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