December 2, 2015
The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters
James McPherson
George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History, Princeton
The War That Forged a Nation: Why the Civil War Still Matters
James McPherson
George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History, Princeton
Jock McFarlane, Introducer James McPherson, Speaker
Minutes of the 11th Meeting of the 74th Year
The meeting was called to order by President Owen Leach at 10:15 a.m.
170 members were present, the most in Old Guard history.
The invocation was led by Julie Denny.
The minutes of the meeting of Nov. 18, 2015 were read by Michael Curtis. The guest speaker at that meeting was Laura Secor, whose subject was “Iran’s Reform Movement.”
A moment of silence was observed in honor of Bob Thompson, who passed away.
New members were presented: Christopher Coucill, Charles Ganoe, Norman Glickman, Patrick Henry, Fraser Lewis and William Wakefield. All received a round of applause.
Guests and (hosts) were acknowledged as a group: Lee and Melinda Varian (Sybil Stokes); George McLaughlin and Frank McNally, (Jim Ferry); Vicky Campbell (Ron Campbell); Cynthia Groya (BF Graham); Patty Tiebout (John Tiebout); Bob Pisano (John Kelsey); John Silver (Ted Bromley); Ellen Kaplan (Michael Kaplan); Martin Hook (Nancy Beck); Dermot Gately (Bill Schoelwer); Martin Schwarz (David Rosenfeld).
President Leach announced that our next meeting will take place on Dec. 9 at the Friend Center. The speaker will be Prof. Sebastain Seung of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. His talk will be “ Eye-Wire -- A Game to Map the Brain.”
Jock McFarlane introduced our speaker: Prof. James McPherson, George Henry Davis ’86 Professor Emeritus of U.S. History, Princeton University, on the topic “Efforts During the Civil War to Achieve a Negotiated Peace.”
Professor McPherson noted that at the outset of the Civil War, songs for the soldiers consisted of patriotic and confident marches and anthems, but by the end of 1863 and in early1864, after more than 500,000 soldiers had died, the songs had taken on a more mournful air and a yearning for peace. “When This Cruel War Is Over” was written by a Yankee, but was adopted by soldiers on both sides, with different lyrics. Other songs, such as “Who Will Care for Mother Now,” and “Mother, I Have Come Home to Die” were sung by the soldiers.
But how could peace be achieved?
Professor McPherson explained that earlier wars had been over the acquisition of land and could be negotiated. But in the Civil War the issues were over sovereignty and slavery and freedom, and the respective positions were incompatible and irreversible.
By 1863, three different positions emerged toward a possible peace. The first was outright victory by one side or the other. Lincoln’s policy was unconditional surrender and the elimination of slavery. Jefferson Davis’s position was unconditional sovereignty for the Confederacy, and the two positions were non-negotiable.
The second position addressed by both sides was an armistice followed by negotiations with prior conditions agreed to by both sides. George McClellan ran for president in 1864 on a platform advocating such an armistice and the prior conditions that the South would rejoin the Union and all other issues, including slavery would be subject to negotiation. In the South, this position was associated with a pair of Georgians, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, and Governor Joseph Brown. But this position was not acceptable to Lincoln, because it would imply recognition of the South as a separate nation. Stephens hoped to be able to negotiate an armistice after the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863 -- a resounding Confederate victory -- and when the Confederate armies were on the march toward Pennsylvania. But when the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg was known, Lincoln refused to meet with Stephens and said that his plan was “inadmissible.”
A third position was also considered and advanced by parties in both the North and South. This was a ceasefire and negotiations, but this time without prior conditions. This was the position of Northern peace Democrats, known as Copperheads and by several influential Southern peace activists. The Copperheads maintained that negotiations would lead to a peaceful reunion of North and South, and Southern activists, specifically William Holden of North Carolina, saw a ceasefire as a first step toward Southern sovereignty. But the concept of a ceasefire without conditions was seen by both sides as an admission of defeat. Neither would accept such a plan, and their advocates were labeled as traitors. Holden ran for governor of North Carolina and was soundly defeated in the election of 1864. In the North, Clement Vallandigham, principal spokesman for the Peace Democrats, ran for governor of Ohio and lost. He also wrote the peace plank for the Democrat party for the Presidential election of 1864.
In the summer of 1864, peace sentiment was running high in the North, which had suffered enormous casualties in Grant’s Overland Campaign in 1864 and the siege of Petersburg, Va., 1864-65. It looked as if Grant was stymied at Petersburg and Sherman was stuck in the siege of Atlanta. In July, Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, wrote Lincoln: “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for Peace.” Greeley had learned that two Confederate envoys were in Niagara Falls in Canada, supposedly bearing peace proposals from Jefferson Davis. Lincoln knew that the envoys were not in Canada to negotiate peace, and he responded to Greeley that
he “would discuss any proposition that embraces peace, the integrity of the whole union and the abandonment of slavery.” Greeley and John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, met with the Southern agents, but they could not negotiate on Lincoln’s terms and the meeting was fruitless. The Southern press turned the failure into a propaganda success by blaming the failure of the meeting on Lincoln’s intransigent conditions.
The Southerners believed their cause was looking up in the summer of 1864 and they could take a hard line and perhaps bring about Lincoln’s defeat in the forthcoming election. Two Northern citizens, acting on their own, also approached Confederate leaders with the proposition of reunion, abolition and amnesty. They were harshly rejected by Jefferson Davis, and Lincoln was able to state: “Davis does not deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. It is an issue that can only be tried by war and decided by victory.”
The Peace Democrats then tried to assert that the only proviso in the way of a negotiated settlement was abolition, and Lincoln was encouraged to drop this condition. Lincoln did consider that, but in response he noted that 130,000 black men were fighting for the Union side and that if he betrayed them: “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing. The World shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.” In August 1864, Republican leader Thurlow Weed was convinced that “Lincoln’s reelection is an impossibility . . . the people are wild for peace.”
What happened to lift northern spirits and assure Lincoln’s reelection? In August, Admiral David Farragut took Mobile Bay; in early September, Sherman took Atlanta; and in September and October, Sheridan crushed Lieut. Gen. Jubal Early and the Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley. In November, Lincoln was reelected.
Subsequent to the election, General Sherman began his March to the Sea and Savannah fell in late December. Also in December, Gen. George Thomas defeated Gen. John Bell Hood at Franklin and Nashville, and in January 1865, Gen. Alfred Terry took Fort Fisher and Wilmington, N.C., the last port open to Confederate blockade runners.
In February 1865, another attempt at peace negotiations was initiated, by James Preston Blair, who thought he could reunite North and South by proposing a joint expedition to throw the French out of Mexico. Lincoln thought it was a harebrained scheme, and Davis thought that an expected Lincoln intransigency could give him an opportunity to rally Southern spirits. He proposed a meeting “between our two countries.”
The meeting was almost cancelled because Lincoln did not accept the “two countries” concept, but General Grant perceived that the Southern delegates were sincere in their desire for peace, so the meeting went forth on Feb. 3, 1865. Again, Lincoln submitted his terms, which preserved abolition and demanded the surrender of Confederate forces. Davis could not accept “unconditional surrender,” and, once again he rallied Southern spirits with fiery speeches.
But, time was running out. Sherman was marching through South Carolina and wrecking everything in his path. His plan was to join with Grant in the siege of Petersburg and defeat General Lee’s army. On April 2, 1865, Grant broke the Confederate lines at Petersburg, and General Lee and the remnants of his army fled south with hopes to join with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. It was not to be. Lee was cut off and surrounded and forced to surrender at Appomattox, Va. Jefferson Davis continued to flee south, but on May 10, 1865, he was captured by Union cavalry. He was jailed for two years, and then released. He lived on for 22 years, never forsaking his dream of an independent South.
Professor McPherson concluded his remarks by noting that now the nation was united and slavery was dead.
Several questions followed:
Q. When was the closest that the Confederates came to being recognized as an independent nation by France and Britain?
A. September 1862, when the Confederate armies were marching north after great successes at the Second Battle of Bull Run and in the Peninsula Campaign, but they were checked at Antietam, Md., and Perryville, Ky., and after Antietam Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which was well received in Europe.
Q. When Lincoln was assassinated and became a martyr, was he elevated in the public mind to the status of George Washington?
A. Lincoln and Washington were often joined by the public as the founder and the restorer of the nation. They were linked as patron saints of the country.
Q. Could the issue of slavery and sectional conflict have been resolved in the 1840’s and 1850’s?
A. From hindsight, No. There were many attempts to maintain peace between North and South, but they had two entirely different economies and cultures. The Compromise of 1850 created a framework for common interests, and the Dred Scott decision tried to define the rights of blacks, but neither could satisfy the objectives of either party. There were efforts to compensate Southerners for the potential loss of their slaves, but neither side liked the idea. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 only exacerbated sectional differences, spelled the end of the Whig party and the birth of the Republican Party.
Q. How was Jefferson Davis treated after he was captured?
A. He was imprisoned at Fort Monroe while the new Andrew Johnson administration tried to decide if he should be tried for treason. For a while, he was held in shackles and forbidden to see his wife or his doctor. Those strictures were relaxed when it began to appear that he was becoming a martyr. Also, under the Constitution, a trial for treason must be by a jury and must be held in the venue where the alleged treason took place, which in this case would be Virginia. After two years in prison, he was released and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Q. How could North question the South’s right to secede in view of the principle of self-determination?
A. There was a belief in the North that there was really a silent majority in the South that favored union, but it had been swept up by the radical secessionist rhetoric and would express its loyalty to the union when things calmed down. Also, under the Constitution, in principle, national law supersedes local laws.
Professor McPherson concluded the meeting by noting that he would not object if Texas and Florida were to exercise a right to self-determination and was greeted with a hearty round of applause.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:20 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Roland Machold
170 members were present, the most in Old Guard history.
The invocation was led by Julie Denny.
The minutes of the meeting of Nov. 18, 2015 were read by Michael Curtis. The guest speaker at that meeting was Laura Secor, whose subject was “Iran’s Reform Movement.”
A moment of silence was observed in honor of Bob Thompson, who passed away.
New members were presented: Christopher Coucill, Charles Ganoe, Norman Glickman, Patrick Henry, Fraser Lewis and William Wakefield. All received a round of applause.
Guests and (hosts) were acknowledged as a group: Lee and Melinda Varian (Sybil Stokes); George McLaughlin and Frank McNally, (Jim Ferry); Vicky Campbell (Ron Campbell); Cynthia Groya (BF Graham); Patty Tiebout (John Tiebout); Bob Pisano (John Kelsey); John Silver (Ted Bromley); Ellen Kaplan (Michael Kaplan); Martin Hook (Nancy Beck); Dermot Gately (Bill Schoelwer); Martin Schwarz (David Rosenfeld).
President Leach announced that our next meeting will take place on Dec. 9 at the Friend Center. The speaker will be Prof. Sebastain Seung of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and Department of Computer Science. His talk will be “ Eye-Wire -- A Game to Map the Brain.”
Jock McFarlane introduced our speaker: Prof. James McPherson, George Henry Davis ’86 Professor Emeritus of U.S. History, Princeton University, on the topic “Efforts During the Civil War to Achieve a Negotiated Peace.”
Professor McPherson noted that at the outset of the Civil War, songs for the soldiers consisted of patriotic and confident marches and anthems, but by the end of 1863 and in early1864, after more than 500,000 soldiers had died, the songs had taken on a more mournful air and a yearning for peace. “When This Cruel War Is Over” was written by a Yankee, but was adopted by soldiers on both sides, with different lyrics. Other songs, such as “Who Will Care for Mother Now,” and “Mother, I Have Come Home to Die” were sung by the soldiers.
But how could peace be achieved?
Professor McPherson explained that earlier wars had been over the acquisition of land and could be negotiated. But in the Civil War the issues were over sovereignty and slavery and freedom, and the respective positions were incompatible and irreversible.
By 1863, three different positions emerged toward a possible peace. The first was outright victory by one side or the other. Lincoln’s policy was unconditional surrender and the elimination of slavery. Jefferson Davis’s position was unconditional sovereignty for the Confederacy, and the two positions were non-negotiable.
The second position addressed by both sides was an armistice followed by negotiations with prior conditions agreed to by both sides. George McClellan ran for president in 1864 on a platform advocating such an armistice and the prior conditions that the South would rejoin the Union and all other issues, including slavery would be subject to negotiation. In the South, this position was associated with a pair of Georgians, Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, and Governor Joseph Brown. But this position was not acceptable to Lincoln, because it would imply recognition of the South as a separate nation. Stephens hoped to be able to negotiate an armistice after the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863 -- a resounding Confederate victory -- and when the Confederate armies were on the march toward Pennsylvania. But when the outcome of the battle of Gettysburg was known, Lincoln refused to meet with Stephens and said that his plan was “inadmissible.”
A third position was also considered and advanced by parties in both the North and South. This was a ceasefire and negotiations, but this time without prior conditions. This was the position of Northern peace Democrats, known as Copperheads and by several influential Southern peace activists. The Copperheads maintained that negotiations would lead to a peaceful reunion of North and South, and Southern activists, specifically William Holden of North Carolina, saw a ceasefire as a first step toward Southern sovereignty. But the concept of a ceasefire without conditions was seen by both sides as an admission of defeat. Neither would accept such a plan, and their advocates were labeled as traitors. Holden ran for governor of North Carolina and was soundly defeated in the election of 1864. In the North, Clement Vallandigham, principal spokesman for the Peace Democrats, ran for governor of Ohio and lost. He also wrote the peace plank for the Democrat party for the Presidential election of 1864.
In the summer of 1864, peace sentiment was running high in the North, which had suffered enormous casualties in Grant’s Overland Campaign in 1864 and the siege of Petersburg, Va., 1864-65. It looked as if Grant was stymied at Petersburg and Sherman was stuck in the siege of Atlanta. In July, Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, wrote Lincoln: “Our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying country longs for Peace.” Greeley had learned that two Confederate envoys were in Niagara Falls in Canada, supposedly bearing peace proposals from Jefferson Davis. Lincoln knew that the envoys were not in Canada to negotiate peace, and he responded to Greeley that
he “would discuss any proposition that embraces peace, the integrity of the whole union and the abandonment of slavery.” Greeley and John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, met with the Southern agents, but they could not negotiate on Lincoln’s terms and the meeting was fruitless. The Southern press turned the failure into a propaganda success by blaming the failure of the meeting on Lincoln’s intransigent conditions.
The Southerners believed their cause was looking up in the summer of 1864 and they could take a hard line and perhaps bring about Lincoln’s defeat in the forthcoming election. Two Northern citizens, acting on their own, also approached Confederate leaders with the proposition of reunion, abolition and amnesty. They were harshly rejected by Jefferson Davis, and Lincoln was able to state: “Davis does not deceive us. He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it. It is an issue that can only be tried by war and decided by victory.”
The Peace Democrats then tried to assert that the only proviso in the way of a negotiated settlement was abolition, and Lincoln was encouraged to drop this condition. Lincoln did consider that, but in response he noted that 130,000 black men were fighting for the Union side and that if he betrayed them: “I should be damned in time and in eternity for so doing. The World shall know that I will keep my faith to friends and enemies, come what will.” In August 1864, Republican leader Thurlow Weed was convinced that “Lincoln’s reelection is an impossibility . . . the people are wild for peace.”
What happened to lift northern spirits and assure Lincoln’s reelection? In August, Admiral David Farragut took Mobile Bay; in early September, Sherman took Atlanta; and in September and October, Sheridan crushed Lieut. Gen. Jubal Early and the Confederate army in the Shenandoah Valley. In November, Lincoln was reelected.
Subsequent to the election, General Sherman began his March to the Sea and Savannah fell in late December. Also in December, Gen. George Thomas defeated Gen. John Bell Hood at Franklin and Nashville, and in January 1865, Gen. Alfred Terry took Fort Fisher and Wilmington, N.C., the last port open to Confederate blockade runners.
In February 1865, another attempt at peace negotiations was initiated, by James Preston Blair, who thought he could reunite North and South by proposing a joint expedition to throw the French out of Mexico. Lincoln thought it was a harebrained scheme, and Davis thought that an expected Lincoln intransigency could give him an opportunity to rally Southern spirits. He proposed a meeting “between our two countries.”
The meeting was almost cancelled because Lincoln did not accept the “two countries” concept, but General Grant perceived that the Southern delegates were sincere in their desire for peace, so the meeting went forth on Feb. 3, 1865. Again, Lincoln submitted his terms, which preserved abolition and demanded the surrender of Confederate forces. Davis could not accept “unconditional surrender,” and, once again he rallied Southern spirits with fiery speeches.
But, time was running out. Sherman was marching through South Carolina and wrecking everything in his path. His plan was to join with Grant in the siege of Petersburg and defeat General Lee’s army. On April 2, 1865, Grant broke the Confederate lines at Petersburg, and General Lee and the remnants of his army fled south with hopes to join with Gen. Joseph E. Johnston in North Carolina. It was not to be. Lee was cut off and surrounded and forced to surrender at Appomattox, Va. Jefferson Davis continued to flee south, but on May 10, 1865, he was captured by Union cavalry. He was jailed for two years, and then released. He lived on for 22 years, never forsaking his dream of an independent South.
Professor McPherson concluded his remarks by noting that now the nation was united and slavery was dead.
Several questions followed:
Q. When was the closest that the Confederates came to being recognized as an independent nation by France and Britain?
A. September 1862, when the Confederate armies were marching north after great successes at the Second Battle of Bull Run and in the Peninsula Campaign, but they were checked at Antietam, Md., and Perryville, Ky., and after Antietam Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which was well received in Europe.
Q. When Lincoln was assassinated and became a martyr, was he elevated in the public mind to the status of George Washington?
A. Lincoln and Washington were often joined by the public as the founder and the restorer of the nation. They were linked as patron saints of the country.
Q. Could the issue of slavery and sectional conflict have been resolved in the 1840’s and 1850’s?
A. From hindsight, No. There were many attempts to maintain peace between North and South, but they had two entirely different economies and cultures. The Compromise of 1850 created a framework for common interests, and the Dred Scott decision tried to define the rights of blacks, but neither could satisfy the objectives of either party. There were efforts to compensate Southerners for the potential loss of their slaves, but neither side liked the idea. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 only exacerbated sectional differences, spelled the end of the Whig party and the birth of the Republican Party.
Q. How was Jefferson Davis treated after he was captured?
A. He was imprisoned at Fort Monroe while the new Andrew Johnson administration tried to decide if he should be tried for treason. For a while, he was held in shackles and forbidden to see his wife or his doctor. Those strictures were relaxed when it began to appear that he was becoming a martyr. Also, under the Constitution, a trial for treason must be by a jury and must be held in the venue where the alleged treason took place, which in this case would be Virginia. After two years in prison, he was released and lived the rest of his life in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Q. How could North question the South’s right to secede in view of the principle of self-determination?
A. There was a belief in the North that there was really a silent majority in the South that favored union, but it had been swept up by the radical secessionist rhetoric and would express its loyalty to the union when things calmed down. Also, under the Constitution, in principle, national law supersedes local laws.
Professor McPherson concluded the meeting by noting that he would not object if Texas and Florida were to exercise a right to self-determination and was greeted with a hearty round of applause.
The meeting was adjourned at 11:20 a.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Roland Machold