars, and congenial conversations reminiscent of happier times.

        While the commissioners cooled their heels, the diplomatic game played by various Union participants turned downright byzantine.  Lincoln sent a carefully worded letter to the commissioners with conditions for a meeting.  The commissioners responded with a letter of their own.  Each side chose its words carefully, sensitive to nuance and innuendo.  The telegraph lines between City Point and Washington sizzled with rumors and hopes.  The parties began to founder on Lincoln's insistence of "our one common country" and Davis' commitment to "two nations" as a basis for any discussion.  The talks seemed doomed before they had begun.  Finally Grant, so far frozen out of this campaign, entered the fray.  He sent an impassioned telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, confident that Lincoln would read it, too.  Lincoln was moved by Grant's sense of the commissioners' sincerity and agreed to a meeting and so informed Seward, already at Fort Monroe.  

        No one kept a transcript of the four hour meeting but Conroy has clearly digested the recollections of all the participants.  This allows him to recreate the diplomatic dance performed by the five old friends in dramatic tones befitting the grave issues discussed in the saloon of the River Queen. Through it all, Conroy contends, Lincoln's towering presence dominated the room.  Ironically, it was on the issue of slavery that he held out the possibility for some measure of negotiation.  Conroy reports Alexander Stephens recalling that Seward seconded the proposition that "A gradual end to slavery would be palatable if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union freely.  If not, the Thirteenth Amendment would end it abruptly, with the Southern states excluded from the process."  But the commissioners, hide-bound by Jefferson Davis' delusions, had nothing to offer except a truce and possible renewal of trade.  "It was far from good enough," Conroy concludes.  

        Back in Washington, the cat was now out of the bag.  Many Democrats praised Lincoln's efforts for peace and reunion; many Radical Republicans chided him for showing magnanimity to the enemy when on the verge of victory.  But Lincoln could not let go of the possibility of ending the war.  Conroy relates the extraordinarily generous but little known "Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives" message written on February 5 that could have formed the basis of Lincoln's reconstruction policy had he lived.  In it, he asked Congress to appropriate $400 million to compensate slaveholders and offered other lenient terms.  Lincoln read it to the Cabinet.  No one supported it.  Saddened, Lincoln put it in his pocket, leaving his proposal to the judgment of history. 

        Lincoln's offer would have probably fallen on deaf ears because, in Richmond, Jefferson Davis quickly demanded that his commissioners write a public report, leaving out anything positive that emerged from the meeting and to include absolute fabrications that vilified the Lincoln Administration.  Davis hoped to use the "doctored" report to steel the resolve of the South to endure even greater sacrifices.  He seemed determined to lead Southern citizenry into his own private "Gotterdammerung."  Senator William Graham of North Carolina would conclude "there has been a very great duplicity towards a large portion of the Southern people displayed in this little drama."  The war continued in all its ferocity.

        Conroy succinctly wraps up the final months of the war up to the assassination of Lincoln on April 14.  As a final, dramatic, epilogue, he provides thumbnail sketches of the postwar fate of the drama's leading players.  In the war's aftermath, Conroy poignantly quotes Confederate General Josiah Gorgas' May 4 diary entry.  "I am as one walking in a dream, expecting to awake.  I cannot see its consequences, nor shape my own course, but am just moving along until I can see my way at some future day." 

       Because of the failure of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, thousands of young men in blue and gray never had a chance to see their way at some future day.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Bloody Spring: 
Forty Days That Sealed the Confederacy's Fate

Joseph Wheelan

Da Capo Press, 2014, 448 pp., $27.50

        

Review by Gordon Berg

        On a bright Virginia spring morning, twelve men in pewter gray solemnly rode to the top of Clark's Mountain.  From there, they gazed down on a virtual city sprawling below them for miles.  They saw streets, huts, tents, wagons, horses, mountains of supplies, and thousands of men with gleaming bayonets.  Confederate General Robert E. Lee turned to his loyal lieutenants and presciently announced "I think those people over there are going to make a move soon."  Two days later, on May 4, 1864, that city of Union blue began to surge across the Rapidan River.  For the next 40 days, it would relentlessly pummel Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in an unprecedented campaign of bloodshed and maneuver. 

        Numerous books have covered the Overland Campaign, masterminded by newly appointed Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant.  Those who have read them may not find much new in Joseph Wheelan's account.  But for those who haven't, this excellent one-volume account hits all the high points.  In clear, concise, journalistic prose, filled with energetic verbs and colorful adjectives, Wheelan vividly recreates those critical days that permanently turned the tide of the war in the East.  In addition, his rock-solid research and instructive anecdotes puts events and personalities into a context that brings clarity to the bloodiest spring of the war.

        Lee had fought in the 80 square miles of woods, thickets, and underbrush known as the Wilderness before.  It was there that he achieved possibly his greatest victory, Chancellorsville.  But Lee had never faced the relentless, unassuming, warrior from the West.  James Longstreet had, however.  Lee's most reliable lieutenant knew Grant personally and predicted "that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war."  Part of Grant's master plan would require the Army of the Potomac, still under the titular command of Major General George G. Meade, to do just that.  Lee, ingenious and audacious himself, understood that the Confederacy was hanging on by a thread; he would have to oblige his bellicose foe or lose the war. 

        Grant never intended to fight in the Wilderness.  But by stopping early on the first day, Wheelan contends, Grant had "handed Lee a glittering opportunity to strike at the massive Union army while it was still inside the claustrophobic Wilderness, a place that nullified Meade's overwhelming advantages in numbers and artillery."  The two armies stumbled upon each other on the Orange Plank Road, the Orange Turnpike, and forest waste in between.  After three days of almost continuous carnage, the names of obscure country places like Parker's Store, the Wilderness Tavern, widow Tapp's house, Saunders Field, and the Chewning Farm would saturate newspapers stories, north and south, and Private Charles H. Wilson of the 18th Massachusetts would become the first name on dishearteningly long casualty lists.

        Both sides took a beating in the Wilderness, Grant worse than Lee.  Wheelan's frequent use of eloquent and descriptive quotes from participants adds a terrible beauty to the almost indescribable chaos.  "It was a wild and disconnected battling of regiment with regiment, of company with company, without plan, or purpose, or knowledge or result," wrote Norton Shepard of the 146th New York.  J.M. Waddell of the 46th North Carolina wrote, "It was a mere slugging match in a dense thicket of small growth,""where men but a few yards apart fired through the brushwood for hours."  Wheelan's own prose often approaches the melodic cadences of the antagonists.  After the fighting on May 6 ended, he describes how "the veil of night fell away in tense silence to reveal a spring morning that might have been delightful but for the fuliginous air, the splintered trees, and the dead and wounded lying everywhere."

        When Grant pulled his forces back from the stalemated battle, his men thought it was to retreat back across the Rapidan to lick their wounds, just as they had done before.  Lee knew better.  He assumed Grant would do what he would have done, strike out for open country around Spotsylvania Court House.  In the dark, Grant sat on his horse and watched as Fifth Corps turned south on the Brock Road, going exactly where Lee had predicted.  Tired, dirty, and grievously bloodied, the men in blue nevertheless cheered wildly for their new commander's decision. 

        But Lee got his exhausted army to Spotsylvania first.  Now, the general whose first inclination was to attack, immediately began to entrench.  Lee realized he faced a different kind of Union commander and different tactics would be needed to defeat him.  "Lee's objective was now to seize the initiative somehow and strike Grant's army a mortal blow," Wheelan contends, "Grant's was to retain the initiative and keep applying pressure to Lee until his army crumbled to pieces."  These character traits guaranteed that the bloody brawl would continue.

         Lee, a fortifications expert, "used the high ground his army occupied between the Po and Ni Rivers to bar the way to Spotsylvania and its web of roads pointing towards Richmond."  According to Wheelan, "the Army of Northern Virginia blocked the Union's path with better fortifications than anything seen in the Wilderness, and its defenses were becoming more impregnable by the hour."  Grant was determined to have at Lee but, with Sheridan and his troopers away running down Jeb Stuart and his horsemen, he was operating with virtually no intelligence.  Wheelan concludes that this led Grant to misread the tactical situation and make several critical errors that dramatically raised the Union body count.  Grant candidly admitted "We have had hard fighting today, and I am sorry to say we have not accomplished much."  Attack and counterattack continued in the Spotsylvania area through May 19, a textbook example of Grant's strategy of attritional industrial warfare. 

         The Overland Campaign was not meant to be conducted in a vacuum.  Wheelan wisely includes complementary operations such as a thrust toward Richmond by the Army of the James under politically astute but militarily impaired General Benjamin Butler and Sheridan's cavalry operation toward Richmond.  Neither action succeeded as planned although the irreplaceable Confederate cavalry "beau sabreur," Jeb Stuart, was killed by Union cavalry at Yellow Tavern on May 11.

        Checked at every turn, Grant finally decided to maneuver again.  On the night of May 20, the army wheeled south and east.  A shift in Union strategy now attempted to entice Lee to attack Grant.  Lee wouldn't bite.  Wheelan's chapter on the often-overlooked May 23-26 confrontation on the North Anna River encapsulates his ability to succinctly summarize a campaign without losing the telling anecdotes that give life to events.  It holds up well against longer accounts of that small, but potentially game-changing, action. 

        The grisliest encounter, however, was still to come.  After successfully withdrawing his army from positions opposite an entrenched enemy, always a risky gambit, Grant again sidled east and south, his movements masked by band music played far into the night.  The next stop would be June 1 at Cold Harbor, a blot on Grant's reputation and henceforth to be likened to murder on the battlefield.  Four and a half days of close-quarter's slaughter ended with a two-hour truce on the night of June 7 to collect the Union dead and wounded, almost 7,000 of them.  In his Memoirs, Grant admitted "At Cold Harbor, no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained."  But heavy losses never deterred Grant.  After another four days of inconclusive but deadly trench warfare, the Army of the Potomac disappeared again, this time to emerge south of the James River in front of Petersburg.  The Overland Campaign had become a siege operation.  Grant's strategy of exhaustion, he maintained, had "so crippled [the enemy] as to make him ever after of taking the offensive."  Wheelan's comprehensive monograph decisively describes how Grant accomplished his mission.  

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.