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Steven E. Woodworth The Last Function of Government Confederate Collapse and Negotiated Peace The seven men sat around a dining-room table, looking for all the world like so many mourners at a wake. Indeed, Confederate secretary of the navy Stephen Mallory thought he and his six companions made a picture that was “the most solemnly funereal” he had ever seen. The deceased, however, was not a person but an idea. The dream of Confederate nationhood had succumbed to Northern military pressure—and perhaps other factors. It was dead, at any rate; in most minds it had been dead for quite some time. Yet its specter continued to haunt the minds of one or two members of the meeting. President Jefferson Davis still refused to face what was by now a settledfact.“Ithinkwecanwhiptheenemyyet,”heinsisted,“ifourpeoplewill turnout.”ItwasApril11,1865,andRobertE.LeeandtheConfederacy’schief army had surrendered two days earlier. Nevertheless, the president, backed as usual by Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin, clung to the increasingly bizarre delusion that the South could still achieve independence. Even Davis himself had to admit in later years that his opinion had been “over-sanguine.” The fact was that the organized Confederate government could no longer extort even minor concessions from its foe. It would endure such conditions of peace as its now completely victorious conqueror saw fit to impose. As the Confederate cabinet, joined by its two top remaining generals, brooded heavily through its last meeting, it was the military men who hammered home to Davis the reality of the situation. While the president stared down at a scrap of paper he held in his lap, absently folding, unfolding, and refolding it with nervous hands, Gens. Joseph E. Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregardstatedcategoricallythattheendhadcome.Furtherresistancewas a practical impossibility. It was wormwood and gall to Davis, and at least one 13 14 Steven E. Woodworth observer thought the generals, both of whom had carried on bitter personal feuds with the president during the war, seemed to take grim pleasure in it. Johnston, the senior of the two and the chief spokesman, later recalled how he had concluded his remarks by urging “that the President should exercise at once the only function of government still in his possession, and open negotiations for peace.” In fact, it was too late even for that, and Davis began toseeasmuch.Allthatwouldbeofferedthem,hecountered,was“asurrender at discretion.”1 It need not have been so. Extensive opportunity had existed, even after the Confederacy’s military options had been exhausted, for working out a negotiated peace that could have secured far better terms for the South. Lincoln was willing to make substantial concessions in exchange for an early end to hostilities, provided only that such a peace encompassed both Union and emancipation. A trail of opportunities—all somehow missed—had led to this council of despair around a dining-room table in Greensboro, North Carolina. Several times over the past two years, even before hope of victory had vanished, some Southerners had appeared ready to explore the possibilities of a negotiated peace. In June 1863 Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens approached Davis about it. Vicksburg was already besieged and all but lost, and Lee’s army was, unbeknownst to Stephens, preparing to move northward for its invasion of Pennsylvania. The vice-president suggested that as a prewar friend and political associate of Abraham Lincoln, he might be well suited to the role of negotiator. The ostensible purpose of his mission would be to discuss the conduct of the war—the exchange of prisoners and Federal actions viewed by Confederates as uncivilized. At least, thus Stephens hoped to be able to sell the idea to the rival presidents, but he had more in mind. In asking Davis’s authorization, he went further and requested authority to discuss with Lincoln “any point in relation to the conduct of the war.” His goal, he explained, was to bring about a peace agreement based on the “recognition of the sovereignty of the states, and the right of each . . . to determine its own destiny.” That was an exceedingly ambiguous formula that could have embraced a restored Union, an independent Confederacy, or perhaps something in between. Davis rejected it out of hand, and Lincoln would have too. Davis did not trust the short, slight, wizened Confederate vice-president, and he had reason not to. Stephens’s heart had never been in the Confederate cause. He was a gifted but not quite mentally balanced Georgian whose [18.222.22.244] Project...

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