CHAPTER LIV.

A VALEDICTORY.

Putting Emancipation into the Constitution-Sherman in South CarolinaThe Peace Conference in Hampton Roads-Useless Bloodshed-The Second Inaugural.

CONGRESS assembled on the 5th of December, 1864, and the President sent in his Message the next day. In this he tersely reviewed the military and political position of the country, at home and abroad. He called attention to the manifest gains of the country in wealth and population, with reference to its undiminished ability to continue the war. He urged the adop tion of an Amendment to the Constitution, forever prohibiting human slavery in the United States. He declared that the Rebels could at any time have peace by simply laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution.

At the previous session of the same Congress an effort to provide for such a Constitutional Amendment as Mr. Lincoln advised had failed. The time was not then ripe for it. It was now plain to all, however, that the full time had come, and the necessary two-thirds vote of the House of Representatives was obtained with moderate difficulty, the Senate being already secure.

The President publicly declared to a crowd who assembled at the White House, to congratulate him, that the Amendment seemed to him the one thing needful. It completed and confirmed the work of the Proclamation of Emancipation, if duly ratified by the several States. He urged those who heard him to go home and see that this was done.

The war was pressed with untiring vigor, at every point,

through the month of December. In January the army under General Sherman faced northward, sweeping through South Carolina. Charleston fell into its hands like an overripe apple. No force remained with any power to stand in its way, and the Richmond rulers began to realize that their hour was coming. Studying well the terms of peace announced in Mr. Lincoln's message to Congress, but not yet comprehending them, they determined upon a last effort to save something from the impending wreck of the Confederacy.

An informal conference was obtained, February 3, 1865, upon a steamer in Hampton Roads, between the Vice-President of the Confederacy, Alexander H. Stephens, R. M. T. Hunter and J. A. Campbell, representing the Richmond authorities; and Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Seward. The President's assent to this interview was given at the request of General Grant, but with small hope of profitable results. None such were at all possible. No written propositions were made or offered on either side. No formal report of the conversation was permitted, but the substance of it was at once made public, both at the North and South.

The Confederate commissioners desired to obtain a temporary cessation of hostilities, in the nature of an armistice or truce between two independent powers, each reducing their armaments and postponing the express terms and conditions of a permanent peace and settlement to some future time and after further consideration and negotiation. It was argued that the passions of the two peoples would thus have time to cool, commercial and other relations could at once be resumed, and an end could be reached without further bloodshed. What the commissioners omitted to urge was that the Rebellion would thereby gain much more than it could by a sudden destruction of Sherman's army.

Mr. Lincoln's replies were a substantial reproduction of the doctrines announced in his message to Congress, with the addition of the Constitutional Amendment prohibiting slavery.

The commissioners, sincere as might be their desire to ob tain a season of rest and recuperation for the Confederacy, with a covert acknowledgment of its independent, treaty-making existence, or earnest as may have been their personal longing for peace, were neither prepared nor empowered to negotiate for a full surrender. The President neither could nor would discuss any other proposition than precisely that, for he was acting solely as Commander-in-Chief. He really possessed no other than strictly military right and power in the premises, for it was not a case of a treaty with a foreign power.

A Georgia newspaper, on the supposed authority of Mr. Stephens, reports Mr. Lincoln as declaring that he could not recognize another government inside the one of which he alone was President. "That," he said, "would be doing what you so long asked Europe to do, in vain, and be resigning the only thing the Union armies are fighting for." Mr. Hunter replied that the recognition of the power of Mr. Davis to make a treaty was the first and indispensable step to peace.

This was a mere play upon words, substituting the idea of a "treaty of peace" with the Richmond authorities for the other idea of a restoration of the peace of the whole country. To point his reply, and as offering one precedent of a constitutional ruler treating with armed rebels, Mr. Hunter cited the correspondence of Charles the First of England with the Parliament. The newspaper report says:

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"Mr. Lincoln's face wore that indescribable expression which generally preceded his hardest hits; and he remarked: Upon questions of history I must refer you to Mr. Seward, for he is posted in such things, and I don't profess to be; but my only distinct recollection of the matter is that Charles lost his head.""

There was an old personal friendship between Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Stephens, dating from the time when they were members of Congress together, and the conference assumed therefrom a tone of mutual ease and freedom from constraint; but

the gulf was too wide to be bridged and too deep to be filled and the humane desires which led to it suffered their foredoomed disappointment.

up,

The Northern people understood the matter perfectly, with remarkably few exceptions, and there was never an opportunity for the Southern people, generally, to know why the awful bloodshed of the next few weeks was uselessly insisted upon by their obstinate rulers. Peace was not at all denied or withheld from them, and there was no attainable object for which so many of them should suffer or die. The United States, through its President, did but continue its steady denial of the existence as a nation, and of the treaty-making independence, of the Confederacy.

For one month more the war went bitterly on, from day to day. The end of Mr. Lincoln's first term of office, with the beginning of a second term, arrived at 12 o'clock, noon, of the 4th of March, 1865. The term of Congress also expired, and the session with it; but the President convened the Senate, at once, for an "extra session," by proclamation. For a second time Mr. Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States. It was a grand and solemn occasion, full of strong and striking contrasts with the same ceremonial, in the same place, four years before.

The crowd which assembled was even larger, this time; but it was a different crowd, with changed hearts and with better and higher hopes. The multitude was not the same. The Man was the same and yet he was not, for behind him as behind them was the fire of the sevenfold furnace through which God had led him. No smell of burning was upon his garments of integrity and faith, but his fetters had been largely burned away. He was almost ready to walk out of the furnace and stand before the King. The oath of office was administered by ChiefJustice Chase; the President looked out for a moment, silently, over the multitude, and then he addressed them, and all other men, as follows:

"Fellow-countrymen: At this second appearing to take the

occasion for an exThen, a statement

oath of the Presidential office, there is less tended address than there was at the first. somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented.

"The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself; and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.

"On the occasion corresponding to this, four years ago, all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it; all sought to avoid it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war-seeking to dissolve the Union and divide the effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish: and the war came.

"One eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, extend, and perpetuate this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the government claimed no right to do more than restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

"Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated