Our One Common Country (5 page)

The popular
Atlantic Monthly
published Gilmore's account of Davis's intransigence, relieving pressure on Lincoln. Davis had been outfoxed in the public relations war. The shooting war would go on.

CHAPTER THREE

A Problematical Character, Full of Contradictions

In December 1860, young Henry Adams, son of Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Quincy Adams, great-grandson of John and Abigail Adams, was fresh from Harvard Yard and new to Washington City when he met William Seward, the bright Northern star of the United States Senate, the Secretary of State presumptive in the incoming Lincoln administration, the devil himself in the South's iconography. According to Horace Greeley, a former ally and longtime adversary who praised him for little else, Seward hated slavery “and all its belongings.” As governor of New York in 1839, he had refused to extradite to Virginia three black seamen accused of hiding a slave. People were not property, the governor had said, and their rescue from human bondage was a crime not recognized in Albany. His demonization in the South began then and there, and his maiden speech in the Senate perfected it. Debating the Compromise of 1850, Southern senators relied on the Constitution to protect their slave property, as they always had. Seward invoked “a higher law” and incited them to apoplexy. A South Carolinian compared the gentleman from New York to “the condor that soars in the frozen regions of ethereal purity, yet lives on garbage and putrefaction.” Speaking for the
Richmond Enquirer,
Edward Pollard dismissed him as “a wretch whom it would be a degradation to name.” His name had been famous ever since.

Henry Adams was prepared to be unimpressed nonetheless when his father's old friend, “the governor,” as everyone called him, came alone to the house for dinner and declared himself a disciple of Henry's
grandfather. For Henry at twenty-two, awed celebrities breathing reverence for his ancestors had long since lost their novelty.

As they bantered across the dinner table, the education of Henry Adams had just begun. He watched the governor closely, a little gray man of sixty with a “slouching, slender figure; a head like a wise macaw; a beaked nose; shaggy eyebrows; unorderly hair and clothes; hoarse voice; off-hand manner; free talk, and perpetual cigar,” not to mention a colorful vocabulary in the company of men. There was no awe in him, and no reverence either. In the coming war, Lincoln would ask a cursing mule driver if he belonged to the Episcopal Church. When the startled man replied that he was a Methodist, the president would say, “I thought you must be an Episcopalian, because you swear just like Governor Seward, who is a churchwarden.”

Henry loved him before the soup was served, absorbing his charm and disingenuousness with an amused sort of fondness for both. As a sitting US senator, he had quietly made his home in the little town of Auburn a stop on the Underground Railroad, a felony under federal law, putting his “higher law” where his family was. There was no insincerity in that. But after thirty years in politics, no one could tell the governor from the mask, Henry said, not excepting the governor. Born and raised wealthy in upstate New York in its unpretentious style, well heeled if not well dressed (his suits were said to be twenty years old, and made by a poor tailor), he was everyone's favorite dinner guest, with a highly contagious fondness for provocative conversation, amusing children, expensive wine and brandy, knee-slapping stories, and the widespread expectation of his future presidency. Fire-breathing slaveholders who reviled him in the Senate entertained him in their homes, beguiled like everyone else.

Humility was not his strength. He had been known to raise his hat to tourists under the mistaken impression that they had recognized him. Self-righteous, humorless people thought him glib and insincere, both of which he was, but even his enemies never doubted the agility of his mind. The French ambassador called him
très sage.
“Hopelessly lawless,” Henry Adams called him. At posh dinner parties, he would take off his shoes and warm his damp feet by the fire. In the midst of a weighty discussion, he was capable of stopping in mid-sentence to ask Lincoln's aide John
Hay if he knew Daniel Webster's recipe for poaching a codfish, which ended with a mandate to send for Daniel Webster. Having told his little story, the Secretary of State got up and guffawed around the room, then returned to the risk of war with France and England.

Thurlow Weed, Seward's mentor and political mastermind, was an Albany publisher and editor, a Republican Party boss, and a famously unscrupulous tactician, the very personification of what the common man thought a politician was and ought not to be. Seward shared him with Lincoln, who gladly accepted the gift. Attesting to Weed's notoriety, Lincoln told Seward and Hay about a crafty supporter in Illinois, one Long John Wentworth by name, who had doubted his ability to outwit a wily adversary. The president told the story deadpan, to the governor's vast amusement and his own: “ ‘I tell you what, Lincoln,' said John with a look of unutterable sagacity, ‘You must do what Seward does—get a feller to run you.' ”

To a generation of Southern statesmen obsessed with their honor to the point of killing at twenty paces any man who accused them of chicanery, Seward cheerfully confessed it. According to Montgomery Blair, a caustic Border State rival, “I could fill a volume with his narratives of the tricks he has played if I could recall the half part of what I have heard from him,” though he was generous and kind in his personal life and opened his home and family to his critics as well as his friends. No less a pair of authorities than Jeff and Varina Davis echoed Blair's mixed review. In 1849, Seward had asked the Senate to honor Father Matthew, an immigrant Irish priest well known for his work against drunkenness and slavery. Only one of these sins offended the senator from Mississippi, who took offense at the priest's attacks on “his adopted country's institutions.” Father Matthew “comes covertly as a wolf in sheep's clothing,” Davis said, “and I hold the Senator from New York to be the very best authority on that subject.” And yet, after war, defeat, and heartbreak had given her every reason to feel otherwise, Varina confessed to “heartily liking him.”

“Mr. Seward was a problematical character, full of contradictions,” she said. In 1858, when her husband lay blindfolded for weeks in a shuttered room at home with an eye in danger of bursting from infection, Seward spent an hour with him and Varina every day, easing their suffering with diverting reports from the Senate: “Your man out-talked ours.
You would have liked it. I didn't.” His wit was often lost on his hosts. In a moment of intimate friendship as they sat by her husband's side, Varina asked Seward, in perfect sincerity, how he could rail against slavery as evil, having spent too much time in the South to believe it. Seeing his chance to shock and entertain, he replied that he meant not a word—that he spoke for political effect. Davis reacted incredulously. Did he never speak from conviction? “Nev-ur,” Seward said, with the deepest mock solemnity. The Mississippian raised his bandaged head and whispered through his pain. “As God is my judge, I never spoke from any other motive.” Varina would never forget how the governor put his arm around him and gently soothed him back to his pillow. “I know you do not. I am always sure of it.” After he left with tears in his eyes, the Davises shook their heads and wondered if he had been joking. It had only dimly dawned on them.
*

When the Republicans convened in 1860 to choose a presidential nominee, Seward was sure of victory. Even Davis showed him sympathy when Lincoln was chosen instead. Two weeks had passed before the governor told his wife that the last of the humiliation had been endured. It hadn't. He buried his disappointment in a mission to avert civil war. When the South Carolinians seceded and started the great catastrophe, he said they didn't mean it. If a foreign power attacked Manhattan, “the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their population to the rescue of New York.” In January 1861, with four Southern states gone and his future as Secretary of State well known, he proposed a set of concessions to a fully assembled Senate. The very hallways were jammed. Mississippi had seceded, but Jefferson Davis had not yet resigned his seat. He was in it as Seward spoke, listening intently. Among other conciliations, the New Yorker proposed a Constitutional amendment barring interference with slavery in the states as opposed to in the territories. Almost every Republican disavowed it. It was not good enough for the South.

When the president-elect arrived in Washington for the first time in twelve years, the governor's plans for a de facto Seward presidency ran aground on his realization that Lincoln would be his own man and a better writer and thinker than his Secretary of State. After making
the required adjustments, the worldly Eastern aristocrat and the gangly Western yarn spinner discovered how much they liked each other. Seward grew closer to Lincoln than any other man. He often arrived at Cabinet meetings before the others did, was asked to stay when they left, dominated their discussions, meddled in their portfolios, never troubled them with his own. Jealousy ensued.

Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles was an old Connecticut Democrat with a long, white beard, an unconvincing wig, and a wise, incisive diary—a “man of no decorations,” a contemporary said. Lincoln, who especially liked him, sometimes called him Uncle Gideon. “The Rebel leaders understand Seward very well,” Uncle Gideon told his diary. “He is fond of intrigue, of mystery, of sly, cunning management. Detectives, secret agents, fortune-tellers are his delight.” Lincoln's Cabinet was a candid fraternity, Welles said, “with the exception of Mr. Seward, who had, or affected, a certain mysterious knowledge which he was not prepared to impart.” The Kentucky-born Mary Todd Lincoln despised him. “That hypocrite Seward,” she called him, “that dirty abolition sneak.” So deeply did she loathe him that she instructed her coachman to avoid the street on which he lived. She was heard to tell her husband, “He draws you around his little finger like a skein of thread.”

Her husband was the only judge who mattered, and he valued Seward highly. On many a troubled evening, he took a walk with John Hay to the governor's rented townhouse, a few steps away on the eastern edge of Lafayette Square, for an hour or two of diversion. On one of their nights out, they brought for Seward's edification a Portuguese guide to English conversation, which the president read aloud. The three of them hurt from laughing. Apart from a depth of friendship that permitted public ribbing (“Mr. Seward,” the president explained to a soldier, “is limited to a couple of stories which, from repeating, he believes are true”), Lincoln valued Seward's knowledge of foreign affairs, his longtime relationships with the men of the day, North and South, and his inbred savoir faire, all of which the president lacked. Seward taught him how to present himself, sent him memos on the subject, schooled him on the statesmen he had plotted, dined, and fought with since the 1830s, when Lincoln was defending hog thieves in the unwashed regions of Illinois.

The learning ran both ways. As Hay understood and said, Seward was astute enough to see and generous enough to admit that Lincoln's goodness of heart, well known to everyone in the city, was the least of his claims to respect. As the governor had done at first, many distinguished men would go to the White House expecting to pat him on the head and come away “confused and dissatisfied at finding he stood six feet four in his slippers. Seward was the first man who recognized this.”

Ironically enough, apart from Lincoln himself, whose election had caused them to secede, no Republican leader was more committed to reconciliation with the gentlemen of the South than their antebellum nemesis William Seward, whom the Radicals roundly despised and had tried to force the president to depose. In a downcast evening at the governor's in the summer of 1864, with the Jacobins and the Democrats at either side of his throat, Lincoln told Seward he was ready to hand the nomination to him, to save what they had built together and cure the disappointment of 1860.

Seward said no, “that is all past and settled.” The South had refused to accept the last election, hoping to reverse it in battle, he said. Now “they hope you will lose the next one,” and vindicate them. “When that election is held and they find the people reaffirming their decision to have you President, I think the Rebellion will collapse.”

They were far from reaffirming it now.

CHAPTER FOUR

Good and True Friends

The sainted Andrew Jackson had been dead for nineteen years, but Francis Preston Blair, his famous friend and collaborator, was alive and well in the thick of things, enjoying his golden years as Jackson's voice from the grave—a spitfire for the Union with deep Southern roots and strong Southern ties. When he wasn't charming senators at his country estate in Maryland (Silver Spring he called it, after the mica-flecked stream that ran through it), he was plotting war and peace at the buff-colored limestone townhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue known as Blair House, a three-minute stroll from the Executive Mansion. The path was well worn in both directions. Through ten administrations, Francis Preston Blair—“Preston” to family and friends, “the Old Gentleman” to Abraham Lincoln—had built a potent brand.

Born in Virginia in 1791, he had made his name in Kentucky as a banker, editor, and kingmaker with a slippery sort of cunning. Jackson brought him north in 1830 to sit in his Kitchen Cabinet and run his
Washington Globe.
Filling several Jacksonian needs, Blair supplied the president with speeches and ideas, helped him win his battles with John C. Calhoun and avoid war with South Carolina in the nullification crisis of 1832, and left a pail of milk on the White House steps at the start of every day, contributed by the cow kept in residence behind Blair House.

Three decades later, in 1861, he sent to President Lincoln a plan to free the slaves and send them as colonists to Central America, which the president endorsed. Toward the end of 1864, he turned his nimble mind to a still more ambitious scheme, a plan to restore the Union, emancipate the slaves, and save his native South from defeat and occupation, all at the same
time. If anyone could work such a miracle it was Francis Preston Blair, a counselor to Abraham Lincoln and a father figure to Jefferson Davis.

He had been a leading Democrat for a quarter of a century when he helped give birth to the Republican Party in 1855, fed up with the old fixation on slavery and states' rights. Committing political treason in the eyes of Southern friends, he put air under the Republicans' wings by calling them Jackson's true successors and chairing their first national convention, where every mention of his name drew applause. A newspaperman saw how hard he worked the room, with a head too big for his body, a hat too big for his head, and a “badly-fitting set of false teeth.” Having erred in one particular, the newspaperman dispatched a correction. The teeth were not false but real.

Preston Blair was a strikingly homely man, with the bald, boney look of a gaunt Dickensian undertaker, but his charm and his wit made his looks disappear. Eliza, his wife, was proof. A heart-stopping beauty in her day and a striking woman still, she had chosen to limit her marital role to raising the Blair children, brandying Silver Spring's peaches, presiding over capital society, co-editing the
Washington
Globe,
schooling congressmen on politics and senators on war, and abetting her husband's intrigues. Eight presidents ago, Martin Van Buren had called her the best politician in the city. Not for nothing was she known as the lioness.

Their children were absurdly accomplished.

Montgomery, the eldest, was a scholarly lawyer and a West Point veteran of the Seminole War who had set out for Missouri as a young man, ascended to the bench, represented Dred Scott in the Supreme Court, served as Lincoln's postmaster general, modernized the mail, turned a deficit into a surplus, and advised the president on military affairs more wisely than most of his generals. Montgomery was no charmer (awkward, homely, and repellent, a friend of Lincoln's said), but the president enjoyed his children, who played a nascent form of baseball with the Lincoln boys on the lawn behind the White House. Lured from his office window, the commander in chief had been known to join in, his elbows and coattails flying comically around the bases.

After graduating from Princeton, Montgomery's younger brother, Francis Preston Blair Jr., had followed Montgomery to St. Louis, risen
high in politics, saved Missouri for the Union, won a seat in the House of Representatives, chaired its Committee on Military Affairs in the midst of the Civil War, and resigned to raise his own army. He was now a major general leading one of Sherman's divisions, having first helped Grant take Vicksburg. People spoke of Frank as a future president, not exclusively people named Blair.

Their articulate sister, Lizzie, the social register's Elizabeth Blair Lee, was a favorite of Jackson's in her girlhood and had lived from time to time in his White House, outrunning boys in races despite her fragile health. Now she was her father's astute collaborator and the heart, head, and soul of the Washington Orphanage Society. Mary Lincoln was a friend. So was Varina Davis. Happily for Lizzie, her looks had come from her mother, her humor from her father.

Lizzie's husband, Phillips Lee, was a hard-fighting admiral in the US Navy, the architect of the blockade, and a cousin of Robert E. Lee's, to whom the Old Gentleman had offered the command of all the Union armies at Blair House in 1861 at Lincoln's behest. Preston had caused a new house to be built for Lizzie and Phil next to Blair House, where Montgomery and his family now lived. While Phil was away at sea, Preston and Eliza came down from Silver Spring to live with Lizzie and her little boy, a future US senator.

The Blairs had “the spirit of clan,” Lincoln said, and “a way of going with a rush” for whatever they undertook. Their politics were much like his—fiercely pro-Union and moderately antislavery—which seemed a touch hypocritical in view of their household slaves, until one learned that their “servants” had a standing offer of freedom that only one of them had ever accepted. Preston put them on wages in 1862.

The Blairs' influence with Lincoln had slipped by the summer of 1864, positioned as they were more heretically than he—more cautious on abolition, more sympathetic to the South—but he valued their dogged loyalty and their willingness to draw some Radical fire away from him to them. He loved his trips to their country home, enjoyed their scrappy patriarch, profited from his wisdom and his multigenerational contacts. As several of his predecessors had done, the president revealed himself freely to the Sage of Silver Spring on difficult, sensitive issues, testing new
ideas in the crucible of his mind. Their affection remained mutual even after Lincoln sacrificed Montgomery to the Jacobins and asked him to leave the Cabinet.

Others were not so enamored of the old schemer. Despite a former friendship (they had once joined a group of outdoorsmen on a long Canadian fishing trip), Seward was an old enemy. Preston Blair had worked hard to keep the governor out of the Cabinet, and Seward had worked harder to keep Montgomery out. Some thought the old man would rather have Seward out than Montgomery in. He was known to allude to the Secretary of State as Billy Bowlegs.

They had locked horns early on, when the South Carolinians threatened war in 1861, as they had in 1833. Alone in the Cabinet, Montgomery dissented from Seward's plan to let them take Fort Sumter and lure them back with concessions. When Lincoln invited the Old Gentleman's opinion, he ranted against Seward's advice with such red-faced passion that he asked Montgomery to “contrive some apology for me” after he had composed himself at home. Those traitors in the South were not threatening disunion to win concessions, he had shouted. Disunion was their goal. If Lincoln gave in, he would give up the country he had just been elected to save. Gideon Welles said Blair's rant “electrified” the president, out of character as it was for the cagey old man, and deflected him from Seward's accommodationism.

When Lincoln's aide John Hay drew the president's attention to a prudent letter from the Old Gentleman and compared it to Montgomery's bile, Lincoln told a story. He had once heard a man remark in a tavern that a local old-timer had been tricked in a trade. “That's a lie,” said one of his sons. “The old man ain't so easily tricked. Ye can fool the boys but ye can't the old man.”

Hot for a fight though the old man had been, by the summer of 1864 he had set his mind on ending it, before it destroyed his beloved South and killed his cherished son. Its outcome he thought inevitable if Lincoln survived Election Day—it was only a matter of time—but time was destroying the South, and the Jacobins would see it crushed, Lincoln's kindness
notwithstanding, unless he could find a path to reconciliation. So Blair went to see Horace Greeley.

No friend of the Blairs, Greeley would soon describe them as “a dangerous family,” and the
Tribune
's observation that Lincoln was under their thumbs complimented neither party. Quite apart from their divergence on fundamentals—capitalism, for instance—Greeley would soon tell Preston Blair that the latter had moved for forty years “in the inner circle of public affairs, while I have been on the outside, where I doubtless belong.” But they shared a common interest in pursuing a common agenda—reelecting Lincoln, ending the war with the Union preserved, rescuing the South from the Jacobins—and their strengths were symbiotic. Blair had the president's confidence. Greeley had the
Tribune.
They proceeded to pretend to admire one another.

In the middle of July 1864, Blair took a train to Manhattan and climbed the wooden stairs to Greeley's disheveled office. Wary though it was, their meeting was conveniently cordial. Greeley made his case that the time to seek peace was now, before Lincoln lost the election. The South was ready to talk. If the president healed the nation, his reelection would be a formality. Blair begged to differ. Lincoln must be reelected first and shatter the Rebels' last hope: that a Democrat in the White House would let them have their country, or at least restore the Union with a brokered peace, saving slavery for their grandchildren and abolition for the twentieth century. With Lincoln reelected, they would have to face up to defeat. Any terms would be better than subjugation, and the president could be generous with reelection won. Greeley disagreed, but Blair had built a bridge.

On the same trip to New York, Blair sat down with other prominent men, including General McClellan, and tried to talk him out of a White House run. Surely, Blair said (probably with Lincoln's blessing), the president would give him an important new command if he deferred his political ambitions. But the general was looking to his future, not his past. In 1862 (when he spoke of the president among friends as “the original gorilla”), he had been sure he could take Richmond. Now he was sure he could take Washington.

The Rebels had nearly taken it just a week before. With the North on the offensive in Georgia and Virginia, Washington was lightly defended. On July 9, General Jubal Early rolled up out of the Shenandoah Valley at the head of Stonewall Jackson's old corps and led it within sight of the capitol dome, having first brushed aside a small defending force on Maryland's Monocacy River that included Seward's son and namesake. General Early had too few men to take and hold the city, but men enough to torch it, as the British had done in 1814, leaving Lincoln unelectable.

On July 10, the president stood up in his stovepipe hat on an embattled Union parapet as Rebel sharpshooters peppered it, the first and only time an American commander in chief had sent himself into battle. A lieutenant by the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes shouted at him to get down. In the heat of the moment, the fate of a damned fool was mentioned. When Lincoln returned the next day, an officer was mortally wounded mere feet from his side. Reinforcements saved the day.

As Lincoln watched the enemy withdraw, smoke was rising from Silver Spring. Before the war, Jeff and Varina Davis had enjoyed a pleasant summer at Montgomery's cottage there. Falklands, it was called. Now the Rebels had burned it to the ground. The Blairs were not there to see it. Montgomery and his boys were hunting in Pennsylvania with Preston, the women vacationing on the Jersey shore with Lizzie's seven-year-old son.

Preston and Eliza's mansion was spared the flames but not the attentions of the Rebels, who liberated its wine cellar. The fun got started in the morning and continued until five, when General Early and his second in command rode up in a spitting rage. Early descended on the officers while General John C. Breckinridge laid into the troops, some of them with loot in their hands and lingerie around their necks. Breckinridge put men in irons and summoned a different regiment to guard the house. Early was enraged by the diversion of his attack on the enemy capital but not very much by the looting of one rich Yankee's house. Breckinridge thought otherwise. Before the war, he said, Silver Spring was “a home to me on this side of the mountains.”