No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865 page 4

No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865

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

This was an immensely important document that framed all discussions of peace for the rest of the war. Lincoln intended it not only to lay out his own conditions but also to elicit and publicize the Confederacy's unacceptable counteroffer. But on this occasion, the rebel agents outmaneuvered Lincoln. They admitted to Greeley and Hay that they had no authority to negotiate peace but then released to the press a letter to Greeley accusing Lincoln of sabotaging the negotiations by prescribing conditions he knew to be unacceptable to the Confederacy. Shedding crocodile tears, they expressed "profound regret" that the Confederacy's genuine desire for a peace "mutually just, honorable, and advantageous to the North and South" had not been met with equal "moderation and equity" by President Lincoln. Instead, his "To Whom It May Concern" letter meant "no bargaining, no negotiations, no truces with rebels except to bury their dead ... If there be any citizen of the Confederate States who has clung to the hope that peace is possible," Lincoln's terms "will strip from their eyes the last film of such delusion." The Confederate agents urged those "patriots and Christians" in the North "who shrink appalled from the illimitable vistas of private misery and public calamity" presented by Lincoln's policy of perpetual war to "recall the abused authority and vindicate the outraged civilization of their country" by voting Lincoln out of office in November.26

This letter was, as the New York Times noted editorially, "an electioneering dodge on a great scale" to damage Lincoln "by making him figure as an obstacle to peace." It worked. As Clement C. Clay reported with satisfaction to Judah Benjamin, Northern Democratic newspapers "denounce Mr. Lincoln's manifesto in strong terms, and many Republican presses (among them the New York Tribune) admit it was a blunder ... From all that I can see or hear, I am satisfied that this correspondence has tended strongly toward consolidating the Democracy and dividing the Republicans."27

Greeley did indeed criticize Lincoln both publicly and privately. The president, he wrote in an editorial, made "a very grave mistake" by announcing his own terms instead of asking the rebels to state their terms first.28 In a remarkable letter to Lincoln on August 9, Greeley chastised the president for giving the impression that his policy was "No truce! No armistice! No negotiation! No mediation! Nothing but [Confederate] surrender at discretion! I never heard of such fatuity before." Greeley probably had in mind an editorial in the New York Times that clearly spoke for the administration. "Peace is a consummation devoutly to be wished," declared the Times, but not peace at the price of Union. "War alone can save the Republic ... If the Southern people will not give us peace as their fellow-countrymen, we shall secure it as their conquerors. We know this is not gracious language. But it is native fact." Greeley deplored such language, he told Lincoln, because "to the general eye, it now seems the rebels are anxious to negotiate and that we repulse their advances ... If this impression be not removed we shall be beaten out of sight next November."29

Greeley was right about the potential political consequences of this affair. The Confederates had scored a propaganda triumph and given the Copperheads a boost. Lincoln sought to neutralize the setback by sanctioning publication of the results of another and almost simultaneous peace contact. On July 17, two Northerners met under flag of truce with Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin in Richmond. They were James R. Gilmore, a journalist, and Colonel James Jaquess of the Seventy-third Illinois, on furlough and temporarily resuming his peacetime vocation as a Methodist clergyman who wished to stop fellow Christians from slaughtering each other. Lincoln had given them a pass through Union lines in Virginia with the understanding that their mission was strictly unofficial—although they were well acquainted with Lincoln's preconditions for peace. Davis decided to meet with them because, like Lincoln, he had to consider the desire for peace among his own people and could not appear to spurn any opportunity for negotiations.

Gilmore and Jaquess informally repeated the terms Lincoln had offered in his amnesty proclamation the previous December: reunion, emancipation, and amnesty. According to Gilmore's account, Davis responded angrily: "Amnesty, Sir, applies to criminals. We have committed no crime. At your door lies all the misery and crime of this war ... We are fighting for Independence—and that, or extermination, we will have ... You may emancipate every negro in the Confederacy, but we will be free. We will govern ourselves ... if we have to see every Southern plantation sacked, and every Southern city in flames."30

Upon his return north, Gilmore published a brief account of the meeting in a Boston newspaper and a subsequent detailed narrative in the Atlantic Monthly. Lincoln approved these publications because they shifted part of the burden of refusing to negotiate from Lincoln's shoulders to Davis's.31 The New York Times immediately grasped this point. The Gilmore-Jaquess mission, declared the Times, "proved of extreme service ... because it established that Jeff. Davis will listen to no proposals of peace that do not embrace disunion ... In view of the efforts now being made by the Peace Party of the North to delude our people into a belief that peace is now practicable without disunion," Davis's words were "peculiarly timely and valuable."32

The Richmond Enquirer also recognized that Gilmore and Jaquess had "provoked" Davis into "expressions of hostility which might be represented as a refusal on our part to treat of peace" in order to "rally the war party" in the North. The Enquirer then proceeded to use this incident to fire up the Southern war party. To the Northern demand for unconditional surrender, declared this newspaper, the Southern people responded with the "sole and simple condition" of "unconditional recognition" of Confederate independence ... They will die with arms in their hands before they disgrace this demand by any qualification of their rights."33

The publicity surrounding these peace overtures should have put to rest the Copperhead argument that the North could have peace and reunion without military victory. But it did not. At the rock-bottom point of Northern morale in August 1864—when, as Thurlow Weed observed, "the people are wild for peace"—Democrats were able to slide around the awkward problem of Davis's conditions by pointing to Lincoln's second condition—"abandonment of slavery"—as the real stumbling block to peace. Across the spectrum from Copperheads to War Democrats, and even beyond to conservative Republicans, came denunciations of the president for his "prostitution of the war for the Union into an abolition crusade."34 Democratic newspapers proclaimed that "tens of thousands of white men must bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President." For that purpose, "our soil is drenched in blood ... the widows wail and the children hunger." Emancipation was now Lincoln's sole purpose; "the idea of restoring the Union no longer troubles the Executive brain."35

The most powerful Democratic newspaper was the New York World, which was closely affiliated with General George B. McClellan, whom the party was about to nominate for president. The World claimed that Lincoln "prefers to tear a half million more white men from their homes ... to continue a war for the abolition of slavery rather than entertain a proposition for the return of the seceded states with their old rights." Never mind that no such proposition existed; Democratic newspapers convinced thousands of Northern voters that the South would have accepted such a proposition if Lincoln had not made abolition a condition of peace. The New York Herald, an independent but Democratic-leaning paper with the country's largest circulation, opined that Lincoln had signed his political death warrant by making abandonment of slavery "a ne plus ultra in the terms of peace."36

Even some Republican editors expressed "painful and perplexing surprise" that Lincoln had made "the abolition of slavery the principal object of prosecuting the war."37 Horace Greeley, who two years earlier had criticized Lincoln's slowness to act against slavery, now condemned him for insisting on what Greeley had then demanded. "We do not contend," wrote Greeley in a widely reprinted Tribune editorial, "that reunion is possible or endurable only on the basis of Universal Freedom ... War has its exigencies which cannot be foreseen ... and Peace is often desirable on other terms than those of our own choice." George Templeton Strong sadly concluded that Lincoln's emancipation condition was a "blunder" that "may cost him his election ... [It has] given the disaffected and discontented a weapon that doubles their power of mischief."38

Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times, who doubled as Republican national chairman for this election campaign, thought he saw a way out of the dilemma. Lincoln "did say that he would receive and consider propositions for peace ... if they embraced the integrity of the Union and the abandonment of Slavery," wrote Raymond in an important editorial, "but he did not say he would not embrace them unless they embraced both conditions." If Jefferson Davis were suddenly to offer peace and reunion, wrote Raymond, "we believe that President Lincoln would thereupon stop the war. We do not believe he would continue it for an hour longer, for the abolition of Slavery or for any other purpose."39

As a lawyer, Lincoln was no stranger to such hairsplitting. And the enormous pressure on him from all sides to drop his abandonment of the slavery condition almost caused him to succumb. On August 17, Lincoln drafted a letter to a Wisconsin newspaper editor who had previously supported the administration but could no longer do so if the president intended the war to continue until slavery was abolished. "To me," Lincoln began his letter, "it seems plain that saying re-union and abandonment of slavery would be considered, if offered, is not saying that nothing else or less would be considered." Lincoln concluded the letter with these words: "If Jefferson Davis wishes ... to know what I would do if he were to offer peace and re-union, saying nothing about slavery, let him try me."40