1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [50]
Since its beginnings in President Madison’s time as a humble inn, the hotel had, through a characteristically American process of incessant self-aggrandizement, grown to encompass almost an entire block. Rather than demolish any buildings that stood in its path, the Willard strangled them like some relentless jungle vine, sending out shoots and tendrils of faux marble, carved oak, and polished brass until the unfortunate structures were wholly engulfed. In the winter of 1861, it had recently swallowed up God himself, in the form of a handsome little Greek Revival church that the Presbyterians hastily vacated, paying due reverence to the superior claims of America’s nascent hospitality industry.62
During the first days of February, employees of Willard’s could be seen fussing over the nave of that church, which had been reconsecrated as a conference room with the secular name of Willard’s Hall. At the altar end they installed three portraits: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and Henry Clay.63 Soon afterward, a fourth figure from American history was installed beneath the other three: John Tyler. The former president appeared not as a lithographed engraving but in the actual—now fairly diminished—flesh. In most important respects, though, he had a great deal in common with those other heroes. Like Washington, Jackson, and Clay, he was a slaveholder. Like them, he was a border-state man—in his case, a Virginian, a scion of the Cavaliers, not one of those swaggering Gulf Coast parvenus who had lately made such mischief on the congressional floor. And like them, Tyler loved, at least for the time being, the Union. On the basis of these claims, the last one especially, he was selected by unanimous acclamation president of the Peace Conference of 1861.
This meeting was Virginia’s idea. The Old Dominion, after all, had once invested heavily in the concept of the United States as … well, united states. (Wizened Mr. Tyler, as a boy, had shaken the great Washington’s hand.) In 1787, when the loose-jointed American confederation was tottering precariously, it had been the Virginians who stepped forward to steady things, orchestrating a new form of government that balanced North and South, states and nation, freedom and slavery. So the concept of a Virginia-led “solemn family council”—as the Charlottesville patriarch William Cabell Rives, once Thomas Jefferson’s law student, put it—seemed, at least to its organizers, to be blessed by history itself. (Nor were such men as Rives unmindful of self-interest. They knew that in the event of all-out war, their state would be the battleground.) Virginia’s state legislature issued the call to convene; her fellow border states and all but a few Northern ones answered it.
The delegates assembled in the winter of 1861 with the summer of 1787 foremost in mind, and with a grave self-consciousness born of the prospect that their names would be handed down to futurity. They were, indeed, the best that the old Union had to offer: not only the ex-president, but also senators, congressmen, former ambassadors, war heroes, and railroad owners. “Our godlike fathers created,” President Tyler exhorted his fellow delegates, “we have to preserve. They built up, through their wisdom and patriotism, monuments which have eternized their names. You have before you, gentlemen, a task equally grand, equally sublime, quite as full of glory and immortality.… If you reach the height of this great occasion, your children’s children will rise up and call you blessed.”64
Not everyone in Washington shared such optimism. Twenty-two-year-old Henry Adams was in town serving as secretary to his father, a powerful congressman closely allied with Seward. In early February, he attended a ball hosted by Senator and Mrs. Douglas. Half the capital seemed to be there, packing the stifling parlors; Adams attempted to waltz with a female acquaintance, but finally was “obliged