President Lincoln, General Grant, General Sherman (who has
ridden up from Goldsboro on a separate matter) and Admiral David Dixon Porter
hold an impromptu meeting in the main salon of the River Queen. They discuss the coming end of the Civil War, but just
as importantly, they discuss the architecture of a Civil Peace.
Their meeting, like the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the Yalta Conference of 1945, is one of world-altering significance.
Admiral Porter later says:
I shall never forget
that council which met on board the River Queen. On the determinations adopted
there depended peace, or a continuation of the war with its attendant horrors.
That council . . . really was an occasion upon which depended whether or not the
war would be continued a year longer. A single false step might have prolonged
it indefinitely.
President Lincoln is in a brown study,
still mulling the sights, sounds and smells of his tour of the Petersburg
front. He is perhaps thinking of his failed negotiations with Messrs. Stephens,
Campbell and Hunter just three weeks before in this selfsame room. And perhaps
he is contemplating his offhand rejection of Robert E. Lee’s offer of
negotiations some weeks before that. Grant shares his plans for the Union
Spring Offensive with the President. When General Grant assures the President
that the war is nearing its end, but that it will take, “one more desperate and
bloody battle” to ensure Union victory, Lincoln wrings his hands. “Must more
blood be shed? Cannot this bloody battle be avoided?” he asks.
Grant and Sherman share a glance that
no doubt includes Porter. Grant does not say, as he had boasted just a year ago
at Spotsylvania Courthouse, that “Lee’s army is really whipped.” He has learned
better than that. He recognizes in Lee that singular quality of a truly great
man, that being that Lee can spur ordinary men to do extraordinary deeds. Grant
knows he himself is not such a man. But he serves one, one who motivates him to
do great things, one who has just asked him for a hard truth, and he cannot put
his President off with an evasion. The answer is a simple, “No.”
Lee’s army is crumbling; indeed the
whole edifice of the Confederacy is coming down, but Grant knows that it has
not reached the point of complete collapse, not quite yet. More punishment must
be meted out. More pain must be inflicted. More weariness must soak into the
Confederate soul.
“My God, my God! Can’t you spare more
effusions of blood? We have had so much of it!” Lincoln exclaims. He is anything but
squeamish, but he is heartbroken. He has always been gentler toward the
Confederacy than most Northern men prefer, but he has still wanted them soundly
defeated. But now, with the sights on the road to Petersburg seared into his
mind, a deeper compassion has been awakened in him. He will not unsee what he
has seen.
Admiral Porter believes that Lincoln
“wanted peace on almost any terms.” This is not quite true. Reunification of
the Union remains his primary goal. And he will not trade the emancipation of
the slaves for a quicker end to the war. If battle is needed to secure a Union
victory, then so be it.
But, Lincoln tells his assembled
commanders, he wants a peace without retribution, without ridicule, without
shaming, without hangings and firing squads; he wants an honorable peace:
“[D]efeat the
opposing armies, and . . . get the men composing the Confederate armies back to
their homes, at work on their farms and in their shops. Let them have their
horses to plow with, and, if you like, their guns to shoot crows with. I want
no one punished; treat them liberally all round. We want those people to return
to their allegiance to the Union and submit to the laws. . . “{These] deluded
men of the rebel armies” allowed to surrender without consequence, Lincoln says, “won’t take up arms again.”
As to the fate of the Confederate
leaders, Lincoln is clear: He wants no arrests, no molestations, and no
harassment. If they can leave the United States “unbeknownst” to him he will be
more than pleased with that resolution. In sum, he says of the South, “Let ‘em up easy . . .”
The mood becomes grim when Lincoln
broaches the subject of increasing acts of sabotage and the possibility that
the Confederate armies may devolve into guerrilla bands. Grant admits that he
has no contingency plan to deal with an insurgency, and adds glumly that he
does not believe one can be devised. Sherman says that the only way to deal
with guerrillas is to deny them resources, and in short, to adopt a scorched
earth policy much like his March through Georgia and the Carolinas. But, he
says gloomily, that destroying an insurgent movement will take far more troops
than he presently has, and that it would require destruction of the American
countryside on a scale so vast that no one has seen its’ like as yet in the
Civil War. Someone, perhaps Porter, mentions Missouri, which, though it is not always
in the headlines, experiences “some new outrage daily” as a Show Me State
Unionist has written to the New York Times.
The violence in Missouri --- including beheadings, sexual mutilations, necrophilic
rapes, vivisepulture, and immolations --- is like nothing anyone has ever seen,
at least not since the days of Genghis Khan, and in an atmosphere of collective
sociopathy, it is occurring on both sides of the war. Whether the Union will be
able to subdue the men committing these atrocities is still an open question. The
idea of the entire heart of North America degenerating into such a killing
field is, sadly, becoming too conceivable.
It is with this shuddering thought that the only real option is raised, that
being the fast and thorough undoing of Lee and Johnston and the Confederacy.
The fate of the former slaves is
discussed briefly. Lincoln knows that this is his tenderest subject. The
South’s response to the fate of the emancipated blacks will be a critical
element in Reconstruction. Lincoln has not given the question the thought it
deserves, not yet, but he knows that even the men in the room, himself included,
have ingrained 19th Century cultural and personal prejudices against
people of color. The handling of the issue must be deft. For the moment, he
speculates that some form of “limited equality” is a necessary first step in
addressing the issue of the Freedmen.
The conference on the River Queen ends soon afterward. Lincoln
is staying at Grant’s headquarters, but Sherman and Porter must return to their
units. Lincoln is pensive as he walks with them. His leavetaking of the General
and the Admiral is poignant. He bids them both a farewell, and then, his voice
cracking with intense and sudden emotion, says, “Good-by gentlemen, God bless you all!” Those are the last words he
ever speaks to Sherman and Porter. They will never see him alive again.
Throughout the Confederacy, Southerners
observe a “Day of Prayer, Fasting, and Humiliation” decreed by Jefferson Davis.
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