The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [199]
Lincoln adamantly denied that “two countries” existed. Nonetheless, he agreed to meet with a three-man peace delegation headed by Confederate vice president Alexander H. Stephens, his old congressional colleague. News of the impending conference leaked out and threatened to derail House passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which Democrats charged would create an obstacle to peace. James Ashley, the Ohio Radical who had been rounding up votes for the amendment, implored Lincoln to deny that peace was at hand. On January 31, the day of the vote, Lincoln sent a note for Ashley to read to the House: “So far as I know, there are no peace commissioners in the city, or likely to be in it.” This was literally true since the commissioners were not coming to Washington, but certainly misleading. In any event, on February 3, Lincoln and Secretary of State Seward met with the three envoys on a naval vessel anchored off Hampton Roads, Virginia. The southerners arrived, wrote a Union army officer, accompanied by “the bone of contention…in the shape of a black man carrying a valise.”59
The Hampton Roads conference lasted for several hours and the participants agreed not to take notes. They all eventually recorded accounts of what had transpired, which generally coincide although they differ on some significant points. Seward and Stephens rambled on about the Monroe Doctrine and Blair’s Mexican scheme until Lincoln became impatient and made clear he had no interest in the idea. Lincoln insisted that no consideration of “terms and conditions” could take place until the Confederacy recognized national authority, but promised to be lenient in issuing pardons and restoring confiscated property. When one negotiator cited Charles I as an example of a ruler who entered into an agreement with rebels before a war ended, Lincoln replied, “All I distinctly recollect about the case of Charles I, is, that he lost his head in the end.”60
Alexander H. Stephens later claimed that Lincoln urged him to persuade Georgia to withdraw from the Confederacy and ratify the Thirteenth Amendment with the proviso that it go into effect in five years. This seems highly unlikely; Lincoln was too good a lawyer not to know that such a codicil would have no legal effect. In Seward’s account, Lincoln simply told the Confederates that there was every reason to expect the Thirteenth Amendment soon to become part of the Constitution. Lincoln also mentioned his long-standing idea of compensated emancipation. Indeed, immediately after his return to Washington, Lincoln presented to the cabinet a proposal to distribute $400 million (the sum Greeley had proposed in his peace initiative of the previous July) to the slave states, including the border, if the war ended by April 1. The document also promised to restore all confiscated property, other than slaves, that had not been sold to third parties. The cabinet unanimously rejected Lincoln’s idea. Secretary of the Navy Welles observed that while the desire for peace was admirable, “there may be such a thing as overdoing.” “You are all against me,” Lincoln remarked, and abandoned the proposal. He failed to mention it in his report to Congress on the peace conference.61
The Radical senator Zachariah Chandler considered the Hampton Roads proceedings “disgraceful.” But most Republicans praised Lincoln’s conduct, which they understood as an uncompromising insistence on reunion and emancipation. The outcome reinforced Republicans’ determination to press ahead with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to settle once and for all the fate of slavery. For it to become part of the Constitution required the approval of three-fourths of the states. The admission of Nevada on the eve of the 1864 election (when some Republicans thought its three electoral votes might provide the margin of victory) had increased the number of states to thirty-six, including the eleven of the Confederacy.