No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865

No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865

By James M. McPherson,
President of the Association, 2003

This presidential address was delivered at the 118th Annual Meeting of the AmericanHistorical Association, held in Washington, DC, January 3, 2003.

For at least the past two centuries, nations have found it harder to end a war than to start one. Americans relearned that bitter lesson in Vietnam and, having apparently forgotten it, have been forced to learn it all over again in Iraq. The difficulties of achieving peace are compounded when the war aims of a belligerent include regime change in the enemy polity. In the Napoleonic Wars, the coalition forces finally ended the conflict when they forced Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to abdicate—twice. In World War I, Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Allies would negotiate only with a democratic government in Germany, and the armistice did not go into effect until the kaiser abdicated. In World War II, the Allies demanded the unconditional surrender of Axis governments in order to destroy these governments and install new ones in their place. Both sides in the American Civil War feared that regime change would be the result of losing the war. Defeat would blot the Confederate States of America from the face of the earth. Confederate victory would destroy the United States and create a precedent for further balkanization of the territory once governed under the Constitution of 1789. Both antagonists foresaw these potential consequences in 1861 and embraced war as the only alternative. By 1863, however, the death or wounding of half a million soldiers had replaced the rage militaire of 1861 with a longing for peace. This longing was expressed in music, especially the songs Tenting on the Old Camp Ground and When This Cruel War Is Over. Both expressed a profound desire for an end to the killing and suffering. "Weeping, Sad and Lonely," begins the refrain of When This Cruel War Is Over. "We are tired of war on the old Camp ground," sang those at home and in the armies. "Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, Wishing for the war to cease." 1 Yet the war did not cease; many wondered whether this cruel war would ever be over.

The American Civil War could not end with a negotiated peace because the issues over which it was fought—Union versus Disunion, Freedom versus Slavery—proved to be non-negotiable. This was a new experience for Americans. The American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War had all been brought to an end by peace treaties. The Confederate government would have been happy to bring the Civil War to an end in the same way, for a negotiated treaty with the United States would have constituted de jure as well as de facto recognition of Confederate sovereignty as a separate nation. For that reason, the Lincoln administration refused to consider formal negotiations as a means to end the war.

This refusal did not prevent numerous efforts to achieve peace through negotiations, official or otherwise. These efforts proceeded through three stages: foreign mediation, unofficial contacts, quasi-official conversations. All failed.

Most civil wars tempt foreign powers to intervene either to end a conflict that threatens their own interests or to support one side or the other. The American Civil War was no exception. The French and British governments believed their nations had a large stake in the bloodbath occurring across the Atlantic. Emperor Napoleon III's intervention in Mexico's own civil war would go better if a Disunited States could not enforce the Monroe Doctrine. The Union naval blockade and Confederate contracts for the building of warships in English shipyards threatened to drag Britain into an unwanted war with the United States. The American South had furnished three-quarters of the cotton for the textile industries that were leading sectors in the economies of both countries, especially Britain. In 1861, key officials in Britain and France believed that the North could never reestablish control over 750,000 square miles of territory defended by a determined and courageous people. For all these reasons, the world's two leading powers contemplated making an offer of mediation to bring an end to the American war. Such an offer would have been tantamount to recognition of Confederate independence.

The remarkable string of Northern naval and military victories from February to May 1862, however, forced a temporary reconsideration of this position. Union arms captured parts of the south Atlantic coast, gained control of much of the South's interior river system and of at least 50,000 square miles of Confederate territory, captured New Orleans, Nashville, and Memphis, won the major battles of Fort Donelson, Pea Ridge, and Shiloh, while General George B. McClellan's powerful Army of the Potomac penetrated to within six miles of Richmond, whose fall seemed imminent.

These events had a signal impact abroad. From Paris, the American minister to France wrote to Secretary of State William H. Seward in April 1862 that "the change in the condition of affairs at home has produced a change, if possible more striking abroad. There is little more said just now as to ... the propriety of an early recognition of the south."2 And Charles Francis Adams, American minister to Britain, reported that, as a consequence of Union victories, "the pressure for interference here has disappeared." His son Henry Adams, private secretary to the minister, added that "the talk of intervention, only two months ago so loud as to take a semi-official tone, is now out of the minds of everyone."3

But in the summer of 1862, the Confederacy picked itself up from the mat at the count of nine and counterpunched so hard that by September it had knocked Union forces back on the ropes. Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia drove McClellan away from Richmond in the Seven Days Battles, humiliated Union arms at Second Manassas, and invaded Maryland, while western Confederate armies recaptured part of Tennessee and invaded Kentucky. These developments reopened the question of foreign mediation. The semi-official government newspaper in Paris, the Constitutionnel, urged Northern leaders to "listen at last to the voice of humanity" and "accept mediation" to end "a war disastrous to the interests of humanity."4

In London, the powerful Times demanded that the British Cabinet "stop this effusion of blood by mediation," while the Morning Post, semi-official voice of Prime Minister Palmerston's government, proclaimed bluntly that the Confederacy had "established its claim to be independent."5 Chancellor of the Exchequer William Gladstone agreed. "Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South," said Gladstone in a speech at Newcastle, "have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than either; they have made a nation." Gladstone privately urged his colleagues to acknowledge "that the South cannot be conquered ... It is our absolute duty to recognise ... that Southern independence is established."6