Hampton Roads Conference
The Hampton Roads Conference was a peace conference held between the United States and representatives of the unrecognized breakaway Confederate States on February 3, 1865, aboard the steamboat River Queen in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to discuss terms to end the American Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William H. Seward, representing the Union, met with three commissioners from the Confederacy: Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, and Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell.
The representatives discussed a possible alliance against France, the possible terms of surrender, the question of whether slavery might persist after the war, and the question of whether the South would be compensated for property lost through emancipation. Lincoln and Seward reportedly offered some possibilities for compromise on the issue of slavery. The only concrete agreement reached was regarding prisoner-of-war exchanges.
The Confederate commissioners immediately returned to Richmond at the conclusion of the conference. Confederate President Jefferson Davis announced that the North would not compromise. Lincoln drafted an amnesty agreement based on terms discussed at the Conference, but met with opposition from his Cabinet. John Campbell continued to advocate for a peace agreement and met again with Lincoln after the fall of Richmond on April 2.
Overtures for peace
In 1864, pressure mounted for both sides to seek a peace settlement to end the long and devastating Civil War. Several people had sought to broker a North–South peace treaty in 1864. Francis Preston Blair, a personal friend of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, had unsuccessfully encouraged Lincoln to make a diplomatic visit to Richmond. Blair had advocated to Lincoln that the war could be brought to a close by having the two opposing sections of the nation stand down in their conflict, and reunite on grounds of the Monroe Doctrine in attacking the French-installed Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. Lincoln asked Blair to wait until Savannah had been captured.South
Davis was pressed for options as the Confederacy faced collapse and defeat. Peace movements in the South had been active since the beginning of the war and intensified in 1864 in the face of widespread shortages of food, medicine, and other goods.Alexander Stephens
, Vice President of the Confederate States, had by 1863 become an active advocate for ending the war. Stephens came close to negotiations with Lincoln in July 1863 as the South achieved several military victories, but his efforts were thwarted by the defeat at Gettysburg. By 1864, Stephens had thoroughly lost faith in Davis's leadership, and accepted an invitation by General William T. Sherman to discuss independent peace negotiations between the State of Georgia and the federal Union.Stephens addressed the Confederate States Senate as its nominal presiding officer in Richmond on January 6, 1865, requesting approval to open formal negotiations with the United States government. Though most of the Senate remained committed to the war effort, a number of senators made it known that they supported Stephens.
John Campbell
, another of the peace commissioners, had also opposed secession. Campbell served earlier on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1853 to 1861, but began to consider resignation after Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address in March 1861. He stayed on for the spring term of 1861 and supported the Corwin Amendment to protect slavery from federal intervention.Hoping to prevent a war, Campbell's colleague Justice Samuel Nelson enlisted Campbell to help broker negotiations over the status of Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor in South Carolina. On March 15, Campbell relayed to Martin Jenkins Crawford a supposed promise from Secretary of State Seward that the federal government would evacuate Fort Sumter within five days. As the Fort remained occupied on March 21, Confederate commissioners pushed Campbell to find out more; Seward reassured Campbell that evacuation would take place and Campbell reassured Crawford: on March 21, March 22, April 1, and hesitantly on April 7. Lincoln had already ordered the fort resupplied. By April 12, diplomacy had evidently failed and the Bombardment of Fort Sumter began. Campbell resigned his position on the Supreme Court and went South. Fearing he would be persecuted as a Union sympathizer in his home state of Alabama, he moved instead to New Orleans.
Campbell declined a number of positions in the CSA government, but accepted the post of Assistant Secretary of War in President Davis' cabinet in 1862. For the duration of the job, Campbell was criticized for trying to limit the scope of wartime conscription. By late 1864, he was pushing again for an end to the war. In an 1865 letter to Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, he described the disastrous state of the Confederacy and marveled: "You would suppose there could be no difficulty in convincing men under such circumstances that peace was required. But when I look back upon the events of the winter, I find that I was incessantly employed in making these facts known and to no result."
North
Lincoln would clearly insist on full sovereignty of the Union. Slavery posed a more difficult problem. The Republican platform in 1864 had explicitly endorsed abolition; but pushing too hard on the slavery issue might offend mainstream politicians and voters. Within this precarious political situation, in July 1864 Lincoln issued a statement via Horace Greeley:Lincoln confided to James W. Singleton that his primary concern was the Union. In Singleton's words: "that he never has and never will present any other ultimatum—that he is misunderstood on the subject of slavery—that it shall not stand in the way of peace". Lincoln's reassurance earned him Singleton's support in the 1864 election.
Seward openly suggested in September 1864 that if the Confederate States relented on the question of independence, the question of slavery would fall "to the arbitrament of courts of law, and to the councils of legislation". Seward invited the South to return to the "common ark of our national security and happiness" as "brethren who have come back from their wanderings".
Having won the election, Lincoln told Congress that reaching a peace agreement with Davis would be unlikely: "He affords us no excuse to deceive ourselves. He cannot voluntarily reaccept the Union; we cannot voluntarily yield it." However, said Lincoln, the South could end the War by laying down arms:
Preparation for conference
Blair duly renewed his efforts in January 1865, and traveled to Richmond on January 11. He met with Davis and outlined a plan to end the war, based partly on a North–South alliance against the French presence in Mexico. Blair assured Davis that Lincoln had become more willing to negotiate.On January 12, Davis wrote a letter inviting Lincoln to begin negotiations "with a view to secure peace to the two countries". Lincoln replied, via Blair, that he would discuss only "securing peace to the people of one common country." Davis was upset by this response; Blair blamed the political climate in Washington.
At Blair's suggestion, Davis proposed having Generals Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant meet as representatives of their respective governments; Lincoln refused. Grant ultimately smoothed over the "two countries" dispute and convinced Lincoln to meet the Confederates at Fort Monroe. Davis appointed his three commissioners on January 28 and instructed them to explore all options short of renouncing independence.
Of the three commissioners, Alexander Stephens and Robert Hunter wanted to focus more on the possibility of an alliance against France; Campbell focused more on a scenario for domestic peace. Campbell wrote in his letter to Curtis:
He duped Mr. Davis with the belief that President Lincoln regarded the condition of Mexico with more concern than the war; that he would be willing to make a suspension of hostilities under some sort of collusive contract, and to unite Southern and Northern troops on the Rio Grande for the invasion of Mexico, and that after matters were assured in Mexico affairs might be adjusted here. This was the business at Hampton Roads. I was incredulous, Mr. Hunter did not have faith. Mr. Stephens supposed Blair to be "the mentor of the Administration and Republican party.
The Union Congress was shaken by the news of possible Confederate peace negotiations in late January, just days before a rescheduled Thirteenth Amendment vote. Some Congress members feared that adopting an emancipation amendment would signal hostility and undermine the talks.
Radical Republicans, hoping for a complete victory and stringent terms of surrender, were dismayed by the prospect of a compromise. Opponents of the Amendment exploited these fears in an attempt to prevent its passage in the House.
Reassurance from Lincoln's secretary John Hay was not convincing to Ohio Democrat Sunset Cox who demanded that Ashley investigate the rumor of impending negotiations. Lincoln issued a memo denying the arrival of Confederates—in Washington.
Cox investigated further, decided that Lincoln was "mistaken or ignorant", and shocked a crowd of onlookers by voting 'nay' to the Amendment. When the Amendment passed anyway, two members of the "Seward lobby"—George O. Jones and William Bilbo—both telegraphed congratulations to Seward and commented on his upcoming meeting with the Confederate diplomats. Historians LaWanda Cox and John Cox wrote: "It is worthy of note that these messages of Jones and Bilbo implied a verbal commitment from the Secretary of State that passage of the Amendment would be coupled with a policy of peace and reconciliation which Southerners might accept with relief and Northern Democrats with enthusiasm."
On January 29, a Confederate officer with a flag of truce interrupted the Siege of Petersburg to announce the passage of the three Confederate peace commissioners. Soldiers from both armies cheered. On February 1, Seward dropped off a copy of the new amendment in Annapolis, then departed with the River Queen for Fort Monroe.