All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Hay got back to the White House at daybreak on March 24 and went in to see Lincoln, prepared to take his medicine. To his relief, the president brushed the matter aside. “[T]he Tycoon never minded it in the least,” Hay wrote bluffly to Charles Halpine once he was sure he had weathered the worst, “and as for me, at my age, the more abuse I get in the newspapers, the better for me. I shall run for Constable some day on the strength of my gory exploits in Florida.”

  LINCOLN HAD FAR MORE important things on his mind. At a White House ceremony two weeks earlier, he had made Ulysses S. Grant a lieutenant general, the first to hold that rank since George Washington. The no-nonsense hero of Vicksburg and Chattanooga was now in charge of all the Union armies. (Halleck became chief of staff; Sherman assumed command of the armies of the West.) By the time Hay returned to work, Grant was already preparing a spring campaign so massive and violent that, if successful, it would render the Confederate Army helpless to defend its capital at Richmond. Hay, too, was impressed by Grant when he was introduced for the first time on March 27—“a quiet, self-possessed and strong sense looking man,” he noted in his diary.

  In early May, leading an army of more than one hundred thousand, Grant crossed the Rapidan River near Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville—sites of past Union humiliations—and pitched into Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia without remorse or respite. The battles of the Wilderness and then of Spotsylvania, which followed immediately after, were an unprecedented nightmare of desperately close combat. “The primeval forest had been cut away in former years,” Hay was to write in the Lincoln biography, “and now the whole region, left to itself, had been covered with a wild and shaggy growth of scrub oak, dwarf pines, and hazel thicket woven together by trailing vines and briers. Into this dense jungle the troops . . . plunged.”

  At the infamous “Bloody Angle” of Spotsylvania, “Men were killed by bayonet thrusts over the logs. . . . The thickets were withered by the fire; large trees were cut down by the missiles; the dead lay piled upon each other. . . . [T]here was no especial advantage of position; no skill of tactics brought into play; they both fought to kill, with undaunted spirit, from the first flush of dawn, through the misty morning, the dull, rainy day, to the black night.”

  Unlike McClellan or Hooker before him, Grant never winced. What Hay called “mutual slaughter” was for Grant a Union victory by virtue of the fact that it was not a loss; and though he did not succeed in prying Lee from Spotsylvania, clearing the path to Richmond, he chose to view his work there as a success as well. Both armies had bled profusely—in ten days of fighting, the Union casualties exceeded thirty-five thousand; the Confederacy twenty-four thousand—but Grant was convinced, mercilessly so, that Lee would bleed out sooner than he.

  During the savage days of May, Hay and Nicolay watched Lincoln pace endlessly in the White House. As the dispatches came in from the front, Lincoln expressed approval of his commander’s conduct. “The President thinks very highly of what Grant has done,” Hay observed on May 9. “He was talking about it today with me and said ‘How near we have been to this thing before and failed. I believe if any other General had been at the Head of that army it would have now been on this [north] side of the Rapidan [in retreat]. It is the dogged pertinacity of Grant that wins.’ It is said that Meade observed to Grant that the enemy seemed inclined to make a Kilkenny cat fight of the affair, & Grant answered, ‘Our cat has the longest tail.’ ”

  Six days later, as Grant’s heavy blow against Lee became apparent, Nicolay wrote to his fiancée, “The President is cheerful and hopeful—not unduly elated, but seeming confident.”

  Convinced that he had Lee whipped, Grant kept driving toward Richmond. He was beaten badly at Cold Harbor, ten miles northeast of the Confederate capital, where Union losses were three times those of the Confederacy. Still he continued to tighten the clamp, besieging Petersburg, twenty miles to the south of Richmond, in early June. Despite enormous casualties—in a single month Grant had shed more blood on Virginia soil than spilled by all the armies of the previous three years—the president’s confidence in his general in chief was unwavering. Speaking at a banquet in Philadelphia on June 16, Lincoln said, “I have never been in the habit of making predictions in regard to the war, but I am almost tempted to make one. . . . If I were to hazard it, it is this: That Grant is this evening . . . in a position from whence he will never be dislodged until Richmond is taken.”

  LINCOLN HAD OTHER REASONS to feel encouraged. In Baltimore on June 8, the Republican Party nominated him for reelection on a platform calling for preservation of the Union, no compromise with the rebels, and a constitutional amendment to prohibit slavery. To replace Hannibal Hamlin as vice president, the convention nominated Andrew Johnson, who was serving as military governor of Tennessee.

  But even while Grant was closing in on Richmond, Lee had his eye on Washington. On July 5, he sent General Jubal Early across the Potomac with a column of fifteen thousand. Four days later, the Confederates sliced through Union resistance at the Monocacy River, near Frederick, Maryland, and bore down on the capital. At Silver Spring, they ransacked the estate of Postmaster General Montgomery Blair. After telegraphing Grant for reinforcements, Lincoln actually seemed to welcome the effrontery. Only at the insistence of Secretary of War Stanton did he consent to give up his nighttime residence at the Soldiers’ Home.

  At the White House, Hay and Nicolay could hear the batteries announcing the rebels’ approach to the capital. On the morning of the eleventh, the president and Mrs. Lincoln drove out to witness the attack on Fort Stevens, which guarded the Seventh Street entrance to the city. “He was in the Fort when it was first attacked, standing upon the parapet,” Hay wrote in his diary. “A soldier”—Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as it turned out—“roughly ordered him to get down or he would have his head knocked off.”

  The day turned into somewhat of a lark. “The President is in very good feather this evening,” Hay noticed. “He seems not in the least concerned about the safety of Washington. With him the only concern seems to be whether we can bag or destroy this force out in front.” Two days later, Early gave up on his gambit, more a taunt than an earnest invasion, and withdrew back across the Potomac. Lincoln was predictably annoyed that the federal army had let him escape. By the fourteenth, the president and Mrs. Lincoln were back sleeping at the Soldiers’ Home.

  On July 8, while Early’s army was marching on Washington, Lincoln received a letter from Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, informing him that he had been approached by rebel agents in Canada, claiming that they possessed the full authority of Confederate president Jefferson Davis to negotiate peace between the North and South. Greeley asked Lincoln to arrange for safe passage for the Confederate negotiators between Niagara Falls and the capital, reminding the president that “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country also longs for peace [and] shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood.” Not to pursue peace talks, Greeley warned, could cause Lincoln the November election—with the mutual understanding that a Democratic victory would likely lead to armistice and, ultimately, the continuation of slavery in the southern states. One week later, John Hay left Washington on the most delicate mission he would undertake for his president by far.

  Hay had met Greeley once before, in February 1861, when the editor had boarded the train carrying Lincoln from Springfield to Washington. At the time, Hay had remarked on Greeley’s vanity—his white coat and “yellow hand bag, labeled with his name and address, in characters which might have been read across Lake Erie.”

  Above all, Greeley was an idealist. As a younger man, he had dabbled in Universalism, utopianism, socialism, and Transcendentalism; he had published the first draft of Thoreau’s Walden. He advocated land reform, labor reform, and, more than anything, the end of slavery. He founded the Tribune—“the Great Moral Organ”—in 1841, and, with the founding of the Republican Party in 185
4, he made the paper its mouthpiece.

  Greeley welcomed stories fed to the paper by the White House, yet he also reserved the right to hold Lincoln’s feet to the fire on slavery, most famously in his “Prayer of Twenty Millions” of August 1862, in which he demanded that the president issue an emancipation proclamation.

  By the summer of 1864, Greeley, like most Americans, was sick of war. The recent carnage in Virginia had not bought Richmond, and now the president was calling for five hundred thousand more volunteers. Greeley was convinced that the time had come to consider a negotiated peace. Even if it could not be achieved right away, he told Lincoln, “I do say that a frank offer by you to the insurgents, of terms which the impartial will say ought to be accepted, will, at the worst, prove an immense and sorely needed advantage to the national cause.”

  Lincoln saw the rub immediately. He doubted that the agents in Canada spoke for Jefferson Davis, but he agreed with Greeley that if he refused out of hand to talk to the men, he would pay an enormous price politically. On July 9, the day after receiving Greeley’s letter, he responded cagily, “If you can find any person, anywhere, professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union, and the abandonment of slavery, whatever else it embraces, say to him he may come to me with you, and that if he really brings such proposition he shall at the least have safe conduct.” Greeley answered several days later that peace commissioners were waiting at Niagara Falls.

  Hay traveled all night by boat and rail, arriving at the Tribune office on the morning of July 16. At first Greeley balked when Hay relayed Lincoln’s message requesting that Greeley be the one to meet with the agents and accompany them to Washington; he worried that he would be too easily recognized by newspapermen in Niagara Falls and “abused & blackguarded.” He was also upset that Lincoln had spelled out his terms—restoration of the Union, end to slavery—in advance. Greeley would have preferred that the other side “propose terms which we could not accept,” Hay reported. When Hay stood firm, Greeley agreed to make the trip to Niagara Falls. Hay wrote out the safe-conduct passes himself, leaving the names blank, and handed them to Greeley. He left for Washington the next day.

  He barely had time to report to Lincoln before a dispatch arrived from Greeley. As Lincoln had suspected, the peace commissioners revealed that they were not accredited by Jefferson Davis after all, but insisted that if Lincoln would grant them safe passage to Richmond, they would surely gain Davis’s ear.

  That evening, Hay was again aboard a train, heading this time to Niagara Falls. With him he now carried a letter from Lincoln, an expansion of his July 9 offer, known today as the Niagara Manifesto. “To whom it may concern,” the president began, addressing the peace commissioners. “Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war against the United States will be received and considered by the Executive Government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points, and the bearer or bearers thereof shall have safe conduct both ways.”

  Arriving in Niagara Falls, Hay found Greeley at the International Hotel, and together they rode across the suspension bridge to the Clifton House on the Canadian side, where they found two of the Confederate agents “tea & toasting,” as Hay noted sarcastically. George Sanders was a Kentuckian who had supported Stephen Douglas, advocated the overthrow of European monarchies, and befriended John Wilkes Booth. To Hay he appeared “a seedy looking rebel with grizzled whiskers.” The other man, James Holcombe, was a law professor from Virginia and a former member of the Confederate Congress, whom Hay described as a “spare false looking man with false teeth, false eyes & false hair.” One of their associates, Clement Clay, a former Alabama senator, was absent. Also hovering somewhere nearby was William “Colorado” Jewett, a Peace Democrat from Maine who had earned his fortune in western gold mines and a reputation as a “half-witted adventurer.” It was Jewett who had first alerted Greeley to the purported peace commissioners, and as soon became evident, neither Jewett nor Greeley proved to be trustworthy emissaries—not for Lincoln, anyway.

  The meeting was brief. Hay delivered Lincoln’s “To whom it may concern” letter spelling out the terms on which he was willing to discuss peace. Sanders and Holcombe said they would talk over the proposal with their associates. Hay and Greeley rode back across the bridge to Niagara Falls.

  The Confederates at the Clifton House were shocked by the terms of the Niagara Manifesto. Greeley had never shown them Lincoln’s original letter of July 9 stipulating “the restoration of the Union, and the abandonment of slavery.” Now they regarded the July 18 letter as a low-handed betrayal.

  Hay spent two days cooling his heels, awaiting an answer from the Confederates in Canada; finally he was informed by Jewett that a response had already been sent—not to Lincoln, but to Greeley, who by then had returned to New York. Copies had also been circulated to the press. The Confederates’ letter accused Lincoln of a “rude withdrawal of a courteous overture.” The South desired peace, the letter declared, but Lincoln’s implacable terms were tantamount to “fresh blasts of war to the bitter end.” The commissioners, who were anything but, beseeched the South to strip from its eyes “the last film of such delusion” that peace by negotiation was possible, and implored “any patriots or Christians” in the North “to recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of the country.”

  This last point—the recall of “abused authority”—was perhaps the blow the southerners had wished to strike all along. If peace was their goal, they had gone about it clumsily. If unseating Lincoln was the objective, they had advanced the cause cleverly. By the Niagara Manifesto, Lincoln had implied that he was willing to undergo more Antietams, more Gettysburgs, more Shilohs, more Cold Harbors, the killing and maiming of tens of thousands more soldiers, all in order to free slaves. The majority of northern Democrats wanted peace at any cost, with no thought to emancipation.

  Abolitionist Republicans naturally applauded the president’s resolute stand, but a good many moderate Republicans were convinced that Lincoln had destroyed the party. One of the most vocal, Joseph Medill, editor of the Chicago Tribune, complained to Hay that the Niagara Manifesto had enabled “Copperheads [pro-slavery northern Democrats] to get an enfilading fire on us. Heretofore we have argued that the war was conducted to save the Union, that the object of the war was national integrity, that freeing slaves was a measure of policy, a military necessity to strengthen ourselves and to weaken the enemy. But the President by a stroke of his pen overthrew all this and proclaimed in effect that the war was waged for the object of freeing negroes. The Copperheads will shell us on this point . . . and I assure you our political prospects do not look bright. Unless we have decided military success [before the November election] you will be not a private sec[retary] but a private citizen and Mr. L also, while the Cops will have the Govt.”

  Hay was livid. “The damned scoundrel needs a day’s hanging,” he said of Medill. Indeed, the entire Niagara experience had been extremely trying. It had been a great honor to be entrusted with such a fragile responsibility, and he had acquitted himself ably. But once again he had been burned. Greeley, though well intentioned, had behaved shabbily, fending off his critics with “half statements,” Hay complained, and blaming Lincoln for the whole misunderstanding with the peace commission.

  Nonetheless, Hay had learned a thing or two about the chess game of negotiation: how to read an opponent, when to go first, when to demur, and when to take the offensive. One day he would be not merely a messenger but an ambassador in his own right.

  Then, too, he certainly had sized up Horace Greeley, agreeing with Lincoln’s assessment that “in some respects Mr. Greeley is a great man, but in many others he is wanting in common sense.” Seven years later, when Hay was to go to work for Greeley at the
Tribune, his opinion of the man would improve, but only slightly. Writing in the Lincoln biography after Greeley’s death, Hay still could not forgive the “peculiarities of caprice and impulse which formed the special weakness of that remarkable character.”

  BY MID-AUGUST, EVEN LINCOLN believed he might not be reelected. He went so far as to tuck away in his desk a “blind” memorandum pledging to support the next administration in prosecuting the war to save the Union. He also wrote a letter to Henry Raymond, editor of the New York Times and chairman of the Republican Party, proposing that Raymond travel to Richmond and discuss with Jefferson Davis “what terms of peace would be accepted”—with no mention of slavery or emancipation. He pigeonholed this letter, too, but such gestures, though they never saw the light of day, were a fair indication of how soberly he viewed his prospects. Friends from nearly every state warned him that if the election were held immediately, he would lose badly. At the end of the month, Nicolay wrote that the Republican Party had reached “almost the condition of a disastrous panic—a sort of political Bull Run.”

  Hay, still irritated by the Niagara fiasco, would not abide such pessimism. “I lose my temper sometimes talking with growling Republicans,” he wrote Nicolay. “There is a diseased restlessness about men in these times that unfits them for the steady support of the administration. . . . If the dumb cattle are not worthy of another term of Lincoln then let the will of God be done & the [pestilence] of McClellan fall on them.”

  On August 31, McClellan did fall on them, although at long last he proved to be not a curse but a political blessing. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the general whom Lincoln had admired then fired was nominated as the party’s candidate to run against Lincoln and bring an end to “four years of failure.” The party platform stipulated that “immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities.” Whereas the Republican platform promised union and emancipation, the Democrats pledged peace based only on “the Federal Union of the States.” In his acceptance letter, McClellan attempted to downplay the so-called peace plank, and he ignored the issue of slavery entirely.