Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 2

by Michael Burlingame

  Lincoln was proud that Illinois was the first state to ratify the amendment, and by mid-April, nineteen others had followed suit. By year’s end, it won endorsement by three-quarters of the states and thus became part of the Constitution.

  To commemorate the amendment’s passage, Lincoln, with the approval of the cabinet and congressional chaplains, invited Henry Highland Garnet, a prominent black Presbyterian minister and emigration champion, to deliver a sermon in the House chamber. Garnet did so on Sunday, February 14, before an enthusiastic, racially mixed audience.

  Prior to 1865, it was not clear that the amending process was designed to do more than permit minor adjustments to the Constitution. Now it became evident that major social changes could be accomplished through it. The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment set in motion a chain of events foreseen by the Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer, which predicted accurately that it would be followed by other amendments enfranchising blacks and women.

  The Hampton Roads Conference

  The peace initiative that nearly sidelined the Thirteenth Amendment had been undertaken by Francis P. Blair, Sr., who entertained the delusive idea that the North and South might compose their differences by joining together to expel the French from Mexico. (His scheme resembled the one that Seward had suggested in his April 1, 1861, memorandum to the president.) In early December, Horace Greeley had pleaded with Blair to lobby the president: “You have Mr. Lincoln’s ear, as I have not, and can exert influence on every side where it is needed. Do urge and inspire him to make peace among our friends any how, and with our foes so soon as may be.” Without explaining his plan, Blair asked Lincoln for permission to visit Richmond and confer with Jefferson Davis. The president replied: “Come to me after Savannah falls.” Sherman took that Georgia port on December 22, and Lincoln gave Blair the pass he had requested. In Richmond, Jefferson Davis indicated a willingness to participate in a joint invasion of Mexico. In mid-January, upon receiving a report of this conversation, Lincoln authorized Blair to tell Davis “that I have constantly been, am now, and shall continue, ready to receive any agent whom he, or any other influential person now resisting the national authority, may informally send to me, with the view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.”117

  Davis should have realized that his cause was hopeless, for the Union had recently captured Fort Fisher at Wilmington, North Carolina, thus plugging the last hole in the blockade and cutting one of Lee’s most important supply lines. General Sherman had spent December marching unopposed across Georgia en route to Savannah, a city that he tendered to the president as a Christmas gift. That month General George H. Thomas had obliterated John Bell Hood’s army at Nashville and Franklin. Sherman followed up his spectacular march by thrusting into the Carolinas as he headed toward a rendezvous with Grant.

  When some White House callers expressed anxiety about the military situation, Lincoln went to a map, showed how Grant had Lee trapped at Petersburg and how Sherman was moving thither. Lincoln remarked that his own situation, after being elected twice to the presidency, called to mind “an old fellow in the early days of Indiana who had been a wicked and lascivious sinner, and had joined the church and was getting baptized. The preacher had dipped him in a river, and he had come up gasping and rubbing his face, and then calling on the preacher to dip him again and baptize him once more. The preacher said once was enough. But the old fellow insisted.” So the preacher dunked him again. “As he came up and rubbed the water out of his eyes and mouth and got his breath, he blurted out, ‘Now I’ve been baptized twice, and the Devil can kiss my ass.’ ” Lincoln pointed to a spot on the map “and said that when Sherman’s army got to that place the war would be ended. ‘And then,’ said Lincoln, ‘the Southern Confederacy can kiss my ass.’ ”118

  Instead of taking Lincoln’s offer seriously, Jefferson Davis defiantly sent a trio of peace commissioners with instructions to confer informally with Lincoln “for the purpose of securing peace to the two countries.” (Davis ignored the recommendation of his exceptionally capable secretary of state, Judah P. Benjamin, to omit any reference to “two countries.”) Many members of the Confederate Congress, persuaded that the war was lost, had urged the appointment of peace commissioners to effect a surrender. Much later, they were surprised to learn of Davis’s unyielding instructions, which doomed the conference to failure before it began. One Confederate emissary, Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens, considered his mission a “humbug” from the outset.119

  When word of Blair’s mission leaked out, Radicals expressed alarm. “Blair is an old fool for going to Richmond upon a peace mission and the Administration is little better for permitting him to go upon any pretense whatever,” Zachariah Chandler grumbled. “Nothing but evil can come of this nonsense.”120 The senator and his ideological compeers suspected that Lincoln might offer universal amnesty to the Confederates, restore their confiscated property, allow their army to join with Union forces to attack Mexico, and offer slaveholders enormous financial compensation for their escaped bondsmen, while leaving those still outside Union lines in slavery. Such skepticism prompted Lincoln to remark: “Some of my friends in Congress act as if they were afraid to trust me with a dinner, yet I shall never compromise the principles upon which I was elected.”121 Joseph Medill warned the president not to “be in too much hurry for Peace. Don’t coax the rebel chiefs but pound them a little more. When they are sufficiently whipped they will gladly accept your terms, and the peace then made will be enduring.”122

  On February 1, when Henry Ward Beecher called at the White House to express alarm at Blair’s peace overtures, Lincoln explained that “Blair thinks something can be done, but I don’t, but I have no objection to have him try his hand. He has no authority whatever but to go and see what he can do.” Beecher recalled that Lincoln’s “hair was ‘every way for Sunday.’ It looked as though it was an abandoned stubble-field. He had on slippers, and his vest was what was called ‘going free.’ He looked wearied, and when he sat down in a chair, looked as though every limb wanted to drop off his body.”123 Beecher feared that the “pride of the nation, is liable to be hurt. Anything that looks like the humiliation of our Government, would be bitterly felt,” he told the president.124

  Moderates also had qualms. Gideon Welles confided to his diary that Lincoln “with much shrewdness and much good sense, has often strange and incomprehensible whims; takes sometimes singular and unaccountable freaks. It would hardly surprise me were he to undertake to arrange terms of peace without consulting any one.”125 When Blair returned, Lincoln said he believed that “peace was much nearer at hand than the most confident have at any time hoped for.”126

  On January 30, the Confederate commissioners (Alexander H. Stephens, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell) arrived at Grant’s lines and asked permission to proceed to Washington. Lincoln sent word that they would receive a safe conduct pass only if they agreed to negotiate “with a view of securing peace to the people of our one common country.” When they seemed to accept that condition, the president on January 31 dispatched Seward to parlay with them informally at Hampton Roads. The secretary of state was to make clear “that three things are indispensable.” First, “the national authority” must be restored “throughout all the States.” Second, there was to be no “receding, by the Executive of the United States on the Slavery question.” And finally, there was to be no “cessation of hostilities short of an end of the war, and the disbanding of all forces hostile to the government.” Seward was told to “inform them that all propositions of theirs not inconsistent with the above, will be considered and passed upon in a spirit of sincere liberality. You will hear all they may choose to say, and report it to me. You will not assume to definitely consummate anything.”127 Lincoln also instructed Grant to let “nothing which is transpiring, change, hinder, or delay your Military movements, or plans.”128

  When the Confederates seemed to renege on their agreeme
nt to negotiate based on Lincoln’s conditions, the talks nearly collapsed. The president was poised to recall Seward when he received a dispatch from Grant that changed his mind. On February 1, sensing that such a denouement would “have a bad influence,” Grant urged Lincoln to meet with the commissioners.129 (The general’s wife had prodded him to do something to break the logjam.) In addition, that night Major Thomas T. Eckert reported that the commissioners were hinting that they would be willing to drop Davis’s insistence on Confederate independence.

  The day that Grant sent his crucial telegram, Lincoln met with an amateur peace negotiator, James W. Singleton of Illinois, just back from a sojourn in Richmond. On January 5, the president had issued him a pass enabling him to travel through Union lines to the Confederate capital. Lincoln had known Singleton in prewar years, when he was a prominent Whig-turned-Democrat at Quincy and a close friend of fellow-townsman Orville H. Browning. During the war, the Virginia-born Singleton, whose brother served in the Confederate Congress, became the leader of Illinois’s radical Peace Democrats. In the fall of 1864, Browning had entered a business deal with Singleton, New York Senator Edwin D. Morgan, Robert E. Coxe, and Judge James Hughes of the federal court of claims; they planned to purchase cotton and tobacco in Virginia and sell it for a hefty profit to Northern merchants and manufacturers. Such commerce was legal under the 1863 Captured and Abandoned Property Act. Lincoln felt obligated to Singleton for helping to undermine McClellan’s 1864 presidential campaign by refusing to support the general’s candidacy.

  Lincoln’s relations with Singleton are somewhat murky and confusing. During the election campaign of 1864, the president evidently sent him on a mission to Confederate agents in Canada. In September of that year, Singleton informed one of those operatives that he had met twice with Lincoln, who “says he will go as far ‘as any man in America to restore peace on the basis of Union[.]’ He declares that he never has and never will present any other ultimatum—that he is misunderstood on the subject of slavery—that it shall not stand in the way of peace.”130 On Thanksgiving, Singleton told Orville H. Browning that before the election, Lincoln had informed him that his Niagara Manifesto had “put him in a false position—that he did not mean to make the abolition of slavery a condition, and that after the election he would be willing to grant peace with an amnesty, and restoration of the union, leaving slavery to abide the decisions of judicial tribunals.” Two days later, Singleton added that Lincoln had sent him word “that slavery should not stand in the way of adjustment, and that he intended to say so in his message [to Congress]—that he would determine after the meeting of Congress whether he would send commissioners to Richmond, and if he concluded to do so he would send him, Singleton.”131 On Christmas Eve, Lincoln (according to Browning’s diary) told Browning that he had not intended to make abolition a precondition for peace.

  These reports clash with explicit evidence that Lincoln had decided not to retract his insistence on abolition as a precondition for peace. Perhaps the president was referring to the peculiar distinction that he made in his annual message between an end to fighting and peace. In any event, Singleton traveled to Canada where he talked with Confederates Clement Clay and Nathaniel Beverly Tucker. He told Browning that, according to those gentlemen, the South was ready to cease fighting if it could retain slavery and receive amnesty.

  Singleton later claimed that he had made four or five trips to Richmond at Lincoln’s behest. When the president asked him what could be done to expedite peace, he replied that the Confederate leadership entertained false hopes inspired by some Northern Democrats who claimed that the war-weary North was on the verge of revolt. Lincoln, who viewed Singleton as ideally qualified to disabuse them of such a notion, told him: “if there is anybody in the country who can have any influence on those people, and bring about any good, you are the man. They must have confidence in you; you have been as much their friend as it was possible for you to be and yet be loyal to the government under which you live.” Singleton responded that he was honored and would do his best to enlighten the Davis administration. Lincoln insisted that he would never retract the Emancipation Proclamation but added that the courts might rule it invalid and he would have to enforce that judicial decision.132 Singleton wrote to his wife on January 7: “I cannot … too highly appreciate the confidence Mr. Lincoln has reposed in me and the honor conferred by the bare privilege of making the effort in behalf of my country and suffering humanity.”133

  Two days later, Singleton left for Richmond on a mission that was supposed to be secret. Alexander Long, a leading Peace Democrat and former congressman from Ohio, expressed the hope that Singleton’s effort “may result in good—God grant that some means may be used through whatever instrumentality to once more give peace to the country.”134 In Richmond, Singleton made purchases for his business partners, met with Jefferson Davis and other leaders to discuss peace terms, and evidently helped persuade the Confederate president to send peace commissioners to Hampton Roads.

  Upon his return on January 31, Singleton told William Cornell Jewett that the people of the South “are all anxious for peace,” that it was “in the power of the North to reconstruct by an offer of liberal terms—to be considered and acted upon during an armistice of sixty days,” that the Confederates “will not consent to Reconstruction upon any other basis than the clearest recognition of the rights of States respectively to determine each for itself all questions of local and domestic government, Slavery included,” and finally that they “will not permit Slavery to stand in the way of Independence—to that [i.e., independence] it would be promptly surrendered, but to nothing else—unless it should be a fair compensation coupled with other liberal terms of Reconstruction secured by Constitutional Amendments.”135 Although Lincoln was unenthusiastic about Singleton’s proposals for restoring sectional harmony, he may well have been encouraged by the news that “fair compensation” and “other liberal terms” might persuade the Davis government to cease fighting.136

  Upon reading Grant’s dispatch, Lincoln hastened to join Seward at Fort Monroe. On February 3 they parlayed with the Confederate delegation aboard the steamer River Queen, anchored in Hampton Roads. He greeted the commissioners warmly, especially Alexander H. Stephens, with whom he had worked for the nomination of Zachary Taylor seventeen years earlier when they both were serving in Congress. As the diminutive Stephens began to remove his heavy overcoat and large scarf, the president poked gentle fun at him: “Now, gentleman, you see what a large amount of ‘shuck’ Mr. Stephens has—just wait a minute and you will be surprised to find what a small ‘nubbin’ he is.”137 The president laughed heartily when Stephens retaliated with a story from their congressional days: at the Capitol several Representatives were discussing the proper pronunciation of “Illinois.” Some said it was “Illinoy,” others “Illinoise.” John Quincy Adams smilingly quipped: “If one were to judge from the character of the representatives in this congress from that state, I should decide that the proper way to pronounce the word would be ‘All noise.’ ”138 During the informal conversation that preceded the negotiations, Lincoln “was very talkative and pleasant with all of the commissioners,” Stephens recalled. “He seemed to be in a splendid humor, and was in excellent spirits.”139

  After these preliminaries, the five men got down to business. According to Stephens, Lincoln was “perfectly frank,” submitting “his views, almost in the form of an argument.”140 The only way to restore peace and harmony was “for those who were resisting the laws of the Union to cease that resistance.” The president reiterated that the “restoration of the Union is a sine qua non with me, and hence my instructions that no conference was to be held except upon that basis.” Ignoring this plain language, Stephens expatiated on a plan like the one suggested by Blair, involving an armistice and a joint expedition against the French in Mexico. Lincoln firmly rejected an armistice, which “would be a quasi recognition of the States then in arms against the National Government, as a s
eparate power.” That he “never could do.”141

  As for the projected invasion of Mexico, Lincoln said “that it could not be entertained. That there could be no war without the consent of Congress, and no treaty without the consent of the Senate of the United States. That he could make no treaty with the Confederate States because that would be a recognition of those States, and that this could not be done under any circumstances. That unless a settlement were made there would be danger that the quarrel would break out in the midst of the joint operations. That one party might unite with the common enemy to destroy the other. That he was determined to do nothing to suspend the operations for bringing the existing struggle to a close to attain any collateral end.”142

  As Stephens recalled, Hunter, speaking “at length, in rather congressional style,” urged “that the recognition of Mr. Davis’s power to make a treaty, was the first and indispensable step to peace, and referring to the correspondence of King Charles the First, and his Parliament, as a reliable precedent, of a constitutional ruler, treating with rebels.” Lincoln’s face “then wore that indescribable expression which generally preceded his hardest hits,” and he remarked drolly: “Upon questions of history, I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don’t profess to be bright. My only distinct recollection of that matter is, that Charles lost his head.” That observation “settled Mr. Hunter for a while.”143