No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865 part 3

No Peace without Victory, 1861–1865

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

Within six weeks, however, the mood of the mercurial Greeley had swung by 180 degrees. And Greeley's growing despair reflected that of the Northern people. Instead of winning the war by the Fourth of July, the two principal Union armies were bogged down in front of Richmond and Atlanta after suffering a combined 95,000 casualties in the most concentrated carnage of the war. In the Army of the Potomac, the number of casualties during the two months from May 5 to July 4 were nearly two-thirds of their total in the previous three years.

Northern despondency was all the greater because of the euphoric expectations at the beginning of these campaigns. "Who shall revive the withered hopes that bloomed at the opening of General Grant's campaign?" asked an editorial in the New York World on July 12. The stalemate had become "a national humiliation," declared the World. "This war, as now conducted, is a failure without hope of other issue than the success of the rebellion."16 With unhappy timing, Lincoln on July 18 issued a call for 500,000 more volunteers, with the deficiencies in meeting quotas to be met by a new draft. This call was "a cry of distress," lamented the World. "Who is responsible for the terrible and unavailing waste of life which renders five hundred thousand new men necessary so soon after the opening of a campaign that promised to be triumphant?"17

The World was a Democratic newspaper, and with the presidential election approaching it left readers with no doubt that Lincoln was responsible for this humiliating failure. But many Republicans were equally despondent. "The immense slaughter of our brave men chills and sickens us all," wrote Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. "It is impossible for the country to bear up under these monstrous errors and wrongs." A State Department translator visited Philadelphia in early August. "What a difference between now and last year!" he wrote in his diary. "No signs of any enthusiasm, no flags; most of the best men gloomy and almost despairing."18 The staunch New York Republican George Templeton Strong could "see no bright spot anywhere." Even Sarah Butler, wife of General Benjamin Butler, a favorite of radical Republicans, wondered "what is all this struggling and fighting for? This ruin and death to thousands of families? ... What advancement of mankind to compensate for the present horrible calamities?"19

Sarah Butler's plaintive question has been asked in all wars. But it had special force in the terrible summer of 1864. As before in this war, the peace wing of the Democratic Party—the so-called Copperheads who opposed war as a means to restore the Union—came to the fore when events on the battlefield did not go well for Union arms. The plunge in Northern morale augured well for a Democratic victory on a peace platform in the presidential election. "Stop the War!" demanded editorials in Copperhead newspapers. "If nothing else would impress upon the people the absolute necessity of stopping this war, its utter failure to accomplish any results ... would be sufficient." A Boston Peace Democrat believed Northerners were becoming convinced that "the Confederacy perhaps can never really be beaten, that the attempts to win might after all be too heavy a load to carry, and that perhaps it is time to agree to a peace without victory."20

Several Democratic district conventions passed resolutions calling for a cease-fire and peace negotiations. Confederate agents in Canada, who were subsidizing several Democratic newspapers and politicians across the border, encouraged the belief that such negotiations might pave the way for eventual reunion. First might come "a treaty of amity and commerce," suggested one of the Confederate agents, Clement C. Clay, followed "possibly" by "an alliance defensive, or even, for some purposes, both defensive and offensive." If Peace Democrats were taken in by such doubletalk, wrote Clay to Confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, who oversaw these Canadian operations, he was careful not to dispel their "fond delusion."21

By July 1864, the peace contagion had spread well beyond the Copperheads. The observation by the Richmond Dispatch, the Confederacy's largest newspaper, that a majority of Northern voters would support peace even at the price of Confederate independence may not have been far wrong. "They are sick at heart of the senseless waste of blood and treasure," declared the Dispatch. In New York, George Templeton Strong was "most seriously perturbed" by the "increasing prevalence" of "aspirations for 'peace at any price.'" The astute Republican politico Thurlow Weed wrote to Seward in August that Lincoln's reelection was "an impossibility" because "the people are wild for peace."22

Horace Greeley agreed with this assessment. In early July, he launched a bizarre, failed peace initiative that nevertheless had large consequences. From a self-styled "intermediary," Greeley received word that two of the Confederate agents in Canada were accredited by Jefferson Davis to negotiate a peace settlement. The credulous editor enclosed this information in a letter to Lincoln on July 7. "Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country," Greeley declaimed, "longs for peace—shudders at the prospect of fresh conscriptions, of further wholesale devastations, and of new rivers of human blood." Therefore, "I entreat you to submit overtures for pacification to the Southern insurgents."23

Lincoln did not believe for a moment that the Confederate agents had genuine negotiating powers. And even if they did, the Union president knew that his Southern counterpart's inflexible condition for peace was Confederate independence. Yet, given the despondent Northern mood, Lincoln could not appear to rebuff any peace overture, however spurious. He also thought he saw a chance to rally Northern opinion by demonstrating that an acceptable peace was possible only through military victory. So Lincoln immediately sent Greeley a telegram authorizing him to bring to Washington under safe conduct "any person anywhere professing to have any proposition of Jefferson Davis in writing, for peace, embracing the restoration of the Union and abandonment of slavery."24

This put Greeley on the spot by making him a guarantor of the agents' credentials and a witness to Lincoln's good-faith willingness to negotiate. Greeley balked, but Lincoln prodded him into action by sending his private secretary John Hay to join Greeley at Niagara Falls, Canada, to meet with the Confederates. The president was willing to compromise his principle of refusing to acknowledge officially the existence of the Confederate government by insisting on restoration of the Union as a prerequisite for negotiations. Hay carried to Niagara Falls a letter from Lincoln addressed "To Whom It May Concern," stating that "Any proposition which embraces the restoration of peace, the integrity of the whole Union, and the abandonment of slavery, and which comes by and with an authority that can control the armies now at war with the United States will be received and considered by the Executive government of the United States, and will be met by liberal terms on other substantial and collateral points."25