This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [249]
This meeting with the peace commissioners resulted in nothing, as it was bound to do. Led by wizened little Alexander Stephens of Georgia, Vice-President of the Confederacy, the Southerners came to see Lincoln about some means of bringing peace to “the two countries”; the very phrase (written into their instructions by Davis) was testimony to the Confederate authorities’ final flight from reality. There were not two countries now, and there never could be; the Confederacy was a pinched-off triangle of land in southern Virginia and upper North Carolina, beset by overwhelming power; nothing could be more certain than that it would be ground to fragments as soon as spring made the roads dry enough for army movements. Peace for one united country was the only thing Lincoln would consider, and the commissioners were not even allowed to talk about it.… Lincoln was prepared to offer terms. He even suggested that if the South should lay down its arms now he would go to Congress and ask it to appropriate money to pay southern slave owners for the slaves who would very shortly be set free; at four hundred dollars a head this would be expensive, but he remarked that it would cost no more than going on with the war a few months longer would cost, and besides, it would not kill any young men. But the subject was inadmissible, and the commissioners returned to Richmond, where Davis valiantly addressed a mass meeting and called for war to the bitter end.
In Richmond men seemed to be in a queer, trance-like state, where the real and the unreal danced slowly in and out before minds that could no longer make sober meaning out of the things their eyes saw. On March 13 (Sherman was nearing Goldsboro, Sheridan was joining Grant, Wilson was beginning to invade Alabama with his mounted army) Jefferson Davis informed the Confederate Congress that “our country is now environed with perils which it is our duty calmly to contemplate”;4 and the Congress was laboring mightily with the very proposal that had got General Cleburne so cold a snubbing a year earlier — the proposal that certain Negro slaves be enrolled as soldiers for the Confederacy.
This idea, born of final desperation, was examined and whittled down and solemnly weighed and assessed precisely as if there was still some question about what finally would happen to slavery. A Virginia correspondent wrote to Davis in mid-February, saying that slavery was an institution “sanctioned, if not established, by the Almighty” as the most humane and salutary relationship that could exist between the white and colored races; nevertheless, he added, the military situation was getting desperate and it seemed undeniable that “the teachings of Providence as exhibited in this war dictate conclusively and imperatively that to secure and perpetuate our independence we must emancipate the Negro.”5 And on March 23 the Confederate War Department published for the information of all concerned the text of a law just passed by Congress bearing on this subject.
Under this law the President was authorized to ask for, and to accept from their owners, the services of such numbers of Negroes as soldiers as he might consider necessary in order to win the war. These Negroes, once put into service, would be paid, fed, and clad on an equality with white troops, and if the President did not get enough of them just by asking for them he could call on the separate states to supply their proper quotas, provided that no more than 25 per cent of the male slaves of military age in any state could be called into service. As a final rider Congress